http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/10/jesse_jackson_did_not_meet_with_black_political_prisoners_in_cuba.html My friend Carlos Eire, author, university professor and one of the 14,000 unaccompanied children who came to the US under “Pedro Pan” in the 1960s, alerted us to the latest display of Jesse Jackson irresponsibility. Incredibly, Jesse Jackson, the same man who could not speak enough about Nelson Mandela and aparthed in the […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/10/are_cnns_iran_reports_biased_inept_or_corrupt.html Al-Jazeera bought access to US public opinion when it purchased Current TV from Al Gore, but it faces stiff competition from CNN when it comes to misleading viewers about the Middle East. Over the last week, CNN has promoted a biased, re-branded image of the Iranian regime on at least three major programs. […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304176904579111084193512104.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
Golda Meir didn’t strike pre-emptively in 1973 because she was ‘scared’ of angering the White House.
With all due respect for Halevi, the real lesson from the Yom Kippur War is that Israel has a strategic need as well as legal and historic rights to retain Judea and Samaria. ….Sadat, humbled in war even with the help of Kissinger who pummeled Israel into accepting Egypt’s terms for a final cease fire line, then came to Jerusalem to bark his demands before Israel’s parliament which acquiesced to all his demands including the promise of “autonomy” for West Bank Arabs….And the rest is the history of the foul and dangerous notion of “territory for peace which has clouded all Israel’s subsequent negotiations….rsk
As Israeli leaders weigh their response to the tentative dialogue between Tehran and Washington, which they regard as an Iranian ruse, the invisible presence at the cabinet table in Jerusalem will be the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
In declassified testimony just released by an Israeli national commission investigating the country’s initial failures during the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, Meir explained why she hadn’t ordered a pre-emptive airstrike against Arab forces, though she knew by the morning of Oct. 6 that an invasion would happen within hours. She feared losing American support. “I am scared,” she recalled telling her cabinet. “We will not receive necessary assistance when we have the need for it.”
Meir’s restraint was vindicated by an American airlift of military aid during the war. Yet her decision not to order a strike, along with the army’s failure to respond to earlier intelligence warnings by drafting reservists, almost resulted in Israel’s first military defeat.
Recently, Secretary of State, John Kerry signed a U.N. Arms Treaty in violation of the Second Amendment to our Constitution. On August 5, 2013, the U.N. Office for Disarmament Affairs released the results of the Disarmament Commission study (summarized below) that focused on the confiscation of all civilian weapons, specifically from Americans, […]
http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2013/10/america-and-the-good-psychopat.php?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=America+and+the+good+psychopaths&utm_campaign=20131004_m117448204_America+and+the+good+psychopaths&utm_term=Continue+reading___
In his speech on Tuesday before the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu tried to get the Americans to stop their collective swooning at the sight of an Iranian president who smiled in their general direction.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the premier warned, “I wish I could believe [President Hassan] Rouhani, but I don’t because facts are stubborn things. And the facts are that Iran’s savage record flatly contradicts Rouhani’s soothing rhetoric.”
He might have saved his breath. The Americans weren’t interested.
Two days after Netanyahu’s speech, US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel issued a rejoinder to Netanyahu. “I have never believed that foreign policy is a zero-sum game,” Hagel said.
Well, maybe he hasn’t. But the Iranians have.
And they still do view diplomacy – like all their dealings with their sworn enemies – as a zero-sum game.
As a curtain raiser for Rouhani’s visit, veteran New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins wrote a long profile of Iran’s real strongman for The New Yorker. Qassem Suleimani is the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. It is the most powerful organ of the Iranian regime, and Suleimani is Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s closest confidante and adviser.
Rouhani doesn’t hold a candle to Suleimani.
Filkin’s profile is detailed, but deeply deceptive. The clear sense he wishes to impart on his readers is that Suleimani is a storied war veteran and a pragmatist. He is an Iranian patriot who cares about his soldiers. He’s been willing to cut deals with the Americans in the past when he believed it served Iran’s interests. And given Suleimani’s record, it is reasonable to assume that Rouhani – who is far more moderate than he – is in a position to make a deal and will make one.
The problem with Filkin’s portrayal of Suleimani as a pragmatist, and a commander who cares about the lives of his soldiers – and so, presumably cares about the lives of Iranians – is that it is belied by the stories Filkins reported in the article.
Filkins describes at length how Suleimani came of age as a Revolutionary Guard division commander during the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988, and how that war made him the complicated, but ultimately reasonable, (indeed parts of the profile are downright endearing), pragmatist he is today.
As the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Suleimani commands the Syrian military and the foreign forces from Iran, Hezbollah and Iraq that have been deployed to Syria to keep Bashar Assad in power.
Filkins quotes an Iraqi politician who claimed that in a conversation with Suleimani last year, the Iranian called the Syrian military “worthless.”
He then went on to say, “Give me one brigade of the Basij, and I could conquer the whole country.”
Filkins notes that it was the Basij that crushed the anti-Islamist Green Revolution in Iran in 2009. But for a man whose formative experience was serving as a Revolutionary Guards commander in the Iran-Iraq War, Suleimani’s view of the Basij as a war-fighting unit owes to what it did in its glory days, in that war, not on the streets of Tehran in 2009.
As Matthias Kuntzel reported in 2006, the Revolutionary Guards formed the Basij during the Iran-Iraq War to serve as cannon fodder. Basij units were made up of boys as young as 12.
They were given light doses of military training and heavy doses of indoctrination in which they were brainwashed to reject life and martyr themselves for the revolution.
As these children were being recruited from Iran’s poorest villages, Ayatollah Khomeini purchased a half million small plastic keys from Taiwan.
They were given to the boys before they were sent to battle and told that they were the keys to paradise. The children were then sent into minefields to die and deployed as human waves in frontal assaults against superior Iraqi forces.
By the end of the war some 100,000 of these young boys became the child sacrifices of the regime.
When we assess Suleimani’s longing for a Basij brigade in Syria in its proper historical and strategic context – that is, in the context of how he and his fellow Revolutionary Guards commanders deployed such brigades in the 1980s, we realize that far from being a pragmatist, Suleimani is a psychopath.
Filkins did not invent his romanticized version of what makes Suleimani tick. It is a view that has been cultivated for years by senior US officials.
Former US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker spoke at length with Filkins about his indirect dealings with Suleimani through Iranian negotiators who answered to him, and through Iraqi politicians whom he controlled.
Crocker attests that secretary of state Colin Powell dispatched him to Geneva in the weeks before the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to negotiate with the Iranians. Those discussions, which he claims involved the US and Iran trading information about the whereabouts of al- Qaida operatives in Afghanistan and Iran, could have led to an historic rapprochement, Crocker claims. But, he bemoans, hope for such an alliance were dashed in January 2002, when George W. Bush labeled Iran as a member of the “Axis of Evil,” in his State of the Union address.
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4005/uk-niqab-muslim-veil Permitting the niqab in the British legal and educational systems not only further legitimizes Islamist fundamentalism, but also opens the door for enforced apartheid: veiled women would keep looking at unveiled women as different or even immoral, while Muslim men would look at veiled women as dehumanized creatures to be isolated from the world […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4003/uk-charity-commission-interpal
Since the time that the Charity Commission chairman promised to punish groups which promote extremism, Interpal has nevertheless organized a number of events that once again, demonstrate that extremist organizations continue with impunity to abuse their charitable status.
On 12 September, William Shawcross, chairman of Britain’s Charity Commission, addressed a crowd of leading experts and representatives from the British charitable and financial sectors, and announced that:
We are stepping up our work to prevent and tackle terrorist abuse of charities. The misuse of charities for terrorist purposes represents a despicable inversion of everything charity stands for and we will fight that without quarter. And we have put out very clear guidance to charities about extremist and controversial speakers. It is unacceptable for charities to promote the views of individuals who promote violence and terrorism.
We should welcome, then, the promise by Shawcross that pro-terror organizations will no longer be free to employ the moral monopoly afforded by charitable status to shroud their extremist activities.
Unfortunately, however, charities accused of extremism do not appear to be concerned by any of the proposed changes. Interpal, for example, a leading British charity supported by a number of British politicians and cabinet members, is, in the United States, designated a terrorist organization. A comprehensive profile of Interpal, written by this author and published by the Gatestone Institute in January 2013, examined the charity’s links to terrorist groups as well as its trustees and staff’s expressed support for extremist ideas.
