http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2015/03/01/4-amazing-discoveries-of-ancient-hebrew-in-the-holy-land/?print=1 Editor’s Note: See the previous installments in P. David Hornik’s fascinating series on the Hebrew language: “4 Ways That the Hebrew Language Redeemed the Jewish People in Our Time,” “4 Ways the World Changed for Me When I Learned Hebrew,” “4 Biblical Sayings That Spice Up Today’s Hebrew,” “5 Ways Hebrew Is (Very) […]
The Western intelligentsia is very, very anxious to make sure that you have a positive view of Islam. Thus we see a steady stream of articles in the mainstream media assuring you that the Qur’an is benign, the U.S. Constitution is Sharia-compliant, and the Islamic State is not Islamic. These articles come in a steady stream, and they have to, because they are asking non-Muslims to disregard what they see every day — Muslims committing violence against non-Muslims and justifying it by referring to Islamic texts — and instead embrace a fictional construct: Islam the religion of peace and tolerance.
This takes a relentless barrage of propaganda, because with every new jihad atrocity, reality threatens to break through. It wasn’t accidental that Hitler’s Reich had an entire Ministry of Propaganda: lying to the public is a full-time job, as the cleverest of propaganda constructs is always threatened by the simple facts. This propaganda comes not just from the Left (the Huffington Post, Salon, etc.), but also from the Right, or at least the Right-leaning media (Forbes); it seems as if whatever divides Americans politically, they’re all united on one point: Islam is just great, and only bigoted, racist “Islamophobes” think otherwise.
It was laughable from the start, but the fact that it was taken seriously is troubling. The ethics apparatus of the United States judiciary moves slowly. It seems also to move truly. It did both on February 19, when it cleared Judge Edith Jones of all the misconduct accusations lodged against her after she delivered a lecture titled “Federal Death Penalty Review” at the University of Pennsylvania. That lecture took place on February 20, 2013.
In it Jones defended the death penalty, mainly by dismantling some leading arguments against it. Three months later, 13 individuals and public-interest groups formally complained that, in her talk, Judge Jones violated several norms of judicial conduct, chiefly by manifesting “bias” against some minority groups. The plaintiffs’ roster indicates some of these groups. Among them were the NAACP and a couple of Latino organizations. Judge Jones unequivocally denied the allegations. The Committee on Judicial Conduct agreed: It concluded that none of the charges was supported by even a “preponderance” of the proof, which is the lowest of evidentiary standards. This is tantamount to a total vindication of Judge Jones.
Can we finally—finally!—be done with the Clintons? As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton schemed to subvert record-keeping and transparency rules for reasons that are probably more or less communicated by her surname: The Clintons are creeps and liars and scoundrels and misfits, always have been, always will be. They are the penicillin-resistant syphilis of American politics. The Democrats’ response to Herself’s trouble has taken three main forms:
1) What she did wasn’t technically illegal, says David Brock and other slavish Clinton retainers, even hauling out that old Al Gore classic, “no controlling legal authority”;
2) What about Scott Walker, huh? say the Democratic-party operators, pointing out that as a county executive Walker also used a private email system — and, to be honest, Walker’s response to the terrorist assault on Milwaukee County’s consulate in Benghazi has never been explained to my satisfaction; and
3) the president repeats his favorite mantra: Wuddint me!
Chairman Trey Gowdy knew about Clinton’s secret server six months ago, and that too is a scandal. In assessing the Benghazi select committee headed up by Chairman Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), there are two possibilities, and they are not mutually exclusive: (1) The committee is just a Potemkin probe erected by the Republican establishment to get restive conservatives to pipe down, and (2) the committee is incompetent. The panel, of course, was commissioned by the Republican-controlled House to investigate the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2012, attack in which al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists killed Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans — information-management officer Sean Smith and two former Navy SEALs, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, contract employees whose valor saved dozens of lives during the siege.
Netanyahu’s powerful new language. At last.
Those were strong words that came from Benjamin Netanyahu when he finally got to speak before Congress.
Just as strong were three words he left unspoken.
Israel’s war is everybody’s war. It’s Jihad, silly. It’s ISIS, stupid.
The Israeli prime minister did not even whisper that hallucinatory nonsense about a “two state solution” so favored by the Left.
If the Left still thinks whoring for peace is the way to go, as appears to be the case from the Labor Party’s most recent effort at appeasement (turning the “West Bank” judenrein and into the next Gaza-type hellhole) Netanyahu offers something else entirely – a war to be won on the frontline of words.
Washington: Saudi Arabia’s King Salman has awarded a prestigious prize to Zakir Naik, a televangelist and religious scholar from India, heralding him as “one of the most renowned non-Arabic-speaking promulgators of Islam”. Naik, a trained doctor, founded the Peace TV channel, which supposedly reaches an audience of 100 million English-speaking Muslims. His popular YouTube stream includes videos titled “Who is deceived by the Satan, Christians or Muslims?” and “Does eating non-vegetarian food have any effect on the mind?”
Naik’s creed is an expansive one. “Islam is the only religion that can bring peace to the whole of humanity,” he said in a video biography aired at the ceremony.
It’s a Tuesday night three weeks before election day, and Naftali Bennett, the head of one of Israel’s oldest religious parties, is speaking in English to 1,000 mostly young, secular Israelis. For Bennett, 42, an ambitious, talented, American-style politician seeking to catapult his Jewish Home faction to third place among Israel’s parties, this isn’t all that surprising.
The contest is widely seen here as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s second-longest-serving prime minister and a lightning rod for criticism across the political spectrum. The yard signs and billboards of the opposition declare “It’s us or him,” and an American-style PAC, reportedly funded, indirectly and in part, by the U.S. State Department, has launched ubiquitous anti-“Bibi” ads urging Israelis to “Just change.” Netanyahu’s highly controversial address to Congress about the Iranian nuclear threat only added fuel to the fire.
Her support seems a continent wide, a cracker deep, and just as prone to crumble. Like snowflakes on a frozen sidewalk, the latest damaging revelations about Hillary Clinton are starting to stick. More than that, Servergate raises the question: Why, precisely, should she be president anyway? This week brought news that then–secretary of state Clinton never had a State Department e-mail address. Instead, she exclusively used a private account to e-mail others in the Obama administration, including some of her staffers who communicated via their own private accounts. Clinton did not simply keep using an old account. She launched hdr22@clintonemail.com as her Senate confirmation hearings opened. Rather than have her e-mails automatically available on government computers for permanent scrutiny, Team Clinton gave State 55,000 pages of handpicked e-mails. What they may have withheld is anyone’s guess.
It is a seductively attractive notion, that Islam might reform itself and its more ardent, violent followers, as did Christianity in bowing to the separation of church and state. Alas, such optimism ignores the very nature of the religion and the bloody lessons of the West’s own history
Contemporary commentary on the crisis of Islam is bedevilled by several important misconceptions about religious history and the nature of Islam.
It is commonly claimed — for example, by the New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman – that the crisis of the Muslim world will only be resolved when Islam undergoes a Reformation similar to that experienced by the Christian West. Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan, claimed on Radio National’s Between the Lines “there is a problem in the religion [Islam], it has not been reformed to enable it to coexist with Western notions of human rights.” According to Phillips, the medieval Christian Church carried out beheadings and burnt people alive before reforming itself at the beginning of the Modern Age: “It came to an accommodation in the Reformation with secular authority. It divided church and state. Islam has not had that kind of Reformation”. Phillip’s argument was cited by Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian beneath the headline “Battlefield of ideas is where fanatics will fall”.
