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October 2015

Why Have We Forgotten Where We Are, Who We Are? By Nurit Greenger

In 1929, 86 years ago, for the Holiday of Shavuot-Pentecost, Levin Kipnis wrote the early Hebrew song ‘Baskets on our shoulders,’ an Israeli children’s song that is sung to date.

Yedidya Admon wrote the tune to the song and many artists recorded it, among them the singer Yaffa Yarkoni.

The poet’s song version is as follows:

Baskets on our heads,
Our heads are decorated,
From all corners of the land we arrived,
We brought the first fruits.
From Yehuda-Judea, Yehuda, from Shomron-Samaria,
From the valley, from the Gallil-Galilee –
Clear the road for us,
Our first fruits with us,
Bang, bang the drum and bang the flute!
About Levin Kipnis

Levin Kipnis, who lived between 1894-1990, was an Israeli children’s story writer and a poet, who wrote mostly in Hebrew and also in Yiddish, and in 1978 became Israel’s Prize Laureate for children’s literature.

A Ray of Light Amid the Terror: Evelyn Gordon

It’s hard to find any silver lining in a situation where Palestinians are perpetrating multiple stabbing attacks against Jews every day, and most of the “international community” is siding with the perpetrators. Yet this dismal situation may finally have produced something Israel desperately needs: An Israeli Arab political leader who represents his community’s sane majority. The 65 percent who are proud to be Israeli, the 55 percent who identify with the Israeli flag, the ones who genuinely want to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors.

For decades, Israeli Arab leadership at the national level has been an unmitigated disaster. The community’s current Knesset members, elected on a joint ticket called the Joint Arab List, span the gamut from the “moderate” Ayman Odeh to the “firebrand” Hanin Zoabi, to borrow the media’s favorite misnomers. The former merely refuses to condemn Palestinian terror, saying, “I cannot tell the nation how to struggle … I do not put red lines on the Arab Palestinian nation.” The latter may face criminal investigation for actively inciting it, having allegedly told a Hamas publication that the current terror needs more “national support,” because “If individual attacks continue without national support, they will be extinguished within the next several days, and therefore hundreds of thousands are needed to start a real intifada.” In between are MKs who spew a wide variety of anti-Israel libels; my personal favorite was Ahmed Tibi’s 2014 op-ed in The Hill claiming that Israeli Arabs are subject to Jim Crow treatment – signed, without a trace of irony, by his then-title of deputy speaker of the Knesset.

Pignoli Peril Marilyn Penn

For those whose anxiety quotient hasn’t been filled by fears of snail dart extinction and global warming, there is now another impending disaster that hits us in our kitchens where we are most vulnerable. According to conservationist Jonathan Slaght, “the pine nut industry may be contributing to the crash of an ecosystem.” (Pesto? Hold the Pine Nuts,NYT 10/19) Apparently, most of our imported pignoli come from the Korean pine tree found in a rain forest in Russia’s far east where several species such as chipmunks, black bears and red deer depend on these tiny nuts for sustenance during winter. Memo to self: aren’t bears traditionally animals who learned to outsmart winter’s low food supply by clever hibernation?

Our greedy American demand for less expensive pignoli than the Italian Armani version has led to over-harvesting the forests and selling the nuts to the Chinese who sell them to us in typical “made in China” cheaper price points. This international trade is being blamed for the phenomenon of hungry bears leaving the forest to attack residents of Luchegorsk, a town you never knew existed and cannot pronounce that will now live in infamy as the innocent victim of white privilege and culinary cupidity. Mr. Slaght neglects to point a finger at the Italians whose telegenic chefs first taught us how to dress up spaghetti with the leftover rampant basil planted by over-zealous summer gardeners. I sincerely hope that Calvin Trillin gets wind of this crisis as he is the one who suggested changing America’s traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner to spaghetti carbonara. Admittedly, there are no pignoli in that recipe but the nudge to love Italian food became a shove for all readers of Trillin’s classic tome, “Alice, Let’s Eat.”

America, we can grow more of our own pine nuts and/or substitute color-coordinated pistachios in our domestic version of pesto. Or, we can stop worrying about the food preferences of Putin’s bears and say in the immortal words of Catherine the Great, “Let them eat borscht.”

The Americans Obama Left Languishing In Iran’s Jails The human toll of Obama’s appeasement of the mullahs. Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

President Obama had several key opportunities to put pressure on the ruling mullahs in the Islamic Republic to free the three American citizens (pastor Saeed Abedini, journalist Jason Rezaian and US Marine Amir Hekmati) who have been held for years in one of Iran’s notorious jails on bogus and baseless charges.

Last week, Jason Rezaian, the Tehran bureau chief for The Washington Post, who has been behind bars in Iran since July 2014, was convicted. An Iranian court has finally handed down a verdict, but it is vague. The verdict comes after 447 days of Mr. Rezaian being in jail — that is three days more than the 444 days that American diplomats were held hostage. For those who argue Iran of 2015 is far different from the revolutionary Iran of 1979, this is a clear-cut example that the Islamic Republic is still the same: Islamist, anti-American, and oppressive.

The Iranian Students’ News Agency quoted Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, a hardliner who is a spokesman for Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, as stating that Rezaian had been found guilty. Interestingly, Mr. Mohseni-Ejei, who was the minister of intelligence from 2005 to July 2009, insisted that he did not know the details of the sentence. Really?

Immigration Law Enforcement: Why Bother? The crucial issues at stake for American citizens. Michael Cutler

Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the responsibility for securing America’s borders against the illegal entry of people and contraband and for conducting inspections of people and cargo entering the United States has been the responsibility of CBP (Customs and Border Protection) a component agency of the DHS.

The Performance and Accountability Report / Fiscal Year 2014 reports that for FY 2014 CBP had 59,544 employees and was provided with a $13.9 billion annual budget for law enforcement and trade operations.

Yet I am compelled to ask, “Why bother spending all that money and expending that effort?”

Consider that President Obama and many politicians from both political parties have declared that we should provide unknown millions of illegal aliens, who evaded the vital inspections process at ports of entry, with lawful status in the United States. While the Democrats want to provide these individuals who have trespassed on the United States with a pathway to United States citizenship, most Republicans “only” want to provide them with lawful status and employment authorization.

Most illegal aliens do not enter the United States seeking United States citizenship. Most enter the United States seeking employment opportunities that ultimately displace American workers on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder and, by their sheer huge numbers, suppress the wages for all such workers.

Three Observations on Israel and the Palestinian Terror Wave…. When the chips are down, as isolated as ever. David Hornick ****

The Palestinian terror wave that began on October 1 struck again on Sunday evening with an attack at the bus station in Beersheva, my town. Monday, at the time of writing, has been quiet so far, but it’s certainly too soon to say whether the wave is subsiding.

It’s not too soon, though, to point out some things that already emerge from this latest onslaught. They are not new phenomena. They indicate, though, that even as Israel keeps making great strides in various fields that benefit humanity (water use and conservation is one of the most dramatic), and keeps upgrading its ties with important countries (lately, particularly, India), it remains a country that is subjected to special, malign treatment.

The Democrats- Reflexively barking out slogans and soundbites that offer nothing for a nation. Bruce Thornton

The media court-encomiasts of the Democrat Party were gushing last week over Hillary Clinton’s supposed “victory” in the first primary debate. “Crushed” was the cliché de jour used to describe Clinton’s besting of the cranks, has-beens, and nobodies running against her. Such praise is akin to calling her the tallest building in Wichita Kansas, to paraphrase William F. Buckley.

Yet when it comes to substance, there was little or nothing specific or fresh or even rational in the various nostrums the candidates shouted out like the expletives and epithets involuntarily vocalized by victims of Tourette’s Syndrome. Except for a brief tussle over who hated the NRA the most, and the occasional good sense from Jim Webb, the debate was a dreary list of reflexive progressive talking points utterly disconnected from the real world.

When gun control came up, for example, candidates immediately started twitching and barking out “assault rifles!” and “gun shows!” The facts suggest otherwise. As BusinessWeek pointed out, fewer than 3% of the 12,000 murders in 2014 involved rifles of any sort, let alone semi-automatic assault rifles––a percentage less than knives (13%) and feet and hands (6%). As for gun shows, sellers are subject to the same federal licensing laws as sellers in retail stores, and in any case guns purchased at gun shows account for no more than 2% of the guns used in crimes.

Christie Davies Rape, Islam and the Deafening Silence

Authorities insist on describing predators only as “Asian”. In Banbury, Birmingham, Blackburn, Bristol, Burnley, Cambridge, Carlisle, Derby, Leeds, London, Manchester, Oldham, Oxford, Peterborough, Preston, Rochdale, Rotherham, Sheffield and Telford locals need no translation
A few weeks ago a Muslim sex gang was convicted at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, of raping a girl when she was under sixteen and arranging for another sixty men to do the same. The offences occurred in the quiet market town of Aylesbury. It is just the latest in a long series of trials for rape and sex attacks on under-age English girls by Muslim gangs in town after town right across the country including Banbury, Birmingham, Blackburn, Bristol, Burnley, Cambridge, Carlisle, Derby, Leeds, London, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Oldham, Oxford, Peterborough, Preston, Rochdale, Rotherham, Sheffield and Telford. The victims of these horrible sex crimes were usually vulnerable young girls without families to protect them. More trials are currently taking place in Newcastle and Manchester. The gangs were often traffickers who once they had gained control over a girl would pass her around as a sex-object so that as many of their fellow Muslims as possible could enjoy her.

What is striking is that whenever a group of Muslims commits a crime of this kind, the press and broadcasters go out of their way to avoid identifying the religion of the malefactors. They are even less willing to suggest any causal connection between these acts and the central practices of that religion, the connection that makes it both ethical and necessary to identify and stress the faith of the perpetrators.

Trump-ism wins big in Switzerland. By Kevin D. Williamson

Is It Possible to Speak about Culture?

Another populist anti-immigration party in Europe has made a very strong showing in a national election — the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) just won a third of the seats in parliament — and polite society is as always scandalized.

You’d think they’d be getting used to it. It may have happened while Senator Sanders wasn’t looking, but in Denmark, the country that currently serves as a beloved mascot of American progressives, the Danish People’s party took 21 percent of the vote in the 2015 general election, just behind the first-place Social Democrats with 26 percent; in reality, though, that wasn’t a second-place finish for the DPP, which picked up 15 seats while the Social Democrats picked up only three. The big issue for the DPP? Border controls, restrictions on immigration and asylum, and Euroskepticism.

In a pattern that will not be unfamiliar to those following the politics of “welfare chauvinism” — which is traditional welfare-statism fortified with nativism — the DPP’s win came largely at the expense of the free-market Venstre party, which seeks to reduce welfare spending while the DPP promises to increase it.

And so it goes: The anti-immigration, pro-welfare Sweden Democrats won 49 seats in parliament in the 2014 election. The UK Independence party, which was founded to oppose British submission to the European Union, has made immigration its centerpiece domestic concern, with party leader Nigel Farage calling it “the biggest single issue facing this party.” Its electoral clout continues to grow. In France, the National Front had a big year in the 2014 municipal and European elections, taking 25 percent of the vote. A 2015 poll commissioned by the left-leaning magazine Marianne found that National Front leader Marine Le Pen was the favorite to win the first round of the 2017 presidential elections. In the Netherlands, the Dutch Freedom party, which has called for a ban on immigration from Muslim countries, has gone in a few short years from non-existence to third-largest party. In 1993, there was a schism in Jörg Haider’s Austrian Freedom party (FPÖ), with a faction objecting to the party’s obsessive and sometimes extreme focus on immigration and nationalism breaking off to form a more conventional free-market party, which was never heard from again, while the FPÖ, now under new leadership, thrives as the third-largest party, lagging its two larger competitors by only a few percentage points in the elections.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: OBAMA’S MORAL EQUIVALENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST ****

Moral Abdication in the Middle East The West has developed a dangerous concern for ‘proportionality.’
In the current epidemic of Palestinian violence, scores of Arab youths are attacking, supposedly spontaneously, Israeli citizens with knives. Apparently, edged weapons have more Koranic authority, and, in the sense of media spectacle, they provide greater splashes of blood. Thus the attacker is regularly described as “unarmed” and a victim when he is “disproportionately” stopped by bullets.

The Obama State Department has condemned the use of “excessive” Israeli force in response to Palestinian terrorism. John Kirby, the hapless State Department spokesman, blamed “both” sides for terrorism, and the president himself called on attackers and their victims to “tamp down the violence.”

In short, the present U.S. government — which is subsidizing the Palestinians to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year — is incapable of distinguishing those who employ terrorist violence from the victims against whom the terrorism is directed. But why is the Obama administration — which can apparently distinguish those who send out drones from those who are blown up by them on the suspicion of employing terrorist violence — morally incapable of calling out Palestinian violence? After all, in the American case, we blow away suspects whom we think are likely terrorists; in the Israeli instance, they shoot or arrest those who have clearly just committed a terrorist act.