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April 2012

IRAQ’S COMING CIVIL WAR: DANIEL GREENFIELD

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. […]

ABRAHAM MILLER: JEW BASHING AT THE UNIVERSITIES IS THE NEW NORMAL

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. […]

HOT PICKS FROM FSM…CHECK THESE OUT AT THE SITE

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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
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Allen West: Muslim Brotherhood influencing our national security strategy

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/blog/#ixzz1t2ifdQb1
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White House Lawyer Clears White House on Secret Service Scandal

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SHOSHANA BRYEN: REMEMBERING ORDE WINGATE ****

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.

JIHAD DENIAL AND ARMENIAN GENOCIDE REMEMBRANCE

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.

EDWARD CLINE : COMIC BOOKS, HATE CRIME AND KAFIROPHOBIA

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 […]

SETH LIPSKY: ON THE CONSTITUTION AND JUSTICE GINSBERG…EXCELLENT

‘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.

JEFFREY LORD: THE PERFECT STORM OF LIBERALISM….LONG BUT IT’S A GEM *****

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.

RUSSIA AND THE COMMUNIST PAST ON THE GLAZOV GANG

Russia and the Communist Past — on The Jamie Glazov Show
by Frontpagemag.com
Russia expert David Satter joins Frontpage’s radio program for the full hour.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/25/russia-and-the-communist-past-on-the-jamie-glazov-show-1/

JIHADISTS AHOY! “VIVA PALESTINA” BEGINS SIXTH JOURNEY TO GAZA

http://www.investigativeproject.org/3549/viva-palestina-begins-sixth-journey-to-the-gaza

A British-based organization that has delivered millions of dollars to the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip embarked Sunday on its sixth convoy to Gaza from Bradford, UK.Viva Palestina 6, dubbed “The Right of Return Convoy,” is organized by Viva Palestina Arabia (VPA), an affiliate group of Viva Palestina (VP). The convoy is “about the return to Palestine – the right of Palestinians to return and returning our attention to this central issue by contributing to the construction, the rebuilding, of a Palestine for all Palestinians, with Jerusalem recognized as its capital,” according to the organization’s website.

Newly elected British parliamentarian George Galloway founded VP, which has extensive ties to Hamas. He also has supported other terrorist organizations including Hizballah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Some political pundits in the UK note that Galloway’s electoral victory in late March was due to his invocation of faith. At a campaign rally that month, he taunted his rival Imran Hussain, by claiming “I’m a better Pakistani than he will ever be. God knows who’s a Muslim and who is not…A Muslim is ready to go to the US Senate, as I did, and to their face call them murderers, liars, thieves and criminals.”