DANIEL GREENFIELD: ON ARIEH O’SULLIVAN AND CHRIS CHRISTIE’S FLUB ON THE NYPD AND TERRORISM
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A LONG TALE…. ARIEH O’SULLIVAN
The first time I met Arieh O’Sullivan was in the predawn darkness of a winter morning in Jerusalem in 1997, when he came to pick me up in a jeep emblazoned with the Confederate flag on its spare tire.I was just starting out as a journalist and working as a cub reporter at The Jerusalem Post, and O’Sullivan, a veteran of The Associated Press, was the Post’s seasoned military correspondent. I thought O’Sullivan had one of the coolest jobs in the world, and it turned out that this diminutive Jew with an Irish name and a Southern accent was a pretty cool guy, too.
What happened to that jeep?
While you can take the boy out of Mississippi, you can’t take Mississippi out of the boy. My jeep had a red and white Rebel Flag on the back spare tire and a plastic statue of General Robert E. Lee stuck on the dash, making it most likely the only Confederate shrine in the Middle East.
And somebody had had the chutzpah to steal my jeep from in front of my house. A decade ago, we had joined about 200 families and built a new village in the forested hills above the Elah Valley: nice modest villas surrounded by vineyards and olive groves in central Israel. Every now and then thieves would steal a car, but I never thought they’d set their sights on the old General.
Were they Palestinians? Bedouins? Jews? Or (good gracious) damn Yankees?!
“Forget about it,” a police officer told me. General Lee was likely deep in the West Bank, a region to which Israelis have long stopped venturing. “Probably already in a chop shop.”…
Two days passed and I got a midnight call from a friend, a former agent from the Israeli Antiquities Authority. The whole underworld is only two degrees removed from everyone. My buddy knew Arab ancient grave robbers, who knew car thieves, who knew car thieves, who were holding General Lee. They were Palestinians in the Hebron hills, and they were willing to sell it back. The catch was that I had to deliver the cash personally to an area fraught with danger for a Jew.
Now Arieh O’Sullivan has joined the Sons of Confederate Veterans
Arieh O’Sullivan left South Mississippi in 1981 to join the Israeli army. He has made a life as a journalist and olive farmer in that country, but holds tight to his Southern heritage in ways that sometimes perplex his friends, co-workers and even his mother. On Wednesday, he further tightened his connection to the region of his birth by taking the oath of the Sons of Confederate Veterans at Beauvoir.
O’Sullivan, who holds dual American and Israeli citizenship, is proud of the service given by his great-great-grandfather, Alabama Calvary Lt. George A Johnson. In the oath administered by Wallace Mason of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, O’Sullivan pledged to uphold the traditions of faith in God; honor; chivalry and respect for womanhood; a passionate belief in freedom for the individual; and a military tradition of valor, patriotism, devotion to duty and a spirit of self-sacrifice.
O’Sullivan said there is an unconscious nationalistic soul many Jews carry with them that is similar to the camaraderie shared by Confederate descendants.
“I feel it flowing through me,” he said. “If you have a sense of history that you carry with you, you are enriched by it.”O’Sullivan is the son of former Ocean Springs Police Chief Efraim O’Sullivan.
A self-proclaimed “Jewish redneck,” O’Sullivan carried a Confederate flag with him into battle with his unit, the Fighting Farmers. He kept the flag, purchased at Gettysburg when he was 12, in the spare grenade pocket of his Israeli army uniform.
He named his jeep the General Lee and attached an image of the Confederate leader to the dashboard. The jeep has a battle flag for a spare tire cover. O’Sullivan said he gets bizarre looks from people sometimes because of his conspicuous affinity for the Confederacy.
“I try to educate them,” he said. “It’s about people who stood up for something they believed in.”
But there’s an even more interesting rebel backstory to the O’Sullivan clan.
Toward the end of the Second World War, Thomas O’Sullivan of Bantry, County Cork, decided to join the British army. He was assigned to the Coldstream Guards which was the first unit to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war he was transferred to the Sixth Airborne Division and was posted in Egypt along the Suez Canal. In 1947 his unit was moved to Palestine where his anti-British sentiments led him to befriend some members of the local Hagana Jewish underground. One night, fortified with a few belts of whiskey, O’Sullivan roared out of his base in Haifa with a “liberated” Cromwell tank. It was the Jewish state’s first tank.
O’Sullivan stayed in Israel to fight in its war of independence and married a Jewish girl who had been raised in the Cayman Islands. Eventually they moved to Louisiana, U.S.A. where they raised a family together. Their son, Ephraim O’Sullivan, was a policeman in New Orleans when the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973. He decided to enlist in the Israeli army and serve the fledgling Jewish nation. After the war he worked briefly as a policeman in Israel before deciding to return to the United States. Ephraim pursued a career in law enforcement and went on to become the police chief of Ocean Springs, the first Jewish chief in the history of Mississippi.
In 1981, Ephraim’s son, Arieh (Hebrew for lion), dropped out of Louisiana State University to join the paratroopers in Israel. He fought bravely in Lebanon in the summer of 1982 after which he became a war correspondent for the Jerusalem Post. He covered conflicts in the Congo, Ethiopia, the Balkans, as well as the Middle East. He and his wife are presently raising their three O’Sullivan children in the Holy land.
…and now you know the rest of the story.
YOU CAN’T MAKE UP JOURNALISM LIKE THIS
“Well, the truth is that US President Barack Obama has a quick and safe way to prevent Israel from attacking Iran.
He should just say: “Trust me!” – but in a persuasive way.”
…from the Jerusalem Post, “How to prevent an Israeli strike on Iran”.
LEARNING TO LOVE BIG BROTHER-HOOD
The Arab Spring, like the banking system and the national debt, has become too big to fail. The “too big to fail” label mandates the cover-up of a bad policy that has too many influential people, movements and countries tied into it to allow anyone to admit that the whole thing has gone pear-shaped.
The only way to deny the failure of the Arab Spring as a means for creating a better and freer region is by embracing its disastrous consequences. In other words, goodbye, Egyptian Twitter activists; hello, Muslim Brotherhood.
The triumph of Islamic parties in Egypt and Tunisia leaves Western “Springers” with only two choices: to either admit that the whole thing is a disaster and that the brakes need to be applied or learn to love the Brotherhood.
The entire article on the Too Big to Fail Arab Spring continues at FPM
CHRIS CHRISTIE AUDITIONS FOR HOLDER’S JOB
Gov. Chris Christie tonight laid into the New York Police Department for spying on New Jersey Muslims, saying he doesn’t know if the actions were “born out of arrogance, or out of paranoia, or out of both.”
At a briefing Thursday, the governor wouldn’t weigh in on whether he thought civil rights were violated, saying that wasn’t his job and that he would leave that to any agencies investigating the NYPD’s intelligence operations.
“My view, politicians shouldn’t be involved in that. Leave it to law enforcement,” Christie said. “If there were any violations of law by the NYPD, I am sure the attorney general will take whatever steps he deems appropriate.”
Isn’t it great how Christie puts his faith in Holder to do the right thing.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told federal lawmakers this week that the Justice Department was reviewing requests to investigate the NYPD’s intelligence operations amid the scandal.
“We’re in the process of reviewing those letters to determine what action, if any, we should take,” Holder told a House appropriations subcommittee.
So now Holder and Christie can hold hands with a few Imams and shut down what’s left of our counter-terrorism capabilities.
Christie, who was U.S. attorney when the surveillance took place, reiterated that he and his top-level staff don’t recall being briefed on the operation. Neither New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg nor Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has apologized for the department’s actions, further incensing leaders on this side of the Hudson River.
“My concern, and I don’t know all the details yet, but my concern is, why can’t you be communicating with law enforcement here in New Jersey?” he asked. “Are we somehow not trustworthy?”
Well let’s see. Does the name Mohammed Qatanani ring any bells?
Bloomberg is pretty awful, but he hasn’t openly collaborated with a Hamas terrorist and appointed his lawyer to a superior court judgeship.
Why indeed would the NYPD think that Christie is untrustworthy?
Nonetheless, Christie’s latest comments drew praise from at least one Muslim leader in New Jersey, Aref Assaf, head of the Paterson-based American Arab Forum.
“I’m so gratified. I’m honored to be a resident of the state of New Jersey under his leadership,” Assaf said. “He doesn’t mince words; he was unambiguous about the incursion of the NYPD into our state without proper protocols.”
Muslim leaders have been invited to a meeting Saturday in Trenton with state and federal law enforcement officials to discuss New Jersey’s response to the NYPD surveillance operations.
Yeah that would be why.
Christie conceded that as the top federal prosecutor in the state he didn’t always tip off municipalities on corruption busts, but it was not required.
“I had federal jurisdiction, so we could go anywhere,” he said of his U.S. attorney job. “This is the New York Police Department. I know they think their jurisdiction is the world. Their jurisdiction is New York City. My concern is this kind of obsession that the NYPD seems to have that they’re the masters of the universe.”
As Christie knows quite well, Muslim terrorists in New Jersey operate there to carry out attacks on New York. Christie’s own behavior shows why the NYPD has more credibility on fighting terrorism than federal authorities do. And New York City is ground zero for terrorism, not just against New Yorkers, but residents of New Jersey, quite a few of whom also died on September 11.
This isn’t just Christie being pissy because the NYPD gathered some intel in his backyard without checking all the forms in advance, it’s pandering to his voting base, which includes some members of the Jihad First crew.
It’s a sad state of affairs when Bloomberg is better on terrorism than Christie, but that’s exactly where we’re at.
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