http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/08/rebuilding-jerusalem/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=d05ffd0081-Mosaic_2013_8_16&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-d05ffd0081-41165129 “The idea of Judaism is inseparable from the idea of the Jewish people, and the idea of the Jewish people is inseparable from the idea of the Jewish land” THE Zionist movement dates from A.D. 70, the year of the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish State. The Zionist Organization dates from 1897, […]
Another Tack: Hobson’s choice – the Obama variation Was it really meaningless coincidence that just as an alarmed American administration closed down some 20 embassies throughout the Mideast – including the one in hardly unfriendly Tel Aviv – Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan delivered his opening court-martial statement? Although superficially unconnected, these events are inextricably linked. […]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-obamas-unconstitutional-steps-worse-than-nixons/2013/08/14/e0bd6cb2-044a-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html
President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.
Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with health care. No, “this was in consultation with businesses.”
He continued: “In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law. . . . It looks like there may be some better ways to do this, let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare. We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.”
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2013/08/15/americas-problems-in-the-middle-east-are-just-beginning/?print=1 It’s 2015, and there is a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas), financed by Iran, wins an election on a platform demanding the expulsion of the Jews from Israel. Iran, meanwhile, smuggles shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to terrorist cells in Palestine that can take down […]
http://bit.ly/14CZmYb 1. IBM acquired Trusteer for $700MN, its 13th Israeli acquisition (Globes Business Daily, August 16, 2013). 2. Warren Buffett defined Israel as “the leading, largest and most promising investment hub outside the United States.” Bill Gates stated that “innovation going on in Israel is critical to the future of the technology business.” Israeli firms […]
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4125/qatar-risky-overreach Haifa, Israel – With seemingly limitless wealth and a penchant for often supporting both sides of the argument, the State of Qatar has become a highly significant player in Middle East power-politics. Recent events in Egypt and Syria, however, have put the brakes on Qatar’s ambitions. In this second part of his analysis […]
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/add-brussels-to-the-list-of-where-jews-need-to-hide-again/2013/08/16/ Atheneum Maimonides, a Jewish school in central Brussels. Note the video cameras, unmarked entrance, absence of windows on lower levels. For years there have been reports of Jews being warned not to wear items that identify them as Jewish in places where there are large or numbers are particularly aggressive anti-Semites. People are told […]
Zurich unveils sex drive-in The Swiss city of Zurich on Thursday unveiled a sex drive-in which local authorities say will enable them to keep closer tabs on prostitution, a year after voters backed the plan. Due to be opened officially in a ceremony on Aug 26, the nine so-called “sex boxes” are located in a […]
Home From his rented vacation villa in Vineyard Haven, MA, President Obama conceded the obvious, “America cannot determine the future of Egypt,” he said. He went on to declare, “We don’t take sides with any particular party or political figure,” only to contradict himself by announcing the cancellation of U.S.- Egyptian joint military exercises “while […]
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Menachem-Begin-His-legacy-a-century-after-his-birth-323183?utm_source=Menachem+Begin%27s+Legacy+on+his+100th+Birthday+%28Jerusalem+Post%29&utm_campaign=Menachem+Begin%27s+Legacy+on+his+100th+Birthday&utm_medium=email
Begin’s life had, at its core, an unwavering constant, a guiding principle that shaped everything. It was a life of selfless devotion to his people. That devotion fashioned a life in which determination eradicated fear, hope overcame despondency, love overcame hate, and devotion to both Jews and human beings everywhere coexisted with ease and grace. It was a life of great loyalty-to the people into which he was born, to the woman he loved from the moment he met her, and to the state that he helped create.
Menachem Begin, Israel’s sixth Prime Minister, was born one hundred years ago today. A century after his birth, and more than two decades after his death, it behooves us all, regardless of our political stripes, to take a moment and to reflect on the profundity of his contribution to the Jewish people. That claim will undoubtedly strike many as strange, since more than half a century after he helped rid Palestine of the British, Begin is still disparaged by many of the very same Jews who see in the American revolution a cause for genuine pride.
Begin himself seemed to sense the irony, so he spoke time and again about the American revolution. In an article commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s death, he combined two passages from Thomas Jefferson’s letters-one to James Madison and another to William Stephens Smith. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical,” Begin quoted Jefferson, adding the American revolutionary’s sobering observation that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
It was natural that Begin thought about the Zionist revolution in light of what American revolutionary patriots had wrought 175 years earlier. After all, the American and Zionist revolutions shared much in common. Both were fueled by a people’s desire for freedom after long periods of oppression in which religion had played a central role in their persecution. Both were designed to force the British to leave the territory in question so that they (the American colonialists and the Zionists) could establish their own, sovereign countries-in Israel’s case on the very ground where a sovereign Jewish nation had stood centuries before. Both produced admirable democracies. And both were violent revolutions.
