Displaying posts published in

December 2013

DAVID GOLDMAN: THE NED OF ERDOGAN’S CAVE OF WONDERS- AN I TOLD YOU SO

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2013/12/27/the-end-of-erdogans-cave-of-wonders-an-i-told-you-so/

Turkey is coming apart. The Islamist coalition that crushed the secular military and political establishment–between Tayip Erdogan’s ruling AK Party and the Islamist movement around Fethullah Gulen–has cracked. The Gulenists, who predominate in the security forces, have arrested the sons of top government ministers for helping Iran to launder money and circumvent sanctions, and ten members of Erdogan’s cabinet have resigned. Turkey’s currency is in free fall, and that’s just the beginning of the country’s troubles: about two-fifths of corporate debt is in foreign currencies, so the cost of servicing it jumps whenever the Turkish lira declines. Turkish stocks have crashed (and were down another 5% in dollar terms in early trading Friday). So much for Turkey’s miracle economy.

RAEL JEAN ISAAC: THE CORRUPT ACADEMY

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/the-corrupt-academy-rael-jean-isaac.html

“One has to start somewhere.” That’s how the president of the American Studies Association justified the ASA’s vote to boycott Israel when he was asked why the organization had ignored the vast number of human rights abusing states that pepper the planet. He might have added, where else do we get equivalent PR bang for the buck? Would the Wall Street Journal devote an editorial and an op-ed piece (on one day!) to our radical left pint-sized under-the-radar association if we had condemned the Sudan? And if the Wall Street Journal doesn’t appreciate us, our academic peers will.

Nowhere has the long march through the institutions recommended by Antonio Gramsci as the road to power been more successful than in our colleges and universities (with the Democratic Party a strong runner-up). In all too many cases, the liberal arts divisions are occupied territory of the left.

Ethnic and gender studies are especially prone to being taken over by the wackiest elements of our species. These radical activists take over the National Councils (and more important, the executive committees) of the Associations composed of those teaching in these fields (like American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Asian Studies, Native American Studies, Women’s Studies etc.). They rightly see that by controlling these outfits, they will have megaphones to broadcast their junk morality on to a broader scene, never mind that these forays into “progressive” politics have nothing to do with the purposes or supposed sphere of competence of the group of which they are a part. The upshot is that these so-called scholarly associations increasingly come to resemble the UN Human Rights Council, absurdly obsessing about Israel (a human rights paragon, as these things go) as the greatest, if not only, human rights abuser on this earth.

In the case of the American Studies Association, following the annual meeting, its National Council voted unanimously to endorse the Israel boycott. Jonathan Marks (a professor of politics at Ursinus College) notes in the Wall Street Journal that the Council’s executive committee (whence such resolutions spring) has six members, five of them anti-Israel activists who had previously endorsed the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Four of them had signed a 2009 letter to Obama describing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as “one of the most massive ethnocidal atrocities of modern times” and declared a one-state solution “almost certainly” the only road to peace. In other words the only way Israel could satisfy these human rights mavens would be to abolish itself.

Boasting of its democratic openness, the Council then opened the resolution to

WILLIAM MEHLMAN: BEYOND THE PALE

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/?p=1191

While a picture may still be worth a thousand words, its repute as bondsman for the “whole truth and nothing but the truth” has become a footnote to a bygone age. A current case in point is Fiddler With No Roof, a video film produced under the auspices of Israel-based “Rabbis For Human Rights.” Starring Theodore Bikel, a practiced Israel critic reprising in narrative guise his cinematic role as “Tevye the milkman,” it strives to create a parallel between Czarist Russia’s expulsion of Tevye and his fellow townsfolk from their beloved “Anatevka” and Israel’s proposed relocation of 30,000 of its Bedouin citizens in the Negev from a disease-ridden collection of tents and corrugated metal huts sitting on the edge of a toxic waste dump to a group of modern apartment blocks equipped with running water, electricity, sewage and sanitation disposal facilities, a nearby school, health and social services. Fiddler With No Roof doesn’t waste much footage on these inconvenient facts, or with the quarter acre of land and monetary compensation each of the relocated families will be receiving, or the fact that the transferees, far from being expelled to any Arab Pale of Settlement, much less out of the Negev, are to be consolidated with an existing Bedouin community five kilometers down the road from their uninhabitable dwellings. Fiddler With No Roof’s crowning omission, however, is its failure to inform us that 15,000 of the 30,000 being considered for relocation have petitioned the Israeli government to remove them from their pestilential surroundings.

Being readied for a final reading in the Knesset, the relocation bill is the product of a carefully crafted, $2.5 billion, five-year plan enabling Israel to get a handle on a runaway Arab ethnic segment, powered by illegal polygamous marriage, that doubles in size every 15 years. At its fringes, it is a population rampant with poverty, chronic unemployment, crime, violence, illiteracy, illness, the world’s highest birthrate and an infant mortality rate seven times that of Tel Aviv. It has been allowed to run wild over the Negev for decades, erecting scores of instant slums, while claiming ownership, past, present and forever over every dunam of desert its camels may have trod. As explained by former minister Benny Begin (Likud), who with National Planning Director Uri Prawer formulated the Bedouin consolidation strategy, “We [Israel] cannot lay thousands of kilometers of water pipes to reach every group of shacks in the middle of the desert. If we want to improve the situation of the Bedouin we need to create responsibly- sized communities big enough to have a school with residents near enough so its youngest children can attend.”

Freedom vs. Security — on The Finch Gang

Freedom vs. Security — on The Finch Gang

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/freedom-vs-security-on-the-finch-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang, hosted by Michael Finch, the Freedom Center’s Chief Operating Officer, was joined by Mark Vafiades, the Chairman of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County, Dr. Karen Siegemund, Founder of Rage Against the Media and Orestes Matacena, a Hollywood filmmaker and actor.

The Gang gathered to discuss Freedom vs. Security. Watch both parts of the two-part series below:

Part I:

DANIEL GREENFIELD: A LEFT WING AMERICA STANDS ALONE

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/a-left-wing-america-stands-alone/print/ American progressives like to think of their country as backward and reactionary compared to Europe. And they have never been more right than now when Europe and the rest of the First World have gone right while America under Obama has been left back. Recently Australia, Japan and Norway welcomed in conservative governments. Tony […]

MARK STEYN: HEADING SOUTH

https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/366761/print Whether or not Nelson Mandela was emblematic of the new South Africa, his memorial service certainly was. Thamsanqa Jantjie, the lovable laugh-a-minute sign-language fraud who stood alongside President Obama gesticulating meaninglessly to the delight of all, was exposed in the days that followed as a far darker character. A violent schizophrenic charged over the […]

AL QAEDA RENEWED: KATHERINE ZIMMERMAN

https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/366725/print The recent crisis in Syria has driven the growth of al-Qaeda groups in that country; in Iraq, al-Qaeda has killed dozens at a time in coordinated car bombings. The broad network of al-Qaeda affiliates now threatens the United States from safe havens across the Middle East and North Africa. But it is far from […]

ALLAH AKHBAR AND HO-HO-HO! DANIEL GREENFIELD

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“A flag bearing a crescent and star flies from a flagpole in front of the World Trade Center, next to a Christmas tree and a menorah.”

New York Times, 1997

In 1997, Mohammed T. Mehdi, the head of the Arab-American Committee and the National Council on Islamic Affairs, lobbied to have a crescent and star put up at the World Trade Center during the holiday season. His wish was granted, despite the fact that he had been an adviser to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman also known as the Blind Sheikh.

In the name of diversity and political correctness, an adviser to the religious leader behind the World Trade Center bombing, was allowed to plant an Islamic symbol of conquest in the very place that had been bombed.

Long before the Ground Zero Mosque was even a twinkle in the eye of aviolent ex-waiter and a slumlord Imam, the World Trade Center allowed Mohammed T. Mehdi to bully it into flying the symbol of Islam.

By 1997, Mohammed T. Mehdi had become an unambiguously ugly public figure. He had been fired by Mayor Dinkins in 1992 for anti-Semitic remarks. The year before he had proclaimed that, “Millions of Arabs believe Saddam stands tall having defied Western colonialism”.

In 1995, the US Attorney’s Office in New York had listed Mehdi as anunindicted co-conspirator in the trial of Sheikh Rahman. Mehdi had already published a book titled “Kennedy and Sirhan: Why?”, which contended that Robert Kennedy’s assassin had been acting in self-defense.

MARK LANGFAN: WHAT ARE WE THINKING?

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/175506#.UrwZ0TaA2Un
Analysis: As John Kerry seeks to force a deal based on the ‘Allon Plan’, Arutz Sheva analyst says the implications for Israel are dire.

In a game of tug-of-war, everybody knows what happens if the rope breaks in the middle: both sides keep the part of the rope that’s closest to themselves.

This simple truism for all fights everywhere works everywhere – except for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over Judea and Samaria. Why? Because in 1967, Yigal Allon, an Israeli General, came up with a “peace” plan that contradicted all common sense – and military doctrine.

Allon came up with the “Jordan Valley” peace plan. In this “plan,” Israel would cede Western Samaria (Shomron) – the part that is closest to Tel Aviv abutting the Green Line, and only keeps the eastern Samarian Jordan Valley – the part that is furthest from Tel Aviv, abutting the Jordan River and disconnected from Israel by Western Samaria.

For 45 years, all of Israel’s governments have based all of their “peace” plans on Allon’s Jordan Valley plan. For 45 years, all of Israel’s governments have deluded themselves with a “plan” that is both idiotic and contrary to all basic principles of warfare.

Now, with US Secretary of State John Kerry reportedly trying to force a deal along the lines of the Allon Plan on Israel (with even more concessions than originally envisioned), it is more important than ever to understand what exactly the plan is – and why it is utterly suicidal for Israel to accept.

TABITHA KOROL: ACADEMICS SURRENDER TO ALLAH

http://drrichswier.com/2013/12/25/american-studies-association-academics-surrender-to-allah/

Five thousand members of the ASA, American Studies Association, would be better identified as Academics Surrender to Allah. They have declared jihad against the State of Israel. Why? ASA president Curtis Marez admitted that there are worse countries than Israel but, he added, “One has to start somewhere!” Can you picture Marez as part of a firefighting team sent to extinguish a blaze in Southern California, and he’ll start “somewhere” in North Dakota? So they’re boycotting Israel’s universities, which are also attended by Palestinian students, rather than boycotting Palestinian universities that were instituted by Israel but are prohibited to Jewish students – perhaps a study in reverse psychology.

If you ever wondered how Nazism took hold in Germany or if the masses “really knew” what was happening in their country, look at America now. There have already been 50 court cases in 23 states decided according to Islamic Sharia law, and the actions of the ASA clearly expose the many who are willingly Sharia-compliant, eager to abandon civility, justice, and integrity, to join forces with tyranny. Just in: another 1,000 academics have just joined the crusade.*

Israel’s universities are listed among the top 100 world universities in mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer sciences and economics, with the world’s highest per capita rate of university degrees and the world’s highest ratio per capita of scientists, technicians, PhDs, physicians, with contributions in every aspect of life, while being only .02% of the world’s population. Israel contributes to advances in water shortage, agriculture, space travel, solar power, DNA, and more, for all the world’s benefit. Her advanced methods of Intelligence benefit America’s security.