Displaying posts published in

February 2013

WSJ: THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS AND THE AGENDA

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323696404578300680529770600.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
The President’s Plans
Obama offers an agenda aimed at electing a Pelosi House.

The big question of President Obama’s second term is whether he wants to forge bipartisan compromises in the next two years, or whether he wants to spend these years campaigning against Republicans to regain Democratic control of the House in 2014 and then finish his Presidency with another liberal crescendo. Judging by his inaugural address and Tuesday night’s State of the Union, we’re guessing he’s going for Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Mr. Obama’s second inaugural was a clarion call to “collective action,” as he put it, and Tuesday’s speech showed what he thinks that should mean in practice. “The American people don’t expect government to solve every problem,” he said, while proceeding to offer a new government program to solve every problem.

Not enough job creation? Have the feds set up 15 new “manufacturing hubs” where business can get government advice.

Decaying public works? How about a “Fix-It-First” plan to pay the unemployed to repair roads and bridges? Thus do the “shovel-ready” stimulus projects of the first term become the “most urgent repairs” of the second.

Lousy K-12 results? Have the feds finance pre-school for “every child in America.” A government study only recently found that any benefits from the current pre-school program, Head Start, wear off by third grade. But he’d still make it a universal entitlement.

Not enough money to subsidize electric cars or more Solyndras? Create a new Energy Security Trust, funded by taxing oil and gas companies.

Not all women earn as much money on average as men? Pass the Paycheck Fairness Act so government can unleash the trial lawyers to enforce equal pay.

THE TRUTH ABOUT SODA STREAM AND THE LIBELS AGAINST IT BY THE BOYCOTT AND DIVEST GROUPIES…SEE NOTE PLEASE

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

I HAVE USED THIS PRODUCT AND IT IS TASTY WAY TO SUPPORT ISRAEL…WITH A LITTLE FIZZ…..RSK
Cutting Through The BDS Lies: The Truth About SodaStream (video)
The fiends of the BDS movement and their leftwing NGO abettors have this Israeli company squarely in their sights. Judge for yourself whether it deserves to be demonised.
SEE: SODA STREAM….BUILDING BRIDGES NOT WALLS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl85AL1l0H0&feature=player_embedded

DANIEL GREENFIELD: WHERE IS OUR PANAMA CANAL?

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Sitting in the CNN studio today, with an earpiece jammed in one ear and a microphone clipped to my jacket, the disembodied voice of some CNN guest urgently proposing that the government take advantage of historically low borrowing rates to invest in infrastructure howled in my ear. Without a monitor, the voice had no body belonging to it. It was the muse of liberalism. The idiot angel standing on the shoulder of Uncle Sam crying out, “Spend, spend, spend.”

In 1 Time Warner Circle, all the elevators play the CNN feed in small monitors. On the floor, there is more of the same. There’s no escaping CNN in the tower of the corporate parent of CNN. Like some cheap production of 1984, it’s everywhere and nowhere, one long commercial break for the country’s least popular news network, whose most famous figure is doing his talk show on Hulu, still in his trademark suspenders while his third-rate British replacement shrieks nightly about gun violence.

CNN is irrelevant, but in the ugly Time Warner Center, part shopping mall, part unfinished pile of construction equipment arranged to look like two skyscrapers, defacing the view outside Central Park, it’s all that matters. In the CNN bubble, it’s still vitally important and incredibly influential, even if its most influential moment in the last ten years consisted of two shameless doughy buffoons screaming at each other about gun control.

If America ever goes the way of CNN, then it too will be reduced to some badly designed urban skyscrapers full of important people talking importantly about issues while outside the world has moved on. The disembodied voice in the backlit wilderness cries out that we must invest more in infrastructure. “America built the Panama Canal. They said it couldn’t be done and it revolutionized commerce.”

But where exactly is our Panama Canal? For that matter, where after years of insane deficit spending is our anything? What infrastructure achievement has the shovel-ready administration managed to achieve? What has it done besides rename a few areas after politically correct figures and set up some monuments to the destructive energies of the left?

In December we learned that the National Park Service had spent $1.5 million to restore the graffiti on an Alcatraz water tower put there by leftist American Indian activists in the 70s. Their manifesto read, “We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for $24 in glass beads and red cloth.” But 24 bucks in tourist junk would be a bargain compared to $1.5 million spent during a recession to preserve the sort of leftist idiocy that trolls today leave in comments sections.

Al Gore, Al Jazeera, and the Gray Lady by EDWARD CLINE ****

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/al-gore-al-jazeera-and-the-gray-lady The New York Times isn’t called The Gray Lady for nothing. It has entered its 162ndyear of publication. Despite its falling daily circulation that hovers tenuously around one million, it is still regarded as the nation’s “newspaper of record.” It boasts a monthly tally of thirty million “visitors” to its online version. “Visitors,” however, […]

Gallup: Americans Disapprove of Obama Policy on Nearly Every Issue: Tony Lee

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/02/12/Gallup-Americans-Disapprove-of-Obama-on-Nearly-Every-Issue

According to a Gallup poll, 42% of Americans approve of Obama’s gun policies while 54% disapprove.

On taxes, 41% approve and 57% disapprove. On the economy, 39% approve and 60% disapprove. On “the situation in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” 36% approve and 55% disapprove.

And on the federal budget deficit, 31% approve and 65% disapprove.

The only area in which Obama gains the support of a majority is on “national defense” issues, but the poll was conducted before North Korea reportedly tested a nuclear weapon on Monday as Obama seeks to diminish America’s nuclear arsenal.

Gallup conducted its poll from Feb. 7-10.

MISSING AT THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS….ANY MENTION OF AMBASSADOR CHRIS STEVENS: JOEL POLLAK

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/02/12/SOTU-Chris-Stevens-Was-Not-Even-Remembered In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama failed to mention the late Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the three other Americans who died on Sep. 11, 2012 in the terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. He mentioned the victims of the massacre in Newtown, CT in December, and invited the […]

“Women Cause Rape Upon Themselves” Says Egyptian Human Rights Committee

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2692/_women_cause_rape_upon_themselves_says_egyptian_human_rights_committee Egypt’s Shura Council is blaming women and ‘Western values’ for an increasing number of rapes within protests in Tahrir Square gypt’s ‘Shura Council Human Rights Committee’ today addressed the recent wave of sexual harassment proliferating during mass protests, calling for specific places of protest for females in a move that is being interpreted as […]

UK TOWN “TWINNING” WITH PALARAB TOWN….CAUSES LOCAL ROW

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2699/local_row_breaks_out_over_uk_council_twinning_with_palestinian_town

Officials and locals in the borough of Pendle, UK, have expressed concern over the twinning of the town with Beit Lid in the West Bank

Accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ and the wasting of resources have been levelled across partisan divides in the northern borough of Pendle in the United Kingdom, following a local government decision to utilise taxpayer resources to twin the town ‘in solidarity’ with the Palestinians of Beit Lid.

While twinning is a common part of establishing cross-border links, the contentious message being advocated by members of the Labour, Lib Dem and Green parties in Pendle is that the borough should twin with the Palestinian area because it has “had a hard time of it”.

Conservative councillors argued that the Israel-Palestine issue was one the council should not involve itself in. The advocates of the motion to twin called for the signing of an agreement as well as a motion to welcome the “observer status” of Palestine, granted by the UN. The motion also called for the council to condemn Israeli government plans to build settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

Heated discussions have involved the public intervention of residents and councillors, including one British National Party member stating, “I do not wish to see my area forever associated with a regime inseparably linked to terrorism”. This statement has been widely seen as unhelpful, as it has been interpreted as accusing ordinary Palestinians of being terrorists.

But the Pendle-Beit Leed group, represented politically as the Pendle for Palestine Twinning group, also has some explaining to do regarding its links in the UK. On January 28th 2012, the group announced a partnership with the Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association (CADFA), a group led by a man who has expressed support for Khader Adnan – a jailed terrorist leader from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). The PIJ is a banned terrorist organisation under UK law, whose car and suicide bombings have murdered hundreds of Israeli Jews and Arabs.

CADFA stands accused of propagandising for the eradication of the Jewish State, with one screenshot of their presentations showing ‘Palestine’ as the entirety of Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Munir Nusseibeh, CADFA’s Chairman, has also led the group in supporting Hana Shalabi, whom they describe as a “political prisoner”. Shalabi is also a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

EDWARD ALEXANDER: Cynthia Ozick and William Shakespeare on Judith Butler: Plus Ca Change, Plus C’est La Meme Chose

http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/02/12/cynthia-ozick-and-william-shakespeare-on-judith-butler-plus-ca-change-plus-c%E2%80%99est-la-meme-chose/

Will Judith Butler, who recently brought her frenzied campaign to expel Israel from the family of nations to Brooklyn College, be remembered as a latter-day Yael in reverse, delivering Israel not from but to her enemies? Or as the author of anti-Israel diatribes comprising a virtual Magna Carta of stupidity (written not in Latin, to be sure, but in prose of stupefying opacity)? Or as a Malvolio, sick with self-love? Or as just another self-deluded and self-fascinated Jewish apostate? Cynthia Ozick answered this question almost a decade ago in her conclusion to an essay called “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” which Paul Bogdanor and I used as a Preamble to a book about Jews who hate Israel called The Jewish Divide over Israel. I take the liberty of quoting Ms. Ozick here.

Judith Butler, identifying herself as a Jew in the London Review of Books, the claim that linking “Zionism with Jewishness… is adopting the very tactic favored by antisemites.” A skilled sophist (one might dare to say solipsist), she tosses those who meticulously chart and expose antisemitism’s disguises into the same bin as the antisemites themselves. Having accused Israel of the “dehumanization of Palestinians”; having acknowledged that she was a signatory to a petition opposing “the Israeli occupation, though in my mind it is not nearly strong enough: it did not call for the end of Zionism”; and having acknowledged also that (explicitly) as a Jew she seeks “to widen the rift between the state of Israel and the Jewish people,” she writes:

It will not do to equate Jews with Zionists or Jewishness with Zionism…. It is one thing to oppose Israel in its current form and practices or, indeed, to have critical questions about Zionism itself, but it is quite another to oppose “Jews” or assume that all “Jews” have the same view; that they are all in favor of Israel, identified with Israel, or represented by Israel….To say that all Jews hold a given view on Israel or are adequately represented by Israel, or, conversely, that the acts of Israel, the state, adequately stand for the acts of all Jews, is to conflate Jews with Israel and, thereby, to commit an antisemitic reduction of Jewishness.

One can surely agree with Butler that not all Jews are “in favor of Israel”: she is a dazzling model of one who is not, and she cites, by name, a handful of “post- Zionists” in Israel proper, whom she praises. But her misunderstanding of antisemitism is profound; she theorizes rifts and demarcations, borders and dikes; she is sunk in self-deception. The “good” anti-Zionists, she believes, the ones who speak and write in splendidly cultivated English, will never do her or her fellow Jews any harm; they are not like the guttersnipe antisemites who behave so badly. It is true that she appears to have everything in common with those Western literary intellectuals (e.g., Tom Paulin and the late Edward Said) whose aspirations are indistinguishable from her own: that Israel “in its current form” ought to disappear. Or, as Paulin puts it, “I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all.” Tony Judt, a professor of European history, confirms this baleful view; writing in the New York Review of Books, he dismisses the Jewish state as—alone among the nations–”an anachronism.” Yet Butler’s unspoken assumption is that consonance, or collusion, with those who would wish away the Jewish state will earn one a standing in the European, if not the global, anti-Zionist world club. To a degree she may be right: the congenial welcome she received in a prestigious British journal confirms it, and she is safe enough, for the nonce, in those rarefied places where, as George Eliot has it (with a word altered), it would be “difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [Zionism] which had not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print.” In that company she is at home. There she is among friends. But George Eliot’s Zionist views are notorious; she is partial to Jewish national liberation. A moment, then, for the inventor of the pound of flesh. Here is Cinna, the poet, on his way to Caesar’s funeral [in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar]:

How Islamism Tainted France’s Presidential Election by Nidra Poller

http://www.meforum.org/3447/islamism-france-election

What is Europe going to do about Islam? Submit? Resist? Or just wait it out, dimwittedly? The recent French presidential election offers insight into the way Islam, or more exactly the Islamist factor, may eventually play out in European politics.

Despite attempts by the Left to focus the debate on the economic crisis, Islam played a decisive role in the contest. The Socialist candidate, whose platform was tilted to favor the party’s Muslim clientele, could not have won without total support in the second round of voting from far Left parties marked by zealous anti-Zionism and a full range of anti-Western ideologies. The question of Islam-in-France was raised with unprecedented candor by incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy of the Movement for a Popular Majority (UMP). For the first time in France, a major party clearly advocated a push back against Islam (qualified of course with the adjective “radical”). This strategy fired up the enthusiasm of the base, mobilized voters, brought tens of thousands to party rallies, and led to a daily increase in Sarkozy’s polling figures. It would be fair to estimate that if he had had one more week to campaign he might have defeated Hollande during the second-round vote on May 6, 2012.

But his momentum had already been slowed by Marine Le Pen, candidate of a refurbished Front National. During the first-round campaign of April 9-22, the media kept its spotlight on her in a replay of the strategy used by the last Socialist president, François Mitterrand, who deployed them to exaggerate her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s importance and weaken the conservative opposition. While accusing the Right of dallying with the Front National “fascists,” Mitterrand had unashamedly governed with a coalition of communists and the far Left without which the Socialists could never have won. A variation on this strategy was used in 2012: Anyone who dared question the virtues of “immigration” (code word for Islam) or defend national identity (code word for Islamexasperation) was smeared with pejoratives, all related to Nazism and the Holocaust.

French exasperation with Islam is prompted by situations such as this where Muslims illegally take over streets in Paris in order to pray. Authorities look the other way while the French are left wondering what has happened to their country.

In fact, this worked to the advantage of Le Pen, who came in third with 17.9 percent of the vote in the first round. What explains her pulling power? Did millions of French voters, disappointed with Sarkozy’s failure to release the pent up energies of the French economy, go for the Front National’s unrealistic economic program? Or did they, like the more vocal counter-jihad activists who rushed into her arms, simply ignore it and focus strictly on her championing of Islamexasperation? The activists, blaming Sarkozy for being big on rhetoric but soft on Islam, placed their faith in Le Pen, who came out beating the drum against Muslim street prayers (“an invasion without tanks”) and marched forward, stressing all the issues about which they themselves were blogging. They believed she would put an end to shameful compromises by the Right and the Left, which they designated by the composite “UMPS” (UMP + PS [Parti socialiste]).

Enchanted by her tough-on-Islam rhetoric, the new enthusiasts ignored the core of small-minded, retrograde anticapitalist—and often anti-Semitic—Front National stalwarts. Members of the “Jews-for-Marine” faction gave credibility to her clumsy visits to the United States and Israel. Her secularist Jewish supporters hardly noticed the way she lumped Judaism together with Islam, willing to sacrifice kosher slaughter if Islamic halal could be abolished along with it.[1] They did not even hear her declare that the U.N. Security Council should recognize Palestine.[2]

Heady with power after her good first round showing, Le Pen orchestrated the defeat of Sarkozy by convincing half of her supporters to cast a blank ballot in the second round of voting. Bloggers and activists associated with the counter-jihad site, Riposte Laïque,[3] believed that the UMP, condemned for its failure to stop the Islamic onslaught, would fall apart, and Le Pen would pick up the pieces. Confident that a slew of deputies would be elected in a Front National wave, they said she would be the leader of a new conservative party and, in 2017, why not Présidente de la République?
The True Victims

There is one category of the indigenous European population that is clearly persecuted by Muslim immigration: the Jews.

Not all Muslims attack Jews but virtually all anti-Jewish violence in France is committed by Muslims. And it is so widespread, so merciless, so stubbornly resistant that thousands of Jews have chosen to emigrate.[4] Of those who remain, many valiantly devote their energies to denouncing the violence and trying to defend Jews against it. But no less shocking than the flight or fight choice imposed on Jews is the general indifference to their dilemma.

The expulsion of a few illegal immigrants can monopolize prime time news for days while most attacks against Jews are ignored by the national media. Those that are reported are twisted out of shape by fabricated ambiguity. The victim says he was beaten/knocked down/kicked/slashed/bombarded with anti-Semitic insults. The perpetrator denies the insults. The journalist gives equal credibility to the Jew-basher and the bashed Jew, and the story quickly drops out of sight.[5]

On the rare occasion when an anti-Semitic crime is too big to ignore, it is drowned in a flood of emotion: Solemn public figures in skull caps attend synagogue ceremonies, Jewish community leaders and intellectuals publicly agonize in the media, and minutes of silence and solemn marches are organized. But the connection between Islam, Jew hatred, the specific killer, and the criminal act is severed. This was the case with the murder of Sébastien Selam by a Muslim neighbor in 2003 and the kidnap-torture murder of Ilan Halimi by an Islamist gang in 2006.[6]

Islamism’s brutal face showed up once again on the eve of the official presidential campaign in the form of Muhammad Merah, who assassinated three paratroopers of fellow North African origin—Abel Chennouf, Imad Iban Ziaten, and Muhammad Legouade—and then on March 19, executed Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his sons Aryeh and Gavriel, and 7-year-old Miriam Monsonego at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse. A surviving soldier, Loic Liber, is a tetraplegic while student Bryan Aaron Bajoui is recuperating from critical chest wounds and the shock of witnessing the murders.

Because Merah killed both Jews and apparent Muslims (in fact one of his Maghrebi victims was Christian), the crime could not be termed as purely anti-Semitic. The fact that he was a run-of-the-mill punk rather than a wildly deranged one-of-a-kind killer raised no alarms in the public mind: Ominously, a striking increase in attacks against Jews following Merah’s jihadist operation showed that a very broad swath of the French Muslim population is both radicalized and activated.[7]

This does not mean that French society was not shaken by the Merah massacre. The weekly Nouvel Observateur featured a cover story on anti-Semitism in July. Yet, the lead article by Isabelle Monnin, “Journey to the Depths of Anti-Semitism,” meanders with half-closed eyes down the path of the new anti-Semitism. Merah is identified as a jihadist admired by a “small minority.” Several attacks against Jews are described. (Attacked by whom?) Jews who wear skull caps are afraid to go into certain neighborhoods. (What kind of neighborhoods?) Most incidents, it seems, are not violent enough to be worth reporting. Others—in Villurbane, a North African bashed a young Jew’s head with a hammer—are admittedly serious but, writes Monnin, they are whipped up by bloggers, leading to a “paranoid trend that makes every attack on a Jew the absolute proof of rampant anti-Semitism.” Finally, Monnin identifies the Jew-bashers when she states that “today’s anti-Semitism is often [sic] committed by youths of Maghrebi origin or sub-Saharan Africa calling themselves Muslims.” Are they not really Muslims? Or does the author think they do not represent true Islam? She attributes this anti-Semitism to a “political-religious molasses transposed from the Israel-Palestine conflict and anti-Americanism.” But, she alerts her readers to watch out for “a certain number of Jews whose racism and Islamophobia is reinforced by the increase in anti-Semitism.”