BRUCE BAWER: NORWAY’S MUSLIMS DEMANDING SHARIA-CONTROLLED ZONE

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/oslo-muslims-demand-sharia-controlled-zone/ After the one-two punch, on a single day last summer, of a deadly explosion in the center of Oslo and an even more deadly shooting spree on a nearby island, the Norwegian government did what it does best: it formed a commission. This one was charged with figuring out just how one man had […]

ON IRAN THE ENDGAME IS APPROACHING: P. DAVID HORNIK

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/israel-to-obama-no-more-time-for-iran-games/ The open-to-the-public U.S.-Israeli war of words on Iran continued this week. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he didn’t believe Israel had “made a decision as to whether or not they will go in and attack Iran at this time” and added: “With regards to the issue of where we’re at from a diplomatic point […]

BRUCE THORNTON: THE MUSLIM BROTHERS TAKE OVER EGYPT

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/the-muslim-brothers-are-taking-over-egypt/ We don’t hear much anymore the breathless celebrations of Egyptian democracy that followed our abandonment of the creepy but reliable Hosni Mubarak. The “Facebook kids” who enchanted our media with their tech-savvy cool have been forgotten. It’s hard to find anymore the optimism of Senator Joseph Lieberman, who in Foreign Affairs called the Arab […]

THE MIRAGE OF MODERATE ISLAM: DANIEL GREENFIELD

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Travelers across the vast stretches of the Arabian desert have been known to get lost and in their thirst and exhaustion hallucinate oases with palm trees and flowing water. Western policymakers lost in the vast stretches of madness that define the Muslim world are even more wont to hallucinate the oasis of a moderate Islam to take refuge in. Whether you’re dying for a drink or a way to reaffirm your reality, a mirage is sometimes the only way you can find it.
Moderate Islam is a mirage, a projection by desperate Westerners of their own values and culture, on an entirely different religion and culture. It is a mirage that many Muslims are eager to uphold, in the same way that desert merchants might sell goblets and bowls of sand to passing travelers foolish enough to confuse water with dust. And like travelers who think they are drinking water, when they are actually swallowing sand, it is a deception that will eventually kill the deceived.

When the Western cultural elite look at Islam, they see what they have to see to avoid falling into crisis mode. Like the traveler who would rather choke on sand, than face up to the fact that he is lost in a desert, they would rather keep most things as they are, even at the cost of the extinction of the nations they preside over, than confront the full scope of the threat surrounding them. A threat that they had a hand in nurturing and feeding in the name of goals that seemed to make sense at the time.

DAVID ‘SPENGLER” GOLDMAN; ROMNEY’S MATH AND THE RYAN NOMINATION

Romney’s math and the Ryan nomination
by Spengler

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NH21Dj02.html

As pollsters on both sides of the American political divide point out, the standout fact about the presidential election is the small number of undecided voters. As Jeff Zeleny observed in the New York Times August 15, polls show that only 5% of voters remain undecided.Both the Barack Obama and the Mitt Romney camps, Zeleny adds, are fighting for the enthusiasm of their own supporters rather than the marginal vote from the center: Romney “is now running a campaign more focused on energizing an anti-Obamacoalition than on trying to expand the universe of Romney voters with an argument that he is the most qualified economic steward. Mr Obama has been responding in kind, opening a deeply divisive period in the race in which firing up hard-core partisans is taking priority over trying to pursue relatively small numbers of undecided voters in the middle.”

Polarization of this extreme degree is not ideological, but existential. The great split down the center of America society is not between the rich and the middle class, as the Obama campaign suggests, but within the middle class itself.

This helps explain why Paul Ryan was a smart choice for the second spot on the Republican ticket. There are still more people paying taxes than getting a check from the government, and their patience with tax creep is exhausted.

The home price collapse wiped out nearly half the median family’s wealth during 2007-2010, but the tax burden middle-class homeowners continued to rise.

THE WEEKLY JIHADS

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

2012.08.19 (Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan) – Islamic bombers kill two people at a cemetery.
2012.08.19 (Malgobek, Ingushetia) – A Fedayeen suicide bomber enters a funeral and slaughters at least seven mourners.
2012.08.18 (Mosul, Iraq) – Muslim terrorists kill six family members in their homes.
2012.08.18 (Michni, Pakistan) – Four young men are brutally gunned down by radical Sunnis.
2012.08.18 (Herat, Afghanistan) – Fundamentalist bombers murder four people at a crowded market.
2012.08.18 (Aden, Yemen) – An al-Qaeda rocket attack and suicide bombing leaves twenty people dead.

PAUL RYAN THE PERFECT ANTI GORE: S. FRED SINGER

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/08/paul_ryan_the_perfect_anti-gore.html Vice-president hopeful Paul D. Ryan is the polar opposite to former VP Al Gore. Instead of promoting fears, the candidate is a pretty solid skeptic when it comes to catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). Romney is obviously comfortable with that stance and is using Ryan to reposition himself on the issue of global warming […]

SEE THIS VIDEO: “BEATING AND KILLING WOMEN IS PART OF OUR PALESTINIAN IDENTITY….EVERY SOCIETY HAS ITS DEFECTS AND ITS CHARMS”

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2012/08/misogynistic-violence-thats-part-of-our.html

YUSUFF JABAREEN: SENIOR ARAB LECTURER AT TECHNION DISCUSSES …THE ARAB “CULTURE” OF MISOGYNY…..

PALWATCH.COM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeIQomcc3y4&feature=player_embedded

JAMES MELVILLE IN JERUSALEM IN 1857: DAVID SUGARMAN

http://www.jidaily.com/1152a?utm_source=Jewish+Ideas+Daily+Insider&utm_campaign=49d3668974-Insider&utm_medium=email

The Moby-Dick author sought spiritual connection on an 1857 Holy Land trip. He found dust and rocks instead.

Herman Melville, the popular writer of adventure stories, all but lost his readership with the publication of Moby-Dick; or The Whale. “Mr. Melville has survived his reputation,” one critic wrote in 1851 of the “imposing” novel, with its diatribes, tangents, and verbosity. “If he had been contented with writing one or two books, he might have been famous, but his vanity has destroyed all his chances for immortality, or even of a good name with his own generation.” While some reviewers recognized the greatness of Moby-Dick, it failed to achieve the success Melville had hoped for, selling only a scant 3,100 copies during his lifetime. “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century,” he lamented to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, “I shall die in the gutter.”

Melville never fully recovered from the disappointing response to Moby-Dick. In 1857, upon the suggestion of his wife, Melville set off to Europe and the Middle East in the hopes of finding some clarity, inspiration, and cheer. It was on this trip that Melville visited Jerusalem, a place that did not live up to the author’s high expectations. The journal Melville kept on his journey, along with Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, the epic the trip helped shape, illustrate what a strange and mystifying place Jerusalem was for the 19th-century traveler. But Melville’s descriptions and reflections, his spiritual longing and ultimate disenchantment, also hint at the development of a remarkable relationship—that between the American tourist and the Holy Land.

DEMPSEY AND ISRAEL DIFFER ON IRAN THREAT….SEE NOTE

http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=281871

FROM ONE OF MY MOST TRUSTED E-PALS…..I, like many others, think that Israel cannot rely on the U.S. Past experience, like the eve of the 1967 6-Day war was the same.Resupply of weapons and ammunition during the 1973 war happened only after Israel made drastic threats. Remember the nuclear alert during the war?My own worst fears are that the U.S. would aid the enemies of Israel under this administration. It already has in the promotion of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Mideast and within the U.S. The Bush administration also gave the Muslim Brotherhood (CAIR) unprecedented access to the inner workings of the U.S. Government.As most of you know, all this has been well documented. Jan

Chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff reveals he and Israeli counterpart Benny Gantz in constant contact on Iran, admits “clocks ticking at different paces,” reach “different conclusions” from intelligence reports.

Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, said on Sunday that Israel and the United States view the Iranian nuclear threat differently.

Speaking to reporters on his arrival to Afghanistan, Dempsey said that the US and Israel have a different interpretation of the same intelligence reports in regards to Iran’s nuclear program.

“Israel sees the Iranian threat more seriously than the US sees it, because a nuclear Iran poses a threat to Israel’s very existence,” Dempsey said.

“You can take two countries, give them the same intelligence and reach two different conclusions. I think that’s what’s happening here.”

He also acknowledged that he and his Israeli counterpart, IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, regularly confer on Iran. “We speak at least once every two weeks, we compare intelligence reports, we discuss the security implications of the events in the region.”