Displaying posts published in

March 2015

THE POETRY OF ALYSSA LAPPEN

My dear friend and e-pal Alyssa A. Lappen is pleased to announce the April 21 launch of her first full-length poetry book, The Minstrel’s Song (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2015), at 6:15 p.m. at the Brooklyn Heights Library. The event is sponsored in honor of National Poetry Month by the Friends of the Brooklyn Heights Library. Cross-Cultural Communications Editor and Publisher Stanley H. Barkan will also be present.Ms. Lappen’s poetry has been widely published; she won the 2000 annual chapbook award from Ruah: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry, and received a Harvard Summer Poetry Prize. She is also an investigative journalist focusing on the Middle East and Islam.

The Minstrel’s Song, a 96-page volume, features seven sections of verse, as well as seven original art works by Israeli artist Helen Bar-Lev.

THE PLAN

Into the arid space between earth and sky,
the cracks in the human soul seep. They fill

with hail of stones from the Temple Mount,
the Waqf’s iron door slammed, barring Jews

who wish to pray in a small circle of ten,
their blue-fringed shawls worth lives

of 69 martyrs—if only the shawls stay
folded, unused, and grow drenched

with suicides’ blood. Stones play well
in the press. So come, puppet children

and hurl them. My poor little slaves
of hate, make of my Iago a saint.

October 6, 2000

_____________
Note: The Waqf is a body of Muslim clerics, to which Israel gave control of the Temple Mount in 1967 out of respect for Muslim belief—although it is Judaism’s holiest site, where the second temple stood until its destruction in 70 C.E. The Waqf has long denied access to any minyan—the minimum of ten men required by Jewish law to offer prayers.

DIANA WEST: THOUS SHALT NOT CRITICIZE FOX PARTS ONE AND TWO

PART ONE: On March 17, Politico carried the story of why it was that Mickey Kaus quit the Daily Caller.Politico:

The blogger Mickey Kaus has quit his job at The Daily Caller after the conservative site’s editor-in-chief, Tucker Carlson, pulled a critical column about Fox News from the site, Kaus told the On Media blog on Tuesday.”It’s pretty simple,” Kaus said in an interview, “I wrote a piece attacking Fox for not being the opposition on immigration and amnesty — for filling up the airwaves with reports on ISIS and terrorism, and not fulfilling their responsibility of being the opposition on amnesty and immigration…. I posted it at 6:30 in the morning. When I got up, Tucker had taken it down. He said, ‘We can’t trash Fox on the site. I work there.'”Carlson, who co-founded The Daily Caller in 2010, is a conservative contributor to Fox News and the host of its weekend edition of “Fox & Friends.”Kaus says when he told Carlson he needed to be able to write about Fox, Carlson told him it was a hard-and-fast rule, and non-negotiable.”He said it was a rule, and he wouldn’t be able to change that rule. So I told him I quit,” Kaus explained.

First of all, three cheers for Kaus! Principle over all. And let’s send up a fourth cheer for his effectively taking an extremely important story public: the story about the company town that Fox has become for right of center journalism.

PART TWO:

Picking up with Mickey Kaus quitting The Daily Caller after Tucker Carlson took Kaus’s column critiquing Fox off TheDC website because, Kaus says, Carlson told him TheDC can’t trash Fox because he (Carlson) works there…

ALAN CARUBA: IS OBAMA ANTI-SEMITIC?

President Obama made no secret of his displeasure that Benjamin Netanyahu was reelected to be Israel’s Prime Minister. Only David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister and one of the nation’s founders, served longer.

Obama lives in some parallel universe apart from the lessons of history and the realities of what is actually occurring. On May 18, 2009, not long after Obama had been in office and Netanyahu was visiting the White House, Obama was demanding that he endorse Palestinian statehood and freeze the settlements on the West Bank.

Considering that the Palestinians had refused statehood from the day the United Nations endorsed Israel’s independence that has been a fool’s mission no matter who was President or Prime Minister.

Why Obama is Helping Iran Get the Bomb — on The Glazov Gang

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/jamie-glazov/why-obama-is-helping-iran-get-the-bomb-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the editor of Frontpage’s blog, The Point.

Daniel came on the show to discuss Why Obama is Helping Iran Get the Bomb, unveiling the sinister calculations of a Radical-in-Chief (starts at 14:35 mark). The discussion occurred within a focus on The Real Meaning of ‘Allahu Akbar’.

Daniel also focused on Why Jihadists Lust for Their Own Death, How Islam is Different, What’s Behind Obama’s Bullying of Israel, Measuring Obama vs. Putin, and much, much more.

Comrade Putin’s Fascist Temptation By Vladimir Tismaneanu and Marius Stan

Vladimir Putin has become the world champion of the Communist-Fascist Baroque. Last week, at the “Holiday Inn” hotel in St. Petersburg, under the patronage of the pro-Putin “Rodina” party, did take place what is antiphrastically called the “Conservative Forum. The attendees included representatives of extremist, neo-Nazi groups, those nostalgic for the “European Order” proclaimed by Hitler, as well as white supremacy maniacs, anti-Semites of every stripe, hysterical xenophobes, and other individuals we normally call crackpots. Those who tried to protest this fringe conclave were apprehended by the police.

Thus, as the seventieth anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany approaches, the former KGB lieutenant colonel, who pledges urbi et orbi to worship the Soviet sacrifices from that terrible global carnage, more brutal and bloody than anything previously known to mankind, becomes the accomplice of a vengeful assembly inspired by the most abject fascist nostalgias. This gathering took place in the city on the Neva, the same Leningrad of the 900-day survival in the atrocious conditions of the Wehrmacht siege. However, it is also the city of Putka and the mafia which brought him to power.

Obama Creates Chaos and Calls it ‘Peace’ By James Lewis

Obama has surrendered to Iran’s fanatical thirst for nukes, and now all of Iran’s Muslim enemies are going to war, because they understand the mullahs a lot better than Obama does.

A huge regional war is breaking out between the two biggest enemies in Islam, the Sunnis and Shi’ites. This war has its roots in Ayatollah Khomeini, Jimmy Carter’s favorite Islamofascist “spiritual leader,” who was allowed to take over the 70 million people of Iran by the terminally delusional Carter regime.

But our guy Obama has made everything worse, by siding with the two most extreme and murderous forces in the region, the mullahs of Iran on the Shi’ite side, and the Muslim Brotherhood on the Sunni side.

In this mess you need a scorecard. Here’s one.

UK: Whatever Happened to that Muslim Brotherhood Review? by Douglas Murray

The former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, has described the Muslim Brotherhood as “at heart a terrorist organization.”

Officials who are soft on extremism hope that both the extremism strategy and the Muslim Brotherhood review are not merely being kicked into the long grass but will, in fact, never see the light of day.

This is — it must be said — politics at its very worst.The Muslim Brotherhood has wreaked havoc for decades. Its desire to carry our coups and to rule Middle Eastern countries according to the rule of a hardline interpretation of Islamic law is not ancient history — it is very recent history.

Britain has for some years now been the major global hub of for these revolutionaries to fundraise, organize and dip in and out of whenever they are in or out of power.

The Rules of Racialists—Part Two By Victor Davis Hanson

Last week I reviewed some rules to navigate [1] in our race-obsessed culture. Here are three final statutes.

3) Class Is Irrelevant

In our racialist society, race always trumps class. In that sense, we do live in a classless society — at least as far as racial matters are concerned.

Eric Holder’s children, who improperly were flown to the Belmont Stakes with their dates in their father’s private government jet [2], would be entitled to affirmative action in a way that an impoverished grandchild of the Oklahoma diaspora is not. But at least a lower-middle-class white male is not penalized in college admissions to the degree that would be a straight-A Asian student. In today’s multiracial society of great economic fluidity, more than a half-century after the civil rights movement, the children of multimillionaire rappers would be deemed at a disadvantage in comparison to impoverished newly arrived destitute immigrants from Asia. But then again we are supposed to cry for the billionaire Oprah, who claims she was shown disrespect for gazing at some tony overpriced purse in a European millionaire boutique [3]. Such is the bathos of the current civil rights movement.

Criticizing Hamas Is the Newest Campus Hate Crime By Daniel Greenfield

It was the summer of 2014. Hamas rockets had pounded Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The rockets were stored in schools. They were launched from mosques and churches.

The dead included Daniel Tregerman, a 4-year-old Israeli boy killed by shrapnel. Another Hamas massacre of Jewish children was narrowly averted when a father managed to get kindergarteners inside before a rocket hit.

At the beginning of August, even the White House spokesman had called Hamas’ actions “barbaric”. Later that month, Professor Andrew Pessin, a Yale and Columbia educated teacher of religion and philosophy at Connecticut College, wrote, “One image which essentializes the current situation in Gaza might be this. You’ve got a rabid pit bull chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape.”

Pessin referenced Hamas suicide bombings in the 90s making it clear that he was talking about terrorism. As author of The God Question, he had respectfully condensed the views on religion from Christians, Jews, Atheists and Muslims, and was about as far from a bigot as any human being could get.

The Obama-Iran Deal: Anatomy of a Disaster By Bruce Thornton

All the rumors from Lausanne indicate that the U.S. is on the brink of a disastrous deal with Iran over its nuclear weapons program. If these leaks are true, a final agreement will leave the Islamic Republic, as it calls itself, in possession of centrifuges and other facilities––27 that we know of–– needed for producing nuclear materials and weapons. Token concessions, such as limiting the number of centrifuges, will count for little given that the Iranians claim that key sites such as Fordo will remain off limits to IAEA inspectors, as will other sites devoted to missile development and other military applications.

In the end, it won’t matter if sanctions are phased out quickly or slowly, if Iran ships its enriched uranium to Russia (an unreliable monitor, to say the least), if some sort of easily gamed “inspection” process is established, or if some “sunset” clause ends all these restrictions on Iran’s nuclear development in 5 years or 10. Iran will still possess the technical knowledge and infrastructure for enriching uranium and manufacturing a nuclear weapon, its economy now unhampered by the dismantled sanctions regime. But to paraphrase the Taliban, we Westerners may have the watches, but the slaves of Allah have the time. This deal means one thing: sooner or later Iran will become a nuclear power