http://frontpagemag.com/2012/john-perazzo/valerie-jarretts-radical-roots/ It was recently revealed that for several months, President Obama’s closest and most trusted advisor, Valerie Jarrett, has been leading secret negotiations with representatives of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in an effort to develop normalized relations between the U.S. and Iran. Hallmarks of such a relationship would include the commencement of direct airline […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/israel-mulls-response-as-rockets-hit/ Just one rocket was fired from Gaza at Israel on Tuesday—a remarkably quiet day. Again the words ceasefire and truce were in the air. Israel’s citizens and leaders know that when it comes to Hamas and the other terror groups in Gaza, those words are as meaningful as they are regarding a hurricane or […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obamas-post-family-america/print/ The Republican Party went into the 2012 elections with a number of handicaps. One of the biggest of these handicaps was that it genuinely believed in a single country defined by the American Dream of family values, hard work and national greatness. The Democratic Party, which scored decisive victories across the country, never believed […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
There’s only so many ways to skin a cat or win an election. Like gambling, you don’t just take the easy money, you look for the big score. The Republicans have always taken the easy money, setting up their own dime store New Deal after losing to FDR and Truman, setting up affirmative action and HMOs after JFK and LBJ; scoring short term political victories and long term defeats
As we speak, a small horde of consultants and would-be consultants is urging the Republican Party to take the easy money of amnesty, tax hikes and anything else that will make them an inoffensive version of last election’s Democratic Party. And if any of that is followed by a victory, then the consultants order an expensive bottle of wine and the left goes on planning another big score.
The key to winning the game is in the numbers. Demographics.
The weakness of the kind of state that Western liberals love to set up, the one with 4-day workweeks where everyone is either in a university or a union, where no one goes to church or synagogue, where having more than 2 kids is frowned on and retirement can be had before your hair goes white, is that it demographically trends conservative. Not necessarily what most conservatives think of as being conservative, but nevertheless those retired 60-year olds who have one daughter named Inga and take four vacations a year, don’t much like change. They don’t like America, Israel, banks, war, monarchy and a lot of the things that the left expects them not to like; but they also form societies that lack the left’s radical appetite for change.
Older societies trend conservative. And a low birth rate means that the society will be old and the growth in children will come from more traditional households. Those children can be broken down in the mandatory public education system and influenced through cultural dementia, but the long run prospects don’t look good for the left. Eventually you end up with a society where everyone expects to retire at 55, even though there aren’t enough younger workers to take their place, and half of those potential younger workers are getting useless advanced degrees or dreaming of moving to America, while the other half are joining some revivalist religious movement. And that’s a bad deal either way.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-new-kind-of-civil-war?f=puball Now that all the excuses, rationalizations,analyses, number-countings, hand-wringings, finger-pointings, and tear-sheddings have largely passed, I feel that I can say something about why, on November 6th, Mitt Romney lost his bid for the presidency and Obama retained it. It seems that all that is left to do, for someone who realizes that a second […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/israel-will-defend-itself
Minister: We’ll Hit Them Till They Say ‘Enough’
Min. Moshe Yaalon says “We will put an end to this. We will not maintain restraint.”
Minister Yaalon said Sunday that Israel does not intend to maintain restraint in the face of the intense rocket attacks from Gaza. “If the terror organizations do not cease their fire we will be prepared to toughen our response as much as necessary, until they say ‘enough!’,” he said.
“There is a complicated war here and in the end we will finish it,” he said. “This is not a one-off move. But we will put an end to it. We do not intend to maintain restraint because the situation is unbearable for us.”
“We will bring quiet to the south even if it takes some time,” he said. “Hamas’s leadership will not get off scot free and as far as we are concerned, the most extreme options are possible.”
Channel 2’s political reporter quoted unnamed senior sources in Jerusalem Sunday who said that a ground operation like Cast Lead is not possible because Israel “does not have legitimacy” to act against Gaza as long as relatively few Israelis are killed and wounded by the terrorists. He added that Mohammed Morsi’s election in Egypt and Barack Obama’s re-election in the U.S. also make the situation more difficult for Israel.
The above is the latest news out of Israel as of Sunday and it describes Israel’s situation as a civil war in Syria rages on its border, and there was an exchange of fire in the area of the Golan Heights, a military acquisition of a long ago war. Syria threatens the stability of the region to include Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon.
It is noteworthy that Min. Yaalon identified the reelection of President Obama as a further complication of their military decisions, not the least of which is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.
It seems clear even at this point that Obama is seeking accommodation with Iran despite the fact that it has technically been at war with the United States since 1979. Israel knows that if Iran reaches a point where it can weaponize its missiles with nuclear warheads, they will be attacked.
http://news.yahoo.com/wave-bombings-kills-17-people-across-iraq-100903605.html
BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraqi insurgents unleashed a new wave of bombings across the country early Wednesday targeting security forces and civilians, police and health officials said, killing 17 people and wounding dozens more in the latest challenge to government efforts to promote a sense of stability.The deadliest explosions took place in the disputed northern city of Kirkuk. In the first attack, a parked car bomb exploded near the offices of a Kurdish political party, then another bomb went off as police and rescuers gathered, a police officer said. Such double bombings are a common insurgent tactic. Five members of a security unit from the nearby Kurdistan self-rule region were killed and four others wounded, officials said.
About an hour later, another parked car bomb hit an Iraqi army patrol in the Sunni-dominated town of Hawija to the west of Kirkuk, killing five soldiers and wounding four others.
Kirkuk is located some 290 kilometers (175 miles) north of Baghdad, is home of mix of Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen, all competing to control the city.
In Baghdad, a parked car bomb explosion shook the city center during the morning rush hour, killing one civilian and wounding 10 others, police said. The blast went off near the Palestine and Ishtar Sheraton hotels, two downtown landmarks, rattling buildings several blocks away.
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2045/four_more_years_of_obama_s_middle_east Like most modern American presidents, Obama will likely try to secure his legacy by a bold foreign policy initiative. All the more reason to be concerned ow that America has re-elected Barack Obama, it is time to ask what his second term might usher in for the Middle East, especially Israel. If he is […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2041/abu_qatada_s_victory_incites_extremism_on_both_sides
“And indeed for those who now only give any weight to the rulings of transnational bodies it should be recalled that even the UN has sanctioned Qatada as an associate of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban.”
The images of Abu Qatada smirking to himself, and indeed perhaps to us, as he was driven from the court ruling that allows him to remain in the UK, should have been enough to rile anyone. Indeed, with the exception of a few fringe human rights groups and ultra-Left commentators it feels as if the entire country is united in its opposition to this man remaining in our land.
And yet he remains here all the same and today is released on bail from Long Lartin Prison.
That this man is a dangerous and hostile figure is hardly in dispute. Described as Osama Bin Laden’s ambassador to Europe and having been implicated in terror cells in Chechnya, Germany, Tunisia as well as in his home country Jordan, and indeed in the 9/11 attacks, his terrorist credentials are quite impeccable.
And indeed for those who now only give any weight to the rulings of transnational bodies it should be recalled that even the UN has sanctioned Qatada as an associate of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Yet, laughably, following the ruling Qatada could stay in Britain, his solicitor, Gareth Peirce, pleaded: “I think the time has come in the world, with the conflicts in the world, for us to talk to each other and understand each other and enter into dialogue, and perhaps nothing is as black and white as it is painted” – A statement of such astonishing moral relativism that one doubts whether even Peirce can really believe a word of it. After all, what’s not black and white about his client having called for the murder of Americans, Christians, and Jews?
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/11/13/petraeus-and-the-failure-of-american-intelligence/
My evaluation of the state of U.S. intelligence after the Petraeus scandal appears this morning at Asia Times Online.
No one rises through the ranks of intelligence services by reporting pertinent facts that politicians don’t want to hear, Edward Luttwak observes. Bad policy produces bad intelligence. If you believe that Hitler is an ally, at least of convenience, as Stalin did in 1941, you will reject as fraudulent hard evidence of an imminent German invasion of Russia. If you believe that the Soviet Union is a prosperous, peace-loving land, as the foreign policy establishment did when Reagan took office, you will ignore evidence of Russian vulnerability and fear-aggression, as did Robert Gates, then head of the CIA’s Soviet section. CIA Director William Casey brought in an alternative team headed by Fortune magazine editor Herbert Meyer to produce an alternative, correct analysis.
