In David Brooks’ hortatory sermon on what parental love should be, he preaches that “it is supposed to be oblivious to achievement. It’s meant to be an unconditional support – a gift that cannot be bought and cannot be earned. It sits outside the logic of the meritocracy, the closest humans come to grace.” (Love and Merit, NYT 4//24/15) In his essay, he refers to current trends in child-rearing involving greater praise and greater honing, compared with an earlier generation that stressed greater obedience. He might have stretched his imagination further and realized that as far back as recorded history, there have been different modes of parenting and few (if any) considered unconditional love a necessity or even a factor. Open favoritism figures prominently in the Bible from Abraham’s preference for Isaac over Ishmael to Isaac’s preference for Esau over Jacob to Jacob’s love for Joseph over all his brothers. Cultural outlooks produce very different modes of parenting as well; the tiger mother considers it a sign of the greatest love to push her child to excellence so that child’s life will offer more rewards that come with personal achievement.
That the Hillary! candidacy is doomed is now a foregone conclusion. Madame Defarge has no aptitude for the job, only a taste for it, and a venomous certainty that it is somehow rightfully hers. But when you’ve lost Jon Chait:
The qualities of an effective presidency do not seem to transfer onto a post-presidency. Jimmy Carter was an ineffective president who became an exemplary post-president. Bill Clinton appears to be the reverse. All sorts of unproven worst-case-scenario questions float around the web of connections between Bill’s private work, Hillary Clinton’s public role as secretary of State, the Clintons’ quasi-public charity, and Hillary’s noncompliant email system. But the best-case scenario is bad enough: The Clintons have been disorganized and greedy.
The news today about the Clintons all fleshes out, in one way or another, their lack of interest in policing serious conflict-of-interest problems that arise in their overlapping roles:
Bshara Nassar — a self-described “peacebuilder and social entrepreneur, a graduate of Bethlehem University, Palestine,” with “a master’s degree in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University” – leads a campaign for a “Nakba Museum Project of Memory and Hope” in order to “bring the Palestinian refugee story to Washington, DC.”
The campaign, supported by Nonviolence International with Nakba Museum and Indiegogo, a crowd-funding organization, was launched in 2014 and seems to enjoy some popularity. A would-be parallel between “Nakba” (the dislocation of Palestinian Arab society in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war of 1947-1948) and the Holocaust (the genocide of Jews operated by Nazi Germany) has been, for decades, a recurrent trope in the anti-Israel narrative. Concurrently, many anti-Israel activists, especially in the Islamic world, claim the Holocaust to be a hoax, while many others urge a “new Holocaust” or a “real Holocaust” against present-day Jews in Israel or elsewhere.
Alexander Soros’s announcement, first published in Politico, reads in part:
…other politically active American Jews have joined me to launch the Bend the Arc Jewish Action PAC, which will focus the passion and political power of American Jews on supporting those progressive politicians who truly speak to the core values of Jewish voters.
We’re not only progressive in our views. We’re also among the most politically engaged groups in America. In our local communities, American Jews are active, fighting for the issues we care about. Right now, we’re joining with other religious groups to protest so-called “religious freedom” laws in Indiana, Arkansas, Louisiana, and elsewhere that would allow discrimination against LGBT people. We’re supporting efforts to empower home health care workers to organize for better wages and working conditions. And we’re rallying behind the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Last December, on the first night of Chanukah, thousands of American Jews gathered across 15 U.S. cities to protest police brutality against African Americans.
Prosecutors allege that, among other plots, the group was planning to kidnap a random member of the public, dress their victim in an orange jump suit, and then film him or her being beheaded.
Catalonia not only has the largest Muslim population in Spain, it also has the largest concentration of radical Islamists in Europe, and is a main center for Salafi-Jihadism on the continent.
“But what they do not know is that, once they allow us to vote, we will all vote for Islamic parties because we do not believe in left and right. This will make us win local councils and as we begin to accumulate power in the Catalan autonomous region, Islam will begin to be implemented.” — Abdelwahab Huzi, Salafist preacher, Lleida.
Police in the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia have arrested eleven members of a jihadist cell that was planning to behead a random person in Barcelona.
The cell, which prosecutors say was actively recruiting jihadists for the Islamic State, is also accused of planning to bomb public and private buildings in Catalonia, including a Jewish bookstore in Barcelona.
For nearly four decades Saul David Alinsky – lived Jan 30, 1909 – Jun 12, 1972 – was an American community organizer and a writer. In his work career, Barack Hussein Obama is known to have been an American community organizer as well. Alinsky is considered to be the founder of modern community organizing business. Obama followed in his footsteps.
Alinsky’s organizing of people skills were focused on improving the living conditions of poor communities across North America. In the 1950s years, he began turning his attention to improving conditions for American blacks in their ghettos, beginning with Chicago, Illinois, and later on in California, Michigan, New York City and a dozen of other social “trouble spots,” as he called them.
Despite the growing menace and media savvy of the terrorist Islamic group ISIS, the FBI appears to be, once again, failing in its investigative and enforcement responsibilities. The agency that let us down with 9/11 and, afterward, reacted mainly in a flurry of political correctness and appeasement toward Muslims is now trying to reassure the American public that we have nothing to fear from ISIS on the North American continent.
This despite warnings from the nonprofit Judicial Watch of ISIS activism in Mexico, and recent ISIS-related arrests in Minnesota. More is needed from the nation’s top domestic intelligence and security agency than this whistling in the dark if we are to be safe in our own country.
The CNN headline about this meeting was: First on CNN: Jeb Bush distances himself from James Baker http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/23/politics/jeb-bush-james-baker-foreign-policy/
Well I was there and meeted and greeted him. Sorry folks, he offered a limp semi apology for his closeness to Baker a black-belt Israel hater with the following:
“According to the two sources in the room, Bush — in a light-hearted tone — remarked that people like Baker and George Shultz, secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan, were over 85 years old, drawing some laughter from the audience. Bush went on to emphasize that he plans to surround himself with foreign policy advisers who are from a different generation than those who served in previous administrations.” ( Geezeerphobia?)
He stated that he did not like J Street, repeating his completely true long standing support for Israel.. However this is accurately reported
“At Thursday’s event, Bush also said that he disagreed with some of the conclusions in Baker’s J Street speech. Bush added that he believed that Baker’s remarks weren’t anti-Israel and that Baker is a supporter and friend of the country.”
And he then threw this ridiculous bouquet at Baker. “He brought down the Soviet Union”…..huh?
Jeb Bush is likeable, accessible, charming and spent time on questions and graciously continued by mingling with the crowd and walking around. I wish him a permanent and happy and fruitful retirement from politics.
The Houthis see a Jewish conspiracy behind the campaign against them. But in the Yemeni civil war of the 1960s, Israel helped the Shiite tribes from which the rebels hail.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels accuse Israel of standing behind the Saudi-led military campaign launched against them in February. The charge is not unusual—blaming Israel for the Mideast’s sundry ills is a time-honored regional pastime. For once, though, the allegation has some historical basis: During Yemen’s 1962-1970 civil war, the Jewish state airlifted a steady supply of money and arms to the ruling monarchy. On one point, however, the Houthis’ accusation falls flat: That monarchy actually represented the same Shiite tribes from whom today’s rebels spring.
At the time, Yemen was divided—as it was for most of its history—between the absolute monarchy of the Mutawakelite dynasty in the north, and a British protectorate in the south centered on the strategic port of Aden. The Mutawakelites were Zaydis—a sub-minority within the Islamic minority of Shiism who consider Muhammad’s great-great grandson Zayd the rightful heir to the prophet’s mantle. (Zaydis are commonly known as Fivers, because they deem Zayd the fifth and final leader of the faithful, as opposed to the majority of Shiites who recognize a chain of 12.)
In 1962, nationalist army officers led by Gen. Abdullah al-Sallal—and inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s anti-monarchist coup in Egypt a decade prior—staged a coup against Imam (King) Muhammad al-Badr. Britain, fearing unrest in its neighboring colony, backed the royalists, as did the fellow monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and a 16-year-old state of Israel.
At the time the Jewish state’s chief antagonist was not, as today, the Shiite theocracy of Iran but its own neighbor—and the Arab world’s largest state—Egypt. In one of the oddities of the Cold War (think Cubans in Angola), Nasser had sent 70,000 troops—a third of his army—to Yemen to fight to a blood-drenched stalemate that historians have dubbed “Egypt’s Vietnam.” Of the 100,000 to 200,000 men killed in the war, some 25,000 were Egyptian.
Two years into the war, a disillusioned Egyptian pilot defected to Israel, and told his interrogators that his fellow Egyptians were using chemical weapons in Yemen. Then-Foreign Minister Golda Meir feared Israel would be next, and hoped that bogging down the Egyptians in a faraway country would keep them too busy to threaten her own.
British intelligence had for months sought Israeli support for the royalists, and soon found a willing partner. On the night of May 26, 1964, Imam Badr called a strategy session of tribal leaders who were backing the monarchy, including one Sheikh Hassan al-Houthi, the patriarch of the Houthi tribe that today leads the fight against Yemen’s internationally recognized government. Around midnight, the assembled dignitaries heard a plane hum overhead and saw 14 parachutes drop, prompting one elder to marvel, “Look! Even God is helping the imam.” The plane—carrying military materiel, medical supplies and money—was flown by Israeli pilots.
“Who can count the dust of Jacob or number the seed of Israel.” Numbers 23:10
The sun sets above the hills. The siren cries out and on the busy highways that wend among the hills, the traffic stops, the people stop, and a moment of silence comes to a noisy country.
Flags fly at half mast, the torch of remembrance is lit, memorial candles are held in shaking hands and the country’s own version of the Flanders Field poppy, the Red Everlasting daisy, dubbed Blood of the Maccabees, adorns lapels. And so begins the Yom Hazikaron, Heroes Remembrance Day, the day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terror– Israel’s Memorial Day.
What is a memorial day in a country that has always known war and where remembrance means adding the toll of one year’s dead and wounded to the scales of history. A country where war never ends, where the sirens may pause but never stop, where each generation grows up knowing that they will have to fight or flee. To stand watch or run away. It is not so much the past that is remembered on this day, but the present and the future. The stillness, a breath in the warm air, before setting out to climb the slopes of tomorrow.
Who can count the dust of Jacob. And yet each memorial day we count the dust. The dust that is a fraction of those who have fallen defending the land for thousands of years. Flesh wears out, blood falls to the earth where the red daisies grow, and bone turns to dust. The dust blows across the graves of soldiers and prophets, the tombs of priests hidden behind brush, the caverns where forefathers rest in sacred silence, laid to rest by their sons, who were laid to rest by their own sons, generations burying the past, standing guard over it, being driven away and returning each time.
