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May 2012

MY SAY: ON DAVID LITTMAN

There is an old saying….”they do not make them like that anymore.” David Littman, the beloved husband of my friend Bat Ye’or was unique in his devotion to the cause of the Jews in every corner of every continent. He was articulate, persuasive and unrelenting. Indeed, they just don’t make them like him anymore. What a loss. To my friend Gisele and his children I can only offer condolence and the comfort of good memories. We are in the debt of this great couple. I am honored to have known David and to continue my friendship with Bat Ye’or.

Rest in eternal peace David.

RICK RICHMAN: RESTORING THE RECORD: EUROPEAN JEWS ON THE EVE OF THE HOLOCAUST…..SEE NOTE PLEASE

http://pjmedia.com/blog/restoring-the-record-european-jews-on-the-eve-of-the-holocaust/?print=1

“Prof. Wasserstein slights Jabotinsky with faint praise, dismissing him with a cursory analysis, denigrating even his appearance.”

FRANKLY I WOULD NOT READ A BOOK THAT SLIGHTS JABOTINSKY AND IGNORES HIS ROLE IN IMPLORING JEWS TO LEAVE THE HELL HOLES OF EUROPE BEFORE IT WAS TOO LATE. PROFESSOR WASSERSTEIN IS SIMPLY A FOONOTE AMONG HISTORIANS AND JEWISH HISTORY BUT JABOTINSKY IS A GIANT FOR ALL TIMES. AND RICK RICHMAN DESERVES CREDIT FOR REMINDING US…..SKIP THIS ROTTEN BOOK…..RSK

Restoring the Record: European Jews on the Eve of the Holocaust

On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War [1]

Bernard Wasserstein, Simon & Shuster, 552 pages.

Professor Bernard Wasserstein, a distinguished academic who holds an endowed chair in modern Jewish history at the University of Chicago, has painted an extraordinary portrait of Jewish civilization in Europe on the eve of its destruction. His goal was “to capture the realities of life in Europe in the years leading up to 1939, when the Jews stood, as we now know, at the edge of an abyss”; to “breathe renewed life momentarily into those who were soon to be dry bones”; and to restore forgotten individuals to the historical record, without “special pleading or sentimentality.”

He has produced a book covering virtually every aspect of Jewish pre-war life — politics, religion, society, culture, language — in the four geographical zones that comprised Europe: (1) the Western democracies, in which Jews had been emancipated for several generations; (2) Germany and areas absorbed into the Third Reich, where Jews were being systematically stripped of citizenship, property, and economic rights; (3) Eastern Europe, where anti-Semitism was a significant element in politics and public policy, and (4) the Soviet Union, where Jews had upward social mobility after 1917 until the emergence of Stalin. He makes it clear the Jews faced existential threats in all four areas of Europe.

FRANCE’S NEW BURQA FRIENDLY GOVERNMENT: DANIEL GREENFIELD

France’s New Burqa-Friendly Government Posted By Daniel Greenfield URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/21/france%e2%80%99s-new-burqa-friendly-government/ Francois Hollande may be the first Muslim-elected president of France. With an estimated 93 percent of Muslim voters casting their ballots for Hollande, in a close election, their numbers may have made the difference between victory and defeat. The makeup of France’s new […]

P. DAVID HORNIK: EX- ISRAELI SPY BACKS NEATNYAHU ON IRAN

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/21/ex-israeli-spy-chief-backs-netanyahu-on-iran/ Over the weekend Amos Yadlin, formerly Israel’s chief of Military Intelligence, had words of praise for the Iran policy of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. He said the government’s discussions of the issue were “very serious” and called the nine members of its highest policymaking forum—which would […]

BRUCE THORNTON: THE POTEMKIN PRESIDENT DISINTEGRATES

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/21/the-potemkin-president-disintegrates/

After nearly four years in office, the tinsel and cardboard persona of Barack Obama is starting to fall apart. The political unifier who claimed, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America––there is the United States of America,” has been exposed as one of the most divisive and partisan presidents of modern times. The post-racial candidate who supposedly transcended our racial divisions has intensified them, whether by crudely racializing incidents like the Trayvon Martin shooting, or by allowing the Justice Department to facilitate race-industry attacks on state voter-identification laws, or by calling his own grandmother “a typical white person” for fearing black criminals. The decrier of how money has corrupted our politics has spent more time at the campaign contribution trough than he has governing. The “centrist” who set aside partisan politics for the greater national good has been exposed as a doctrinaire progressive adept at bare-knuckled class warfare. And the “smartest guy ever to become President,” as one historically challenged historian put it, has turned out to be remarkably ignorant about a multitude of issues from the economy to foreign policy.

Yet we didn’t need the past three years to learn the truth about Obama. The evidence was all there from the start. What allowed the fantasy Obama to gain the White House was the collusion of a corrupt mainstream media that failed to ask the hard questions or follow through on stories that had managed to get the nation’s attention. The recent revelation from the Breitbart outfit that a publisher’s promotional booklet in 1991 bragged that Obama had been “born in Kenya” is just the latest evidence of how stubbornly and willfully indifferent the media have been to asking the penetrating questions of the sort that have dogged every president, especially those since Lyndon Johnson. The media’s dereliction of duty has allowed Obama to construct ad hoc identities that suit his political agenda and obscure his unsavory past and ideology.

DAVID “SPENGLER” GOLDMAN: WHAT IF FACEBOOK IS REALLY WORTH $100 BILLION

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NE22Dj03.html

What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?

By Spengler

“What if Internet stocks aren’t a bubble?” [1] was the title of my inaugural essay in January 2000, with the observation that an economy based on downloading pop music and porn was a possible future state of the world. “Re-ordering the priorities of the world economy around the vices of affluent people is nothing new,” I observed. “We went through all of this before in the 17th century.”

Facebook’s initial public offering May 18 with a $100 billion valuation, to be sure, is not quite as whimsical as the Internet stocks of a dozen years ago, which had losses rather than earnings. Facebook does earn $1 billion a year. Total US advertising expenditures last year were $144 billion according to Kantar Media, and global ad spending was nearly $500 billion. Facebook users provide data which the firm can process in order to target ads to the right recipients, so that the website stands to gain market share, or so the story goes.

It’s Big Brother running the Matrix on Madison Avenue. Supercomputers with artificial intelligence programs will sift our communications for clues as to our commercial proclivities. Auto companies will know when to pitch SUV’s rather than electric vehicles, and purveyors of timeshares in St Helena or shrunken heads will identify the eight dozen individuals in the world most inclined to buy their products. Advertisers will replace expensive broadcast advertising with targeted Internet ads that follow Facebook users from their home page to their favorite websites.

THE SCOURGE OF ARABY: VICTOR SHARPE

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/05/the_scourge_of_araby.html In the 1921 hit song, The Sheikh of Araby, there is one line that goes as follows, “…While you’re asleep, into your tent I’ll creep.” Of course the song was referring to the sheikh who romantically pursued the headstrong British heroine who then fell in love with him only to find that he was, […]

ALAN KORNMAN: INSIDE ISLAMIC SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA’S TAMPA CONFERENCE

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/inside-islamic-society-of-north-americas-tampa-conference?f=puball Background The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) describes itself on its website as: “The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) is an independent, open and transparent membership organization that strives to be an exemplary and unifying Islamic organization in North America by contributing to the betterment of the Muslim community and society at […]

NORMAN SIMMS: DREYFUS STILL MATTERS BUT NOT THE WAY SOME PEOPLE THINK

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/yes-dreyfus-still-matters-but-not-the-way-some-people-think?f=must_reads On the one hand, the news that Roman Polanski is planning to make a film on the Dreyfus Affair fills me with joy. There has been so much new information made available since the series of anniversaries passed by from 1994 – when a hundred years passed since his arrest, trial, condemnation, exile, torture […]

BIMBO AND UNDERWEAR BOMBS- A WAKE UP CALL ANNEMARIE MCAVOY

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/bimbo-and-underwear-bombs-wake-up-call

The events of the last few weeks ought to raise the question of whether America is as safe as it should be from terrorists. It is very unsettling to learn that Bimbo Olumuyiwa Oyewole, who was a security supervisor at one of the nation’s largest airports, was not only here illegally, but was using the name and identity of a man murdered in New York twenty years ago. Bimbo was from the same area in Nigeria as the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is now serving a life sentence for trying to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009. At the same time, al Qaeda has produced a better underwear bomb in an effort to blow up planes over United States airspace.

Bimbo Olumuyiwa Oyewole, who came to the United States illegally from Nigeria, was arrested Monday for identity theft. He was known by his co-workers at Newark Liberty International Airport as Jerry Thomas. He had worked there for about twenty years, and had been using the name of Jerry Thomas since three weeks before the real Mr. Thomas was killed in 1992. The murder has remained unsolved.