RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the war in Gaza rages, Hamas—the Palestinian terror organization that rules Gaza and also enjoys great popularity in the West Bank—is naturally resorting to propaganda imagery to try to portray Israel as a vicious, immoral slayer of civilians. Of course, some Gazan civilians are getting killed and injured—for reasons that many have pointed out, particularly Hamas’s systematic use of the civilian population as human shields [2].

Palestinian propaganda has a long and inglorious history, and now is a good time to look at the most egregious examples and get an idea of what Israel is up against. Along with the “Pallywood” genre of fraudulent claims against Israel, both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, the Fatah-led government of the West Bank, systematically cultivate outright hatred of Israel and Jews.

The case of the supposed killing of the Palestinian boy Muhammad al-Dura by Israeli forces in a September 2000 firefight in Gaza was Pallywood’s greatest triumph, because the alleged crime was used to incite a whole population into murderous rage and attacks against Israelis. But as was proved by the intrepid French media analyst Philippe Karsenty and others, the charge was a fraud; not only could al-Dura not possibly have been shot by the Israeli troops because of their physical location, but it turned out he was not shot—or killed—at all. See al-Dura’s supposedly dead form miraculously “move” at 2:40, and note the total absence of blood.

Illegal immigrants are a minor annoyance; America’s shift towards European fertility is a catastrophe from which we may never recover. The demographic crisis isn’t at our borders but at home. It’s easy to blow off steam about illegals on the border, and tough to address the fundamentals. I’ve tried to do so in the past, for example here, but the real problems and prospective solutions don’t make easy sound-bites.

Just to make things clear: I want super-tough, restrictive immigration laws. I’d prefer a Canadian-style system that favors highly-educated immigrants with capital to invest. But I don’t think the best immigration law in the world is going to do much good.

The latest dip in fertility below replacement might be driven by economics, but the economics don’t appear to be getting any better.

Barack Obama is apparently very angry with Bibi Netanyahu.

We have known for some time, via hot mike and other methods, that neither he nor his secretary of State much care for the Israeli prime minister. But — perhaps exacerbated by a multiplicity of foreign and domestic policy failures, plus atrocious poll numbers, one this weekend showing Romney beating him handily [1] were the election held today — Obama seemed more irked than usual.

He needed someone to beat up since the world was beating him up. And the Israelis had just hugely embarrassed his secretary of State (and by extension him) by pointing out their absurd bias in favor of Hamas in ceasefire negotiations, so absurd in fact that they outraged even Israel’s most famous liberal/left politician, Tzipi Livni, who would normally do almost anything for a chance for peace. (Ironically, the details of the pro-Hamas negotiations in which Israeli security concerns — the tunnels, demilitarization, etc. — were ignored were exposed by Barak Ravid in Israel’s most liberal newspaper, Haaretz.)

Further, they had outraged the Egyptians [2], who were dumped from the negotiations by Obama and Kerry in favor of Turkey and Qatar. Our administration seems to have a preference for the more extreme Islamist/Muslim Brotherhood societies, although you would think, given their professed loyalty to women’s and gay rights, these cultures would be anathema to them. Never mind. Obama is an equal opportunity narcissist and everything’s fine, unless you cross him.

Which, according to sources in Israel, is where Netanyahu found himself when the American president called Sunday to admonish him about Gaza. Obama reportedly used or implied the threat of withholding the resupply of weapons — don’t know if this includes the Iron Dome itself — if Israel didn’t fall into line and stop attacking Gaza immediately.

What Obama is doing, in effect, is saving Hamas. It’s almost mind boggling to think, but it’s true.

The standard excuse is that if Hamas is obliterated, what replaces it will be even worse. Oh, really? ISIS or similar may be waiting in the wings to step in, but it’s doubtful if Israel (given its huge 87% public support for the current war) will ever let something like that happen, at least in the near future.

“I know of no right to privacy in the United States Constitution,” says Gerald Walpin. “That is a phrase that has been thrown around that the Supreme Court for many, many years said didn’t exist… It doesn’t exist in the Constitution.” Walpin, a former federal Inspector General nominated by George W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate, prominent New York attorney, and author of the book “The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution,” sees the National Security Agency (NSA) as one of the most necessary organizations within the United States. “There is nothing unconstitutional about the NSA program, which merely determines whether somebody calls a number.”

Walpin is in the camp of one political and legal tradition, comprising about half of American citizens, that believes that surveillance programs like those of the NSA are the best way to prevent terrorism and save American lives. The other side is more skeptical, to say the least. They claim the right to privacy is fragile, and that national security programs are overbroad—usurping the privacy of the people while instituting surveillance programs that may not be effective. While neither side can reconcile their political differences, one thing is certain: a lengthy and contentious legal boxing match is unfolding, and the final rounds will likely take place at the podium in front of the Supreme Court.

The NSA surveillance controversy came to a head in June 2013, after the now infamous and exiled former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released a trove of classified documents detailing government surveillance programs to The Guardian. Headlines were bold—is Snowden a patriot or a traitor? The Internet was alive with angry and dubiously informed chatter. People yelled across dinner tables over what the President ought to do. The nation wanted to place blame; was this Obama’s politics or Bush’s? As it gets sorted out in the glaring public eye, the legal justification for United States national security policy will be tested in the courts as well. What’s more, the logical justification behind keeping the policies—that terrorism has been stopped because of them—is being called into question by the public and media.

We should all feel better. Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, columnist for the New York Times and apologist for the Obama Administration recently headlined an op-ed: “Newsflash: There was no debt crisis.” He references the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projection that the U.S. federal debt will be no higher in 2039, as a percent of GDP, than it had been at the end of World War II! In doing so, Comrade Krugman accepts as absolute the prophecy of a vision-impaired seer. He appears unconcerned that today’s federal debt borrowers lack the discipline of their post-World War II compatriots. He seems unwilling to account for the fact that while the last baby-boomer turns 65 on 2030, life expectancy continues to rise. Given current trends, there will only be two workers for every retiree in 2039. No matter. He sums up his opinion, in case anyone misunderstands him: “We don’t have a debt crisis, and never did.”

The federal deficit has declined from a $1.4 trillion peak in 2009 to an estimated $500 billion this year, which is good news. The reasons: slowly rising GDP has resulted in rising tax revenues; sequestration helped on the expense side; and the wind-downs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have reduced defense spending. Those three points are positives. But two other factors exude a whiff of the ephemeral: One, the real cost of ObamaCare has not yet kicked in. Keep in mind, nothing is ever free, especially a government program that is advertised to be so. And, two, average interest rates on federal debt are currently 450 basis points below where they were in 2000 and 300 basis points below where they averaged during the post-War years. Were rates at their long-term historic levels, interest costs on $17 trillion in debt would be $500 billion higher – a meaningful increase on a $3.9 trillion budget.

The CBO’s projections, as to the future of interest rates, assume that markets have down-shifted permanently to the current level. Perhaps the Federal Reserve can work its magic and keep interest rates low. But history has shown that price fixing (including the cost of money) does not work over the long term. In times of crisis, for brief periods such as we had in the fall of 2008, it may be necessary for government to intervene in an extraordinary way, but over time free markets self-adjust and work best. I may not have learned much in forty-seven years in capital markets, but the one thing I feel pretty comfortable forecasting is that prices of all asset categories, including money, will fluctuate. At any rate, combined, all of the above factors have produced an unusual level of complacency about the possible threat of rising debt.

I was instrumental in establishing the “Israeli National Skin Bank”, which is the largest in the world. The National Skin Bank stores skin for every day needs as well as for war time or mass casualty situations.

This skin bank is hosted at the Hadassah Ein Kerem University hospital in Jerusalem where I was the Chairman of plastic surgery.

This is how I was asked to supply skin for an Arab woman from Gaza, who was hospitalized in Soroka Hospital in Beersheva, after her family burned her. Usually, such atrocities happen among Arab families when the women are suspected of having an affair.

We supplied all the needed Homografts for her treatment. She was successfully treated by my friend and colleague, Prof. Lior Rosenberg and discharged to return to Gaza.

She was invited for regular follow-up visits to the outpatient clinic in Beersheva.

One day she was caught at a border crossing wearing a suicide belt. She meant to explode herself in the outpatient clinic of the hospital where they saved her life. It seems that her family promised her that if she did that, they would forgive her.

This is only one example of the war between Jews and Muslims in the Land of Israel. It is not a territorial conflict. This is a civilization conflict, or rather a war between civilization & barbarism.

Bibi (Netanyahu) gets it, Obama does not.

As many people as possible must come to an understanding of what radical Islam is — and what awaits the world if it is not stopped.

Dr. Arieh Eldad is an M.D. at Hadassah Hospital in Israel.

Jews have been accused of harming and murdering non-Jews since the twelfth century in England, when Jewish convert to Catholicism, Theobald of Cambridge, mendaciously announced that European Jews ritually slaughtered Christian children each year and drank their blood during Passover season.

That medieval blood libel, largely abandoned in the contemporary West, does, however, still appear as part of Arab world’s vilification of Jews—now transmogrified into a slander against Israel, the Jew of nations. But in the regular chorus of defamation against Israel by a world infected with Palestinianism, a new, more odious trend has begun to show itself: the blood libel has been revivified; however, to position Israel (and by extension Jews) as demonic agents in the community of nations, the primitive fantasies of the blood libel are now masked with a veneer of academic scholarship and published as politicized scientific study.

Just this month, for example, the British medical journal Lancet further degraded its academic respectability and credibility by publishing something entitled “An open letter for the people in Gaza,” signed by 24 doctors and scientists. In the language of propaganda and politics—as opposed to the reasoned language of science and academically-based inquiry—the signers had as their purpose “denouncing what we witness in the aggression of Gaza by Israel.” These doctors and scientists, none of whom has had to live under an unceasing barrage of more than 10,000 rockets and mortars launched from Gaza into Israel, nevertheless denounced what they see as “the perversity of [Israel’s] propaganda that justifies the creation of an emergency to masquerade a massacre, a so-called ‘defensive aggression.’” Instead, the signers believe there is no basis for Israel’s self-defense, that it is actually no more than “a ruthless assault of unlimited duration, extent, and intensity” and an “unacceptable pretext of Israel eradicating political parties and resistance to the occupation and siege they impose.”

“The massacre in Gaza spares no one,” the letter continued in its hyperbolic, not factual, tones, and, according to the signers, “these attacks aim to terrorise [sic], wound the soul and the body of the people, and make their life impossible in the future, as well as also demolishing their homes and prohibiting the means to rebuild.”

Of course, there is no mention of the Palestinian’s complicity in their own situation, no reference to the nine years of genocidal aggression by Hamas since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, no examination of the failure of Palestinian leadership to even attempt to start building a civil society and functioning government. Every pathology and failure, including the health and well-being of the entire Gazan society, is the fault of Israel—as a result of its siege, its blockade, its oppression, and its current incursion to suppress Hamas rocket attacks.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/robert-spencer-on-arab-winter-comes-to-america-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of thirteen books, including two New York Times bestsellers, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). His latest book is Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In.

Robert joined the show to discuss Arab Winter Comes to America, analyzing the threat of Islamic Jihad and the West’s denial about it. He shed light on ISIS’s Islamic Inspirations, How Jihad Denial Enables Jihad, Why Jihadists are Welcome in the UK But Not Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, and much, much more.

Don’t miss it!

“We are faced with an enemy whose goal is to conquer the world by subversion and infiltration or, if necessary, by open war.”

The speaker was Senator John F. Kennedy and he was discussing the Communist Control Act that he had co-sponsored. The Act did what had been previously thought impossible; it outlawed the Communist Party.

The latest bill to fight an enemy whose goal is also to conquer the world by subversion, infiltration and open war doesn’t have a Kennedy co-sponsor. Instead it has the two members of Congress who have fought the hardest to expose the Muslim Brotherhood; Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert.

The Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act goes to the heart of the beast by designating the entity a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Plenty of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates and splinter groups, from Hamas to Al Qaeda, have already ended up on the FTO list.

But the Brotherhood has been able to keep spewing out new front groups that enjoy immunity.

The Act lists some of the Brotherhood groups and Brotherhood leaders already on the FTO list. These include the Kuwaiti Muslim Brotherhood and the head of the Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood’s political party who served as the coordinator for the bombing of the USS Cole. The Act documents, briefly, the Brotherhood’s history and some of its more recent involvements in worldwide terrorism.

From the original World Trade Center attacks to the recent Brotherhood attacks on Coptic Christians, the Act comprehensively makes the case that the Muslim Brotherhood is a violent terrorist group.

Putin Restores a Cuban Beachhead The Kremlin and the Castros are chummy again, and Moscow is offering military aid.

Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes was the highest-ranking Pentagon intelligence analyst ever to be busted for working for the Castros. What’s also notable, in light of Vladimir Putin’s visit to Havana earlier this month, is that she was nabbed in 2001, long after the Cold War ended.

Besides leaking classified material and blowing the cover of covert U.S. intelligence agents, Montes seems to have been charged by her handlers with convincing top brass in Washington that Fidel Castro —who had wanted the Soviets to drop the bomb on this country during the 1962 missile crisis—no longer presents a threat to the U.S. Montes, who rose to become the U.S. military’s resident intelligence expert on Cuba, partly accomplished that mission. The Pentagon’s 1998 Cuba threat assessment played down its military and intelligence capabilities.

The best Cuba watchers were less sanguine. The Castros remain as paranoid, power-hungry and pathological as ever. They may be economic fools, but they run a good business making the island available to criminal governments, like Iran and North Korea.

Mr. Putin’s Cuba trip reinforces the point. The old Cold War villains are up to no good one more time.

Russia’s president is trying to rebuild the Soviet empire. Eastern Europe won’t cooperate and in Asia the best he will ever be is China’s junior partner. But in Latin America Mr. Putin’s KGB résumé and willingness to stick his thumb in the eye of the U.S. gives him traction. Colonizing Cuba again is an obvious move.