http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/352973/breaking-egypt-transitional-government-names-economist-hazem-al-beblawi-prime-minister Al-Ahram is reporting that Haze El-Beblawy has been appointed Egypt’s interim prime minister. Beblawy is a lawyer and a progressive, Paris-educated economist. He was a prominent banker during the Mubarak regime, worked at the U.N., and, following Mubarak’s ouster, was deputy finance minister and, later, finance minister, under the government led by the Supreme […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3844/honor-compromise-middle-east Why the U.S. administration believes it can persuade Mahmoud Abbas to sign an agreement guaranteeing Israel’s right to exist is astonishing. It is pointless for Western leaders to provide Middle Eastern leaders with incentives to reach compromises where, in Western eyes, all sides win, but in Middle Eastern eyes, their side loses. There, the […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3788/human-rights-ngo Although the Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association [CADFA] claims to promote “human rights,” in reality it is a politicized organization that uses human rights to sanitize its support for terrorism and to obtain public funding from the British government and the European Union. Whether a “coalition of women for peace” or the demand for […]
Two States Not Better Than One: Richard Greenfield
http://www.jewishledger.com/
Whenever Israel’s future is discussed, there is always that glib assertion that Israelis have no choice but to implement a “two-state solution” — A “Palestinian” state alongside Israel. For Israel’s welfare, we are told. Alternatively, Israel would have to absorb millions of “Palestinians,” give them the right to vote and change the nature of the Jewish state forever.
Inherent in this argument is the imperative that Israel must give Arabs the right to vote — a right they would not have in any of the 22 Arab countries around them. But they press on. A ‘two state solution’, they say, is far preferable to an absorption of territory by one Jewish state in which “Palestinians” are not fully franchised voters. It’s all about the vote.
One has to wonder why. Voting rights don’t follow when a new Arab state is created. The Arab world without a free press, an open nominating system, and other democratic building blocks, can’t get from here to there readily. Voting in Islamic states, as it is presented, is mostly a phony exercise staged to mollify world opinion and create a domestic fiction. Perfected in the third world, it is all about one vote, once.
The world never has a problem with Arabs not voting except when Israel is perceived to be the keeper of that right. The most recent self-immolating democracy is Gaza which, when forced to hold an election at U.S. insistence, morphed into an aggressive terrorist, missile-firing entity where no elections will be held again soon. Jimmy Carter’s rush to approve notwithstanding, elections don’t make democracies; institutions have to be built, economies freed, and electorates informed before free individuals can produce the foundations that allow for a democratic impulse to materialize. Elections like the one in Gaza are a third world evasion that persuades the naïve. Americans should know better. Israelis do.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/syria-naval-blast-points-israeli-raid-151721987.html BEIRUT (Reuters) – Foreign forces destroyed advanced Russian anti-ship missiles in Syria last week, rebels said on Tuesday – a disclosure that appeared to point to an Israeli raid. Qassem Saadeddine, spokesman for the Free Syrian Army’s Supreme Military Council, said a pre-dawn strike on Friday hit a Syrian navy barracks at Safira, […]
http://trib.com/opinion/columns/what-amnesty-means-for-wyoming/article_1060e0a9-cf3e-51f1-a31b-960056bd7b0c.html Illegal aliens are the fastest growing segment of Wyoming’s population. They are coming in at double the rate of legal immigration. European immigration is down since 2000, while Hispanic immigration is up 100 percent. Illegal immigration accounted for a third of federal prosecutions in our state. Wyoming voters want secure borders. We can feel […]
KNOCK, KNOCK….
QUESTION:”WHO IS THERE?”
ANSWER: “ALLAH”
QUESTION: “ALLAH WHO?”
ANSWER: ” PRECISELY…ALLAHU AKBAR”
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-nasty-organic-hepatitis-outbreak?f=puball
A recent hepatitis outbreak in USDA “certified-organic” frozen berry mix has people worrying and wondering what steps are being taken to ensure that organic food is safe. Unfortunately, not many.
A remarkably similar case occurred in Germany three years ago. Forty-four people died and 3,700 fell ill after eating E. coli-contaminated certified-organic bean sprouts. Hundreds of survivors will require kidney dialysis the rest of their lives. The cause was never definitively determined, although a nearby cattle operation was suspected of contaminating water used to sprout the organic sprouts.
All this raises critical questions. What measures were taken to ensure that water used on this organic sprouting operation was safe? Was there any testing? Is there any organic field testing now in response to that German tragedy? What about numerous other outbreaks in certified-organic food – like outbreaks of listeria, E. coli and salmonella in organic spinach for instance?
Have such incidents provided incentives for organic industry leaders to recognize the need to test crops in the field, to ensure that they’re safe? Have they prodded government safety inspectors to require such tests? Are organic crops already tested to ensure that these kinds of things don’t happen again?
Sadly, the answer to all these questions is no or nothing. Instead, with steady media help, incidents that should spur the organic industry to take action invariably become mere bumps along the road toward expanding a food system that organic promoters hope will eventually replace conventional farming.
Meanwhile, the organic industry and news media promote regular stories about speculative (and even ludicrous) claims that genetically-modified (GM) crops might pose risks to human health. Recent articles about minute traces of GM wheat getting into a Japan-bound shipment represent just one example.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-conservative-founding-fathers-who-saved-america?f=puball On the Fourth of July it is traditional and proper that we pay tribute to the nation’s Founding Fathers. The names of Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Madison are well known to Americans, but far less of the names of the conservative founders who, in many ways, saved and created the nation through their efforts […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The Zimmerman case is about many things, but it isn’t about George Zimmerman, an Hispanic Obama supporter who campaigned against police brutality only to find himself plucked up by the hand of Big Brother to play the villainous white racist in the latest episode of liberal political reality television.
Zimmerman is the latest Bernie Goetz; another wholly unlikely cult figure who currently campaigns for vegetarian lunches in public schools and squirrel rescue. It’s not that the two men had anything particularly in common. Unlike Goetz, it is very unlikely that Zimmerman jumped the gun, so to speak, but they both fill a similar niche. They represent the embattled lower half of the middle class.
To understand the Zimmerman case, you have to live in a neighborhood that has just enough property values to keep you paying the mortgage and just enough proximity to dangerous territories to make you feel like you’re living on the frontier.
The chain of events doesn’t make much sense to the elites, which is one reason why they assume that the explanation must be racism There weren’t a lot of New Yorker readers cheering as Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey stalked the subways and parks of the city blowing away hoods. The perfect target audience for the Death Wish movies or for Goetz saying “You don’t look too bad, here’s another” was that bottom half of the middle class that didn’t have enough money to leave the city and didn’t have enough liberalism to accept the violence as their just due.
But the case isn’t about race either. It’s about a struggling middle class in a precarious economy trying to hang on to what it has. And it’s about a culture of dropouts from the economy who celebrate thuggery and then pretend to be the victims. It’s doubtful that anyone in Zimmerman’s neighborhood who weathered multiple break-ins has much sympathy for the Martin family. And that’s one reason that the prosecution hasn’t found any useful witnesses.
If Trayvon Martin had been the clean cut innocent kid that the media tried to pretend he is, the reaction might have been different. But he wasn’t. The gap between Martin and Zimmerman wasn’t race, in other circumstances most liberals would have called both men members of minority groups, it was aspiration.
George Zimmerman wanted to to be a cop. Trayvon Martin wanted to be a hood. It’s quite possible that Martin got no closer to his ambition than Zimmerman got to his. Both men were just going through the motions on the edge of a game of cops-and-robbers that suddenly turned deadly real. And even in a country where the thug tops the entertainment heap, the vulnerable parts of the middle class have more sympathy for aspiring cops than for aspiring thugs.
