http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/meet-obamas-million-dollar-muslim-donor/print/ The Free Beacon has a brief profile of Kareem Ahmed from TPM, one of the few million dollar donors to Obama’s SuperPACs. You’d be forgiven if you don’t recognize Ahmed’s name. Before this year, his political giving was limited to a few four-figure checks to California candidates. Several veteran California politics watchers contacted for […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-horowitz/the-left-after-communism/print/
The Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm has been the subject of a lot of fatuous eulogies since his death a few weeks ago. Ron Radosh asks whether an intellectual – a man of ideas — who dedicated his whole life to the defense of the most murderous regime on human record, and to lying in defense of that regime – can be a good historian. The question, if put right, is self-answering. Yet even worthy conservatives like Niall Ferguson apparently get it wrong. Hobsbawm may have been a brilliant writer and an intelligent man. Yet he was morally defective, and that particular flaw is fatal to a historian since in the end the reader must trust his judgments and depend on his integrity and respect for the truth. Here is a review I wrote more than a decade ago of Hobsbawm’s “history” of the 20th century, which is little more than a Stalinist political tract, written after the fact when an honest man would know better.
THE LEFT AFTER COMMUNISM
Have compassion, my child; love those who have it, but fly from the pious believers. Nothing is more dangerous than their company, their humble pride. They must either dominate or destroy…
Rousseau
Workers of the world…forgive me
Graffiti on a Karl Marx statue
Moscow, August 1991
The monuments have fallen now and the faces are changed. In the graveyards the martyrs have been rehabilitated and everywhere the names have been restored. The Soviet Union, once hailed by progressives everywhere as a sixth of mankind on the road to the future, no longer exists. Leningrad is St. Petersburg again. The radical project to change the world is stalled, having left behind a world in ruin. In a revolutionary eyeblink, a bloody lifetime has passed into history; only vacancies memorialize a catastrophe whose human sum can never be reckoned.
In the climactic hours of the Communist fall, someone — Boris Yeltsin perhaps — remarked that it was a pity Marxists had not triumphed in a smaller country because “we would not have had to kill so many people to demonstrate that utopia does not work.” What more is there to say? If Communism’s final hour had truly spelled the end of the utopian fantasies that have blighted the modern era, nothing at all. If mankind were really capable of closing the book on this long, sorry episode of human folly and evil, then its painful memory could finally be laid to rest. Only historians would need to trouble their thoughts with its destructive illusions and appalling achievements. But, in fact, these millennial dreams of a brave new world are with us still, and it is increasingly obvious that the most crucial lessons of this history have not been learned. This applies most of all to those whose complicity in its calamities were most profound — the progressive intelligentsia of the democratic West.
Emblematic of this failure was the appearance in 1995 of Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes, a history of the epoch from the outbreak of the First World War to the end of the Communist empire, a period which Hobsbawm refers to as the “short twentieth century.” The Age of Extremes is actually the conclusion to a tetralogy that one American reviewer called a “summa historiae of the modern age,”[1] and which others have showered with similar accolades since the first volume appeared decades ago. This final installment was awarded Canada’s most coveted literary prize and appeared to reviews which canonized its author’s perspective as definitive for the age. A major assessment in the New York Times by Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann, for example, hailed Hobsbawm’s achievement as “magisterial.”[2] This adjective was lifted from the jacket blurb by a Rockefeller Foundation executive who wrote: “Hobsbawm’s magisterial treatment of the short twentieth century, will be the definitive fin-de-siecle work.” Liberal foreign policy analyst Walter Russell Mead echoed this praise, calling the Hobsbawm’s work “a magnificent achievement of a very rare and remarkable kind.”[3] The economist Robert Heilbroner concurred: “I know of no other account that sheds as much light on what is now behind us, and thereby casts so much illumination on our possible futures.” The historian Eugene Genovese, reviewing it for The New Republic was equally impressed:
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=287779
Should we take Obama at his word? No, not when Israel confronts the threat of nuclear annihilation by Iran.
For Obama, the issue is only political; for Israel, it’s existential—a matter of survival.
“Americans who support Israel should take the president at his word,” wrote Haim Saban recently in The New York Times, claiming US President Barack Obama is fully committed to the Jewish state.
But is that true? Should we take him at his word?No, not when Israel confronts the threat of nuclear annihilation by Iran.
Time and again President Obama has signaled a lack of sympathy—or even outright hostility – toward Israel. Not long ago he was caught on an open microphone agreeing with French President Sarkozy’s slurring of the Israeli prime minister. And then there was his public snubbing of the Israeli leader’s request to discuss Iran during a recent US visit, a measure Reuters termed “a highly unusual rebuff to a close ally.”
Even more worrying, last month former US State Department spokesman PJ Crowley, who attended several of Obama’s meetings with Netanyahu, admitted “there are serious differences between our interests and Israel’s own security interests.”
ALL THIS certainly raises questions about Obama’s sincerity when he publicly says he’ll “always have Israel’s back.” Nor are these the only times the president has left American voters wondering where he really stands on foreign relations.
Remember, earlier this year, when he was inadvertently recorded asking former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for “space” until his reelection, when he’d have more “flexibility” on missile defense? What did he mean? Obama was clearly not being forthright with the American people.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released–chart-prove-it.html#ixzz29I1LsNyS Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about […]
http://thecitizen.co.tz/component/content/article/37-tanzania-top-news-story/26479-chaos-hits-dar-as-boy-defiles-quran.html Dar es Salaam. Violent clashes erupted in Dar es Salaam’s Mbagala suburb yesterday when scores of Muslim youth stormed a police station and demanded that a 14-year-old boy accused of urinating on the Quran be handed over to them. In the aftermath of the confrontation, at least five churches were attacked, several car windows […]
http://washingtonexaminer.com/sunday-reflection-no-vital-u.s.-interest-in-syria/article/2510586 Some wars are fought on strategic ground. Others are fought in places that have no strategic value, but the forces engaged there bestow importance upon it. And sometimes neither the ground nor the fight is important to any nation not directly engaged. This last is the view we should take on the fighting […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3396/islam-free-speech The problem with Islam is that Muslims riot and burn and kill those who repeat what is already in their scriptures. The truth regarding that low-budget video, however, is that all the stories in it were taken from the Islamic books on Mohammed’s life, “Sirat Rasul Allah” [“The Life of the Messenger of Allah”], […]
