http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/15/israel-why-land-matters-part-ii/ Editor’s note: To read Part I of this three-part article series, click here. Conceding Israeli control of the 34-mile-wide area known as Judea and Samaria to any of Israel’s actual or even potential enemies means a return to the pre-1967 nine-mile waistline across Israel’s coastal strip and a security border of 223 miles to […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/15/the-stupid-party/ The presidency of Barack Obama has established once and for all that modern liberalism is now the stupid party. Very little of liberal thought these days represents anything fresh or new, but rather comprises what Lionel Trilling once reduced conservatism to: “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Now it is liberal ideas […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/15/the-rise-of-a-saudi-superstate/
The Rise of the Saudi Superstate
The 32nd summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council may be remembered as the dawn of the Caliphate with the Saudi proposal to accelerate the union of the six GCC States likely to dramatically change the region. The union is being described as “EU Style,” but in practice it would be a larger version of the United Arab Emirates, a federation of tribal monarchies.
The combined entity would have a 1 trillion dollar GDP and some 35 percent of the world’s oil reserves, giving it immeasurable influence on the global stage. And that nucleus of power and wealth would be used to consolidate its influence over rest of the region and the world. If the GCC integrates Yemen, it will be able to turn the Persian Gulf into the Arabian Gulf, and if it integrates Libya, Sudan and Iraq, then it will have a combined population of 100 million and be able to approach the 50 percent world oil reserves marker.
Whether or not the GCC can transition to a Muslim EU, in the words of its charter, “founded on the creed of Islam,” is still an open question. In the last five years the GCC has struggled toward adopting a common market and a common currency, its unity undercut by suspicion of the House of Saud and internal rivalries. While Article Four of the GCC Charter had always made unity into a goal of the GCC and previous Riyadh Declarations had called for consolidating their Arab and Islamic identities into a regional union, there was never enough external pressure and internal promise to make that feasible.
Iran’s nuclear program and the Arab Spring have changed all that. Saudi Arabia’s suppression of Shiite protesters in Bahrain was the first significant use of the GCC’s previously inept Peninsula Shield Force. The victory in Bahrain has kept its Sunni monarchy in power and made it dependent on Saudi backing which has also made its officials into the most enthusiastic proponents of the union.
Holding back the Arab Spring in Bahrain was not only a proxy victory against Iran, it also demonstrated that Saudi influence could hold off Western action against GCC members under its umbrella and gave added weight to Saud Al-Faisal’s call for a combined military and foreign policy. Saudi Arabia can offer GCC members the protection of its enormous influence in the West, as well as one of the largest armies in the region, armed and trained by the United States, and an eventual nuclear umbrella.
Will Vogue Magazine Ever Learn http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/ You might suppose that Vogue magazine would have learned to be a lot more careful about its cover stories, after the landmark outrage of its February, 2011 cover spread lauding Syria’s Asma al-Assad, wife of the dictator.Not quite. Who can forget that cover story? Profiling Asma as “A Rose […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/review-of-the-death-of-liberalism?f=puball
The redoubtable R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. has done it again; he has written yet another penetrating analysis of the liberal establishment in his latest book, The Death of Liberalism, Thomas Nelson, 2012.
Although this is a polemic with the biting attributes of Tyrrell’s acid-like analysis, the points are critical, or as he puts it, fatal. For example, as he notes, the increase in the national debt is crushing and no amount of expropriation in the form of new and higher taxes can retire it. At bottom Tyrrell, relying on a transparent admission by Herbert Croly in the Promise of American Life, maintains that liberalism is an expression of the belief “that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.” Hence, the need for government social engineers who arrogantly do the necessary bidding for reform.
The new progressives invariably invoke the goals of justice and fairness, but their policy applications are anti-democratic and illiberal. They claim, as an example, that universal health care will engender low cost and high quality care, but overlook the fact that it entails stripping many Americans of cherished liberties.
Clearly statism of the kind promoted by the new progressives argues for aggressive legislation to right the wrongs of the past, from the unequal distribution of wealth to urban woe. In the process, liberty is compromised and the promised goals of this intellectual exercise prove elusive. As Tyrrell contends, liberalism is exhausted, a victim of failed policies going back to the New Deal.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/iran-boasts-us-has-abandoned-israel?f=puball
http://www.wnd.com/2012/05/iran-boasts-u-s-has-abandoned-israel/print/
Iranian outlets have been claiming recently the United States has been forced to bow before Iran on its nuclear program, demonstrating the West’s abandonment of Israel and paving the way for the Islamic regime to annihilate the Jewish state.
While restating that Iran will demand ever more in the upcoming second round of talks with the 5+1 nations to be held this month in Baghdad, the Iranian media are now boasting that Israel has been abandoned by its allies and is in a dire bind.
One such editorial, published last week by Iran’s Keyhan newspaper, which is directly under the supervision of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stated, “It can be said that within the last 60 years, this is the first time that the Zionist regime, since its illegal inception, has had to endure rejection by the West over its vision and interest in the region.”
The editorial, written by Sadollah Zarei, a columnist for the hard-line paper, said that within the last three months, Israeli officials, after reports that America is on the verge of accepting the Iranian nuclear program, have made several trips to Washington, where on one trip they met for 10 days with U.S. officials to try to change President Obama’s decision to accept Iran’s nuclear program. They were unsuccessful.
“The ramifications of [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s defeat in the face of Obama’s policies have been a breakdown in Israel’s usurper regime, where now many within its own government have spoken against its own prime minister, claiming Iran is a rational regime and not after the bomb,” Zarei wrote.
While Israel’s government is in disarray internally, the editorial said, the West is forced to watch Iran’s victory in nuclear negotiations.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/bombshell-al-qaeda-infiltrator-was-working-for-brits-not-cia-cover-blown-for-election-year-politics?f=must_reads http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/05/14/bombshell-al-qaeda-infiltrator-was-working-for-brits-not-cia-cover-blown-for-election-year-politics/ Just a week ago the establishment media was aflutter with news that a CIA double-agent had thwarted a new type of underwear bomb attack targeting U.S. flights in a plot devised by al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula. But as the week progressed, a developing bombshell story got buried under President Obama’s gay marriage […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-coming-islamic-state-of-yemen Don’t be overjoyed by the penetration of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group’s branch in Yemen, by Saudi, British and American intelligence. Osama Bin Laden picked Yemen as the best “launching point” for creating an Islamic state with good reason. In Yemen, Al-Qaeda is advancing, the Islamists dominate the political scene, southern […]
http://melaniephillips.com/a-french-greek-wake-up-call
The recent elections here and in Europe have left Jews and all who care about freedom and democracy with many reasons for unease.
In Greece, around two thirds of those who voted did so for extremist parties of left and right. Chillingly, the neo-Nazi “Golden Dawn” party won no fewer than 21 seats. As I write, Greece is in chaos, with fresh elections a distinct possibility if no party can form a government.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the EU, whose founding credo was to prevent fascism from ever again taking root in Europe, is now looking at a member state with a significant fascist element in its ruling body.
Not only that, the EU itself precipitated this calamity. For the Greek debacle was a public spasm of fury against austerity measures imposed by Brussels and Berlin.
The convulsions in Europe are throwing up some curious and disturbing parallels and alliances. In France, the left-wing Francois Hollande won on the very same anti-austerity platform as the neo-Nazis in Greece.
Hollande says he is an “enemy of finance” – in effect making common cause with the far right, which identifies the Jews as controlling that financial world, which they agree with the left is a conspiracy against the interests of working people.
Behind his victory, moreover, lies an alliance between Islamic radicals and the left. Writing before the election, French Jewish commentator Michel Gurfinkiel wrote that the French left had recast the proletariat as the “multitude”, the West as “Empire” – and Jews as Zionists, the spearhead of counter-revolution.
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2119/Sgt-Bowe-Bergdahl-Prisoner-of-COIN.aspx
From today’s New York Times, a story about Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the lone American POW in Afghanistan. We still don’t know the circumstances under which he was captured in 2009, but we do know something about his outlook on the counterinsurgency (COIN) disaster as conceived and executed by Gens. Petraues and McChrystal under Presidents Bush and Obama.
From the story:
Sergeant Bergdahl was assigned to the First Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, Fourth Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, based at Fort Richardson, Alaska. He deployed as a machine gunner in early May 2009 to a small combat outpost in Paktika Province, at a time when American forces were extremely sparse in the area.
At first his e-mails home were effusive. “He was happy as a clam,” Mr. Bergdahl said. He wrote of “how beautiful it was, how wonderful the people were.”
But the tone of his son’s e-mails soon darkened, Mr. Bergdahl said, although he declined to say specifically what set off the change.
Mr. Bergdahl would say only that he himself had become disillusioned by the military’s doctrine of counterinsurgency, aimed at winning over the Afghan population by building roads, schools and good governance while protecting them from insurgents. As part of the strategy, American troops often travel on roads planted with homemade bombs, or improvised explosive devices, to meet with villagers during the day to collect information about their needs — and to ask the whereabouts of insurgents so they can target them in night raids.
