ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

High-Stakes Game over Syria As Khamenei-Putin Axis Advances How long can Israel defend itself as the Khamenei-Putin axis advances? P. David Hornik

Posted By on December 2nd, 2016

The news out of Syria this week is, as usual, complex—and seemingly contradictory.

On the one hand, the Russian-Syrian-Iranian-Hizballah alliance appeared to have overcome rebel resistance in Aleppo—a major turning point that would shift the war’s momentum in the alliance’s favor.

On the other hand, Arab and other media reported that on Wednesday the Israeli air force struck a Syrian weapons depot west of Damascus and a weapons convoy headed for Hizballah in Lebanon.

As of Thursday evening there had been no retaliation against Israel, and Israeli analysts generally saw a retaliation as unlikely.

Media outside of Israel have, of course, often reported in the past on Israeli airstrikes—usually against Hizballah-bound weaponry—in Syria.

Israel’s policy has been to keep mum, neither denying nor confirming the reports. Last April, though, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel had carried out “dozens” of strikes in Syria against “game-changing weaponry” for Hizballah.

It’s no secret that, since the 2006 war between Israel and Hizballah in Lebanon, Hizballah has massively rearmed and now harbors tens of thousands of missiles. But Israel regards some kinds of weapons—precision rockets, advanced antiship and antiaircraft systems—as out of bounds for the terror group.

What has changed in the Syrian arena, though, is that late last year Russia deployed its powerful S-400 radar and antiaircraft system there. It covers Syria, Lebanon, and much of Israel and can track Israel’s northern airspace.

Since then there have been far fewer reported Israeli airstrikes in Syria. In one of them, last September, the outcome seemed ominous when Syria—not a military match for Israel by itself, but backed by Russia and Iran—fired missiles at two Israeli aircraft.

Why, then, the Israeli strike this week? Why no military response this time?

ISRAEL Comments turned off

FRANCE SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF LABELING PRODUCTS MADE BY JEWS BY MICHAEL OREN

Posted By on December 2nd, 2016

To its credit, France is one of the first countries in Europe to ban economic boycotts of Israel. To its shame, France is the first European country to implement a 2015 European Union decision to label Israeli products from Judea and Samaria—the West Bank—and the Golan Heights.

Who, besides France’s Jewish community—already diminished by the sharp rise in anti-Semitism in the country—will buy products labelled “Made in an Israeli Settlement”? Who is the French government fooling when it says that it is against any boycott of Israel and then acts to facilitate one?

Such a policy is viewed by the vast majority of Israelis as highly prejudicial if not anti-Semitic. There are 200 territorial disputes in the world today, and France has singled out one of them—Israel’s with the Palestinians—for special treatment. There is no French labelling of Chinese goods from Tibet or Moroccan goods from Western Sahara. And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, France labels products from only one party—the Jews.

Most indefensibly, France regards the Golan Heights, where there is not a single Palestinian, as occupied territory. Occupied from what country, one might ask? Syria, which lost the Golan to Israel nearly 50 years ago after twice using the area to wage genocidal wars against the Jewish State, no longer exists. To who would France want Israel to return the Golan—to ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, or Bashar al-Assad?

Though intended to punish Israel, France’s labelling decision seriously harms the many thousands of Palestinian and Golan Druze who work in Israeli companies. The move also rewards the Palestinian Authority for refusing to negotiate directly with Israel for almost eight years now and for seeking unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state without giving Israel peace. It rewards the Palestinians for rejecting two Israeli offers of statehood—in 2000 and 2008—in Gaza, almost all of the West Bank, and half of Jerusalem. The French decision places an unelected and far from corruption-free Palestinian leadership ahead of the Middle East’s only functioning democracy.

For Israelis, as well as many Jews worldwide, France’s labelling decision cannot be viewed in isolation from French history. From the Dreyfus trial at the end of the 19th century, to Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws 50 years later, France has much to atone for in its relations with Jews. During World War II, French Jews were prohibited from serving in the army or working as doctors, lawyers, journalists, or state officials. Jewish students were expelled from schools and banned from commerce and industry. The French government and police participated in the roundup of 75,000 Jews, almost all of whom were murdered by the Nazis.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Note to Israelis: The US is not racist: Ruthie Blum

Posted By on December 2nd, 2016

Since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election last month, Israelis have been engaged in a heated debate about how the victory of the billionaire businessman who gets into fights on Twitter will affect the Jewish state.

The Left, which has been fawning over Barack Obama for eight years, has been attributing all the ills of his country and the world during this period to a combination of piggish capitalism and racism ostensibly so indigenous to America that even the Great Black Hope was unable to stomp them out. Members of this very vocal sector of the Israeli media and academia are naturally appalled by Trump, but point to his success as evidence that their analysis of the character of the United States is accurate.

According to this position, it was not the failures of the Democratic Party that led to its defeat, but rather the very nature of the voting public. The holders of this view went as far as to claim that a country with such a number of yahoos and evangelical Christians was simply not ready for a woman president.

This is exactly how these same Israelis interpret the fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just broken David Ben-Gurion’s record for the length of tenure in the office of the premiership, though the primitive and religious voters whom they put down are Orthodox Jews and those of North African descent. Different culture, same snobbery. And a virtually identical — delusional — outlook on peacemaking in the Middle East.

In contrast, the Israeli Right has been celebrating Trump’s win, highlighting two causes for optimism. One is the assumption that the president-elect is sympathetic to the settler enterprise — since he does not consider it to be at fault for a lack of peace with the Palestinians — and therefore will not respond to every additional Jewish apartment built in the West Bank with the apoplexy exhibited by the Obama administration.

The other is the hope and even belief that the Trump administration might finally be the one to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thereby providing an ideological stamp of legitimacy to the sovereignty of the Jewish people over their holy city, the capital of the State of Israel.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

School Bans Students from Raising Their Hands to Answer Questions Why not let teachers decide what method works best for their classrooms? By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on December 2nd, 2016

Samworth Church Academy, a high school in Nottinghamshire in the U.K., has banned its students from raising their hands to answer questions because it is unfair to students who do not raise their hands.

In a letter explaining the policy, Samworth principal Barry Found called hand-raising an “age-old practice.”

“We find that the same hands are going up and as such the teaching does not challenge and support the learning of all,” he said, according to an article in the Daily Mail.

Samworth teachers have been instructed to forbid hand-raising in their classrooms and instead call on students at random to answer questions — which is completely and totally ridiculous.

Now, I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with calling on students at random in itself. When I was in school, most of my teachers used a combination of both hand-raising and random call-outs, depending on the situation. If they — being the professionals that they were — noticed that the same students were raising their hands over and over again, they would usually say something along the lines of “Does anyone else have the answer? You’ve been quiet back there, how about you?” and that seemed to work pretty well. Honestly, I really can’t see any benefits to banning hand-raising completely — but I certainly can see some problems.

First of all, as Jane Crich of the U.K.’s National Union of Teachers told the Daily Mail, an administrator’s making a blanket rule prevents the teachers from being able to decide how to best teach their own groups of students.

“Any professional teacher should be trusted to teach a particular topic in a particular style according to the class they have,” Crich said.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Virginia School System Considers Banning ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ By Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on December 2nd, 2016

A key component in the ongoing effort by American public education to make kids dumber is the removal of entire chunks of relevance from various curricula to craft a narrative more conducive to, and comfortable for, the liberal version of things. It is most often done in the history books, where the more integral stories are excised and replaced with a focus on fringe events or people.

Literature is another convenient target. Book banning is generally considered the kind of thing that totalitarian societies run by tyrannical fascists do, but every fascist has to get his or her start somewhere:

Two classic American novels have been temporarily pulled from book shelves in Accomack County Public Schools.

Superintendent Warren Holland confirmed to 10 On Your Side that a parent filed a complaint about “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Earlier this month, a parent voiced concerns to the school board about racial slurs in both of the novels.

“Right now, we are a nation divided as it is,” the mother is heard saying in an audio recording of the meeting on Nov. 15. She tells the board that her biracial son, a high school student, struggled getting through a page that was riddled with a racial slur.

“So what are we teaching our children? We’re validating that these words are acceptable, and they are not acceptable by any means,” the parent said.

Victoria Coombs, a mother of two, told 10 On Your Side she agrees that books with offensive racial slurs should not be read in schools.

“It’s not right to put that in a book, let alone read that to a child,” she said.

But other Accomack County residents told 10 On Your Side that banning a classic for offensive language can be a slippery slope.

“I don’t want to see it happen because if you start with one racial word in a book and have to go on and on and on and pretty soon you’ll be burning books left and right,” R. Kellam said.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DNC Chair Candidate Rep. Keith Ellison Met with Hamas Fundraiser Mohammed al-Hanooti By Patrick Poole

Posted By on December 2nd, 2016

Keith Ellison, who is campaigning to become Democratic National Committee chairman, met with Hamas fundraiser Mohammed al-Hanooti at a 2009 campaign fundraiser for Virginia House of Delegates candidate Esam Omeish. Ellison was the keynote speaker at the event.

Last week Chuck Ross at The Daily Caller reported on the appearance of Ellison at the Omeish campaign event, noting that Omeish had previously called for Palestinians to follow “the jihad way” against Israel.

Given that, it’s no surprise to find al-Hanooti, who styled himself as “grand mufti” of Washington D.C. and whom FBI documents identify as a top U.S. fundraiser for Hamas, at the campaign fundraiser.

Pictures posted to Flickr by Omeish show Ellision and al-Hanooti chatting at the event.

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Mohammed al-Hanooti has been identified by federal prosecutors and top counterterrorism officials as a enthusiastic supporter of Hamas — serving as one of its top fundraisers — and also as an active supporter of terrorism and extremist Islamic ideology for several decades.
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He also holds the rare distinction of not only being named by prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terror-finance case in American history, but also of being listed as a conspirator in the trial of “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the planned follow-up attack on New York City landmarks.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The climate scam corruption metastasizes By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on December 2nd, 2016

The problem with a giant con game like global warming hysteria is that the baseline dishonesty ends up corrupting other institutions. Academia is pre-eminent among the collateral corruptees, but even a Native American tribe in genuine peril is in on the game. Willis Eschenbach provides the ugly details at Watts Up With That?

He spotted news that a tribe on the seashore of Olympic Peninsula is being touted as the “first climate refugees.” He drily notes eight other separate claims of being the first climate refugees, so he dubs the Quinault Indian Nation the “ninth first climate refugees.”

But that is not the nub of the criticism. It is that the Quinaults are genuinely threatened by tsunamis and in all logic ought to evacuate their current settlement right on the shore, because a major fault is nearby and overdue.

But the money is not in tsunamis; it is in global warming. So, as NPR says:

In the U.S. Northwest, sea-level rise is forcing a Native American tribe to consider abandoning lands it has inhabited for thousands of years.

The Quinault Indian Nation, whose small village lies at the mouth of the Quinault River on the outer coast of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, now relies on a 2,000-foot-long sea wall to protect it from the encroaching Pacific Ocean. (snip)

The Quinault tribe has developed a $60 million plan to move the entire village of Taholah uphill and out of harm’s way. That will mean relocating the school, the courthouse, the police station and the homes of 700 tribal members a safer distance from the encroaching Pacific.

“It’s a heavy price tag,” Sharp acknowledged, adding that she and others with the Quinault will be turning to Congress, philanthropists and the tribe’s own financial resources to pay for the project.

NPR plays the usual sympathy game:

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Mourning Hiroshima While Facilitating the Next Nuclear Disaster By Janet Levy

Posted By on December 2nd, 2016

On a recent visit to Tinian, an island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, I visited North Field, site of the B-29 bomb-loading pits for the famed Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombs. Early on the morning of August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay took off for Hiroshima and released Little Boy. Three days later, Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, delivering the final blow to the Japanese that led to the surrender of the imperial government.

A few days later, as part of a follow-up visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Park, I viewed the monument dedicated to the legacy of the first city in the world to suffer a nuclear attack and to the memories of the bomb’s victims. Much to my surprise, I learned that until recently, no sitting American president had visited the site since the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945. Previous presidents had been wary of a visit that could be misconstrued as an apology for an action that many believe definitively ended the war and potentially saved up to one million lives in the process.

Although, technically, President Obama did not offer a formal apology during his visit in May this year, his remarks could easily have been interpreted as such. He stated that he hoped that his trip to the bombing site would prompt America’s “shared responsibility to look directly in the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.”

He ended with a reference to a future “in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening. … I hope that sometime in the future, they will start to realize that this was not the right thing.”

According to news reports, the rationale for Obama’s visit was to remind the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons, highlight the threat of a world that continues to produce nuclear weapons, and call for a nuclear “moral revolution.” The visit was of a piece with Obama’s perceived mantle as a world peacemaker. Yet, in truth, his actions have increased the opportunities for nuclear proliferation among nations hostile to the West while undermining the military strength of the U.S. and our longtime ally, Israel.

Early in his presidency, in Prague in 2009, Obama proclaimed his vision of a world without nuclear weapons. In fact, this declaration was largely responsible for his being considered for the Nobel Peace Prize with the hope that the award might spur his peace efforts. In Prague, Obama told a crowd of 20,000, “Today, the Cold War has disappeared, but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.”

In light of these facts, it is puzzling to consider the meaning of Obama’s Hiroshima visit after his promoting and signing of the Joint Commission Plan of Action or JCPOA with the Islamic terrorist state of Iran, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal; his ardent push for the treaty known as New START with Russia, thereby relieving the U.S. of nuclear weapons stockpiles; and his apparent tolerance for North Korea’s nuclear testing. This is curious indeed at a time when rogue states and non-state actors have been actively involved in the acquisition of nuclear weapons with little comment from the White House.

In his book, Obamabomb: A Dangerous and Growing National Security Fraud, Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst and senior vice president with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., explained how the JCPOA increased the threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and made Iran a greater danger to regional and international security.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

1875: The Global Warming Solution By Tony Collins

Posted By on December 2nd, 2016

Let’s assume global warming is real. Correct or not, we will start today with that supposition. Assume with me that there is a problem for a moment so that we may discuss tangible solutions.

Let us start by defining our terminology, as the concept of “climate change” tends to drift to fit the data—the true hallmark of scientific rigor.

The argument at hand is that the earth is warming due to greenhouse gases which man is releasing into the atmosphere; most especially carbon dioxide. This has been culminating since around the time of the post-war industrial boom accompanying and following World War II. Since then, CO2 emissions have continued to expand at an alarming rate. Through this anthropomorphic, man-made increase in warmth the average surface temperature of the earth will continue to climb, the oceans will rise, polar bears will need to learn to surf, and all that jazz. Also, potentially, parts of coastal California will eventually fall into the ocean. This is apparently to be taken as a bad thing, but must depend on one’s perspective.

This is a real problem.

Even if it isn’t, there is the famous “play it safe” argument. If we can’t be positive either way in regards to climate warming, shouldn’t we work to reduce our greenhouse emissions just to be sure? Those that argue in this alternative and don’t take it to the logical extreme are not serious people.

The case for global warming, as straightforward as it is, should be equally easy to solve. We simply need to return to the carbon levels of 1940, the front end of our carbon production explosion, and all the anticipated pain will go away. Any other suggestion from trillion-dollar, jet-setting, pretend-you-aren’t-part-of-the-problem climate summits is a half-measure.

So, problem solved. In 2014 humans emitted 35.69 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere . To solve climate change, we don’t have to take this down to zero; just back to 1940 levels. In that year, according to the Carbon Dioxide Emission Analysis Center, human emission was 1.299 million metric tons.

While we will go with it for today, admittedly this isn’t strictly “apples to apples” in its comparison; though it is also not too far off. Climate activists would, here, bring up solar and wind power, and such, as a key difference from 1940. And I would agree if those not-ready-for-primetime solutions were going to solve the carbon “problem” at any point in the conceivable future. If it were to be practical, I could buy the “play it safe” argument that we switch away from fossil fuels.

As an aside, in this regard I somewhat agree with so-called climate advocates. I have faith that technology will continue to improve on its own accord, fossil fuel use will eventually be replaced with more efficient solutions (a process which can be done without government coercion), and this whole thing will be rendered rather academic within a hundred years. Activists will probably claim a successful victory at this point; having done nothing but hold summits that agree to cripple economies.

But the argument—THE argument—is that this needs to be solved immediately; not that we have a couple hundred years of wiggle room. We are already past the date when New York was supposed to sink and landfall hurricanes would be an annual occurrence. Unless we can switch to solar and wind power tomorrow, an immediate reduction in emissions of 96% should just about suffice in their place.

Well, except for the pesky global population.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Roger Franklin US Letter: The Left Faces Reality

Posted By on December 2nd, 2016

The sense of near-bilious dismay at Trump’s victory is everywhere as I write, a scant twenty-four hours after the votes were tallied. At the D.C. bus station this morning, for example, a young woman emblazoned with Hillary buttons burst spontaneously into tears. It was a beautiful thing to see.
An old joke in New York newspaper circles imagined Armageddon as reported by the city’s rival rags. The pre-Murdoch New York Post, then owned by the genteel leftist Dorothy Schiff, pitched to the interests and sympathies of its core readership: “End of World: Jews and Negroes Suffer Most”. What brings this to mind is the headline that runs across the top of this morning’s ink-and-paper Times:

Democrats, Students and Foreign Allies
Face the Reality of a Trump Presidency

Can’t you just savour the dilemma facing the Times men, women and persons who drafted those few words? So many victims set for the gibbet, so little space on one front page to list them all. What of all the other groups allegedly destined to be ground beneath the Trump jackboot? What of environmentalists and homosexuals, Muslims, Mexicans and sundry other swarthy sorts, unionists, bureaucrats, women, the elderly, universities, endangered species, entire cities, the US legal system and perhaps, as any Times editor worth his organic, non-iodised sea-salt would have put it had space permitted, the very fate of the planet itself?

The sense of shock, of appalled and near-bilious dismay that such a man could have beaten Saint Hillary is everywhere as I write, a scant twenty-four hours after the votes were tallied. On yesterday’s bus to New York two of my fellow passengers were very glum girls indeed. They were students most likely, sporting backpacks, Hillary buttons and matching pairs of red and puffy eyes. As we shuffled aboard, the taller laid her head on her friend’s shoulder and heaved a few more tears, the perfect picture of heartbroken misery.

It was lovely to watch.

And it only got better as the shock and horror of democracy’s result on November 8 inflicted its dreadful torments on Generation Snowflake, whose serried brat-allions, summoned by social media, turned out to march down Fifth Avenue that night. I heard about the protest over dinner with my son, a dual-citizen who lives in New York and whose phone was running hot with Facebook messages from contacts variously de-friending him or simply heaping abuse on his tousled head.

“I’ve just been called a fascist again,” he said with a rueful smile after a message from his gender-fluid cousin interrupted the poori and chicken-liver appetiser. His crime against leftist sensibilities? He had observed via Facebook that there might well have been another Democrat destined for the White House if Team Hillary had not rigged the primary system in order to render Bernie Sanders a mere annoyance, rather than a bona fide contender. He had a point. The landscapes of the fulcrum states that went with Trump or swung to him—Michigan, Wisconsin, all of the South—are punctuated by empty factories, silent mills, grim prospects. An old-fashioned, soak-the-rich class warrior might, just might, have won those votes. As it was, those citizens’ blue-collar lot was to be worse than ignored, it was to be loudly scorned. This was the wasteland of the “deplorables”, as Mrs Clinton so ill-advisedly described them.