http://frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/ron-pauls-middle-east-delusion/print/ In an op-ed at Counterpunch.org last week, former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul addressed what he calls “the tragic-comedy of US foreign policy” and explained “How to End the Gaza Tragedy.” The real tragicomedy is that Paul continues to cling to his dangerously naïve foreign policy perspective. In his article, Paul asserts his usual […]
http://www.jidaily.com/7c3dc
It has been already five long days since the beginning of the “Pillar of Defence” Operation. Many thoughts come to mind. Tonight, I have decided to summarise them in ten words. Ten common terms, usually used, but this time my feelings and emotions are going to redefine them in a new way.
·Sirens: I am walking around in Tel Aviv, the cultural and economic centre of Israel. The bubble, the hub, the very place where nothing is supposed to happen. The cacophonous blast of the sirens surprise me as I make my way; it informs me that I have one minute and 45 seconds left (compared to the 15 seconds in the southern city of Sderot) to reach a shelter. The siren is loud and penetrates all.
·Fear: The feeling courses through me and will remain until the end of the alert. It reminds me that I am so vulnerable. It shows me that every single object around me has become a target and that I, too, have become one.
·Shelter: It is the first time that I enter an armoured room to seek refuge. I have entered the first building on my way, and as all the other passers-by have done, I am going towards one of the special rooms, a “strong room”, usually used as guest or storage rooms. This time I contemplate its walls, trying to persuade myself that no rocket will pierce them. But my attention is quickly drawn to the nearby children who have started to cry. The alert’s ten-minute waiting period will be dedicated to calm them down and to convince them that all is OK. In the shelter, dozens of Israelis, previously unknown to one another, are chatting like old friends. I also take part of the conversations. I check the news on my smartphone. A woman, a southerner, says that she has heard the boom of a rocket exploding. She is used to it, she explains; for her, this has been the norm for four years already.
·Comprehension: I would not dare to say that after having experienced only one alert I have understood everything. But it is like a first draft: I am starting to see what Southern inhabitants have been living with since 2005. Constant firing, alerts that go off both day and night, damaged houses and rockets’ fragments lying on the streets. And I am ashamed to say, that until now, I had never realised the terrible reality of their daily lives.
·Mutual aid: People are wonderful and show an exemplary solidarity. Everywhere in the country, doors are opened for Southerners. Friends and family call each other to hear from one another and check in. My Israeli friends make sure that I, the new immigrant, know how to react in case of an alert. “You know, you have never experienced this in Paris, we are used to it already”, they tell me. I wonder: can you ever really get used to it? I adopt the country’s habits and I also call, one by one, my married friends to check if their husbands have been mobilised, and if I can do anything to help.
And this solidarity is not only between Israelis. It also takes the form of messages coming in from all over the world: SMS, emails, phone calls, “likes” on Facebook. Any single person that supports Israel, it does not matter if they are Jewish or not, holds on to let us know that we are not standing alone. And these daily proofs that they care touch us and strengthen us. Thank you. We are grateful for it.
·News: I have never watched the news so many times in the same day. I go from one website to another, checking the “breaking-news”, counting the number of rockets fired since the morning. I woke up checking what is going on and I fall asleep, my phone in my hands. Every time I read an unknown person has been injured, my stomach hurts and I stop everything to say a psalm for his speedy recovery.
·Technologies: Tsahal, or the Israel Defence Forces, had understood that this time, it cannot lose the “social networks war”. The IDF“tweets” when it strikes Hamas terrorist heads or when they target stashed hidden weapons. They put videos on-line and refresh their Facebook page all the time.
Technology also means the “Iron Dome”, the mechanism that intercepts the murderous rockets as they hurtle towards heavily populated areas. Each missile is extremely expensive but in Israel, life has no price.
·Disgust: For all those who explain this operation through conspirationist theories, asserting that Bibi had organised all of this to get more votes in the upcoming elections.
·Confidence: A double meaning. A strong and renewed confidence in the Jewish people’s resilience and its ability to hold it on. And an even stronger confidence in the Source of everything, Hakadosh Baruch Hu, the Holy One Blessed Be He, that at every single moment protects us and saves us.
·Pride: My last word. A enormous sense of pride for this country that is Israel. An undefinable feeling that makes me so happy and gives me so much courage in these hard moments. A noble feeling, fed every day by what I see around me. The majestic feeling, that makes it clear that when I came here, I made the right choice.
http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/5472/features/a-world-without-enemies/
“And on the matter of the suffering on both sides, undifferentiated sympathy in this case reflects not moral strength but moral obtuseness and weakness. If you want to end the suffering, on both sides, you should unequivocally root for Hamas’s defeat. Hamas is a virulently anti-Semitic terrorist organization that attacks Israeli civilians on one side of the border as it hides behind Palestinian civilians on the other. Or, as Hamas proudly proclaims, “We love death more than you love life.”
In Isaac Babel’s 1931 short story “Argamak,” a Jewish intellectual “thirsting for peace and happiness” joins a Red cavalry division made up of Jew-hating Cossacks. The division commander understands the Jew’s strange choice—and has contempt for it. So, he takes a prized stallion from one of the Cossacks and gives it to the Jew to ride. The Cossack is furious. The Jew, sensing the Cossack’s hatred, asks the commander, “Why did you give me an enemy?” Not bothering to disguise his contempt, the commander explains, “I understand you completely. . . . Your aim is to live without making enemies. . . . Everything you do is aimed that way—so you won’t have any enemies.”
More than 80 years later, Babel’s Jews still live.
During Israel’s recent mini-war with Hamas, the online Slate magazine published an article by its legal writer, Dahlia Lithwick, titled, “I Didn’t Come Back to Jerusalem to Be in a War.” Lithwick lived in Israel as a child in 1977, the year of Anwar Sadat’s visit to the Israeli Knesset. She recently returned there with her children for another year, in part to enlarge their horizons beyond an American world made up of “equal parts comfort and Lego.” She did not expect the enlargement to include a war with Hamas.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/muslim-brotherhood-tyrants-show-their-true-faces/ On February 10, 2011, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared before the House Select Committee on Intelligence to testify on threats to the United States. Mubarak was one day away from resigning, under pressure from Washington, paving the way for a Muslim Brotherhood takeover, and the situation in Egypt was on everyone’s mind. […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2189/unbelievable_uk_hypocrisy_on_israel_again
he statements (below) today from the British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, are so gratuitous it beggars belief. The US has also condemned Israel for announcing a relatively tiny number of new settlement apartments in existing blocks, though not new settlements as such.
It’s all in response to the Palestinians’ “successful” move last week to upgrade their status as a quasi state at the United Nations.
Britain was initially opposed to the move; then was about to vote in favour; then took the coward’s way out and abstained. Here’s William Hague on the building plans:
“If implemented, these plans would alter the situation on the ground on a scale that makes the two-state solution, with Jerusalem as a shared capital, increasingly difficult to achieve.”
Absurdly, he added:
“Israeli settlements are illegal under international law and undermine trust between the parties,”
Oh, come off it Mr. Hague. The Palestinian move fundamentally undermines the Oslo Accords, the legal basis on which the two-state solution is based. All objective observers can see that. (Equally, as the Al Jazeera leaks showed, even the Palestinians accept that 95 percent of “settlements” would become part of Israel under any peace agreement anyway. Talk about a red herring issue.)
Real world observers can also see that Israel would have had no choice but to respond. So please, an end to all this fake indignation.
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2191/uk_threat_to_israel_over_settlement_building
UPDATE: THEY CHANGED THEIR MINDS BUT THE PERVERSITY OF LIMITING ISRAELI HOUSING TO PRESERVE EAST JERUSALEM FOR THE ARABS IS APPALLING….RSK
The British government is threatening to remove its Ambassador from Israel as the Jewish State reopens settlement building plans in response to the Palestinian statehood bid
Britain has today threatened to recall its ambassador to Israel over the row over settlement building.
Since the Palestinian Authority’s UN statehood bid last week, tensions between Western governments and Israel have run high, as Israel has sought to penalise the Palestinians for seeking a unilateral solution to the peace process and ruling out negotiations with Israel.
Embarrasingly for Britain, the argument is now reaching its peak with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office threatening trade sanctions and even the withdrawl of Britain’s ambassador, a move that will likely illicit poor reactions from the Israelis given Britain’s recent cowardice on the UN vote and increasing irrelevance in the peace process.
The recent authorisation of new settlement homes in the E1 area of Jerusalem are a continuous sticking point for foreign leaders who fail to understand Israel’s quagmire in attempting to deal with, as well as financially prop up the Palestinian Authority while taking much of, if not all of the flack for the failure of peace negotiations.
E1 is incredibly sensitive as development would close off East Jerusalem – a likely future capital of Palestine – from the West Bank.
The Commentator’s sources have stated that while this may be an empty threat, the government is on course to isolate itself from its allies in Israel and the United States, a development that could negatively impact trade relations with two key economic partners.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/334596/care-plan-b-kathryn-jean-lopez
Have you heard about the holiday gift some people think American girls should be getting this year? “Emergency contraception.”
Truth be told, it’s not likely to happen before the winter solstice. But a fiscal cliff isn’t the only disaster to be on alert about. During Thanksgiving week the American Academy of Pediatrics announced its recommendation that “morning after” prescriptions be issued to adolescent girls as a matter of course, allowing them the false security of what has long been described by advocates as a “fire extinguisher” in their purse to counter at least some of the consequences of risky behavior.
“There’s no good reason” why there should not be follow-through on the recommendation, the San Francisco Chronicle asserts. No good reason? Good and plenty, as it happens.
This approach, besides being deeply insulting to the human dignity of adolescents, exposes the reality that when we talk about sex these days, we all too often put good health and good sense aside, despite the rhetoric about “women’s health.” (Even the pediatricians do!) “Women’s health” routinely assumes promiscuity, whatever the age, and despite the risks to the girl’s or woman’s physical and mental health.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Take a ride to a welfare neighborhood some fine morning, evenings are best avoided even in the safest such places. Don’t go in expecting Detroit. Even much of Detroit doesn’t look like Detroit. Newark and Oakland aren’t even there yet. Detroit is what happens when the load is too big and there’s no one left to carry it. Most welfare neighborhoods are still located in cities where there is someone left to pick up the tab.
You’ll see less charred buildings and more towering multistory housing projects. Some of these are the ugly bestial fortresses that date back to FDR’s championing of affordable housing. One such monster, the Knickerbocker Village, former home of the Rosenberg spies, had to be evacuated in the recent hurricane and residents lived without heat and power for weeks.
30 years later they began to run to 20 story gray and brown towers reek of hopelessness. When power company workers came to restore power to the Brooklyn shoreline, they were sent to these places first in the hopes of calming mob reaction. Instead televisions came raining down from the upper floors forcing the workers to flee for safety. But don’t expect that to happen during your visit. That sort of thing is reserved for major holidays and power outages.
More recently the trend has been smaller homes that look almost like normal housing, except that there are too many of them lined up all in rows that go on forever, and even the red brickwork and white doors quickly darken with neglect, fumes and that intangible pollutant that comes to all places where the people have nowhere to go and nothing to look forward to.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/12/02/feinstein-well-over-200-threat-warnings-against-benghazi-mission-at-time-of-attack/ Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she has reviewed “well over 200″ threat warnings that applied to the Benghazi mission before the Sept. 11 attack that killed four Americans. “Now, it couldn’t say at a certain time or on a certain day. There had been prior attacks. It’s well known, the attack on the British […]
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/12/02/iraqi-refugee-arrested-for-bombing-arizona-social-security-office-with-ied-media-silence-ensues/ Editor’s Note: Updates to this story follow the article. The typically quiet town of Casa Grande, Arizona, was rocked by an explosion at the local Social Security Administration office early Friday morning of what appears to an improvised explosive device (IED). No one was hurt in the explosion, which occurred shortly before the office […]
