On the day that Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was leaving for the United States to give what the Washington Post called “the most important speech of his life,” my grandchildren were watching Big Hero 6. When I heard the smallest of the animated characters say, “We didn’t set out to be super-heroes, but sometimes life doesn’t go the way you planned,” it sounded like the tagline for Bibi’s launch as hero of the free world.
Can such a hero prevail? Elected leaders of democratic societies can rarely rise to courage or bravery of heroic proportions because of the compromise it takes to get reelected and because critical electorates feel compelled to cut leaders down to their size. In his nine nonsuccessive years heading Israel’s government, Netanyahu has taken as much political firepower as Israel has from its enemies. Nonetheless, like the country he heads, Netanyahu has grown stronger in every round. Despite attacks against him from both sides of the Atlantic, he gave Congress one of the boldest speeches in its great history—a speech its audience knew was as consequential for America as it was for the Jews.
“We love death more than you love life.” —Islamic extremist saying, for the ears of Israeli Jews and Christians
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” —Elie Wiesel
Netanyahu’s Protest
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech to a joint session of the US Congress for the third time in his career. The prime minister said that any deal with Iran cannot be trusted, since Iran has never changed its behavior of promoting terrorism worldwide or of threatening the State of Israel with destruction. An active terrorist rogue state can never be trusted to own nuclear weaponry. Netanyahu pointed out that a treaty with Iran will only delay the timeframe by which Iran may, with international permission, eventually acquire nuclear bombs, saying that a path forward to a deal with Iran would not be a “farewell to arms, but a farewell to arms control.” (For the full text of the speech use this link: http://www.ibtimes.com/netanyahu-speech-congress-full-text-read-bibis-entire-remarks-iran-1834610.)
A few weeks ago, near the Disunited Nations there was a small, very small (it was freezing outside) group of people huddling with a placard and a “Palestinian” flag. I wondered what the colors stood for on the flag. I was particularly interested in the color green since that is the hue of the faux environmentalist movement, the climate warming mongers, money and jealousy, and the official color of Hamas. What did it have to do with “Palestine.???”
I googled it: It was the flag of the British mandate in Palestine long before the lion’s share of the land was deeded to create the phony Kingdom of Jordan, in violation of the Balfour Declaration. A variant of it was used by Jordan during its illegal occupation of the West Bank. In 1948 the flag was copied and endowed with a new meaning.
Green is for the land of Palestine,
White is for the peace in which the Palestinian people lived before they were made refugees,
Red is for their blood spilled trying to liberate their land, and
Black is for their life under occupation.
Well not quite the Stars and Stripes is it?…rsk
The European Union on Friday submitted its formal promise on how much it will cut greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations ahead of climate change talks starting in November and called on the United States and China to follow its lead.
The European Union is the first major economy to agree its position before the talks in Paris aimed at seeking a new worldwide deal on global warming.
“We expect China, the United States and the other G20 countries in particular to follow the European Union and submit their contributions by the end of March,” Miguel Arias Canete, climate and energy Commissioner, told reporters after a meeting of EU environment ministers in Brussels.
Along with an estimated 637,000 people from the U.S. recently, Paris Hilton and Conan O’Brien somehow squeaked through the cracks of the diabolical U.S. “blockade” of Cuba for a visit to Havana. (Btw, in the 1950’s when Cuba was a “U.S. tourist playground” an average 200,000 Americans visited Cuba annually.)
From the Associated Press this week:
Having seen a long-ago tape of (Jack Paar’s) historic visit just months into the regime of Fidel Castro, (Conan) O’Brien said, “We’ve got to go – right away!”
“It wasn’t as complicated as I thought it would be,” said Conan executive producer Jeff Ross, who reached a production liaison in Havana. “He said, ‘Just come. We’ll get you an invitation from the Cuban government. You’ll have the run of the place.’”
The 10-member troupe went in mid-February and spent several days in the Cuban capital.
“I was shocked,” said O’Brien, “by how much we were left completely alone.”
Let’s get one thing out of the way, the administration bringing charges has openly sold ambassadorships to donors and bundlers.
It has arranged for huge grants to companies owned by its donors. Holder, who moved these charges forward, got involved in the pardon of Marc Rich, a wanted fugitive, in the hopes that he would get the Attorney General spot.
So whatever the merits of the case are, this is political. Top Democrats like Rangel and Reid have committed blatantly illegal acts. As Senate Majority Leader, Reid worked to aid Chinese business interests linked to his son. Hillary Clinton’s brother got a special mining concession from Haiti. Menendez isn’t being charged because of the merits of the case.
He’s being charged because he stood up to Obama on Iran. The timing here isn’t coincidental.
The current presidential administration and State Department have been long touting that global warming/climate change are just as dangerous as Russian bears and Islamic terrorists. In February 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry addressed Asian leaders in Jakarta by informing them, “Climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” With such attitudes, is it any wonder the east-west divide all the way from the Middle East to Ukraine in the north is literally on fire with no promising solution or relief to be found anywhere on the horizon? While common sense cries out that the world is entering into very serious times not seen since perhaps World War II, America has a presidential administration and a State Department seemingly far more concerned about global warming/climate change than the cauldron that has erupted in the Middle East, and the seething geopolitical dangers that could easily blow up all of Europe itself.
Worse, leftist pressure has made the U.S. military go green over the last decade. The U.S. armed forces are now buying more and more energy from expensive renewable technology contractors. Presumably by 2025, the U.S. Army will become a virtual green model of sustainability for the entire country. In other words, the Left is using the Defense Department to keep renewable energy boondoggles afloat by wasting taxpayer dollars on green pipe dreams. It would be far better to hook up the U.S. military to the Keystone Pipeline and base it squarely upon Frack Nation principles and practices so that the army will not be dependent upon foreign oil.
Such common sense, of course, would be an intellectual affront to Leftist elites who have imbibed deeply from modern environmentalism since the 1960’s. All too many of them believe primeval nature represents some kind of lost natural purity that requires the destruction of capitalism. Even worse, they also believe Nature itself knows best when it comes to public policy. Both presumptions are myths of the modern leftist imagination that have perverted science and politics to the point where politicians can now trumpet climate change as a very serious national security threat without blushing. Only the mindlessness of Nature can explain such credulity.
Hillary Clinton systematically evaded federal recordkeeping and disclosure requirements. This is very straightforward – indeed, the purpose of evasion is the only logical reason for setting up a complex, alternative, extra-governmental communications system. Predictably, Clinton sympathizers are trying to complicate and obfuscate something that is really very simple. In a nutshell, Mrs. Clinton’s scheme was the antithesis of the system set up by federal law. Under the latter system, government officials must conduct even trivial government business on government facilities. A governmental system serves the imperatives of security and accountability: (a) it is built with extraordinary protective layers to ward off spies and hackers; (b) the communications transmitted and stored are readily available for disclosure to Congress, the courts, and the public. Most significantly, it puts the law in charge of decisions about what communications should be maintained or disclosed in the event a government official contends his or her communications should be withheld on grounds of privacy or privilege.
Islamic State has turned from beheading hostages to waging war on the world’s cultural heritage. Last week the jihadist would-be caliphate posted a five-minute video of its members destroying statues in the Mosul museum with sledgehammers and power tools. This week its fanatics bulldozed the remains of the 3,000-year-old city of Nimrud.
In response the Iraqi government called for an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council, and Irina Bokova, Unesco’s secretary-general, said the “deliberate destruction of cultural heritage constitutes a war crime.”
The Senate on Wednesday failed to override President Obama ’s veto of Congress’s bipartisan bill authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline, falling five votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority. The vote was nonetheless a bipartisan rebuke of the President that shows how captive his Administration is to green billionaires.
In an interview last weekend with a North Dakota TV station, Mr. Obama said: “I’m happy to look at how we can increase pipeline production for U.S. oil, but Keystone is for Canadian oil to send that down to the Gulf. It bypasses the United States and is estimated to create a little over 250, maybe 300 permanent jobs.” Except for the prepositions, everything in that statement is false.
