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March 2016

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Hezbollah terrorist Nasrallah: Arab regimes have never done anything for the Palestinians

By on March 8th, 2016

Hezbollah leaderNasrallah vehemently attacked Arab regimes for their decision to label Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, claiming that “the Lebanese resistance is the only one that regains Arab dignity and fights for the Palestinian people.”

Last week, the Gulf Cooperation Council voted to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization amid the Lebanese Shi’ite group’s involvement in various regional conflicts alongside Iran and the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

In a speech he delivered Sunday afternoon to commemorate the martyrdom of a senior Hezbollah commander, Ali Fayyad, Nasrallah mocked the contribution of Arab regimes to the struggle against Israel saying, “If we had waited for the Arabs and their armies, Israel would still be in our lands [South Lebanon].”

Responding to the GCC’s decision to label Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, Nasrallah delivered a belligerent message to Arab states, saying, “We do not need your weapons; leave us alone.”

“Arab regimes led by Saudi Arabia side with Israel against our struggle. They do so because the defense of Israel is the guarantee to their survival,” Hezbollah’s chief further stated.

Hezbollah’s chief criticized the “Arab indifference” toward Israel’s alleged assassination of Omar al-Nayef, a former Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist who died under mysterious circumstances in Sofia, Bulgaria, on February 26.

Nasrallah also provided details about the fighting in Syria, claiming that Hezbollah does not receive orders from Iran instructing it how to operate in the country.

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The Irish election: More trouble for Israel in the Emerald Isle Herb Keinon

By on March 8th, 2016

Even before last week’s election, the Irish government was considered among the most hostile in Europe to Israel, second only to Sweden.

It may take weeks to sort out the recent Irish election and crown a new government in Dublin, but one thing is already certain: Israel’s position in the Emerald Isle is about to go from bad to worse.

Though it is not clear whether the ruling Fine Gael will form a coalition together with its bitter political rival Fianna Fail, or whether Fine Gael will form a minority government, it is clear that pro-Israel candidates were roundly defeated across the board, while pro-Palestinian candidates enjoyed a good day Friday at the polls.

For instance, Fine Gael’s Alan Shatter, the sole Jewish MP who served from 2011 to 2014 as both justice and defense minister, and who has been the victim of anti-Semitic swipes for his willingness to speak up for Israel, was defeated.

As was Joanna Tuffy, a Labor Party parliamentarian who headed the small Irish-Israel parliamentary friendship caucus. In fact it is not clear whether there will even be such a group in the next parliament, as the three or four members of this group were either voted out or retired.

On the other hand, new MP Gino Kenny, from the Anti-Austerity Alliance, celebrated his election victory on Saturday by waving a Palestinian flag. (Imagine the reaction were a congressman from Oklahoma to celebrate his victory on election night by waving not the US flag, but rather the blue and white banner of Israel.) Another candidate who won, Independent John Halligan, launched his candidacy in January in the presence of Palestinian Authority Ambassador Ahmad Abdelrazek.

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In New Low, Scholars Defend Medieval Blood Libel Charges Against Israel by Cinnamon Stillwell

By on March 8th, 2016

Leave it to the Middle East studies establishment to defend the vilest forms of conspiratorial anti-Semitic rhetoric, provided it’s in service of demonizing Israel. Jasbir Puar, the Rutgers University women’s and gender studies professor and Israel-boycott advocate who, in a controversial February 3 lecture at Vassar College, charged the IDF with the organ harvesting, deliberate maiming, and stunting of “Palestinian bodies,” can certainly count on support from its ranks.

Notorious Israel-bashers such as Rashid Khalidi (Columbia University), Joel Beinin (Stanford University), and Steven Salaita (American University of Beirut) are among the signatories to an open letter to Vassar College President Catharine Bond Hill defending Puar against an alleged campaign of “vilification and hatred” following her inflammatory lecture. Unlike the vast majority of academic jargon-filled apologias for bigotry that populate the lecture circuit, Puar’s talk was widely covered and rightly condemned by a disgusted public. In evoking “hate mail and other threats” against Puar, the authors allude to the specter of death threats — whether real or imagined — a time-honored tradition among academics unaccustomed to the twin horrors of criticism and accountability.

The letter inveighs against the particular evils of a February 17 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Mark G. Yudof, former University of California president, and Ken Waltzer, professor emeritus of history at Michigan State University, titled, “Majoring in Anti-Semitism at Vassar.” Yudof and Waltzer had the temerity to point out the obvious: by accusing Israel of extracting organs from Palestinians for medical research, Puar was “updating the medieval blood libel against Jews.”

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Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech: 70 Years on, America Faces the Same Task By Arthur L. Herman

By on March 8th, 2016

Seventy years ago this past weekend an elderly, rotund man stepped up to a podium in Fulton, Mo., and delivered one of the great speeches of the 20th century — and arguably the single most relevant speech for our own time.

The man was Winston Churchill, and the speech he gave on March 5, 1946, has been known ever since as the Iron Curtain speech, both because it coined a phrase — “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’’ — to describe the inexorable advance of Josef Stalin’s Communist empire in the aftermath of World War II, and because Churchill had summed up the ideological, as well as the geopolitical, map of the Cold War world for the next 45 years.

Certainly it was a prescient moment. In March 1946 many in the United States, including in the Truman administration, still believed the cooperation with the Soviet Union that had won World War II would blossom into permanent friendship.

Churchill knew better. Even before the Berlin blockade and Communist coups in Czechoslovakia and Hungary finally awoke the apathetic and the gullible to Stalin’s true designs, Churchill saw that the struggle between freedom and tyranny would continue after the fall of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan — because that struggle is perpetual and unending.

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Trump Has Funded Empire State Democrats, Crooks By Deroy Murdock

By on March 8th, 2016

Judging by Donald J. Trump’s personal campaign donations in New York state, Republicans and conservatives should expect to have his support about 40 percent of the time. And Democrats should look forward to having Trump in their corner about 58 percent of the time.

That is almost exactly what happened when the real-estate magnate and Republican presidential front-runner whipped out his checkbook and distributed his campaign cash.

The New York State Board of Elections’ Campaign Financial Disclosure Website spells out the details at elections.ny.gov. A search last weekend of this database’s entire available reporting window (January 1, 1999 through January 11, 2016) revealed the political donations that Trump made as an individual within the Empire State between January 29, 1999, and March 1, 2015. Trump gave a total of $601,411.66. These dollars were divided among the political parties as follows:

(For more details on Trump’s donations, please see this spreadsheet.)

Trump currently leads the pack of Republican White House hopefuls, with 384 convention delegates versus 300 for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, 151 for Senator Marco Rubio (landslide winner of yesterday’s Puerto Rico primary), and 37 for Governor John Kasich of Ohio. Although he is asking today for Republican votes in tomorrow’s primaries in Idaho, Michigan, and Mississippi, Trump was a Democrat donor just 18 months ago. On September 2, 2014, Trump gave $2,500 to State Assemblyman Michael Benedetto. His legislative website describes the Bronx Democrat as “an ardent supporter of union rights.” It also states that “the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) presented Mr. Benedetto with a citation for service to the cause of teacher unionism.”

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A Party at the Abyss The GOP’s implosion was entirely avoidable, if anyone had read the signs. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on March 8th, 2016

Well before Donald Trump entered the race, there were lots of warning signs that the Republican party was on the road to perdition.

After the marathon 20 debates of 2012, with the ten or so strange candidates who brawled and embarrassed themselves, there had to be some formula to avoid repeating that mob-like mess. Instead, in 2016 there were 17 candidates and 13 debates along with seven forums. There were supposed to be tweaks and repairs that were designed to avoid the clown-like cavalcade of four years ago, but they apparently only ensured a repetition.

Three of the most experienced candidates, at least in the art of executive governance — Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and Scott Walker — were among the first to get out. The most experienced government CEOs somehow (or logically?) performed poorly in the raucous debates and lacked the charisma or the money or at least the zealous followers of Cruz, Rubio, and Trump.

Or they had too much pride (or sense) — unlike Carson, Christie, Kasich, and Paul — to insist that they were viable candidates when fairly early on, by most measurements, they were not. How strange that those who would have been more credible candidates saw the writing on the wall and left the field — to those marginalized candidates who had no such qualms and ended up wasting months of their time and ours in splintering the vote, engaging in endless bickering on crowded stages, and ensuring that there were few occasions for any of them to distinguish himself. At some point, someone should confess that Democratic debates further Democratic causes far more than Republican debates help Republican causes.

RELATED: At Current Rate, Trump Might Not Get to 1,237 Delegates

The other veteran governor in the race, Jeb Bush, may have felt, at 63 years old and eight years after the end of his brother’s administration, that his presidential ambitions — born in the pre-Trump-announcement days — were now or never. But after the failures of McCain and Romney, the hard left drift of the country, and the spectacle of utter chaos on the border, political correctness run amuck, the huge debt, Obamacare, and the implosion of the Middle East, primary voters were in no mood for another sober and judicious establishmentarian, however decent Jeb sounded. The unfortunate outcome of the 2016 Bush campaign and its affiliates was spending several million dollars to help destroy the candidacy of fellow Floridian Senator Marco Rubio. That did nothing for Bush and only further empowered Donald Trump. Never in all his business days has an enemy of Trump’s proved so helpful to him.

Then there was the strange career of Chris Christie. His campaign was an odd mixture of bullying and New Jersey tough-guy schtick with temporizing and split-the-difference politicking in a year of take-no prisoners politics. His bluster was Trumpian, but he was no Trump-like showman — and he ended only with another destructive legacy of tearing down others without helping himself. His mean-spirited candidacy confirmed that his 2012 ill-timed hug of President Obama in the hours before the election was no accident. His gratuitous attack on Rubio — followed by his obsequious lapdog role with Trump (who does not suffer toadies gladly) — proved kamikaze-like, blowing up the attacker while damaging somewhat his target.

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Last-ditch assaults on affordable energy Paul Driessen

By on March 8th, 2016

Separating reality from ideology and political agendas is difficult, but essential, if we are to revitalize our economy and help the world’s poorest families take their rightful places among Earth’s prosperous people. Energy reality is certainly in our favor. But ideological forces are powerful and persistent.

Right now, 82% of all US energy and 87% of world energy comes from oil, natural gas and coal. Less than 3% is non-hydroelectric renewable energy – and globally half of that is traditional biomass: wood, grass and animal dung that cause millions of respiratory infections and deaths every year. Thankfully, the transition to fossil fuels and electricity continues apace, replacing biomass and lifting billions out of abject poverty, with wind and solar meeting basic needs in remote areas until electricity grids arrive.

In the USA, hydraulic fracturing has taken petroleum production to its highest level since 1972, and oil imports to their lowest level since 1995. America now exports crude oil, natural gas and refined products.

The fracking genie cannot be put back in the bottle. In fact, it is being adopted all over the world, opening new shale oil and gas fields, prolonging the life of conventional fields, leaving less energy in the ground, and giving the world another century or more of abundant, reliable, affordable petroleum. That’s plenty of time to develop new energy technologies that actually work without mandates and enormous subsidies.

So much for the “peak oil” scare. Indeed, in some ways, the world’s current problem is too much oil.

In the face of this global abundance and tepid American, European, Chinese and world economies, Saudi Arabia has increased its oil production, to maintain market share and try to drive more US oil companies out of business. Oil prices have plummeted from $136 per barrel in 2008 to less than $35 or even $30 today. Natural gas has gone from $13.50 per million Btu in 2009 to $3 or less today.

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Crybullies Demand “Office for Social Transformation” to Punish Political Incorrectness March 7, 2016 Daniel Greenfield

By on March 8th, 2016

Campus crybullies are frantically outdoing each other to come up with the nastiest and craziest assaults on free speech and sanity. Robby Soave appears to have found a new winner.

Students at Western Washington University have reached a turning point in their campus’s hxstory. (For one thing, they’re now spelling it with an X—more on that later.) Activists are demanding the creation of a new college dedicated to social justice activism, a student committee to police offensive speech, and culturally segregated living arrangements at the school, which is in Bellingham, up in the very northwest corner of the state.

The demands are for a College of Power and Liberation to teach social justice…

No individual student should have to take on the task of monitoring and challenging injustices within the university. The College of Power and Liberation will provide and support students who are trained and educated in recognizing and addressing these injustices.

and lots of paid positions denouncing political incorrectness… because you can’t expect them to hate people for free.

Though many students, staff and faculty members are committed to doing the important yet difficult work of confronting racism, misogyny, trans- and homo-phobia on this campus, the reality is that students have continuously been expected to live in and address these systems of disempowerment while simultaneously being exploited in order to uphold this image of an “active mind changing lives”. This work is often done without recognition or compensation for labor, time, and effort. The College of Power and Liberation demands an annually dedicated revenue of $45,000 for compensation of students and faculty doing de-colonial work on campus.

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Is Israel Behind the Gaza Tunnel Collapses? As Hamas digs its way to doom. P. David Hornik

By on March 8th, 2016

Earlier this month yet another tunnel Hamas was building in Gaza collapsed, killing at least one Hamas operative. It was the sixth Gaza tunnel collapse in recent months, one of which killed seven of the fighters.

What’s behind it is a matter of public speculation in Israel. Hamas, of course, says Israel is behind the collapses. The latest Israeli media reports claim that the cement Hamas has been importing into Gaza since the summer 2014 war is of poor quality, and that explains the rickety tunnels.

Yet when, after a tunnel collapse in February, the Israeli official responsible for the territories was asked whether Israel was involved in these incidents, he replied: “God knows. I would suggest the residents of the Gaza Strip not to occupy themselves with the tunnels and to get away from them, especially after seeing the results in recent days.”

Israelis living along the Gaza border have indeed been complaining bitterly about hearing tunnel-digging activity at night. The Israeli government has issued what sound like vague assurances. Hamas claims to have seen Israeli combat engineers operating at the border. Some Israeli pundits have suggested that at least some of what the Israeli residents are hearing at night is Israeli digging.

But whatever is causing the tunnel collapses, they’re a metaphor for Gaza’s fate since the war in July and August 2014.

In that war Hamas fired about 4600 rockets at Israel. The great majority were shot down or widely missed their targets. The war did manage to claim the lives of about 70 Israelis, most of them young soldiers—a “glorious” achievement for Hamas.

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Bread Lines for Bernie Forget #FeeltheBern. Try #FeeltheBreadLine. Daniel Greenfield

By on March 8th, 2016

After Bernie Sanders visited the Marxist Sandanista regime in Nicaragua on a propaganda tour, he argued that the bread lines in major cities were a good thing. “American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing!”

The bread lines had been caused by the radical regime’s socialist agricultural policies of land seizures from farmers. Those farmers who refused to be drawn into Soviet-style communal farms rebelled, along with Indian and Creole racial minorities, and became the core of the Contras, the heroic resistance fighters whose mass murders at the hands of Sandinista terrorists were cheered by American leftists.

What had been productive farmland vanished into a warren of newly invented government agencies run by leftist university graduates with no agricultural background obsessed with seizing land, but with no idea of how to run it. The remaining farmers were forced into grinding poverty by a government purchasing monopoly while the profits went not to their farms, but to the political class of the Sandanistas who lived in luxury while farmers fled and city workers waited on bread lines.

Think of them as the Bernie Bros of Nicaragua. Except they wore khaki fatigues, not pajamas. And instead of angrily tweeting, they marched their victims into churches and set them on fire.

The unfortunates that the Democratic Party’s aspiring top Socialist saw lining up for bread were the victims of a regime that had destroyed the country through socialist thievery. And he learned absolutely nothing from the experience. Just as the Sandinistas had learned nothing from the Soviet Union and Venezuela’s Socialists learned nothing from the Sandinistas so that once again today crowds wait for bread, milk and toilet paper in an oil-rich country that has run out of everything except Socialists.

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