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January 2017

Remembering Rich Blumenthal’s Vietnam Deception Senate smear never paid a price for claiming he served. Lloyd Billingsley

​In the confirmation hearings for Jeff Sessions, president-elect Donald Trump’s choice for Attorney General, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat, proceeded as though David Horowitz had been the AG choice.

David Horowitz was not present but Blumenthal cited his statements that all the major Muslim organizations are connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, that 80 percent of the mosques in America are filled with hate against Jews, and that too many blacks are in prison because too many blacks commit crimes.

Senator Blumenthal, an attorney, had not taken the trouble to investigate these statements, which are all true and accurate. Instead he called them “apparently racist” and demanded that Jeff Sessions denounce David Horowitz and give back an award he had received from the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

By any standard, this was the most loathsome and gutless performance many had seen since the hearings for Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork, where smear artists Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) respectively held forth. In the Sessions hearings it failed to emerge that Blumenthal, 70, bears a history of problems with truth and courage alike.

“Candidate’s Words on Vietnam Service Differ from History,” ran the New York Times headline on a May 17, 2010 article by Raymond Hernandez. Blumenthal, then Connecticut Attorney General and running for the U.S. Senate seated vacated by Christopher Dodd, had recently appeared at a ceremony in Norwalk honoring veterans. There he proclaimed, “We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam.” There was one problem, Hernandez noted. The aspiring Senator “never served in Vietnam.”

According to records obtained by Hernandez and his colleagues Barclay Walsh, Kitty Bennett and Bonnie Kavoussi, Blumenthal “obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war.”

These deferments cleared the way for Blumenthal, son of a wealthy New York businessman, to complete studies at Harvard, serve as a special assistant to Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, and “ultimately take a job in the Nixon White House.”

A Farcical ‘Peace’ Conference in Paris Last gasp of an old era? P. David Hornik

The 70-nation conference on the Israeli-Palestinian issue in Paris on Sunday included neither Israeli nor Palestinian representatives and was a farce and a fraud—but could have been still worse.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the conference represented the “last twitches of yesterday’s world. Tomorrow’s world will be different—and it is very near.”

It was, of course, one of the reasons the conference was farcical: although Secretary of State John Kerry was in attendance, he was representing an administration that is in its last five days in office, and whose policy of harassing Israel was—among much else—repudiated in the U.S. elections two months ago.

France, the host and convener of the conference, was hardly in a stronger position: the Socialist government of François Hollande is on its last leg and its path, too, is expected to be jettisoned in the upcoming French elections.

Israeli columnist Prof. Eyal Zisser notes that “in the actual Middle East…no one gives France a second thought and no one is taking its peace initiative seriously.” It was, after all, France that led the misguided Western assault on the defanged Qaddafi regime in Libya and reduced that country to jihadist chaos; and it is France that has sat impotently while its former colonies, Lebanon and Syria, have fallen under Hizballah rule in one case and into Hobbesian mayhem in the other.

And as David Harris has pointed out, France’s credentials as an honest broker on the Israeli-Palestinian issue are also less than sterling:

at the World Health Organization General Assembly in May…France voted in favor of a measure that bizarrely singled out Israel by name as the only country in the world accused of undermining “mental, physical and environmental health,” and…France could do no more than abstain at UNESCO in April on a resolution that denied any Jewish (and Christian) link to the holy sites in Jerusalem.

Powers at Paris Meeting Send Signal to Trump on Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process Conference marks another flashpoint between the international community and the U.S. president-elect, who has forcefully backed the Israeli government By Matthew Dalton in Paris and Rory Jones in Tel Aviv

Top diplomats from world powers gathered in Paris to affirm their stance on peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, days before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump takes office threatening to upend the international consensus behind addressing the long-running conflict.

Some 75 governments and international organizations used Sunday’s meeting to send a message to Mr. Trump that the only viable solution to the conflict is the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Noting that a new administration was poised to take power in Washington, French President François Hollande said that decades of talks to create a Palestinian state can’t be “improvised or overturned.”
“This solution is the only one possible for peace and security,” Mr. Hollande said during the meeting.

The conference marks another flashpoint over Israel between the international community and Mr. Trump, who has forcefully backed the Israeli government since winning the election. Mr. Trump’s team objected to the conference in talks with French diplomats ahead of the meeting, a French official involved in the discussions said.

“They made it clear that they did not think it was a good idea,” the official said. The Trump transition team couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry attended the gathering, one of his last meetings before handing over control of U.S. diplomacy to Mr. Trump’s team.

Mr. Trump’s moves on Middle East policy have threatened to upset the delicate balance that the U.S., Israel’s most important ally, has striven to preserve between Israel and the Palestinians. He has pledged to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a step seen by Palestinians as backing Israel’s claim on the contested city as its exclusive capital.

Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister, on Sunday called Mr. Trump’s remarks a provocation. “A question as sensitive as Jerusalem can only be addressed in the framework of negotiations between the parties,” Mr. Ayrault told reporters after the conference.

Peter Smith : Of Hot Goblins and Hobgoblins

Even if you subscribe to the careerist encyclicals of warmism’s priesthood, only rank gullibility or the pointed blindness favoured by professional politicians could prompt the conclusion that the answer is solar and wind. They aren’t — unless the real goal is to pauper growth and prosperity.
I feel in my innards that climate alarm is a scam. I felt the same about bird flu and other exotic infectious diseases that have in recent years been regularly held up as threatening our species; though I admit that the HIV- inspired ‘grim reaper’ ads unnerved me at the time.

I can’t recall being persuaded by the Club of Rome alarmists of the early 1970s. British writer and publisher Tom Stacey (in a preface to Bob Carter’s 2010 book Climate: The Counter Consensus) commented on his firm publishing Blueprint for Survival in 1972. Population and resource-depletion Armageddon was predicted to occur before 2000. It was backed, he says, by “38 of Britain’s most honoured scientists, economists and environmentalists, including 18 professors, two Nobel laureates, and seven Fellows of The Royal Society.” I can find no record of these fine fellows being mocked and derided by their colleagues for their alarmist predictions.

One of the doomsday predictions was that “hydrocarbon fuel resources would [by 2000] be well exhausted.” Now that would have fixed anthropogenic global warming (AGW), would it not? But then global cooling was soon to come to the fore in the middle 1970s as a threat to humanity. It’s enough to give any grounded scientist ice age IIexperiencing this chain of authoritative predictions a bout of cognitive dissonance.

American writer H. L. Menken provided his own perspective on scares in 1918.

“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

One hundred years’ later nothing has changed. Antibiotic-resistant germs and a life-giving gas are out to get us; as potentially are AI robots and aliens, if Stephen Hawking and other scientific luminaries are to be believed.

But hold on, AGW might be a real threat. My brain, as distinct from my innards, tells me that I don’t know. To me there is no fault in logic in explaining that burning fossil fuels produces CO2 and, in turn, water vapour; which, unless abated, results in catastrophic AGW. It is a science question of which I have no expertise. My concern, however, is that this particular piece of science seems tenuous to me as a layman (as I will come to) and is in process of subverting economic progress by undermining the production of cheap and reliable energy and, to boot, with no noticeable effect in reducing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.

I am told that the science is settled; apparently this is because there is a consensus among “climate scientists”. I have four problems. First, ‘settled science’ offends my working assumption that all scientific conclusions are forever up for challenge. Second, it is patently anti-scientific, and ignores scientific progress and the overturning of past consensuses, to accept a one-to-one correspondence between the truth and any prevailing consensus. Third, the currently prevailing consensus has important breaches, with numbers of well-credentialed maverick climate scientists taking a different view. Fourth, as I noted above, this piece of science is intrinsically tenuous.

I say it is tenuous because it is wholly based on modelling. To state the obvious, controlled experiments cannot be performed with the global climate. Therefore, my uneducated guess is that the vast preponderance of scientific inquiry bears not at all on the central issue of AGW but on a host of derivative issues; e.g., how GW affects the frequency and intensity of storms or how reduced ocean alkalinity, as a result of increases in CO2, affects particular sea life. None of this research establishes a link between CO2 and GW. It may live off that supposed linkage, but it neither adds to nor detracts from the modelling on which the linkage is based.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Cutting the blood supply to cancer cells. I reported previously (Dec 2013) on Israel’s VBL Therapeutics (aka Vascular Biogenics) and its treatment VBL-111 for brain cancer. VBL-111 targets new blood vessels developed to feed the tumor. Also, delivering the treatment inside a virus triggers the immune system to attack the tumor.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-firm-has-high-hopes-for-new-cancer-busting-drug/

Medical scan diagnosis from home. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Zebra Medical Vision has launched “Profound” –fast, accurate medical image analysis over the web. Individuals can upload their medical imaging scans such as CTs and mammograms to Zebra’s online service, and receive an automated analysis for key clinical conditions. In addition, Zebra also announced a new algorithm that can increase osteoporosis detection by 50%.
https://www.zebra-med.com/profound-by-zebra/ https://www.youtube.com/embed/zUD7wsVx7kA?rel=0
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/zebra-medical-vision-clalit-health-170000666.html

Smart bracelet tracks injured soldiers. Cadets in the IDF Technological Officers Training Course have developed a digital bracelet that medics attach to soldiers injured on the battlefield. Sensors monitor pulse, blood pressure, and body temperature. A chip tracks medication and procedures for handover to the hospital.
https://www.idfblog.com/2016/11/13/idf-technological-cadets-create-smart-bracelet-will-save-lives/

Diagnose skin ailments with your smartphone. I reported previously (May 1st) on DermaCompare from Israel’s Emerald Medical Applications. Founder Lior Wayn has just gone on ILTV to explain his app that uses any smartphone camera, imaging software and proprietary algorithms to identify skin moles that may develop into cancer. https://www.youtube.com/embed/HBVDJrFcZy0?rel=0 http://www.dermacompare.com/

Device to fix shoulder injuries. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Mininvasive makes the OmniCuff device that enables minimally invasive arthroscopic shoulder rotator cuff repair – with over 1 million potential operations annually. Mininvasive has just announced a strategic partnership with China’s MicroPort Scientific Corporation.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161129005943/en/MinInvasive-Announces-Financing-Strategic-Partnership-MicroPort-Scientific

Bringing life-saving devices up to date. I reported previously (Nov 20) on the emergency medical solutions from Israel’s Inovytec. The company’s innovative equipment has just been featured on I24 news.
http://www.i24news.tv/en/tv/replay/the-daily-beat/x54lihc#/the-daily-beat/x54lihc

106 new subsidized treatments and dental treatment. (TY Janglo) In the 2017 healthcare basket of subsidized medicine, Israel’s government has added 106 new medicines and treatments for cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s and HIV. It is also providing free dental treatment for children up to the age of 15.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4902514,00.html

Space & Time in the Brain. Top speakers in the fields of memory, space & time, presented their research during the international “Space & Time in the Brain” conference in Jerusalem. Over 250 delegates heard from experts about the physiology of the brain and its ability to affect temporal and special awareness.
https://scholars.huji.ac.il/jbc/event/space-and-time-processing-brain

Paramedic on electric bike saves baby. (TY Steve) United Hatzalah’s Yehuda Fachima rode his electric bike through the narrow alleys of Jerusalem’s Geula neighborhood just in time to save the life of a 5-month-old baby girl choking on fluids trapped in her airway. An ambulance arrived 7 minutes later to take the baby to hospital.
http://israelseen.com/2017/01/06/israel-seen-electric-rapid-response-bicycle-e-bike-to-the-rescue/

Israeli study shows benefits of Nordic Pole Walking. (TY Don) A study led by Israel’s Dr Don Silverberg has shown that Nordic Pole Walking (NPW) can alleviate chronic low back, hip and/or knee pain. 91% of the study’s 100 subjects had a marked reduction in pain on walking and a substantial increase in distance walked.
http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Health-and-Science/Nordic-walking-sticks-can-alleviate-back-hip-and-knee-pain-475773 http://www.graphyonline.com/journal/journal_article_inpress.php?journalid=IJPTR

This is Israel. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon where Save A Child’s Heart surgeons have been mending the hearts of thousands of children from all over the world, including countries having no diplomatic relations with Israel.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/ll3zsfj_zyo?rel=0

“Trump’s Opportunities and Priorities” Sydney M. Williams

As President, Donald Trump will have many chances to help the nation. His ego and his mercurial disposition may interfere, but opportunities abound. He can help the economy get back on track and, in doing so, help lessen income and wealth inequality that have risen the past eight years. He can help re-build the Middle East and, with a show of strength, help repair relations with Russia and China, which are necessary for long-term global growth. He can help reverse the polarization that has divided our nation, so that we will be able to judge people “… for the content of their character” (as Martin Luther King once said), not for their race, sex or religion. Such tasks should be doable, assuming Mr. Trump’s temperament doesn’t intervene, or the Left does not erect roadblocks.

His most important priority, however, should be to restore democracy – the inherent freedom a liberal, democratic-capitalist republic requires. It is the fount from which all opportunities rise. For eight decades, an expanding administrative state has eroded principles of government laid out by our Founders. In times of war, national security interests allowed Presidents to assume powers alien to our precepts of liberty: Lincoln and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus; Wilson and the Espionage Act of 1917: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the internment of 80,000 Japanese-Americans. But war-time powers lapse when hostilities end. More insidious has been the trend, since the Progressive movement of the late 19th Century, toward increasing the power and reach of the federal government at the expense of Congress, individuals and states; and, within the federal government, the expansion of the Executive over the Congress.

Can Mr. Trump reverse this trend, or at least slow it? I don’t know, but I hope so. Expectations are low. He will enter office despised by those who oppose him – a group that includes opinion makers: mainstream media, educators, Hollywood harlequins and political and business establishment-types from both Parties. Their candidate, Mrs. Clinton, was defeated by a man they scorned. Mr. Trump has none of the goodwill extended President-elect Obama in early 2009. Today, Mr. Obama scores high on personal approval ratings, but, keep in mind, his policies helped defeat Democrats. Even the generally sober David Brooks depicts Mr. Trump as a man who is “inattentive, unpredictable and basically uninterested in anything but his own status at the moment.” But, if Mr. Brooks and his ilk are right, how do they explain his business success? How did he win a Presidential primary that took out 16 other Republican candidates and beat a woman who has been around politics her entire life? And how did he do so while spending less than half the amount of money she spent? Mr. Trump will not get the “honeymoon” usually accorded new Presidents. But conservatives understand that Mr. Trump has provided them the best opportunities for change in a century.

German court justifies synagogue attack German court: Violent Muslim attack against synagogue was anti-Israel, not anti-Semitic. No jail time for the perpetrators.

A German regional court has ruled that an attempt by three Muslims to burn a synagogue was motivated by ‘anti-Israelism’, not anti-Semitism. The perpetrators will not be jailed.

The ruling is akin to a “carte blanche for attacks on Jews,” and is itself anti-Semitic, according to the European Jewish Congress. The organization reacted with “outrage and disbelief” to the decision.

The German court in the city of Wuppertal, affirming a lower court decision, ruled that a violent attempt to burn the city’s synagogue in 2014 was a justified expression of criticism of Israel’s policies in Gaza. The attack took place on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Nazi pogrom which left almost a hundred Jews dead and where over 1,000 synagogues – including the original synagogue in Wuppertal – were burnt and destroyed.

“It is unbelievable that attempts to burn a synagogue have been equated with displeasure of Israeli government policies,” said Dr. Moshe Kantor, President of the EJC. “This court decision equates to open season on Jews.”

The local Wuppertal court panel said in its original 2015 decision that the three Muslims wanted to draw “attention to the Gaza conflict” with Israel. The court deemed the attack not to be motivated by anti-Semitism, and handed down suspended sentences for the three.

“This court decision can also lead to anarchy across Germany,” said Kantor, “because it provides a legal justification for the targeting of any minority, religion and nationality on the basis of a conflict that they could be in some way connected to because of religious or national ties. Is it possible that when Arabs are targeted by far-right groups, it could be claimed they are reacting to the bloodshed and violence in the Arab world? That of course would be absurd, but like in many other areas, there appears to be a separate rule when it comes to Jews and anti-Semitism.”

German politician Volker Beck, a leading Green Party MP, agreed. “This is a mistaken decision as far as the motives of the perpetrators are concerned,” he was reported to have said. He noted that the burning of a synagogue in Germany can only be defined as anti-Semitism.

“What do Jews in Germany have to do with the Middle East conflict? Every bit as much as Christians, non-religious people or Muslims in Germany, namely, absolutely nothing. The ignorance of the judiciary toward anti-Semitism is for many Jews in Germany especially alarming,” said Beck.

Is Tolerance a One-Way Street? by Douglas Murray

When just about every other magazine in the free world fails to uphold the values of free speech and the right to caricature and offend, who could expect a group of cartoonists and writers who have already paid such a high price to keep holding the line of such freedoms single-handed?

Most of the people who said they cared about the right to say what they wanted when they wanted, were willing to walk the walk — to walk through Paris with a pencil in the air. Or they were willing to talk the talk, proclaiming “Je Suis Charlie.” But almost no one really meant it.

If President François Holland and Chancellor Angela Merkel had really believed in standing up for free expression, then instead of walking arm in arm through Paris together with such an inappropriate figure as Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, they would have held up covers of Charlie Hebdo and said “This is what a free society looks like and this is what we back: everyone, political leaders, gods, prophets, the lot can be satirised, and if you do not like it then you should hop off to whatever unenlightened hell-hole you dream of.”

The entire world press has internalised what happened at Charlie Hebdo and instead of standing united, has decided never to risk something like that ever happening to them again.

For the last two years we have learned for certain that any such tolerance is a one-way street.

This new submission to Islamist terrorism is possibly why, in 2016, when an athlete with no involvement in politics, religion or satire was caught doing something that might have been seen as less than fully respectful of Islam, there was no one around to defend him.

The 7th of this month marked two years to the day since two gunmen walked into the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and murdered twelve people. This period also therefore marks the second anniversary of the period of about an hour during which much of the free world proclaimed itself to be “Charlie” and attempted, by walking through the street, standing for moments of silence or re-tweeting the hashtag “Je Suis Charlie” to show the whole world that freedom cannot be suppressed and that the pen is mightier than the Kalashnikov.

So two years on is a good time to take stock of the situation. How did that go? Did all those “Je Suis” statements amount to anything more than a blip on the Twitter-sphere? Anyone trying to answer such a question might start by looking at the condition of the journal everyone was so concerned about. How has it fared in the two years since most of its senior editorial staff were gunned down by the blasphemy police?

The Bigotry against Israel in the UN by Salim Mansur

“[U]nlike America, Europe is inherently anti-Semitic. This anti-Semitism is spread more or less evenly across the political spectrum and, therefore, it translates into widespread hostility to Israel. Europeans hate the Jews. Consequently, they hate the Jewish state.” — Robin Shepherd, A State Beyond The Pale: Europe’s Problem With Israel.

No “Palestinian” leader has publicly disavowed jihad against Jews. Instead, every aspect of engagement by “Palestinians” with Jews and Israelis is considered an obligation for advancing this jihad until its final expected objective of pushing the Jews out of “Palestine” has been reached.

The doublespeak of the Palestinian leadership made no difference within the UN. Since the June 1967 war, the UN began to tilt away from being fair and balanced toward Israel, and extended support to Arabs of the “occupied” West Bank and Gaza as an indigenous “Palestinian” people supposedly wronged by Jews.

“The long march through the UN has produced many benefits for the PLO. It has created a people where there was none; an issue where there was none; a claim where there was none. Now the PLO is seeking to create a state where there already is one.” — Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. ambassador to the UN (1981-85).

All of this occurred with the complicity of member states of the once-Christian West in the UN against one single and much maligned Jewish state, Israel, surrounded by hostile Arab and Muslim states in the Middle East.

The passage of the UN Security Council Resolution 2334 just before Christmas 2016, with the United States abstaining, was an IED-wrapped Chanukkah gift that lame-duck President Barack Hussein Obama delivered to Israel. It was another signal to Palestinians that they may continue their “rejectionism” of Israel, and stage another round of jihadi terrorism providing the UN the excuse to deliver pre-packaged condemnations of any Israeli reaction to the maiming and murder of Jews in the so-called “occupied” territories.

The U.S. abstention was an appalling betrayal of a people wrongly maligned by a sitting American president who for the past eight years went about assuring American Jewry, especially liberal Jews loyal to his party, that he was the most pro-Israel occupant of the White House. Instead, Obama’s decision, as a parting shot before he left office, not to veto Res. 2334 lifted the veil over the unspoken animus that he not only harbors within himself but also one that still stirs many within Western nations against Israel despite their solemn public denunciations of anti-Semitism.

This is evident in the language of Res. 2334. It exclusively condemns Israel stating: “settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has [sic] no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation of international law”. It also effectively revokes Security Council Res. 242 of 22 November 1967.

There was no pretense in Res. 2334 to be fair, and hold Palestinian Authority (PA) and with Hamas equally responsible for inciting terrorist violence against civilians within Israel, thus poisoning any diplomatic effort required for a negotiated settlement between the parties. The adoption of Res. 2334 was a “gang up” by France, Eurabia, the US and the 57 countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) against Israel. It was reminiscent of the long, shameful history of Jews as a minority people, abused and tormented by the majority among whom they resided.

For the past half century, Res. 242 was the keystone in the UN framework for peace in the Middle East. It laid out the process envisaged in the “land-for-peace” formula between parties in conflict following the June 1967 war. And on the basis of this formula Israel reached peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan in the aftermath of the October 1973 war.

But Res. 2334, instead, categorically states, the UN “will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations.” In other words, the demand is on Israel to return to the 1949 armistice lines an outcome pre-determined by Res. 2334.

If Israel cannot now trade “land-for peace”, since land held after June 1967 war is deemed “illegal,” then there is no further reason for any negotiated settlement.

Israel cannot simply accept a status quo ante bellum that would be untenable for Israel’s security — Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Abba Eban called then the “Auschwitz borders” — and the PA, with backing of the UN.

Res. 2334 is then a formula for continued terrorist violence by Palestinians against Israelis. The adoption of Res. 2334 — not unintentionally — has driven a nail into the promise of the “two-State solution.” The Security Council was warned ahead of the December 23 vote by President-elect Donald Trump that the United States under his administration will not accept this blatantly anti-Israel resolution.

It needs to be asked — political correctness set aside — of the other four permanent members of the Security Council (Britain, China, France, and Russia): Why, at this time — when the situation in the Middle East has gone from bad to worse — has the Security Council decided to weigh in against Israel, the only democracy and oasis of sanity in the region that has imploded through an excess of Arab-Muslim bigotry and fanaticism?

And, why did the Security Council, whose record in the Middle East is one of abysmal failure in providing “peace and security” to people most in need — the beleaguered Christians, Yazidi, and Kurdish minorities of Iraq and Syria — decide to revoke the long-standing Res. 242 on the patently false excuse of “salvaging the two-State solution”, when the Palestinian leadership has continually refused to engage with Israelis in direct negotiations?

These questions require credible answers, but none can be given.

An Execrable Coup—An Exhilarating Counter-Coup By Joan Swirsky

In 2009, America experienced a genuine coup d’état, exquisitely formulated and flawlessly executed after decades of planning by the socialists, communists, and jihadists among us who loathe America and have wished for nothing less than transforming our great country into a mecca of far-left, anti-American policies, punctuated by preposterous liberal constructs like political correctness and multiculturalism, and ultimately subservient to Sharia law.

As strange, indeed mind-bending, as this seems, remember that anything that is alien to American values and promises to undermine America’s passion for freedom and strength is considered a good thing and heartily embraced by the America-hating left. Hence, their fetish with Islam, a political system-cum-“religion” that is antithetical to every value that sane Americans hold dear.

As proof, the policies and laws enacted over the past eight years have consistently militated against America’s well-being. This is the proverbial drop in the bucket:

An eviscerated military and favor-the-enemy Rules of Engagement.
Porous borders over which tens of thousands of unvetted illegal aliens have swarmed, many of them violent criminals and, no doubt, stealth jihadists.
A Big Government mentality that encourages unemployment (95-million) and therefore dependency on government from cradle to grave.
Massive debt––currently pushing $20 trillion––which weakens our country’s ability to pay for essential needs like infrastructure, Medicare and Medicaid, et al., again with the goal of dependency on government.
A horrific healthcare system (Obamacare) that alienates doctors, punishes patients with sky-high premiums and inferior care, and simply doesn’t work–––hence its inevitable implosion (taking place right now).
The most dumbed-down educational system in American history––Common Core––that is based on the fantasy of fairness but in fact deprives every public-school student of even a minimally decent education and a chance to succeed…more government dependency.
Implanting operatives from terrorist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood into every branch of our government, including (to name a few) the State Dept., the Pentagon, Homeland Security, the Attorney General’s office, the EPA, the FBI, the CIA, on and on and on––all of them intent on subverting the U.S. Constitution and replacing it with Sharia law, the animating force of Islam, which dictates not only that gays be executed and women who are raped be tried and convicted for infidelity, but that a failure to embrace Islam be punished with either a hefty tax or death.
A foreign policy that supports our enemies and spits in the faces of our most faithful allies, for instance Israel, England, Egypt, the list is long.
Handing over control of the Internet to the United Nations––the most corrupt, tin-pot-dictator-driven, anti-American, anti-Semitic, American-resource-draining cesspool in our country. If I had one piece of advice for President-Elect Trump, it would be to kick this rancid organization out of the United States! Nothing they’ve ever done has been good for our country. Talk about “draining the swamp”!

AGENT OF CHANGE––GIMME A BREAK!

Americans were both horrified and dumbfounded when the former community organizer, Barack Obama, turned out not to “transform” America for the better, but to be the figurehead––no one would accuse him of being a leader––who left our country in devastating debt, largely unemployed, perceived as the prototypical 97-pound weakling by our allies, and viewed by our own citizens as a lazy but golden-tongued puppet who preferred non-stop golfing vacations and entertaining rap stars and police-hating performers like Beyoncé in the White House to even a remote semblance of governing.