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Why the BDS Movement is Destroying a Future Palestinian State by Fred Maroun see note please

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

This is a decent try by an apparently very decent man…..but an Arab Palestinian state of any size or demographic constitution would destroy the future of Jewish Palestine, namely, Israel….rsk

Israel could have played by Arab rules and deported all Arabs in the land it occupied, but it did not. Precisely because Israel respected the human rights of Arabs, and despite its own self-interest, Israel gave the Palestinians a platform from which to seek the destruction of Israel.

One can only hope that the Palestinians, like Egypt and Jordan, will soon decide to live in peace with a neighbor which turned out to be far better in the way it treats Palestinians than the Palestinians’ own “Arab brothers” — not all that bad, after all. One can only hope that Palestinian leaders will start promoting a culture of peace rather than a culture of hate.

From the moment Israel declared its independence, one of the main Arab tactics has been to exploit the Jews’ Achilles heel – their highly developed culture, which respects and values life, and their support for human rights.

Of Arab origin, I have long known about the Arab stereotype of the West and Israel — that they are weak because they care about the lives of their own people and they are eager to respect the human rights of their enemies. Golda Meir is reported to have said, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

Until now, Israel has conformed to that Arab stereotype — such as with “knocks on the roof” in Gaza to warn residents to leave buildings being used for military purposes before they are targeted — but in conversations with Zionists, it seems that this attitude is changing. While Jews will always value life, their determination to minimize enemy casualties and to respect their human rights at almost all costs might be unraveling, and it is the Palestinians who are likely to pay the price.

During the War of Independence, the Arab side ensured that not a single Jew was left on the Arab side of the 1949 armistice lines, but a large number of Arabs were allowed by Jews to remain on the Israeli side. Today those Arabs constitute 20% of the Israeli population.

Israel’s respect for the human rights of Arabs living in Israel has been used by Arabs against Israel. The idea of any Jews on the Arab side is demonized and any “normalization” with Jews is aggressively discouraged

By contrast, Arabs living in Israel have consistently elected Arab parliamentarians, even anti-Zionist ones who openly support Palestinian terrorists. If Israel expels those politicians from the Knesset — as there is a proposed law to do — it is accused by the West of being undemocratic, but if it does not expel them it is seen by Arabs as weak.

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The Anti-Momentum of the Delusional, Destructive John Kasich By Ian Tuttle

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

First, there was Jim Gilmore. Then, there was Ben Carson. Now, there’s John Kasich. This Republican nomination cycle boasted a bumper crop of candidates with delusions of grandeur. Two of them, at least, had the sense to pack it in.

Not the governor of Ohio, who has already been mathematically eliminated from securing the Republican nomination outright. At present, John Kasich has won only one state (his home state) and four — count ’em: four — non–Buckeye State counties. He hasn’t won a delegate since March 15. And one week after Ohio, he came in fourth in Arizona in a three-man race, losing by 23,000 votes to Marco Rubio, who by then had dropped out.

What’s the opposite of momentum?

RELATED: Why Won’t John Kasich Go Away?

With Republicans preparing for a string of states likely to prove friendly to Donald Trump — New York, Trump’s home state, votes next Tuesday, followed a week later by the “Acela Corridor” (Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, and Maryland) and Pennsylvania — this might seem like Kasich’s time to shine. He’s a moderate man for moderate states, right? Maybe not. A new PPP poll has Kasich up on Cruz in New York by just five percentage points (25 to 20), and a recent Fox News poll has Kasich leading Cruz by just two points — and both of them lapped by Trump.

Meanwhile, one gets the impression that Kasich isn’t even trying to win. The governor failed to file a full slate of delegates for the Maryland primary, meaning that even if Kasich wins the state, he won’t be able to claim all of its delegates. At RedState, Moe Lane wrote in March: “There’s no really good way to say this, so I’ll just be blunt: Depending on where you live in Maryland, you will be provably throwing away your vote if you vote for John Kasich” (the emphasis is his).

And recall: This is the same candidate who didn’t collect enough signatures to get on the ballot in Illinois or Pennsylvania. (The only reason his name appeared in Illinois is that no candidate challenged him; and in Pennsylvania, the Rubio camp dropped its challenge.)

If Kasich’s “strategy” is unclear, so is his ultimate aim. Maybe he thinks he can win at a contested convention, that 1,237 delegates come to their senses in Cleveland and spirit him to the nomination on the basis of his generally favorable polling against Hillary Clinton in hypothetical head-to-head matchups. The GOP nomination might be “a bizarre process,” as Kasich said on CNN earlier this week. But it’s not that bizarre.

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Did Cosmo Interview Hillary Clinton — or a Robot? I really can’t tell the difference. By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

Cosmopolitan published an interview on Tuesday that I think was with Hillary Clinton — although I can’t be completely sure, seeing as her answers sounded more like they had come from a robot than an actual human being.

I’m not exaggerating. This interview was so boring and so unproductive that Cosmo clearly struggled to even come up with a headline for it. After all, the one that it went with — “Hillary Clinton Responds to Bernie Sanders’ Remark That She’s ‘Condescending’ to Young People” — was not even really accurate.

Sure, Hillary was asked about the remark, but she didn’t exactly answer. In fact, she exactly didn’t answer, responding with “Well, he’s criticized me for so many things in the last week, I’m not going to respond to his comments.”

Then — just like a perfectly functioning machine — she swooped in with a preprogrammed political talking point:

“I will say this,” she said. “I’m excited that so many young people are involved in this campaign.”

“I think it’s great if they support me, if they support Senator Sanders, the fact that they are committed to being part of the political process is a great development,” she added.

Whoa . . . so Hillary’s thoughts on this are, in essence: I like young people. It is good for young people to like politics. It is good. Hot take, Hil!

Her answer to a question about a controversial skit she performed this weekend with Mayor de Blasio that featured a joke criticized by some in the media as racist was equally (read: not at all) insightful:

“He has addressed it, and I will really defer to him because it is something that he’s already talked about.”

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A Trump Administration Would Cave to Putin, Threatening Poland and Israel His bromance with Putin endangers key American allies. By Robert Zubrin

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

As the New York primary approaches, Empire State residents with international connections may wish to consider the implications of a Donald Trump presidency for lands overseas that are dear to many of their hearts.

Trump wants to gut NATO. He has openly expressed admiration for Russian revanchist strongman Vladimir Putin, and he has hired several Kremlin-allied persons as his top advisors. These include Carter Page, an investor in the Russian gas giant, Gazprom, and a vocal supporter of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Paul Manafort, a henchman of deposed Ukrainian dictator Victor Yanukovych, on whose behalf Putin’s invasion was initiated. Furthermore, Trump has been endorsed by Aleksandr Dugin, the totalitarian “Eurasianist” philosopher and geostrategist, and a leading advocate for the policy of expanding Russia into a transcontinental Eurasian bloc incorporating most of Europe and Asia.

What do these affiliations mean for several countries that could soon be in the Kremlin’s line of fire?

Let’s start with Poland. Polish independence was extinguished in the late 18th century, and with the exception of a 20-year period between the wars was not fully recovered until the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. Putin wants to restore the Soviet bloc, or at the very least, the Czarist empire, which included not only Ukraine, but most of Poland, and the Baltic states as well. This means that, as far as Putin is concerned, Polish independence must be crushed. His potential methods for achieving this objective include both military and economic means.

Russia’s military dominance in the region is obvious. Its only potential counter is NATO, an alliance that Trump says is obsolete. The threat of Russian military aggression against Poland and the Baltic states had been greatly enhanced by the failure of the Obama administration to honor America’s commitment to defend Ukraine with more than token support. Trump’s advisor Carter Page, however, has attacked Obama for defending Ukraine too strongly, with the administration’s economic sanctions against Gazprom no doubt being particularly objectionable. Such an approach — without NATO protection or even the threat of retaliatory sanctions — would make a Trump administration a virtual green light for further military aggression by the Kremlin in Eastern Europe.

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Why Cruz Is the Likely Choice at the Convention By Jonah Goldberg

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

I wouldn’t say that the GOP is falling in love with Ted Cruz, but maybe it’s falling in like.

In arguably the most improbable political season of our lifetimes, this fact has to rank high on the list of things no one could have seen coming. If they gave out report cards for first-term senators, Cruz would get an “F” in the “plays well with others” category. Party leaders believed that his 2013 gambit to shut down the government over Obamacare was a disaster for everyone but Cruz, and they have harbored a not-so-secret disdain for him since.

But that’s all over — at least for now.

Like Perseus pulling Medusa’s head out of a sack to petrify his enemies, Cruz has been able to dangle the prospect of a President Trump to strike fear in the hearts of even his biggest detractors.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) once said choosing between Donald Trump and Cruz was like choosing between being shot or poisoned. Graham chose his poison. He’s out there raising money for Cruz. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), whose hatred for Cruz was the stuff of Sicilian blood feuds, seems to have reconciled himself to the fact that Cruz is the only person who can stop Trump. McConnell’s definitely not in love, but he recognizes that these are the cards we’ve all been dealt.

RELATED: Cruz Is a Safer General-Election Bet than Trump

Team Cruz fears that people such as McConnell will use the convention in Cleveland this summer to reshuffle the deck and get a new deal — a new candidate more palatable to the establishment. “There is still distrust over whether or not the party is actually willing to accept Cruz as the nominee or if they’re using him to shut down Trump only to then stab Cruz in the back come summer,” Erick Erickson, a conservative talk-show host and Cruz backer, told the Washington Post.

The concern is understandable but overblown. Although a contested convention is likely, the “white knight” scenario, in which someone other than Cruz, Trump, or John Kasich swoops in and “steals” the nomination, is not.

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Is NATO Worth Preserving? By Victor Davis Hanson —

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

Donald Trump recently ignited another controversy when he mused that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was obsolete. He hinted that it might no longer be worth the huge American investment.

In typical Trump style, he hit a nerve, but he then offered few details about the consequences of either staying in or leaving NATO.

NATO is certainly no longer aimed at keeping a huge Soviet land army out of democratic Western Europe, as was envisioned in 1949.

The alliance has been unwisely expanded from its original twelve-nation membership to include 28 countries, absorbing many of the old communist Warsaw Pact nations and some former Soviet republics. NATO may have meant well to offer security to these vulnerable new alliance members. Yet it is hard to imagine Belgians and Italians dying on the battlefield to keep Russian president Vladimir Putin’s forces out of Lithuania or Estonia.

Today’s NATO pledges to many of its newer participants are about as believable as British and French rhetorical guarantees in August 1939 to protect a far-away Poland from its Nazi and Soviet neighbors.

No NATO member during the 40-year Cold War invoked Article Four of the treaty, requiring consultation of the entire alliance by a supposedly threatened member. Turkey has called for it four times since 2003.

The idea that Western Europe, beset with radical Islamic terrorism and unchecked migrations from the war-torn Middle East, would pledge its military support to the agendas and feuds of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly Islamist and non-democratic regime is pure fantasy.

Few NATO members meet the alliance’s goal of investing 2 percent of gross domestic product in defense spending. Instead, socialist Europe expects the United States to carry most of NATO’s fiscal and military burdens.

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The Age of Discontent By Richard Fernandez

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

In the nearly 30 years since the Fall of the Berlin Wall the fortunes of freedom have experienced a drastic reversal. In the Philippines, where the color revolutions all began in 1986, the son of Ferdinand Marcos is among the leading candidates for the vice-presidency. “The Philippines is steadily giving into ‘strongman syndrome’, the misguided belief that tough-talking and political will alone can address complex 21st-century governance challenges.”

Soon, Philippine (cacique) democracy as we know it may come to an end, as the Filipino people increasingly opt for political outsiders as well as the offspring of a former dictator, who have promised decisive leadership and national discipline. The latest survey suggests that a provincial mayor, Rodrigo Duterte, and Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. are cruising towards the top two positions in office.

If “political outsiders” and “strongmen” sound attractive to the voters in the 2016 election cycle, they’re in lots of company. A Bloomberg report notes that voter anger and consequent shift toward political outsiders is world-wide. “From the supporters of Donald Trump to the street protesters of southern Europe, voters around the world are mad as hell. Inequality, immigration, and the establishment’s perceived indifference are firing up electorates in a way that’s rarely been seen before. As these charts show, the forces shaping the disruption of global politics have been building for years and aren’t about to diminish.” Among their findings are:

The share of wealth owned by the middle class declined in every part of the world on a relative basis;
U.S. workers’ share of income has dropped to near the lowest since World War II;
Incomes in Europe’s southern crisis countries have fallen since 2009 relative to the northern Europeans;
The European youth has lost its future. In Spain and Greece, unemployment among those under 25 is close to 40 percent;
U.S. student debt is soaring, while median pay for recent college graduates has barely budged;
Europe’s asylum and border policies have collapsed under the pressure of refugee and immigration flows;
In 2015 only 19% of Americans trusted their government “just about always” or “most of the time” – down from 54% after the 9/11 attacks;
It’s the same picture in Europe as distrust of government has surged, to a high of 84% in Spain

In brief the report suggests that “the future” — that favorite word of the Left — has disappeared. Nearly 90% of French parents, 72% of British, 65% of American and 56% of German are convinced their children will be worse off than they are. Not that the “present” is any better. For one thing the threat of major “war”, that condition the Left promised to save the world from, has grown under the stewardship of their Nobel Peace prize winner.

In the light of these global trends the situation in the Philippines is not unique but typical. The Bloomberg report argues that all over the world insurgent parties, often featuring strongmen who promise the trains will run on time, are on the rise. In place of the Color Revolutions three decades ago there is an enormous nostalgia for the age of diktat. The Wall Street Journal describes an Arab democracy activist who evolved into a suicide bomber. A Japan Times article argues that the Arab Spring has taught Western diplomats that the best way to spread progress is through stable autocracy. If one were to ask leftists what’s the biggest foreign policy mistake of the last 20 years the answer would probably be ‘not leaving Saddam in power’.

Inside the Beltway, the analysts are awakening to the possibility that faith in old-time democracy may be dying in America too. Eli Saslow of the Washington Post begins by way of focusing on a funeral in Oklahoma. “Anna Marrie Jones: Born 1961 — Died 2016.”

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Ohio State Shuts Down Student Occupation after Arrests, Expulsion Threatened By Debra Heine

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

A student sit-in at Ohio State University was shut down last week when a senior administrator informed the participants that they would be arrested and expelled if they didn’t retreat from their “occupied space” in the area outside of President Michael V. Drake’s second-floor office.

The incident happened at Bricker Hall, Ohio State’s main administration building, which the students planned to occupy until school officials capitulated to a set of “demands.” According to the Columbus Dispatch, the site became an “open mic” situation for about eight hours last Wednesday night, with dozens of students, faculty, and several advocacy groups participating.

They complained that university officials don’t listen to them and have silenced them; officials say they have talked many times with the leaders of the groups, and that the protesters just don’t like the answer.

University officials say the occupation began with about 80 people at around 3:30 p.m.; a statement from one of the organizers said it was about 150.

Their list of demands included:

We demand complete, comprehensive and detailed access to the Ohio State budget and investments immediately, as well as personnel to aid students in understanding this information.

OSU Divest: Divest from Caterpillar Inc., Hewlett Packard and G4S due to their involvement in well-documented human rights abuses in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and across the globe. . .

Real Food OSU: Sign the Real Food Campus Commitment. Ensure the administration work with Real Food OSU through the entire implementation of the Real Food Campus Commitment, in place of, or as a means of attaining, the university sustainability goal of increased “production and purchase of locally and sustainably sourced food to 40% by 2025.”

Ohio State Vice President Jay Kasey paid the protesters a visit shortly after the occupation began, with a message from the president.

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Russian Jets Buzz Navy Destroyer in ‘Simulated Attack’ By Rick Moran

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

Russian SU-24 bombers flew over the American destroyer Donald Cook at an altitude of less than 30 feet in what was described as a “simulated attack.” The Daniel Cook was in international waters at the time.

“This was more aggressive than anything we’ve seen in some time,” said a defense official. And it wasn’t the only aggressive move against our Navy by the Russians in recent days.

Military Times:

The maneuver was one of several aggressive moves by Russian aircraft on Monday and Tuesday.

Shortly after leaving the Polish port of Gdynia, near Gdansk, on Monday, the Donald Cook at was sea in international waters conducting flight operations with a Polish helicopter, part of routine joint training exercises with the NATO ally.

During those flight operations, a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 combat aircraft appeared and conducted about 20 overflights, coming within 1,000 yards of the ship at an altitude of about 100 feet, the defense official said. In response, the commander of the Donald Cook suspended flight operations.

On Tuesday, the Donald Cook was underway in the Baltic Sea when a Russian helicopter — a Ka-27 Helix — made seven overflights and appeared to be taking photographs of the U.S. Navy ship, the defense official said.

Shortly after the helicopter left the area, an Su-24 began making “very low” overflights with a “simulated attack profile,” the defense official said. The aircraft made a total of 11 passes.

The ship’s commander repeatedly tried to make radio contact with the Russian aircraft but received no response, the defense official said.

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The feds dawdle while patients die needlessly: Betsy McCaughey

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

Our dysfunctional federal government’s bungling is killing people.

Example: Every year, more than half a million patients undergoing a common medical procedure risk getting a superbug infection because their doctor is using a contaminated instrument. A doctor inserts a thin, tubular scope down your throat and into your digestive system to treat cancer and other problems. You assume the tube is clean. Think again.

The scope’s defective design allows bacteria to grow even after it’s rigorously cleaned between patients. The Food and Drug Administration, whose job is to ensure the safety of medical devices, has known about this problem since 2012 but dawdled while patients died. Three months ago, Olympus, the manufacturer of most of these specialized scopes (duodenoscopes), began recalling them.

Yet numerous hospitals are still using them, and patients are still getting infected and dying – eight more infections and two more deaths according to last month’s FDA data.

Even at prestigious institutions such as UCLA Medical Center, New York-Presbyterian, Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, Massachusetts General in Boston and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, patients have been infected with superbugs from contaminated duodenoscopes.

When hospitals fail to warn patients about the risk, it makes a mockery of the idea that patients are giving “informed consent” before the procedure, says medical-safety expert Lawrence Muscarella.

Worse, the FDA and another federal agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, go along with the hush-up about which hospitals are having a problem. These agencies are supposed to work for us – the public – but clearly they’re siding with the hospitals. The FDA is stonewalling about where the two most recent deaths occurred.