http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4228025,00.html Op-ed: Will Jews, Christians finally join forces in battle against genocidal Islamic hatred? The Coliseum, where thousands upon thousands of “Judaeis” have been massacred by the Roman emperors, became for one night an arena for alliance between Christians and Jews against “odium fidei,” or religious hatred. Last Wednesday in Rome, Jewish leaders for the […]
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=187 If you come across the byline of Giulio Meotti, stop and read what he has to say. Like Italian MP Fiamma Nirenstein — a fearless warrior in the battlefield of ideas — Meotti is among the small number of European intellectuals who have not been carried out to sea by the tide of cowardice […]
Who Will Suffer As A Result of Euro Policies? The Jews. Peter Martino
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3060/euro-policies
It is as if the U.S. were to renounce the dollar for the “amro,” a common currency with countries as different as Mexico. Colombia, Brazil and Argentina. A documentary on German television last week revealed that the political class in Europe knew that the Greeks were cooking the books, but did not care. Extremist parties of the Left and the Right (all of them anti-Semitic) are rapidly gaining electoral support at the expense of mainstream parties….
The European Union, and especially its common currency, the euro, is on the brink of collapse. The Greeks, unable to form a government after the May 6 elections, will have to go to the polls again next month. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel is rapidly losing support. If she cares about her reelection next year, she had better push Greece out of the eurozone rather than keep that country afloat with German taxpayers’ money. If Greece leaves, the whole euro edifice might come down – a better outcome than the present situation, in which extremist parties on the Left and the Right (all of them anti-Semitic) are rapidly gaining electoral support at the expense of mainstream parties which keep clinging to the failed project of the common European currency……read more
Our Intelligence Community: What Are We Getting for Our $80 Billion? Peter Huessy
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3059/intelligence-budget
The briefers knew less than the Commission members they were briefing. What the intelligence community failed to do was see weapons of mass destruction and missiles as “instruments of state power,” rather than as “contraband traded contrary to traditional norms.”
Americans are justifiably concerned that our national leaders do not seem to anticipate looming threats. They quite correctly ask, “What are we getting for the $80 billion a year we pay to gather intelligence?”
“Don’t worry” says the former deputy director of its Counterterrorist Center: it is not the fault of the intelligence community: “They screw things up all by themselves” he states. “On major foreign policy decisions, intelligence is not the decisive factor”.
Is the intelligence community really that innocent?
Now retired, this same 28-year CIA veteran had a hand in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. The report was a bombshell: its summary dismissed Iran as a threat to US, effectively taking it out of the mix of national security issues in the 2008 Presidential campaign.
This was apparently accomplished by a sleight of hand. In a footnote, the NIE report clarified that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and that the report was referring only to the warhead design and not the harder part, the enrichment of uranium and the production of nuclear weapons fuel.
In this instance, US policy on Iran was being guided by an intelligence community as an accomplice in dumbing-down our security assessments to make the “Iranian problem go away.” The former Secretary of Defense, the late Les Aspin, had a phrase for such work: “They cooked the books.”….READ MORE
Another week, another heated Republican primary.
On Tuesday it’s Nebraska’s turn, as Republican voters pick their nominee to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson. State Attorney General Jon Bruning, the front-runner, boasts more money than his rivals and has the backing of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He has led consistently in the polls, and he recently won the endorsement of Rick Santorum.
Running to his right is Treasurer Don Stenberg, propelled by the Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund, headed by Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.). Those two groups regularly get involved in GOP primaries, backing candidates they see as uncompromisingly conservative. Both organizations supported Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who this past Tuesday upset Sen. Richard Lugar in Indiana.
The wild card: state Sen. Deb Fischer, who on Thursday won the endorsement of Sarah and Todd Palin.
Nebraska is one of Republicans’ biggest pickup opportunities as they try to erase Democrats’ 53-47 majority in the Senate. Tuesday’s GOP winner will face Democrat Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and senator who is widely seen as the one Democrat who could give his party a fighting chance in the state.
Republicans are seeking to portray Mr. Kerrey as a carpetbagger, noting that he has lived in New York for a decade. Mr. Kerrey, a former Navy SEAL wounded in Vietnam, says he has stayed in close touch with Nebraska, where he owns five restaurants and three health clubs.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
HISTORY IN THE UNMAKING
• First President to Preside Over a Cut to the Credit Rating of the United States Government• First President to Violate the War Powers Act • First President to Orchestrate the Sale of Murder Weapons to Mexican Drug Cartels• First President to issue an unlawful “recess-appointment” while the U.S. Senate remained in session (against the advice of his own Justice Department).• First President to be Held in Contempt of Court for Illegally Obstructing Oil Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico • First president to intentionally disable credit card security measures in order to allow over-the-limit donations, foreign contributions and other illegal fundraising measures.
…and there’s lots more “History” where that came from. Just imagine all the “History” he can make in another four years”
PROFILES IN COURAGE
So after four years, Obama finally got around to openly stating a position that everyone knew he always held, but that he sorta denied he held until the fundraising needs were bad enough to bring it to the table. And it’s a position devoid of specific commitments too.
If that’s not courage, I don’t know what is.
Four years from now maybe he’ll finally admit that he intended to badly damage American business and have the Muslim Brotherhood take over the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the media is chewing over what Romney did in high school, described under the trendy label of “Bullying”. Isn’t it wonderful how we can’t nail down what Obama was doing far more recently than that, but our dedicated media corps is busy investing what Romney was doing as in high school.
Any day now we can expect a hard hitting piece on Romney’s war on women in first grade. The current news lineup includes a congratulatory piece on Obama’s fundraising, an attack on Romney via his High School years and another attack on Romney from Obama over the auto bailout.
We may not quite be living under communism, but we are certainly living under its media apparatus.
OBAMA WHITEWASHES GENOCIDE IN SUDAN
This is a point that flew most people’s radar when commenting on Obama’s big Holocaust speech.
While Obama mentioned ‘atrocities’ twelve times in his speech, he only mentioned ‘genocide’ three times and one of those times he was quoting from the mission statement of the Holocaust Museum. The list of examples from his own policies contained only one example of genocide, the mass murder program carried out by the Sudanese government.
Tellingly Obama described this actual genocide as a ‘conflict’ rather than an atrocity and urged both sides to negotiate, a sharp contrast with his next three examples, in Cote D’Ivorie, in Libya and in Uganda, where he clearly placed the blame on three leaders and described military and pseudo-military actions that he had taken to end the violence.
President Omar al-Bashir, whom he urged in his speech to have the “courage” to negotiate and make peace, is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. There is no comparison between the actions of Gaddafi or Gbago and those of Bashir. Yet Obama ignored actual genocide, and defiled the Holocaust Memorial Museum by using it as a stage for whitewashing one of the world’s worst ruling mass murderers.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/britain-is-shackled-to-the-corpse-of-europe
Europe’s economic problems are about to get a whole lot worse. For the past three years, governments have tried, however ineffectually, to tackle the debt crisis. Now, though, in country after country, voters are demanding precisely the high-tax and high-spend policies which caused the recession in the first place.
Yesterday’s elections in France and Greece were the first of what will surely be many advances by the populist Left. In both places, candidates were elbowing each other aside during the campaign to demand more intervention and an end to cuts.
The new French President is an unapologetic Socialist of the kind we haven’t known in this country since Michael Foot. François Hollande wants wealth taxes, stimulus spending and a massive expansion of the state payroll.
He understands that this might lead to dismay in the international markets, but he has an answer to that: he will create a French credit ratings agency which, unlike the American ones, will tell him what he wants to hear.
Hollande summarises his programme as ‘growth, not austerity’. Gosh. Who knew it was so easy? Why has no one thought of that before?
The truth, of course, is that France has already pushed tax-and-spend to its limits. The government accounts for an extraordinary 56 per cent of the economy, and the French budget was last in balance in 1974. If state expenditure really had a stimulus effect, France would be the wealthiest country in Europe.
Yet every one of the ten presidential candidates there demanded even greater state intervention. Nicolas Sarkozy promised to make France ‘stronger than the markets’. Three of the other contenders were Trotskyists and one was a Green.
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/299782
Ismail Belghar, a 36-year-old Muslim man living in Australia, assaulted, abducted, and nearly killed his sister-in-law. The victim, a 25-year-old Moroccan named Canan Kokden, had dared to take her older sister, Mrs. B, to the beach without Belghar’s permission. This heinous effrontery was amplified, Belghar later recounted for police, when Mrs. B thereupon “displayed her body,” sustaining the shoulder sunburn that tipped him off.
To Australians, this may have been, well, just a day at the beach. For Belghar, though, it was an “abhorrent” offense against sharia, Islam’s legal code and comprehensive societal framework.
The telltale burn is also starting to show on the West’s shoulders, our courts of law. Australia has not changed Belghar, but the Belghars are changing Australia.
Innately, Islam is not moderate — just ask Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, who rejects as “ugly and offensive” the very term “moderate Islam.” Instead, Islam can be moderated, but only by a culture that is self-confident and self-assertive. Alas, that is no longer Western culture. So, the more Muslims immigrate, the less the West is moderating Islam. It is Islam that leaves its mark.
In the usual endearing family way, Belghar telephoned his sister-in-law to convey that he was a tad rankled: “You slut, how dare you take my wife to the beach!” Afterwards, happening upon Ms. Kokden at a shopping mall in New South Wales, he angrily confronted her, slapped her face, and dragged her to the railing of an over-ground parking lot. As he seemed ready to hurl her to the traffic below, her brother (Kokden’s chaperone at the mall) finally stirred himself to intervene, tackling the assailant. Belghar was charged with attempted murder, among other crimes.
http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/5536
“On April 1,1983, a twenty one year old senior at Columbia University named Barack Obama attended the “Socialist Scholars Conference” in New York City’s Cooper Union, which had been touted as a meeting “In honor of Karl Marx’s centennial (1818-1883).” This conference became the catalyst for Obama’s future political agenda. Thus begins Stanley Kurtz’s dazzling and meticulously researched book “Radical- In- Chief-Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.”The opening remarks of the 1983 Conference were tellingly delivered by City University’s radical professor Frances Fox Piven, described by the author as “…preeminent theorist, strategist, and historian of community organizing, with a keen sense of the roots of community organizing in America’s early communist and socialist movements.” RSK
In 1966, two Columbia University sociologists, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, collaborated on a theory to end poverty in the United States. This theory, today, is referred to as the “Cloward-Piven Strategy.” People who are familiar with the likes of Saul Alinsky and William Ayers are familiar with the strategy, as are the full complement of the Progressive Movement. In a nutshell, the underlying principle of the Cloward-Piven Strategy is to so overload the entitlement system – to add so many to the entitlement rolls, that the country’s economic system collapses, unleashing chaos and violence in the streets, thus affecting radical Leftist political change in government. Up until recently this theory has been just that, a theory, and a theory that anarchists and Progressives have salivated over for their want of execution. But today, we are seeing the fruits of the Cloward-Piven Strategy played out to success in Greece and several other financial destitute countries in Europe.
To briefly summarize the Cloward-Piven Strategy, I turn to Richard Poe who wrote an article of the same name, which is featured at DiscoverTheNetworks.org.
Mr. Poe observes that Mr. Cloward and Ms. Piven sought (and “seeks,” in the case of Ms. Piven) to facilitate the fall of Capitalism by “overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.” Mr. Poe explained that Cloward and Piven saw the so-called “ruling class” as using entitlements to “weaken the poor”; to make the poor dependent on government, thus “dousing the fires of rebellion,” following the “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” theory.
In a 1970 New York Times interview, Cloward is quoted as saying that poor people can only advance when “the rest of society is afraid of them.” He then theorized that activists should refrain from demanding that government provide more for the poverty stricken and, instead, should strive to pack as many people on the welfare (read: entitlement) rolls as possible, creating a demand that could not be met, facilitating the destruction of the welfare system and massive financial crisis. As a byproduct, rebellion would be ignited amongst the people; chaos would rule the streets and governments would be damaged beyond repair, many falling to history making it possible for new radicals to assume the roles of oligarchs, ushering in new systems of government and the dismantling of the Capitalist system in particular.
Bernard Lewis: A Stand-Up Guy Who Fell Down
http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2011/08/09/bernard-lewis-pied-piper-of-islamic-confusion/
I HAVE GREAT REGARD FOR HIS ACUMEN AND KNOWLEDGE…HOWEVER, IT HIS HIS SUPPORT OF CAMP DAVID, OSLO, GAZA, WYE, ROAD MAP THAT IS SO DISTURBING AS WELL AS HIS PROMOTION OF THE MYTH OF AN ERA OF GREAT COMITY BETWEEN ARABS/MOSLEMS AND JEWS….THE ERA CONSISTED OF A FEW BURPS AND BUMPS IN HISTORY ALL PRECEDED AND FOLLOWED BY UNRELENTING HATRED OF JEWS SINCE THE TIME OF THE PROPHET…. IT WAS NOT ALWAYS SO WITH LEWIS….READ THIS SHORT ESSAY…..RSK
The unapologetic Lewis viewed Islam as unrelentingly autocratic, with a conception of freedom, “hurriyya,”—perfect slavery to an autocratic Allah and his sharia—antithetical to the uniquely Western notion of individual liberty. In short, for Lewis, Islam was a totalitarianism, analogous to Communism—a direct analogy he in fact made. Quoth Lewis, circa 1954:
I turn now from the accidental to the essential factors, to those deriving from the very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought. The first of these is the authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition….Many attempts have been made to show that Islam and democracy are identical-attempts usually based on a misunderstanding of Islam or democracy or both. This sort of argument expresses a need of the up- rooted Muslim intellectual who is no longer satisfied with or capable of understanding traditional Islamic values, and who tries to justify, or rather, re-state, his inherited faith in terms of the fashionable ideology of the day. It is an example of the romantic and apologetic presentation of Islam that is a recognized phase in the reaction of Muslim thought to the impact of the West….
Without ever offering any coherent intervening historical or doctrinal explanations, “The Islam is Autocratic Totalitarianism Lewis,” five decades later, Lewis suddenly morphs into to “The Evangelical Democratist Lewis,” epitomized by his rather unhinged essay, from 2006, “Bring Them Freedom Or They Destroy Us.”
As noted here,
Lewis then [in the 1950s] was both unapologetic and pellucid in identifying the intractable obstacle to such efforts at democratization—Islam itself. ..Lewis’s volte-face on the merits of experiments in “Islamic democracy,” has been accompanied by his equally troubling intellectual legacy regarding three other critical subject areas: the institution of jihad, the chronic impact of the Sharia (Islamic law) on non-Muslims vanquished by jihad, and sacralized Islamic Jew-hatred.
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=269521
SHAME ON GORDIS FOR THE PUSILLANIMOUS RESPONSE ABOUT GAZA AS A MODEL FOR ISRAELI WILLINGNESS TO COMPROMISE:
“Yet for some reason, Gordis, who recently penned a rather telling riposte of Beinart’s book in this paper, chose to be largely non-confrontational and to avoid assertively challenging either the credibility of Beinart’s sources or the cogency of his arguments.Although he began making an excellent opening point – that essentially there is “nothing Israel can do to end the conflict – not even land for peace” – he ended up severely undermining his case, declaring that he had no real disagreement with Beinart on most issues and that basically they shared the same vision for Israel – even if they differed on how to attain it. Acknowledging a priori that your adversary’s case is essentially valid is not a recommended strategy for winning arguments.
Perhaps most disturbing was his reassuring Beinart he too had many reservations about the settlements and that “many are going to have to get bulldozed.”
“We have shown in Gaza,” continued Gordis, trying to convince Beinart that settlements are not a real obstacle to a viable Palestinian state, “that we know how bulldoze when we need to bulldoze.”
That is not the lesson of the 2005 Gaza disengagement. The real lesson is that even if we do bulldoze, it is of no avail. It is pity that Gordis chose not drive this home.
Into the Fray: Last week’s exchange in NY was disappointing – more for what was not said rather than what was.
“I wish you all, the parents and the entire tribe of settlers… restorers of the Jewish settlement in Hebron… great blessing and joy in raising your son. Bringing your son into the covenant of the Patriarch Abraham, in the city of Abraham after 40 years separation from it, has a special symbolic significance. It bears testimony to our continuous connection to this place, to which we have returned never to leave.”
– Yigal Allon, January 29, 1969
These sentiments, conveyed in a congratulatory letter from the Labor Party’s iconic moderate, to a family in Kiryat Arba, the Jewish neighborhood adjacent to Hebron, on the occasion of the first brit ceremony in the community, underscores how decoupled from historical fact and political context the discourse on the Palestinian issue has become.
Allon, who commanded the Palmah in the War of Independence, served as deputy prime minister, education minister and foreign minister under Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin.
He was arguably the first mainstream politician to explicitly propose making far-reaching territorial concessions in Judea and Samaria, in what came to be known as the Allon Plan. Yet even he, the archetypical “pragmatic” secular Zionist, understood the profound significance of Hebron for the Jewish people, its heritage and its nationhood.
Relativity of ‘radicalism’
It is instructive to keep this in mind when assessing last week’s debate between Peter Beinart and Daniel Gordis at Columbia University, sparked by the publication of Beinart’s book The Crisis of Zionism.
