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March 2015

JACK ENGELHARD: TOO MUCH INFORMATION?

Now that “the Iran-backed Houthis” have entered our language, are their opponents the good guys? Who cares?
Yes, too much information, if you ask me. That’s why every single red-blooded American is watching West Virginia versus Kentucky.

Hey, it’s March Madness. That’s college basketball, to my relatives in Israel who mistakenly think that America is talking about Israel.

Not the case. Americans have other pursuits and can only absorb so much. Today we are being asked to learn how to spell Houthis – as in “Iran-backed Houthis” who are devouring Yemen. Are you kidding? Where is Yemen, by the way, and how did they sneak into the news? Last week there was no Yemen.

Who’s got the scorecard and who’s keeping score? Now it’s the Sunnis versus the Shiites. Can they tell themselves apart? We can’t.

MY SAY: A CHURCHILL FOR OUR TIME

I am in the midst of reading Martin Gilbert’s masterful biography “Churchill- A Life.” It is long-nearly 1,000 pages- and heavy. Churchill was a hero, a prophet, a strategist and a realist who confronted the worst hatred of the last century.

I am delighted that Netanyahu won Israel’s recent election, but a modern day Churchill- as so many reputable pundits have called him- he is decidedly not.

The only person who comes to mind as this century’s Churchill is Geert Wilders…a hero, a prophet, a realist, a strategist…who has warned the West about the faith driven Muslim goals of conquest, caliphate and submission. Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician and the founder and leader of the Party for Freedom which currently is the fourth-largest party in the Dutch parliament. He has been subjected to libel, harassment and opprobrium by the media, the police, and the “enlightened” progressives.

He does not bend or retract or submit to pressure….rsk

There Is Nothing European About Muslim Violence By Daniel Greenfield

The first school I ever attended had heavy steel doors behind which lay a narrow corridor and a window of bulletproof glass. The next set of steel doors could only be opened by the former Israeli commando behind the glass. And no one was allowed to enter or leave except on a staggered schedule so that in the event of a terrorist attack not more than a handful of children and parents would be killed.

This school wasn’t in Israel. Israeli schools don’t look like this. Jewish schools in Europe do.

European Jewish institutions tend to have more of the ubiquitous Israeli security guards keeping watch (some, like Dan Uzan during the Copenhagen attacks, have paid the ultimate price) than their Israeli counterparts. More than Israel, a single non-Muslim state encircled by the shattered remnants of a Muslim empire, they feel as if they are cut off and under siege.

Pre-war Jewish synagogues and schools in the Holocaust territories of Europe were grand and baroque. The Jews who attended them lived in an atmosphere of constant anti-Semitism that has no equal today outside the Muslim world. But they refused to be afraid or to lose their sense of confidence.

Managing Obama’s War Against Israel: by Caroline Glick

Our current situation is unpleasant. But it isn’t the end of the world.

On Wednesday, the Jerusalem Municipality announced it is shelving plans to build 1,500 apartments in the Har Homa neighborhood. Officials gave no explanation for its sudden move. But none was needed.

Obviously the construction of apartments for Jews in Jerusalem was blocked in the hopes of appeasing US President Barack Obama.

But is there any reason to believe he can be appeased? Today the White House is issuing condemnations of Israel faster than the UN.

To determine how to handle what is happening, we need to understand the nature of what is happening.

The CIA S’plains It: Muslims Joining Islamic State Because of Economics and Illiteracy by Raymond Ibrahim

Originally published by PJ Media.

Speaking at the Council of Foreign Relations on March 13, CIA Director John Brennan said that “the Islamic State had ‘snowballed’ beyond Iraq and Syria, estimating that at least 20,000 fighters from more than 90 countries have gone to join the militant group, several thousand of them from Western nations, including the United States.”

“Left unchecked, the group would pose a serious danger not only to Syria and Iraq, but to the wider region and beyond, including the threat of attacks in the homelands of the United States and our partners,” said Brennan.

Illegal Alien Police Officers? By Michael Cutler

As I read the USA Today March 21, 2015 news report, “Police departments hiring immigrants as officers” I realized that my late father was, once again, correct. He used to say, “Nothing is so good it could not be better or so bad it could not get worse.” Hard as it is to imagine, things have gotten worse — much, much worse.

Here is an excerpt from the USA Today article:

At a time when 25,000 non-U.S. citizens are serving in the U.S. military, some feel it’s time for more police and sheriff departments to do the same. That’s why the Nashville Police Department is joining other departments to push the state legislature to change a law that bars non-citizens from becoming law enforcement officers.

Department spokesman Don Aaron said they want immigrants who have been honorably discharged from the military to be eligible for service.

“Persons who have given of themselves in the service to this country potentially have much to offer Tennesseans,” he said. “We feel that … would benefit both the country and this city.”

Current rules vary across departments.

Some, like the Chicago and Hawaii police departments, allow any immigrant with a work authorization from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to become an officer. That means people in the country on temporary visas or are applying for green cards can join.

Colorado State Patrol Sgt. Justin Mullins said the department usually struggles to fill trooper positions in less populous corners of the state, including patrol sectors high up in the mountains. He said immigrants from Canada, the Bahamas, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Central America who are willing to live in those remote places have helped the agency fill those vacancies.

“People that want to live there and build a family there and work there is a little more difficult to find,” Mullins said. “People moving from out of state, or out of the country, if they’re willing to work in these areas, then that’s great for us.”

Other agencies, like the Cincinnati Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, require that officers at least have a pending citizenship application on file with the federal government. And others, like the Burlington, Vt., and Boulder, Colo., police departments, require that officers be legal permanent residents, or green-card holders.

The notion that it is acceptable to hire non-citizens, and in some jurisdictions, aliens who aren’t even lawful immigrants as police officers, defies logic and reasonableness. However, this lunacy should not really come as a surprise. After all, the presumptive next Attorney General has some distressing ideas about immigration that came to light during her confirmation hearing as noted in a Yahoo/AP news report, “Attorney General nominee defends Obama immigration changes,”

I included an excerpt of that report in my February 2, 2015 article for FrontPage Magazine, “Loretta Lynch: Same as the Old Boss – The Attorney General nominee’s disturbing views on U.S. immigration law.”

Here is the quote from the Yahoo/AP report:

Lynch said she had no involvement in drafting the measures but called them “a reasonable way to marshal limited resources to deal with the problem” of illegal immigration. She said the Homeland Security Department was focusing on removals of “the most dangerous of the undocumented immigrants among us.”

Pressed by Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a leading immigration hard-liner, she said citizenship was not a right for people in the country illegally but rather a privilege that must be earned. However, when Sessions asked whether individuals in the country legally or those who are here unlawfully have more of a right to a job, Lynch replied, “The right and the obligation to work is one that’s shared by everyone in this country regardless of how they came here.”

Sessions quickly issued a news release to highlight that response. Under later questioning by Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, Lynch clarified it, stating there is no right to work for an immigrant who has no lawful status.

Ms Lynch’s statement that everyone, irrespective of how they came to the United States, has an obligation to work is certainly unsettling, to say the least, especially since she will, if confirmed as Attorney General, set the standards for criminal prosecutions of federal crimes across the United States — including crimes that involve violations of our nation’s immigration laws.

Of course Ms. Lynch made a half-hearted attempt to make it seem as though, in her judgement, U.S. citizenship was a privilege, but, with the incredible hiring practices of a number of police departments around the United States, this distinction about U.S. citizenship no longer matters for law enforcement officers in the United States.

This administration and so-called “Sanctuary Cities” and “Sanctuary States” have made a mockery of some of our nation’s most important and, you would think, uncontroversial laws — our immigration laws that were enacted to protect innocent lives and the jobs of American workers.

Yet you would never know it to listen to the advocates for Comprehensive Immigration Reform and the mayors and governors who openly shield illegal aliens from detection, thereby undermining national security and public safety.

These politicians refuse to consider how their actions run in direct opposition to the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, the subject of my March 11, 2015 article for FrontPage Magazine “Ignoring the 9/11 Commission’s Warnings — Even as terrorists expand operations in Europe.”

Additionally, consider that last year the DHS released more than 30,000 criminal aliens last year and then had the chutzpah to make a big deal about arresting 2,059 criminal aliens under the aegis of “Operation Cross Check” in a press release ICE issued on March 9, 2015. This press release served as the predication for my March 18, 2015 FrontPage Magazine article, “The Problem at Immigration and Customs Enforcement – A federal agency takes a step forward — and ten steps back.”

On March 19, 2015 I was interviewed by J.D. Hayworth on Newsmax-TV’s program, “America’s Forum” about this deplorable practice of releasing criminal aliens whose very presence in the United States represents a violation of law and aliens who have committed violent crimes, including homicide and rape have been intentionally released by the DHS operating under Mr. Obama’s orders. Newsmax posted a report about my interview with a link to the video under the title, “Michael Cutler: ‘Anarchy’ to Free Illegals Guilty of Crimes.”

Having raised the issue of “anarchy,” on March 12, 2012 Californians for Population Stabilization published my commentary, “Fast Track to Anarchy” which I wrote in response to the wrong-headed decision by the LAPD to not impound the cars of unlicensed illegal alien drivers encountered by their police officers. I wrote my commentary because I expressed my concerns that this was pushing California down the slippery slope of anarchy.

Obama Leaks Israeli Nuke Secrets By Matthew Vadum

President Obama ratcheted up his personal war on the State of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by leaking Israel’s nuclear secrets to the media.

This betrayal of one of America’s most loyal allies took the form of the Pentagon’s quiet declassification of a 386-page top-secret memo, titled, “Critical Technological Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations.” The report from 1987, released just before Netanyahu’s address March 3 to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, goes into intricate detail about the Israeli nuclear weapons program and explains how Israel became a nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s.

BUSY, BUSY WEEK FOR JIHADISTS

http://thereligionofpeace.com/

2015.03.25 (Sirte, Libya) – Five people near a power station are lit up by a suicide bomber.
2015.03.25 (Nangarhar, Afghanistan) – Three children, a farmer and a cow are all sent to Allah by Taliban bombers.
2015.03.24 (al-Baghdadi, Iraq) – Caliphate terrorists send mortars into a neighborhood that take apart eight innocents, including three children and their mother.
2015.03.24 (Lahore, Pakistan) – Islamists on motorbikes open fire on a church.
2015.03.24 (Taiz, Yemen) – Shiite militia open fire on a group of unarmed demonstrators, killing six.
2015.03.24 (Wardak, Afghanistan) – Thirteen bus passengers are singled out and shot to death by Muslim radicals.

* Sources for individual incidents can be provided upon request.

Why is Obama so Obsessed with Israel? By James Lewis

Barack Obama is a man with amazingly fixed beliefs, which seem to orbit the White House at some faraway distance in space. After Ferguson, Obama’s feelings of rage against whites and cops are hard to deny. Obama’s Islamophilia and even his jihadophilia are there for all to see, along with this administration’s consistent Chicago-style thuggery.

But these days Obama’s biggest obsession seems to be Israel, which is acting like any other sovereign nation would in the face of deadly enemies.

That simple fact seems to enrage the President of the United States.

The delusional conviction on the Left is that the Israel-Palestinian dispute is the key to peace in the Middle East — a belief so bizarre and otherworldly that it’s hard to imagine who came up with it. It sounds like the Marxist idea that if you only wiped out every last capitalist, love and harmony would reign on earth. Every faction on the Left has these “wipe out the bad guys” dreams. Some feminists honestly fantasize about a world without men; LGBT’ers dream of a 100% LGBT world.

But if Israel were to disappear tomorrow, all the other wars in the Middle East would just keep boiling over.

So the Sh’ites in Iraq would still be killing the Sunnis and vice versa. The Syria civil war wouldn’t stop, nor the Libyan civil war. Muslim jihadists would still commit atrocities against Christians, Yazidis, and of course, against any Jews who haven’t yet left. The Turks would still hate the Kurds, the Twelver Armageddon cult would still hate less extreme believers, and Boko Haram in Nigeria would still be kidnapping and abusing hundreds of African village women and children to sell in the slave markets. The Sudan would still be trying to wipe out African tribal peoples, and ISIS would still be rampaging and posting snuff films on the internet.

Peace on earth, good will to men?

Not exactly.

But that seems to be Obama’s idea. Just that one little problem to solve, and shazzam! Paradise on earth.

Another Nobel Prize for O, and on to his new career as Secretary General of the United Nations, aka president of the planet.

If you live in a world of incorrigible false beliefs, nothing will ever work. No matter how many enemies you hassle through the IRS, no matter how many Republicans you smear through the lynch mob media, no matter how you rage against the cruelties of capitalism or global warming, nothing is going to get better, because all your premises are false.

False premises lead to false conclusions every single time.

Obama has demanded that Israel must retreat to the ceasefire lines of the 1948 War of Independence, in order to deserve permanent peace with the Arab “Palestinians” whose great-grandparents fled from that war.

When people with common sense take a look at the resulting map they can’t believe the tiny sliver of territory Obama wants to leave for Israel.

Given the fact that Israel has been assaulted by multiple Arab armies four times since it declared independence sixty years ago, and that it is currently under daily genocidal threats from the nuclear-arming Iranians, Obama’s idea looks plain crazy. But it’s obvious that Obama and his inner circle are convinced that having a defensible territory means nothing. All of human history contradicts that idea.

The new Obama proposal that the Iranians will agree to wait ten years before rushing to build their nukes simply means that Israel will have another decade to wait for a genocidal attack. Sovereign nations do not agree to becoming suicidally vulnerable, even after ten years.

And if Obama believes that Israel is actually protected by its own nuclear weapons he understands nothing about nukes, which are only weapons of last resort — at least for rational nations. Which is why the U.S. and the Soviet Union never came to nuclear blows over a forty-year period. An actual nuclear exchange is a suicide pact, and only the martyrdom cults of Iran and Hamas actually celebrate suicide-killings.

This much should be obvious to any sensible person. The last few decades of massive propaganda and pressure by Eurosocialists, Muslim fascists and people like Obama is therefore just another lefto-cult delusion. The Left lives in some airy-fairy future that never comes, and this is simply another example of that mental disorder. Not so long ago they marched for U.S. disarmament and against American anti-missile defense. When it comes to military reality they are really not sane.

At least one Republican, James Baker III, seems to share the anti-Israel obsession, as shown in his talk to the turncoat group J Street. Baker was there to signal to the anti-Israel Left that Jeb Bush is on their side. Baker is a Texas oil guy, and his anti-Israel rancor presumably goes back to the time forty years ago when every Muslim oil regime had it in for Israel.

But that is simply not true anymore. It’s another false belief.

Egypt and Israel are cooperating closely in President Sisi’s war against the Muslim Brotherhood and other terrorists in the Sinai Desert. Israel just signed a four billion dollar deal to supply natural gas to Egypt. The forty-year Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty is holding up. Jordan has a de facto peace with Israel. It is Lebanon’s occupation by Iran’s proxy army Hizb’allah keeps that border unstable. Even Assad’s Syria had a de facto peace with Israel before the bloody civil war.

Right now the Sunnis are scared about Iran’s aggression, which threatens their survival, or in the case of Egypt, they are trying to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood before the MBs destroy the ruling regime.

The Saudis have had contacts with Israel for years, and are consulting closely on the Iranian threat. The reason is obvious: When Iran goes nuclear (with Obama’s active help) there is only one nuclear counterweight in the region, which would be Israel. Now that America has bugged out, and we can’t be trusted to protect the Arab nations against Iran, they are looking for allies anywhere they can. That’s what happens when you destabilize the Muslim Middle East. People get more insecure and scared, not less.

The Iranians have had greedy eyes on the holy cities of Mecca and Medina since 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini tried to overthrow the House of Saud during the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca). But Iran’s Shi’ites see themselves as Mohammed’s true heirs, while the Saudis are the betrayers who wrongly possess Mecca and Medina. This religious warfare has been going on for about 1200 years, and it’s not going to be another quick fix.

There is another amazing fallacy in the Left’s anti-Israel dreams. Hamas and the PLO have locked their genocidal goals against Israel into their founding charters. They have never shown any willingness to change the declared goal of genocide. What’s more, their leaders constantly rage against Israel to out-demagogue their own political competitors. And finally, all their money comes from the hate-Israel campaign at the UN, and they would go broke without it.

But wait! It gets worse.

If the PLO ever publicly recognized Israel’s right to exist, two predictable things would happen:

First, the more extreme factions like Hamas and Islamic Jihad would stage violent rebellions against the PLO. They’ve done it before.

Second, the PLO leadership would be targeted for assassination.

Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel forty years ago and was assassinated by the same Muslim Brotherhood that Obama likes so much.

Career politicians in the PLO don’t forget that. They are survivors, and risking their lives is not in their playbook.

You might think that somebody would have explained the facts of life to Mr. Obama in the last six years. But Obama has a hard time listening to other people, especially if they have different ideas.

Which makes it impossible for him to learn anything.

Bottom line: Obama is enraged because he is stuck in false beliefs about Israel and the Pals. In psychiatry this is called a mental obsession. Obsessions don’t have solutions in the real world, they just keep running, over and over again.

But you can predict who will get the blame…

Jews Counted Among Lincoln’s Closest Confidants: By Beth Kissileff

The scholars behind book/exhibit ‘Lincoln and the Jews: A History’ illustrate how firmly Jews are part and parcel of US history

JTA – A whopping 16,000 books have been written about President Abraham Lincoln. But a new book and an exhibit at the New York Historical Society tell a previously untold story about Lincoln: his relationships with Jews.Benjamin Shapell has been collecting documents relating to Lincoln and the Jews for over 35 years, housing them in the in the archives of the Shapell Foundation. For the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, Shapell persuaded Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, who had authored a book about Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and the Jews and co-edited a Civil War reader, to help organize the material so it could be shared with a wider audience.

Interestingly for a project connected with physical archives, the Internet proved a boon. The American Jewish newspapers from Lincoln’s time are all online now, so for any name mentioned in a document, a search could be made in contemporary newspapers.