http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1784 The utterly irreplaceable There is a saying in Hebrew, usually used in relation to layoffs in the workplace: “Graveyards are full of people who were deemed ‘irreplaceable.’” The idea behind this characteristic tidbit of witty cynicism is that no matter how valuable an employee, there is always someone around who will be capable of […]
http://www.wnd.com/2012/04/meet-the-men-who-dreamed-of-israel/print/
His descriptions of playing on the white-hot sand dunes of pre-state Tel Aviv are mesmerizing. To have seen the still-forming Jewish state in 1920, a short generation after Herzl, must have been sublime.
Benzion Netanyahu was there.
An immigrant from eastern Europe (his father was smart enough to heed the warnings and leave the continent), young Benzion – who of course would go on to raise an iconic family in the state of Israel – saw up close the challenges faced by a growing number of Jews longing for a safe refuge from the millennia-old anti-Semitism that has plagued this peculiar people since biblical days.
Here’s the best part: Benzion is still with us (he just turned 102), and his latest book (you read that correctly) has just been released: “The Founding Fathers of Zionism.”
A collection of profiles of five men who helped promote the idea of statehood for the exiled Jews, “The Founding Fathers of Zionism” has the feel of putting the reader “right there.” In fact, the profiles were mostly written years ago, and Netanyahu’s personal interaction with Ze’ev Jabotinsky puts flesh on the old bones.
Some of the profile subjects are familiar, such as the famous Theodor Herzl. The Austrian Jew spent the last years of his life devoting himself to rallying support for a Jewish state by networking. He predicted the establishment of the state and was very close in his prediction.
Indeed, in his profile of Herzl (as with the others), Netanyahu presents the most nuanced discussion of the challenges facing the Jews in this endeavor – the information in “The Founding Fathers of Zionism” is highly relevant even for those who oppose Israel today.
“With genius simplicity,” Netanyahu writes of Herzl, “he derived his conclusions from the universally known fact that every attempt by the Jews at infiltration had ended in failure because they had never possessed the right of national settlement. Therefore, it was necessary to reverse the order: it was necessary first to secure the right to national settlement, only after which the attempt at immigration will not end in failure. Therefore, before the moment comes when this right is secured, Herzl opposed any infiltration.”
The remaining profiles – of Leo Pinsker, Jabotinsky, Max Nordau and Israel Zangwill – offer each man’s unique perspectives on the difficulties facing Jews in Europe, especially those who saw the rising tidal wave of anti-Semitism. In short, they fairly shouted their warnings that unless the Jews had a state of their own in which they could defend themselves, all would be lost.
Iraq’s Coming Civil War http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/25/iraq%e2%80%99s-coming-civil-war/print/ As the Obama Administration tries to hammer together an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the body count from his disastrous retreat from Iraq is swiftly rising. Last week alone there were fourteen car bombings orchestrated by Al-Qaeda in Iraq, whose goal has always been a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. […]
Jew-Bashing at Universities the New Normal http://pjmedia.com/blog/jew-bashing-at-universities-the-new-normal/?print=1 In February 2010, a student at the University of California, San Diego, left a noose dangling from a bookcase in the school library [1]. Although the noose was directed at no individual student, the obvious racial overtones of this symbol of the Southern lynch mob provoked predictable outrage. […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/blog/
I’d Rather Have Allah Slaughter Me Than See Saudi Women at the Olympic Games
Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/blog/#ixzz1t2iWHaHJ
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
Allen West: Muslim Brotherhood influencing our national security strategy
Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/blog/#ixzz1t2ifdQb1
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
White House Lawyer Clears White House on Secret Service Scandal
Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/blog/#ixzz1t2inbrST
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/from-aharai-to-afghanistan-remembering-orde-wingate/
A small group gathered Sunday at Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the life and work of British Maj. Gen. Orde Wingate of blessed memory, who is interred there with the Americans with whom he was flying when his plane crashed in Burma in 1945.
Israel and the Jewish War Veterans led the annual commemoration of Wingate, a passionate Zionist and a believer in Jewish military capability long before it was a proven commodity. But it would be unsurprising to find that CIA Director David Petraeus was a Wingate acolyte. His Iraq surge owes much to Wingate’s style of thinking, and the British general might well have lessons for Afghanistan.
Sent to Palestine by the British government in 1936 to put down an Arab insurgency, Wingate was an egalitarian, responsible for the fact that Israeli soldiers don’t salute. He taught the Jews of the Yishuv, as well as his British soldiers, counterinsurgency tactics to defeat marauders who were attacking villages and British installations including the Baghdad-Haifa oil pipeline. Night operations to keep the insurgents off guard; ambushes rather than fixed defense; and living among the people to engender trust and gather intelligence — these were all part of his textbook. Most important, he gave the Jews what remains the battle cry of the IDF: “aharai!” – after me.
Wingate – and especially “aharai” – was a rebuke to the British military hierarchy that sent young soldiers “over the top” in World War I while their officers remained in the trenches. His love of Zion was a rebuke to the British political hierarchy that was uncomfortable with the Mandate to establish a Jewish State in Palestine.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/04/jihad_denial_and_armenian_genocide_remembrance.html
The Center for Security Policy, under security analyst Frank Gaffney’s bold and thoughtful leadership, is launching a 10-part, web-based video course (key findings summarized here), today, April 24, 2012, entitled, “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: The Enemy Within.”
Today, appropriately, also marks the 97th anniversary of the date officially commemorated as the start of the Armenian Genocide — a jihad genocide — April 24, 1915. Persistent jihad denial by U.S. policymaking elites across the intervening century — a mindset so egregiously delusive at present it reflects mindslaughter — is the tragic, shared living legacy of these superficially disparate, but intimately related phenomena, both animated by canonical Islam.
The Armenian genocide is formally commemorated each April 24th because on that date in 1915, the Turkish Interior Ministry issued an order authorizing the arrest of all Armenian political and community leaders suspected of anti-Ittihadist or Armenian nationalist sentiments. In Istanbul alone, 2345 such leaders were seized and incarcerated, and most of them were subsequently executed. The majority were neither nationalists, nor were they involved in politics. None were charged with sabotage, espionage, or any other crime, and appropriately tried. As the intrepid Turkish author Taner Akcam recently acknowledged,
…Under the pretext of searching for arms, of collecting war levies, or tracking down deserters, there had already been established a practice of systematically carried-out plunders, raids, and murders [against the Armenians] which had become daily occurrences…
Within a month, the final, definitive stage of the process which reduced the Armenian population to utter helplessness, i.e., mass deportation, would begin.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/comic-books-hate-crime-and-kafirphobia?f=must_reads What follows is a potpourri of comments I left on various sites over the last few days. I have edited and expanded on some of these comments, because links and connections occurred to me long after I hurriedly posted the comments. I left this comment on a Daniel Pipes article on Islamic comic books […]
‘A Legal Backwater’
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/04/24/a-legal-backwater
So many constitutions worldwide — and how many except ours recognize the right to keep and bear arms?
America is in danger “of becoming something of a legal backwater,” a justice of the High Court of Australia, Michael Kirby, is quoted as telling the New York Times. His comment is in a scoop that ran under the headline “?’We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World.” The story follows up on an interview Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave to Al-Hayat TV in Egypt. In the interview she said that were she drafting a constitution in the year 2012, “I would not look to the United States Constitution.” Instead she commended to her viewers the constitution of South Africa, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of Canada.
Justice Ginsburg’s remarks went viral on the web among those who thought they were inappropriate for a justice bound by oath—as every American official must be*—to support the Constitution. TheNew York Sun commented on them in an editorial, “Lost in Egypt,” suggesting she had missed an opportunity to take the discussion of law-giving all the way back to Sinai. But the New York Times’ dispatch opens up the question of how popular an example our Constitution is these days. The Timesreporter, Adam Liptak, gained an advance look at a new study on precisely that topic. He quotes its authors, two law professors, as reporting that our Constitution “appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere.”
Mr. Liptak, in my view, is onto an important story here. One of the key features of these newfangled constitutions with which everyone is so smitten is that they are much longer than America’s parchment. In Canada’s constitution, which our friendly neighbor got around to writing only in 1982, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is, at more than 1,000 words, twice as long as our Bill of Rights, which has 482 words. The curious thing is that with all that verbiage, the Canadians failed to find space to provide for the right that one of our greatest constitutional commentators, St. George Tucker, called the “true palladium** of our liberty”—namely, the right to keep and bear arms.
“Why, that’s impossible!” you might exclaim. “No constitution writer could forget such a right.” But feature this. The South African bill of rights is more than ten times the length of ours. And in that vast verbiage there’s not one syllable protecting the right to keep and bear arms. The document covers equality, dignity, life, security of person, slavery, privacy, religion, expression, picketing, association, politics, citizenship, movement, occupation, labor relations, the environment, property, housing, health care, education, language, culture, and arrest, among other rights. But not so much as a peep about the palladium of our liberty.
Oh, and South Africa’s constitution states that the whole list of rights can be thrown into a cocked hat if there’s a state of emergency. But never mind, the European Convention on Human Rights appears to be even longer than South Africa’s—running to more than 5,000 words. Yet the Europeans couldn’t find room for the palladium of liberty, either. Mr. Liptak of the Times reports that only 2 percent of the world’s constitutions feature this one of the most basic rights. I cite this right only as an example of the problem with these hyper-long and detailed constitutions. When something is left out of a long list of rights, it tends to look less like an accident—given that they thought to list so much else.
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/04/24/the-perfect-storm-of-liberalism
“How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?” –Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm
The Perfect Storm of Liberalism has arrived.
A professional collapse inside the several departments and agencies of the United States government created by a decades-long erosion of standards. An erosion fed by all manner of deadly liberal obsessions from racial quotas to political correctness to an addiction to lawsuits, the tolerance for a culture of out of control spending, wildly improper personal behavior, and more.
This deadly combination is now surfacing repeatedly in scandals as seemingly different as those engulfing the Secret Service, the GSA, the U.S. military, the Department of Justice, and every other tentacle of the federal government imaginable.
Let’s look at it liberal issue by liberal issue and examine how this perfect storm of liberalism is swamping the affected government department or agency in question.
Let’s start with:
• Racial quotas and the Secret Service: AnAmerican Spectator source has fingered the hot-button issue of racial quotas as a serious problem for the Secret Service, an allegation now surfacing (hesitantly to be sure) in no less than the liberalWashington Post.
Did the Secret Service deliberately reduce its hiring standards to insure that minorities were hired and promoted in the name of racial quotas?
Ironically setting up the possibility that the personal security of America’s first black president — himself a decided liberal –could have been breached with disastrous consequences?
Did this alleged lowering of the agency’s standards wind up slowly infecting the agency across-the-board? Thus setting the stage for the explosive sex scandal that has led to the investigation of 12 Secret Service agents.
Was the Cartagena scandal actually “fixed” — “settled” — until the Miami SAC got wind of what was happening on her turf — when she blew the scandal wide open?
This is exactly the allegation from a source with considerable Washington and Secret Service connections. Precisely because of these close connections, the source requested anonymity. But this source tells a story that paints a grim portrait of an agency led by a “weak leader” — Director Mark Sullivan — in thrall with the liberal idea of racial quotas. A political correctness that led to the appointment of an African-American woman — Paula Reid — as the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the 150 member Miami Field Office. The Miami office, responsible for Secret Service agents operating in South America — as they were for President Obama’s now infamous trip to Cartagena, Colombia — is said to rival only New York and Los Angeles for prestige.
What is really going on here? Was the Cartagena story “fixed” –until Agent Reid blew the whistle? If so, who did the fixing? The White House? The State Department? Who?
Let me stipulate. As has been reported, Agent Reid blew the whistle on the Cartagena shenanigans the moment she heard about them. To her credit. Say again, to her credit.
