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February 2017

RUTHIE BLUM: A BEAR HUG FOR ALL THE MULLAHS TO SEE

The strong reactions elicited by Wednesday’s joint press conference held by U.S. President Donald ‎Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are warranted, but mostly for the wrong ‎reason.‎

One commentator after another has been highlighting and debating about the supposedly major ‎about-face in American foreign policy vis-a-vis the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that was being announced ‎from the podium.‎

‎”So I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like,” Trump said, ‎alongside a beaming Netanyahu. “I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with ‎either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two. But ‎honestly, if Bibi [Prime Minister Netanyahu] and if the Palestinians — if Israel and the Palestinians are ‎happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best.”‎

As soon as the two leaders left the stage, pundits and politicians in America, Israel and the Palestinian ‎Authority began weighing in frantically on the significance of that statement, reporting on it as though ‎Trump had declared the United States was no longer supporting a key pillar of its Mideast policy.‎

Well, everyone can and should relax, because nothing whatsoever has changed on the ground. ‎Whichever way one slices it, the reality remains the same: The Palestinian leadership is not seeking ‎statehood alongside Israel, but resistance against Jewish statehood. PA President Mahmoud Abbas ‎and his henchmen in Ramallah, as well as the Hamas rulers in Gaza – with a particularly bloodthirsty ‎new chief there who has said his organization should emulate the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist ‎group Hezbollah – make no bones about demanding that any territory they claim to be their own be ‎void of all Jews.‎

Nor did Trump disavow the two-state solution; he simply said that it is up to the Israelis and ‎Palestinians to decide how to proceed. In other words, he was completely repudiating former ‎President Barack Obama’s strong-arm approach. More importantly, he was doing so while proudly ‎showing appreciation — and even affection — for Netanyahu.‎

And herein lies the seismic shift that is causing such a stir. ‎

For the past eight years, the White House and State Department have operated on the basis of an ‎ideologically dim view of Western greatness and power. Obama made no secret of this in Europe, prior ‎to his inauguration, where he stated outright that no countries are better than others. Shortly after ‎taking the reins, he began to court the radical elements of the Muslim-Arab world, abandoning the ‎moderates in order to appease their jailers. And his very first phone call was to Abbas.‎

MY SAY: AT LEAST ARISTOPHANES HAD A SENSE OF HUMOR

So, it now appears that those who identify as women (please note how politically correct I am genderally speaking) are planning another big demonstration/protest named A Day Without Women.

Anna L. Stark writes about it: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/02/a_day_without_women.html

How dull and how silly and pointless.

In 411 BC the playwright Aristophanes had a far more original and hilarious idea. He wrote “Lysistrate” a comedy about a woman’s mission to end the Peloponnesian War by denying all the men and warriors sex.

Lysistrata plans a tribunal of all the Greek women to discuss her plan. When they assemble she disdains the weakness of women and convinces them to swear an oath that they will withhold sex from their husbands until both sides sign a treaty of peace. The sex drive finally has an effect and Lysistrata frees the women and men to resume doing what comes naturally.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=imgres&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwje9pv9jJfSAhVFTSYKHfelDm8QjRwIBw&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Brides_for_Seven_Brothers_(musical)&psig=AFQjCNFlejgvPjcZAmCCOPdl9ZsdFiUSsw&ust=1487419878155713

Now there is an idea. By the way the story was adapted into a fabulous musical movie in 1954 with Jane Powell and Howard Keel and sensational choreography by Michael Kidd which includes raising a barn.
Script by Lawrence Kasha and David Landay, music by Gene de Paul, Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, and lyrics by Johnny Mercer, Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn. There was also a TV series in 1982.

Scandinavia: The West’s Citadel of anti-Semitism by Giulio Meotti

Hate for Israel has become a real obsession in Scandinavia, which revived the glorious partnership between the liberal “useful idiots” — the ones concerned about equality and minorities — and the Islamists, the ones concerned about submission and killing “infidels”.

Despite the fact that Jews in Norway are only 0.003 percent of the total population, Oslo is now world’s capital of European anti-Semitism. Norwegian newspapers are full of classic anti-Semitic tropes.

A festival in Oslo also rejected a documentary, “The Other Dreamers,” about the lives of disabled children, simply because it was Israeli. “We support the academic and cultural boycott of Israel,” wrote Ketil Magnussen, the founder of the festival.

The same racism exists in Sweden. Dagens Nyheter, the most sophisticated Swedish newspaper, published a violently anti-Semitic op-ed entitled, “It is allowed to hate the Jews”.

Does Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallström really mean that to defeat Islamic aggression, Israel must surrender? The Palestinians’ situation is indeed desperate, but as they have had full autonomy for decades, their desperate situation is caused by their own corrupt leaders who appear deliberately to keep their people in misery try to blame it on Israel, in the same way that people maim children to make them “better” beggars.

The Nazi daily Der Stürmer could not have drawn it better.

On January 12, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten published an article about Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and his senior adviser: “The Jew Kushner reportedly pushed for David M. Friedman as the new ambassador to Israel”, Aftenposten wrote. The newspaper had later to apologize for calling Kushner “the Jew”.

A few weeks earlier, the city council of Trondheim, Norway’s third-largest city, passed a motion calling on its residents to boycott Israeli goods — a city aspiring to be “Israel-free”. Then it was the turn of another Norwegian city, Tromso, population 72,000, whose city council approved a similar motion. More than 40% of Norwegians are already boycotting Israeli products or are in favor of doing so, according to a poll.

What hell is happening in Scandinavia, whose countries, Norway and Sweden, are bastions of political correctness, champions of multiculturalism and, according to the Global Peace Index, the most “peaceful” countries in the world? “The most successful society the world has ever known”, however, as The Guardian labelled Sweden, has a dark side: Israel-slandering and anti-Semitism.

Sweden and Norway are manipulating public opinion in the way immortalized by George Orwell in his novel “1984” as the “Two Minutes Hate”. These countries have seen the creation of a public opinion according to which Israel is a merciless enemy of humanity that ought to be dismantled forthwith.

Sweden’s Fatuous Feminists They’re tigresses when confronting Trump, but meek in the face of real misogyny. February 17, 2017 Bruce Bawer

So here’s twenty-first-century Western feminism in a nutshell. Earlier this month, after the White House released a photograph of Donald Trump signing a presidential order in the presence of several male appointees, Isabella Lovin, the Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, put out a picture of herself signing a climate-change law in the company of other top female officials. Plainly, the photo was meant as a defiant statement of proud womanhood in the face of the world’s leading threat to female equality and dignity – the new man in the Oval Office. Indeed, the current Swedish government, in which the cabinet consists of twelve men and twelve women, has proclaimed itself to be “the world’s first feminist government.” Buzzfeed’s article about this triumphant moment carried the headline: “Did The Swedish Government Just Epically Troll Donald Trump With This All-Woman Photo?”

But what a difference a couple of weeks can make. The other day a four-man, eleven-woman Swedish delegation traveled to Tehran to ink a trade deal with the mullahs. Throughout the visit, the women, led by Trade Minister Ann Linde, wore hijabs, plus long, shapeless coats obviously selected for maximum “modesty.” One photograph, which shows the female members of the Swedish delegation striding past Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, is wonderfully illuminating: in their postures, in their facial expressions, these women’s defiance in response to big, bad, evil Trump is nowhere in evidence. They’re all wearing dark pants. The woman whose face we can see the best is the very picture of meekness and obeisance. The look on her face might well be that of a humble, pious, provincial nun about to be introduced to the Pope. Her right hand is on her chest, a signal that Rouhani need not worry that she might try to shake his hand. Another picture shows Linde herself clearly bowing to an Iranian official. The “world’s first feminist government,” which “epically troll[ed]” Trump, thus effectively communicated to Iran – and the entire Muslim world – a message of submission that could hardly have been improved upon. UN Watch quite rightly dubbed it a “walk of shame.”

In Sweden, of course, every properly brought up man or woman knows that it’s virtuous to thumb your nose at the U.S. president and equally virtuous to bow and scrape to terrorism-supporting imams. But a picture says a thousand words, and the images of those female officials sporting hijabs in Iran proved to be too much even for a lot of otherwise hardy Swedish stomachs. The leader of the Liberal Party worried aloud that the pictures would empower “conservative forces in our suburbs” (in other words, religious Muslims). Linde offered the “excuse” that the hijabs worn by her delegation were actually designed in Sweden. Get it? While signing a trade deal, they were modeling Swedish products intended for use by docile females! As Norway’s document.no website commented: “We see the contours of a new Swedish export success: Feminist government facilitates the export of hijabs to Iran.” (By the way, it turns out that when a female Norway official, Ingvil Smines Tybring-Gjedde, was scheduled to visit Iran in December and was told she’d have to wear a hijab, she refused – and canceled the trip.)

What Does Rex Tillerson Need To Know? The potential blessings of being an “outsider.” Bruce Thornton

Reprinted from Hoover.org.

Before his confirmation as the sixty-ninth U.S. Secretary of State, former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson was questioned by Senators from both parties about his qualifications for the nation’s highest diplomatic post. Like Trump, Tillerson has no experience in public service, unusual for both a President and a Secretary of State in modern times. Such reservations raise the issue of what types of experience and knowledge are necessary for conducting foreign policy.

In the modern technocratic state, many believe that creating policy is a professional activity requiring skills and knowledge developed in institutions of higher learning and think tanks. Both Tillerson’s critics and defenders held that assumption during his confirmation hearings. His critics claimed he lacked those requisite skills, while his defenders argued that he acquired them as CEO of Exxon doing international business with numerous countries and government officials. The reason those skills are necessary, both sides believe, is because they’ll help the Secretary of State anticipate developments abroad and respond appropriately.

But the history of U.S. foreign policy since World War II is replete with failures to correctly understand the international landscape, suggesting that technical skills and knowledge may not be enough for managing foreign affairs. In 1956 Dwight Eisenhower and his advisors misinterpreted Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal as an act of anticolonial nationalist self-assertion rather than a bid for regional primacy. Nor did they foresee its malign consequences, such as greater Soviet influence in the region at the expense of the United States and Israel. Even more telling, a whole academic discipline, Sovietology, along with the State Department failed to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, or to imagine that a foreign policy “amateur” like Ronald Reagan could craft a policy––“we win, they lose” –– that hastened its destruction.

Just as consequential for today is the misunderstanding of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which emboldened a new aggressive phase of Islamic terrorism still roiling the world nearly forty years later. Likewise, the Arab-Israel conflict has been misinterpreted by scholars of international relations, many of whom, despite all evidence to the contrary, continue to believe that Palestinian “national aspirations” and Israeli “settlements,” rather than Islamist doctrines, are the prime driver of not just that conflict, but the rise of jihadist violence elsewhere. Finally, in the last eight years, we have witnessed foreign policy decisions based on faulty or politicized analyses and unexamined assumptions, resulting in the eclipse of our prestige and effectiveness by rivals like Russia and Iran.

These failures reflect the problem of large institutions like government agencies and university disciplines––what the French social critic Alexis Carrel called “professional deformation.” Assured of steady funding and hence unaccountable to the market and, apart from political appointees, to the voters when they fail, such institutions can repeat received wisdom year after year while ignoring contrary evidence or alternative arguments that challenge the institutional paradigm.

The Iranian Revolution is a case in point. The agitation against the Shah was interpreted through the postwar narrative of anticolonial resistance to a corrupt tyrant in the name of national self-determination and independence. In fact, it was a long-brewing religious revolution against a secularizing and modernizing regime that the Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the revolution, said was “fundamentally opposed to Islam itself and the existence of a religious class.” Forty years later, under administrations from both parties, this misunderstanding has continued to shape America’s Middle East foreign policy.

Convicted Terrorist and Fraudster Gets New Trial Date While awaiting trial, Rasmieh Odeh cavorts with fascists and bigots. Ari Lieberman

Like an insidious virus, the name Rasmieh (also spelled Rasmea) Odeh keeps popping up in the news. This time her name has appeared in connection with a “Women’s March” event where group organizers, including Odeh, have advocated “striking, marching and blocking roads,” in protest against President Donald Trump. Organizers have referred to the Trump administration as “aggressively misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and racist.” The irony of course is that one of the prime organizers of this event was responsible for murdering two Jewish university students simply because they had the temerity to be born Jewish.

Odeh has also been invited to speak at an event hosted by “Jewish Voice for Peace,” a hate group that is neither Jewish nor peaceful and is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and expulsion of its indigenous inhabitants. The list of other featured speakers includes a cacophony of vitriolic Islamo-fascists, well versed in the art of hate and bigotry. Lindar Sarsour, a rancid Jew-hater elevated to the status of Goddess by the radical left and Diana Buttu, a PLO shill who defended Hamas rocket attacks, among a host of other miscreants, will share the dais with Odeh.

Odeh should have been jailed and deported from the U.S. years ago but a lax immigration system allowed her to fraudulently obtain U.S. citizenship and astonishingly, attain employment as an Obamacare worker.

Odeh was an active member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a violent group that indoctrinates its members in a convoluted mix of Marxism and Islamist supremacy. It is also listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the United States. The Odeh saga began on February 21, 1969 when she along with her terrorist cohorts conspired to plant bombs at a Jerusalem supermarket and at the British consulate office located nearby.

As a result of her actions, two university students — Leon Kaner, 21, and Edward Jaffe, 22, — were killed and nine others were injured. Odeh and her gang were apprehended days later by Israeli police. Physical evidence obtained at the scene undeniably linked her to the crime and she confessed to her role almost immediately. Odeh was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released in a prisoner swap after serving just ten years. Following her release, she lived in Lebanon for four years and then moved to Jordan. From Jordan, she moved to the United States.

In 1995 she filled out an application for an immigrant visa and alien registration and in 2004, she applied for US citizenship and filled out an application for naturalization. She fibbed on both forms denying ever belonging to a terrorist organization. She also denied her past criminal activity, arrest, conviction and prison sentence. She then orally repeated the fabrications when questioned by an officer with Department of Homeland Security.

Why the Media’s Trump Lie Machine is Failing No one believes the media anymore. Daniel Greenfield

Every five minutes the many mouths of the media broadcast, type, post and shriek that President Donald J. Trump is a liar. After months of this treatment, more voters find him truthful than them.

49% of voters believe that Trump and his people are telling the truth. Only 39% believe that the media is.

The media’s war on President Trump isn’t hurting him. It is destroying the media’s own credibility.

After Trump’s win, the media came to the conclusion that its biased attacks on him had been too subtle and understated to connect with the “dumb” voters. So it decided to be far more overt about its smears.

The New York Times, which used to be the best at disguising its biases in the omnipotent voice of professional journalism, called President Trump a liar in its headlines. The media cheered this descent into naked partisanship by the paper of record. But it didn’t hurt Trump. It hurt the Times.

Headlines blasting President Trump as a “liar” are easy enough to find on the internet. The New York Times derives much of its influence from its appearance of serious professionalism. Calling Trump names made it hard to distinguish the New York Times from the Huffington Post.

The first time the New York Times called Trump a liar was during the election. Times editor Dean Baquet insisted that while Hillary Clinton might “obfuscate, exaggerate”, Trump was a liar. And when the Times printed lies about Trump, it too was no doubt merely obfuscating and exaggerating rather than lying.

The Times can’t call its own candidate who lied about landing “under sniper fire” in Bosnia, negotiating peace in Northern Ireland and being kept out of NASA and the Marine Corps by sexism, a liar. And yet it expects someone, anyone, to believe that calling Trump a liar is anything more than a partisan smear.

Before the first debate, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Politico all ran stories accusing Trump of being a liar. The coordinated attack failed to accomplish anything at all.

The New Black Panther Party: Black Racism Personified Any “national conversation” on race must acknowledge the most taboo racism of all. John Perazzo

Editor’s note: Below is the third installment in a series of articles highlighting the network of major hate groups in America that are supported and funded by the Left. Click the following for the previous profile on the Souther Poverty Law Center and Students for Justice in Palestine.

Founded in 1990, the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (NBPP) is a militant black separatist organization that promotes racial violence against Jews and whites. NBPP preaches a “Ten-Point Platform” similar to its that of its namesake – the murderous Black panther Party of the 1960s and ’70s – demanding such things as: “full employment for our [black] people,” in light of the fact that “the white man has … used every dirty trick in the book to stand in the way of our freedom and independence”; “the overdue debt of reparations” from “this wicked racist government [that] has robbed us”; exemption for blacks “from all taxation”; and “education for our people that exposes the true nature of this devilish and decadent American society.”

Khalid Abdul Muhammad, a onetime spokesman for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, joined NBPP in the mid-1990s and by1998 had become NBPP’s chairman. He earned a reputation as an inveterate racist and anti-Semite by characterizing Jews as “slumlords in the black community” who were busy “sucking our [blacks’] blood on a daily and consistent basis”; asserting that Jews had provoked Adolf Hitler when they “went in there, in Germany, the way they do everywhere they go, and they supplanted, they usurped”; telling a San Francisco State University audience that “the white man is the Devil”; declaring that blacks, in retribution against South African whites of the apartheid era, should “kill them all”; and praising a black man who had shot some twenty white and Asian commuters in a racially motivated shooting spree aboard a New York commuter train as a hero who possessed the courage to “just kill every goddamn cracker that he saw.” Muhammad also advised blacks that “[t]here are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes.”

When Muhammad died in February 2001, he was succeeded as NBPP chairman by his longtime protégé, Malik Zulu Shabazz. At a rally the previous summer, Shabazz had openly called for a race war in which black young people would unite against the “common enemy” so that “we will see caskets and funerals in the[ir] community.”

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, NBPP promoted numerous conspiracy theories alleging Jewish complicity. NBPP officer Amir Muhammad, for instance, suggested that Jews had been forewarned about the terror plot and thus had stayed away from the attack sites on 9/11: “There are reports that as many as 3,000 to 5,000 so-called Jews did not go to work [at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon] that day, and we need to take a serious look at that.”

In yet another false claim, NBPP has consistently maintained that Jews were “significantly and substantially” involved in the transatlantic slave trade.

The Russian Conspiracy Theory Boils Over The Left camouflages a “rolling coup attempt” as a righteous national security push. Matthew Vadum

The so-called scandal involving former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn is 9/11, Pearl Harbor, Iran-Contra, Watergate, proof of presidential fascism, a cynical money-making scheme, and a pro-Russian spy thriller all rolled into one, according to the increasingly deranged rants of howling left-wingers and their truth-adverse confederates in the mainstream media.

Despite this relentless barrage of fake news and smears, President Donald Trump pushed back against the orchestrated campaign against him yesterday at what is sure to go down in history as The Best Presidential Press Conference of All Time as he gave the mainstream media the beat-down it deserves. (See transcript.)

“To give you an idea how Trump’s press conference went, afterwards, the press corps demanded a safe space,” Ann Coulter tweeted of the 77-minute long White House event, Trump’s first solo presser as president. “I wish this press conference could go on all day.”

“The public doesn’t believe you people anymore,” a ferocious, animated Trump told the assembled press corps. “Maybe I had something to do with that. I don’t know. But they don’t believe you.”

“This whole Russia scam that you guys” are pushing on people is “so you don’t talk about the real subject which is illegal leaks.”

“The public sees it,” he said. “They see it. They see it’s not fair. You take a look at some of your shows and you see the bias and the hatred. And the public is smart. They understand it.”

“I didn’t do anything for Russia,” he said. “I have done nothing for Russia. Hillary Clinton gave them 20 percent of our uranium. Hillary Clinton did a reset, remember with the stupid plastic button that made us look like a bunch of jerks.”

A mewling Chuck Todd of NBC was offended by the president’s conduct at the press conference and tweeted, “This [is] not a laughing matter. I’m sorry, delegitimizing the press is un-American[.]”

Perhaps he shouldn’t have signed on to the effort to delegitimize President Trump.

Todd, of course, is one the members of the media out to get Trump.

He recently said the invented Flynn-Russia crisis is “arguably the biggest presidential scandal involving a foreign government since Iran-Contra.”

‘The Great Wall’ Review: Keeping Monsters at Bay Matt Damon stars in this medieval saga as a sharp-eyed European archer helping Chinese soldiers defend against zombified beasts By Joe Morgenstern

The organizing principle of “The Great Wall” is Lots—lots of Chinese and American money lavished on a remarkably dull spectacle in which lots of medieval Chinese soldiers, plus a European mercenary played by Matt Damon, struggle to repel successive attacks from lots—and we’re talking in the zillions now—of ravening, slavering beasts that behave a lot like zombies. The Great Wall of China wasn’t built to keep out the Mongol hordes, as we’ve been told, but to keep out these digital hordes (who were not, as far as we’re told, asked to finance its construction). That isn’t a bad idea for a fantasy, but the computer-generated monsters, like the film as a whole, are numbingly repetitive, and devoid of any power to move, scare or stir us.

And what, you may ask, is Mr. Damon doing here? Mainly providing a star presence for an expensive movie that was produced, with extensive English dialogue, for the international market. He also seems to be channeling his inner Charlton Heston—his character, known only as William, is stolid as a fence post, except for occasional moments of fugitive charm. But William, who came to China in search of gunpowder, is a formidable archer and a good soul who can’t resist helping the soldiers who captured him, especially since their anti-monster campaign is being led by the lissome Commander Lin (Jing Tian), a young woman warrior of unlimited courage, if limited interest in a hot love affair. (The culminating mood is one of human commonality and international solidarity.)
Jing Tian

Jing Tian Photo: Universal Pictures

The director was Zhang Yimou. He’s a seminal figure in Chinese film, the man who directed such small-scale masterpieces as “Red Sorghum” and “Raise the Red Lantern,” then made a different sort of name for himself with lavish spectaculars like “House of Flying Daggers” (martial arts as MGM might have staged them) and the opening ceremony for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. There’s no lack of spectacular sequences or fancy weaponry in “The Great Wall,” the most expensive movie ever produced in China: syncopated drums, incendiary arrows, giant harpoons, explosive grenades, aerial balloons that predate the Montgolfier brothers by several centuries, and an elite battalion of female fighters in gorgeous blue uniforms who swoop down on the monsters like aerialists in a circus designed by Busby Berkeley. Yet there’s not a lot of levity, let alone exuberance. Even the 3-D effects are flat, though I did enjoy dodging one wayward discus. CONTINUE AT SITE