http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323539804578259710239304142.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion Conventional political wisdom has long held that the Palestinian issue is the key to the Middle East. Yet as Elliott Abrams points out in “Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” “Arab political life does not revolve around Palestine.” Rather, Palestine is “one issue among many and never the determining factor […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324445904578281851978137578.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Nothing could have harmed the nominee for secretary of defense more than his own confirmation answers.
It shouldn’t have been surprising that the Senate hearings to confirm Chuck Hagel as the next secretary of defense ended up shedding light on much more than this nominee and his qualifications. The trumpets had sounded long in advance on the main claim for Mr. Hagel—i.e., that his experience as an enlisted man, a combat veteran, had endowed him with special expertise not given to others, on matters of war, on our nuclear capacity, the size of our defense budget, a capacity to take the measure of Iran and North Korea.
Mr. Hagel had come by this wisdom, we were informed, because he had been at the front, seen men die, and knew, as we were frequently reminded, what the ordinary soldier thought and felt. All of this, the argument ran, gave him a unique capacity to head the Defense Department.
Could rational men and women seriously credit such a claim? The credential has been touted even by Mr. Hagel’s devout partisans on the left, delirious over the prospect of so conspicuous a voice of antiwar sentiment as secretary of defense. And of course by the president who chose, by this nomination, to make the dreams of those cadres come true.
The same argument was made for Mr. Hagel in the confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, though it would come less and less often as events took a decidedly disastrous turn for the nominee. Here was an affair sizzling with exchanges that seemed to come straight from a skillful Hollywood script of the old school—the kind whose most improbable scenes feel like gut-wrenching reality.
http://righttruth.typepad.com/right_truth/2013/02/broken-college-office-of-submissions.html
When I learned of the upcoming (Feb.7) BDS Movement against Israel, planned for Brooklyn College and sponsored by its Political Science Department, I was appalled. How could Shari’a law, so antithetical to our democratic principles and the school’s own mission statement, be accepted at the beautiful institution I attended so long ago?
How does spewing bigotry and propaganda against the only democratic country in the Middle East, by representatives of Islam who rally and burn our flags, conform to the educational welfare of BC students, alumni, and the community? How does Islamic intolerance on campus lead to outstanding achievements and the furtherance of education? How does permitting the accusatory lies against Israel, the only country in the region that actually does NOT practice apartheid, further democratic values? They clearly contradict the learning environment as they rationalize their irresponsibility and treachery to so many.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stated, “The purpose of education is not just a tool to enable people to trample over the masses. Education is an opportunity to learn, to develop skills, and to improve themselves and society.” How can we improve our society by closing the minds of our students?
How can the school ignore the attempt to spread Islamic ideology worldwide, as Islam’s 1400-year history is replete with conquest, conversion, enslavement, usurpation, and slaughter of 270 million people in the Middle East? The current Muslim countries were once other cultures. While it may appear that these Islamists are here to discuss only one issue, they seek to conquer the sovereign nation of Israel, to deny her 4,000-year history, destroy her economy, and intimidate and manipulate non-Muslims into joining their war. Be assured that BDS is a war strategy to master the minds of Americans who will then join the fray in delegitimizing Israel, and absorbing the 8,000 square miles into their Islamic caliphate, while their counterparts are killing and overcoming the citizenry of Africa, France, Spain, England, Sweden, Norway, and the Benelux countries.
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2623/waiting_for_nobel When will Israel’s achievements be recognised? Insomniacs lull themselves to sleep by counting sheep. Not me. I count Nobel Prizes being handed out in austere Scandinavian ceremonies. Modestly, I confess, I am the sole recipient. There is, however, a problem: the category for my Nobel Prize does not yet exist. But I am optimistic […]
www.econwarfare.com The acceleration in Chinese hacking into U.S. government agencies, major financial institutions, businesses and media outlets seems to match China’s growing investments in this country. Both began to intensify since the economic crisis of 2008. The statements issued by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and the Washington Post, implied the […]
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-03/now-we-know-bush-did-not-lie-about-wmd-in-iraq.html
Remember the debate about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction? It’s back for an encore, thanks to Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, who remarked at a hearingrecently that whatever went wrong in the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi disaster, it wasn’t as bad as the Bush administration’s insistence that those weapons existed.
The blogosphere swiftly picked up the refrain, and so, once more, we have been treated to angry denunciation of the supposed cover-up of the true intelligence about Iraq’s weapons programs. A bracing challenge to this view is provided by “The Art of Betrayal,” Gordon Corera’s enthralling history of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6.
Stephen L. Carter is a professor of law at Yale, where he teaches courses on contracts, professional responsibility, …MORE
Corera, a widely respected British Broadcasting Corp. journalist with impeccable sources in the clandestine world, devotes a good deal of his narrative to the question of what went wrong in Iraq. But the wider focus is on the shadowy, yet colorful, figures who have populated the agency since the dawn of the Cold War.
The book is worth reading for Corera’s detailed recounting of largely unexamined swaths of secret history, which I will discuss in a future column. For the present, let us consider only what he has to say about Iraq — and, in particular, about the notion that U.S. President George W. Bush and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and their staffs fabricated the evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
Silly Theories
One of my favorite historians, Andrew Roberts, insists that Corera’s research “explodes that myth completely.” That seems to me too strong. Rather, Corera offers a nuanced perspective that should serve as corrective to some of the sillier conspiracy theories that still abound. His account is unlikely to convince all the doubters, but should be studied nonetheless for the lessons it carries — lessons to which President Barack Obamaand his administration should pay close attention.
Corera has combed available public sources, both official investigations and various memoirs, and added to it his own reporting, most of it from anonymous intelligence sources. His ironic conclusion: “Everyone, including the spies, was convinced by the intelligence that said Saddam had the weapons,” he writes. Yet “they were not sure it looked strong enough to win the argument.”
By everyone, Corera means everyone. As he reminds us, even Hans Blix, the chief United Nations arms inspector before the war, believed that Saddam Hussein had hidden weapons of mass destruction. David Kay, who led the postwar Iraq Survey Groupthat found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, went into his search expecting to find the opposite. In this sense, Bush and Blair were just along for the ride.
www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
Paraplegics can now walk even better. Version 2 of the ReWalk exoskeleton from Israel’s Argo Medical has just been released. Now one device can be resized to help train different users. New software programs also make the device easier to use.
http://www.embassyofisrael.co.uk/commercial/2013/01/24/argo-medical-technologies-unveils-advancement-of-its-exoskeleton-technology-with-launch-of-rewalk-rehabilitation-2-0/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Xd27c-pz4Y&feature=player_embedded
Israeli professor advises Euro medicines agency. Prof. Jonathan Rabinowitz, of Bar-Ilan University has been appointed to the Advisory Group on Promoting Good Analysis Practice in relation to European Medicines Agency (EMA) Clinical Trial Data and Transparency. He will also co-chair of the Program Committee for the Biennial Schizophrenia International Research Society Conference to take place in Florence, Italy.
http://www1.biu.ac.il/indexE.php?id=33&pt=20&pid=117&level=2&cPath=33&type=1&news=1815
The cause of face/heart abnormalities. One in 4000 babies is born with DiGeorge syndrome, a congenital condition that causes various abnormalities, most often in the face and heart. Weizmann researchers have solved a piece of this puzzle by investigating the genetic network underlying this syndrome.
http://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/when-the-network-is-defective
Putting bones on the flesh. Here is an update on the progress of Israel’s Bonus Biogroup and its founder Dr. Shai Meretzki who is generating bones from patients’ own fat cells. Hospitals in Tzrifin and Afula, have agreed to trial the implanting of engineered bones back into patients as soon as the Helsinki Committee approves.
http://www.jpost.com/Health/Article.aspx?id=301049
Random screening detected and cured 24 early cancer sufferers. When 1,000 apparently healthy Israelis of a median age of 48 were screened at Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center for 11 of the most common cancers, 2.4 percent (24) were diagnosed at an early stage with malignancies and treated successfully.
http://www.jpost.com/Health/Article.aspx?id=301997
Deep TMS helps smokers to quit. Of 115 smokers, 84% of those receiving Deep Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) stopped smoking permanently at the end of the 6-month trial. 36% were still not smoking after the six-month post-treatment monitoring period.
http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000816803&fid=1725
Eight massive Israeli brains. The European Commission has chosen the Human Brain Project as one of its flagship projects. Participating from Israel is a team of eight scientists from the Hebrew University, the Weizmann Institute of Science, and Tel Aviv University.
http://www.huji.ac.il/cgi-bin/dovrut/dovrut_search_eng.pl?mesge135936589605872560
Watch how you walk. Israeli start-up SensoGo has developed a device that, when strapped to a patient’s leg, performs medical gait analysis. It records and uploads data about factors such as the patient’s gait, speed, and style of walking. Doctors can diagnose a patient more quickly and efficiently than from current video methods.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/new-device-deciphers-the-secrets-of-your-step/
http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/the-un-bigotry-machine-2/
Quick quiz. An inquiry set up by the UN Human Rights Council has just released a draft report condemning:
A) Iran
B) China
C) Sri Lanka
D) Israel
The answer, of course, is D — Israel. This is yet another UN document that deserves to be filed in the same dustbin as the ugly and discredited Goldstone report [1]. Never mind Iran, China, Sri Lanka et al. As the Geneva-based monitoring group, UN Watch, points out, [2] since the UN set up its “reformed” Human Rights Council in 2006, “there have been seven one-sided inquiry missions on Israel, and only five on the rest of the world combined. Mass atrocities committed by Iran, China, or Sri Lanka, for example, have never been subjected to a single HRC inquiry.”
This latest report, due to be formally presented to the Council in March, is captioned “Advanced Unedited Version.” I assume they meant to say ”Advance,” since there is nothing advanced about this product. It’s the latest in a long series of exhibits that attest not to the realities of the Middle East, but to the unrelenting bigotry of what is supposed to be the UN’s leading human rights body. The full title – brace yourself, this is one of those UN doozies — is: “Report of the independent international fact-finding mission to investigate the implications of the Israeli settlements on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people, throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”
The three “high-level experts” appointed by the president of the Human Rights Council to produce this document arrogate to themselves, in its introduction, a description of their work as “Guided by the principles of ‘do no harm,’ independence, impartiality, objectivity, transparency, confidentiality, integrity and professionalism…” Yes, and pigs can fly.
UN Watch gives an incisive summary of the contents [2] of this report, and makes the vital point that while the UN is supposed to foster peace, this kind of inquiry has the very opposite effect: “It has the perverse outcome of pushing the parties further apart, while also inappropriately pre-judging final status issues that can only be resolved through direct negotiations.” I’d add that in obsessively savaging Israel, while ignoring most of the genuine perpetrators of gross human rights violations, the UN Human Rights Council — and the UN generally — waste the considerable resources they are given, dishonor their charter mandate, and do a horrendous disservice to the truly downtrodden.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/muhammad-morsis-islamic-jew-hatred-bernard-lewis-islamic-negationism/?print=1
Why do the media’s Middle East pundits ignore the Jew-hatred intrinsic to Islamic doctrine?
A month has passed since the Middle East Media Research Institute posted a 2010 video interview [1] of Muslim Brotherhood leader, and now Egyptian President, Muhammad Morsi spewing Antisemitic vitriol. Morsi’s comments [2] included a characterization of today’s Zionists — plainly Jews in his parlance — as “descendants of apes and pigs” — a specific invocation of Koran 5:60 [3], which he had repeated, elsewhere, in print interviews [4], and commentaries [5].
That this dehumanizing Koranic [6] depiction was in reference to Jews has been validated by the most authoritative classical and modern exegeses [6]* (“tafsir,” or commentaries) on the Koran [7], the words [8] of Muhammad himself (as recorded in the sira, or pious Muslim biographies of Islam’s prophet), as well as a large corpus of Islamic theological writings [6] which demonstrate the motif’s application [6] by Muslims over a nearly 1400-year continuum.
Yet to this day, thousands of reports and opinion pieces later (search “Morsi” + “apes and pigs” using Google.com to estimate the vast output [9]), only a handful have noted this irrefragable [6] link to a Koranic verse [7] (i.e., 5:60 [3]) declaring the Jews to be apes and pigs. The apotheosis of this negationist trend was captured in a January 27, 2013 Times of Israel interview [10] of Charles Small, head of the itinerant Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). Small piously proclaimed that ISGAP was uniquely committed to addressing what was framed as “Islamic” Antisemitism, because,
There’s a reluctance among scholars to open up this subject [i.e., “Islamic” Antisemitism]. This subject is dangerous, embarrassing. It touches on various political interests in international relations that people don’t really want to engage with.
However, also ignoring Morsi’s repetition of the Koran 5:60 [3] “apes and pigs” reference, Small made this pathognomonic assertion [10], “The danger does not come from Islam itself.”
What explains the almost uniform, egregious omission of Morsi’s Koranic reference, and Small’s [10] broader see-no-Islam in “Islamic” Antisemitism mindset, displayed even by politically centrist [11] or conservative [12] Western media outlets, and the centrist or conservative “Middle East experts [11]” opining for them? I argue that such willful blindness is rooted in the misrepresentation of Islamic Jew-hatred — indeed its frank denial as a coherent doctrine — by one of the leading contemporary scholars of Islam, turned late-blooming, ubiquitous public intellectual, whose limited, dogmatic investigation of the subject, has smothered all such desperately required discussion. That scholar is Bernard Lewis.
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/02/book_review_the_long_road_to_freedom.html The Long Road to Freedom — Cubanos in Wisconsin by Silvio Canto, Jr. and Gabriel Canto With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the fall of the iron curtain more than 20 years ago, most Americans do not think any more about the threat from Communist regimes or how people lived in these […]
