WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad Visits Moscow By Nathan Hodge in Moscow and Dahlia Kholaif in Cairo

Posted By on October 21st, 2015

Putin says Syrian government has ‘achieved significantly positive results’ against opposition forces.

MOSCOW—Syrian President Bashar al-Assad arrived in Moscow on an unannounced visit Tuesday, the Russian government said Wednesday, in the leader’s first known trip outside his country since the start of conflict there in March 2011.

In a statement issued by the Kremlin, Russian President said the Syrian government had “achieved significantly positive results” in its fight against an array of opposition forces.

Russia began an aerial-bombardment campaign in support of Mr. Assad’s forces in late September. Mr. Putin said Russia was willing “not only to take the path of military action in the fight against terrorism, but to take the path of a political solution” to end the conflict in Syria.

“It worries us as well—Russia, I mean—that unfortunately a minimum of around 4,000 people from the republics of the former Soviet Union have taken up arms against the government forces and are fighting on the territory of Syria,” Mr. Putin added.

According to the Kremlin statement, Mr. Assad expressed gratitude for Russia’s support.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Georgetown University Presents Syrian Christian who Supports the “Revolution” : Andrew Harrod

Posted By on October 21st, 2015

Supporters of overthrowing Syrian dictator Bashar Assad are truly rare among that country’s Christian minority, yet Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding (ACMCU) found one. Hartford Seminary Professor Najib George Awad’sSeptember 28 presentation (audio) before six people in ACMCU’s boardroom continued a longstanding, surreal ACMCU pattern of never locating Christians with any fears of Islam.

With ACMCU professor and fellow Syrian Christian expatriate Yvonne Haddad moderating, Awad drew upon his previous writing to recast minority in Syria’s context away from a numerical concept. Referencing French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Awad discussed “minoratization as a verb,” a process in which oppressive circumstances create for disfavored groups a status “qualitative in nature…something people transform into.” During decades of Syria’s Assad family dictatorship in particular, regime opponents endured “radical and merciless minoritization,” even though they were Syria’s “dominant majority” across ethnic and sectarian divisions. “In the Arab world today, secularism, democracy and liberalism are the real minority,” he wrote in 2014, including in Syria the “majority of the Syrian public rebelling against the systematic suppression and criminality of the regime.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

Ten Big Lies told about Israel and gives the Ten Straight Truths about Israel. By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Posted By on October 21st, 2015

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity during his speech to the 37th World Zionist Congress, to speak from his Zionist heart to the hearts of Zionists everywhere.

Netanyahu used the occasion to rally supporters of Israel and to call upon them to spread the truth about Zionism and Israel. He spoke during the midst of a wave of terror in Israel unlike any in recent time. The stabbing, shooting, car-ramming attacks on Israeli citizens just during the month of October alone has unnerved many. Once again the media and the outside world uses moral equivalency or worse to condemn Israel for the terror unleashed against its citizens.

Netanyahu’s rock steady speech enlisted all supporters of Israel in the battalion of truth tellers about Israel. The physical attacks are being endured solely by Israelis, but the fight against the vilification of the Jewish State is something in which everyone can and must participate.

The ammunition Netanyahu provided the troops he enlisted consists solely of truth. The truths that can and will deflate the myths perpetuated by so many against the Jewish State.

In all, Netanyahu summarized into Ten Big Lies being told about Israel, and he provided answers to all of them. The entire speech can be found here.

MEDIA Comments turned off

‘If There is a Third Intifada, We Want to Be the Ones Who Started It by Edward Alexander ****

Posted By on October 21st, 2015

“If There is a Third Intifada, We Want to Be the Ones Who Started It”

—New York Times Magazine Cover Story (Illustrated), March 17, 2013

“The most ghastly incident was at Hebron. There was a Jewish population there of over 700 people, an ancient community centred on a Talmudical college. Armed bands intent on slaughter reached Hebron on the 24th [August 1929]. The police were Arab and they stood passively by while their fellow Moslems moved into the town and to deeds which would have been revolting among animals. There was an inn…where some Jews had fled for safety. The Arabs killed and dismembered 23 of them with daggers and axes in an upper room, so that, according to a witness, blood ran down the stairs and soaked through the ceiling… This was not half of the crime…” (Christopher Sykes, Cross Roads to Israel: Palestine from Balfour to Bevin [Collins, 1965], pp. 118-19.)

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

“Martian,” Go Home! Edward Cline

Posted By on October 21st, 2015

There is enough “Red” in Ridley Scott’s The Martian to repaint the Red Planet.

Ridley Scott is a superb director. Most of his films are visually mesmerizing even if one doesn’t like their themes, epistemology, or metaphysics, or share their senses of life. You watch them because of his artistry. He is a kind of cinematic Rembrandt: You may not care for the subject, but the subject is so well executed you can’t help but look at it. As with David Lean’s later work (e.g., Lawrence of Arabia), most of Scott’s directed films are consistently, visually stunning, from the oppressively dark (and rainy) Blade Runner to the edge-of-your-seat claustrophobia of Alien to the brutal combat arenas of Gladiator. I have not seen all of his directed films; some I have avoided seeing because the subjects do not interest or appeal to me (e.g., American Gangster).

It’s too bad he’s a lefty, or is in thrall of Hollywood’s lefty money moguls and studios.

Scott’s film oeuvre is inconsistent in subject and theme, as much as is, say, Otto Preminger’s. Preminger had a bad habit of making suspenseful films and then not resolving the stories, leaving the stories and viewers hanging. Anatomy of a Murder and Advise and Consent are notable examples. I’ve always maintained that some of the best Hollywood directors are, ideologically, the most influential in spreading or sustaining bad ideas. Preminger was one of them. For me, the most memorable film of Preminger’s (in a positive sense) is Laura (1944). Preminger’s output was so eclectic that it is difficult to say whether or not he was a lefty.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Book review: Kissinger — Revered and reviled BY Angelo Codevilla

Posted By on October 21st, 2015

“Surely no statesman in modern times … has been as revered and then as reviled as Henry Kissinger.” So begins Niall Ferguson’s commissioned biography. But reverence and revulsion for Kissinger have never been sequential. Instead, for sixty years, Henry Kissinger has been a paragon of of America’s bipartisan ruling class, whose evolving identity he has reflected.

Ordinary people, however, sensed that he cared less for them than for his own career and ideas, and that he has served America badly. In 1976, as Democratic and Republican Party elites were celebrating Secretary of State Kissinger’s 1972 deals with the Soviet Union, his 1973 “Paris Peace Accords” after which America’s naval bases in Vietnam became Soviet bases, and were looking none too closely at the substance of the newly established relationship with China, the insurgent faction of the Democratic Party that nominated Jimmy Carter made rejection of Kissinger the winning issue of that year’s presidential campaign. Meanwhile Ronald Reagan was doing the same thing on behalf of the Republican rank and file, and continued to do it through his landslide victory in 1980.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Balance of Power: The Board Game by David “Spengler” Goldman

Posted By on October 21st, 2015

Henry Kissinger’s luminous career was punctuated by one great disappointment, namely his failure to foresee the collapse of the Soviet system and the downfall of the foreign-policy system to which he devoted his life. That’s on par with the old joke: “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” Kissinger was more hedgehog than fox: The fox knows many things, said Archilochus, but the hedgehog knows one important thing. Kissinger knew one important thing, which had the sole defect of being wrong. Like the Bourbons, Dr. Kissinger has learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as he showed in an Oct. 16 essay for the Wall Street Journal entitled, “A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse.” Kissinger bewails “disintegration of the American role in stabilizing the Middle East order” and wishes to restore it.

As Angelo Codevilla argued on this site in his review of a new Kissinger biography, the great man took as dogmatic truth that the Cold War was unwinnable, and thus “’the goal of war can no longer be military victory,’ but rather to achieve ‘certain political conditions that are fully understood by the other side,’ and that to this end, the U.S would ‘present (the enemy) at every point with an opportunity for a settlement.’”

Ronald Reagan, by contrast, told the first meeting of his national security team, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose.” He and his advisors–Richard Allen, William Clark, William J. Casey, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and then-younger men like Angelo Codevilla, Herbert Meyer and Norman Bailey–saw a sea-change when it stared them in the face.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Why Have We Forgotten Where We Are, Who We Are? By Nurit Greenger

Posted By on October 20th, 2015

In 1929, 86 years ago, for the Holiday of Shavuot-Pentecost, Levin Kipnis wrote the early Hebrew song ‘Baskets on our shoulders,’ an Israeli children’s song that is sung to date.

Yedidya Admon wrote the tune to the song and many artists recorded it, among them the singer Yaffa Yarkoni.

The poet’s song version is as follows:

Baskets on our heads,
Our heads are decorated,
From all corners of the land we arrived,
We brought the first fruits.
From Yehuda-Judea, Yehuda, from Shomron-Samaria,
From the valley, from the Gallil-Galilee –
Clear the road for us,
Our first fruits with us,
Bang, bang the drum and bang the flute!
About Levin Kipnis

Levin Kipnis, who lived between 1894-1990, was an Israeli children’s story writer and a poet, who wrote mostly in Hebrew and also in Yiddish, and in 1978 became Israel’s Prize Laureate for children’s literature.

BOOKS Comments turned off

A Ray of Light Amid the Terror: Evelyn Gordon

Posted By on October 20th, 2015

It’s hard to find any silver lining in a situation where Palestinians are perpetrating multiple stabbing attacks against Jews every day, and most of the “international community” is siding with the perpetrators. Yet this dismal situation may finally have produced something Israel desperately needs: An Israeli Arab political leader who represents his community’s sane majority. The 65 percent who are proud to be Israeli, the 55 percent who identify with the Israeli flag, the ones who genuinely want to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors.

For decades, Israeli Arab leadership at the national level has been an unmitigated disaster. The community’s current Knesset members, elected on a joint ticket called the Joint Arab List, span the gamut from the “moderate” Ayman Odeh to the “firebrand” Hanin Zoabi, to borrow the media’s favorite misnomers. The former merely refuses to condemn Palestinian terror, saying, “I cannot tell the nation how to struggle … I do not put red lines on the Arab Palestinian nation.” The latter may face criminal investigation for actively inciting it, having allegedly told a Hamas publication that the current terror needs more “national support,” because “If individual attacks continue without national support, they will be extinguished within the next several days, and therefore hundreds of thousands are needed to start a real intifada.” In between are MKs who spew a wide variety of anti-Israel libels; my personal favorite was Ahmed Tibi’s 2014 op-ed in The Hill claiming that Israeli Arabs are subject to Jim Crow treatment – signed, without a trace of irony, by his then-title of deputy speaker of the Knesset.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Pignoli Peril Marilyn Penn

Posted By on October 20th, 2015

For those whose anxiety quotient hasn’t been filled by fears of snail dart extinction and global warming, there is now another impending disaster that hits us in our kitchens where we are most vulnerable. According to conservationist Jonathan Slaght, “the pine nut industry may be contributing to the crash of an ecosystem.” (Pesto? Hold the Pine Nuts,NYT 10/19) Apparently, most of our imported pignoli come from the Korean pine tree found in a rain forest in Russia’s far east where several species such as chipmunks, black bears and red deer depend on these tiny nuts for sustenance during winter. Memo to self: aren’t bears traditionally animals who learned to outsmart winter’s low food supply by clever hibernation?

Our greedy American demand for less expensive pignoli than the Italian Armani version has led to over-harvesting the forests and selling the nuts to the Chinese who sell them to us in typical “made in China” cheaper price points. This international trade is being blamed for the phenomenon of hungry bears leaving the forest to attack residents of Luchegorsk, a town you never knew existed and cannot pronounce that will now live in infamy as the innocent victim of white privilege and culinary cupidity. Mr. Slaght neglects to point a finger at the Italians whose telegenic chefs first taught us how to dress up spaghetti with the leftover rampant basil planted by over-zealous summer gardeners. I sincerely hope that Calvin Trillin gets wind of this crisis as he is the one who suggested changing America’s traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner to spaghetti carbonara. Admittedly, there are no pignoli in that recipe but the nudge to love Italian food became a shove for all readers of Trillin’s classic tome, “Alice, Let’s Eat.”

America, we can grow more of our own pine nuts and/or substitute color-coordinated pistachios in our domestic version of pesto. Or, we can stop worrying about the food preferences of Putin’s bears and say in the immortal words of Catherine the Great, “Let them eat borscht.”