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Ruth King

DANIEL GREENFIELD: REFLECTIONS ON THE JEWISH HOLIDAY OF PURIM

Tonight begins the celebration of the Jewish holiday of Purim.

Like so many Jewish holidays, it is an inconvenient fit for liberal clergy and parishioners who insist that Jewish values consist of social justice.
There is no peace process conducted with Haman, the chief villain of the Purim story. No one tries to understand his point of view or figure out how much bowing he will accept in exchange for calling off the genocide.

Instead he and his fellow conspirators must die.

Purim is a reminder that real Jewish values are not a suicide pact or a soppy tale of moral ambiguity and bleeding heart empathy for genocidal monsters.

Jewish holidays mark historical events by testifying to a G-d of history who is less concerned with feelings and tolerance, than with justice and truth.

Mordechai, like most Jewish Biblical figures, makes for a terrible progressive role model. He doesn’t compromise. Even after Haman has passed his decree, he still won’t bow to him. He causes the crisis and resolves it by being uncompromising.

Hate Crimes: US Lynches the Facts by Douglas Murray

The police are now under serious pressure — as they were in the cases of Trayvon Martin and “Ferguson” — to attribute the crime to causes other than those they may actually think to be the case.

There are many difficulties with “hate crimes” legislation. But one of the worst is that it turns the law from being blind into being a tool that can be used not only to drive home a political vision, but one that can be used to ignore and even lobby to change facts.

While a lot of people seem not to want to recognize when Jews are killed as Jews, the truth is that a very great number of people appear to want Muslims or Blacks, when they are killed, to have been murdered because they were Muslims or Blacks.

This is the disturbing trend that seems to have fed into these moments of Presidential blindness.

Obama and the Koran — on The Glazov Gang

With Obama’s recent boycott of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the U.S. Congress, and with his continued weakness in the face of Iran’s pursuit of the nuclear bomb, combined with his perpetual refusal to acknowledge Islam’s role in ISIS’s barbaric terrorism, the troubling question of Obama’s loyalties to Islam remains on the surface, despite the mainstream media’s refusal to deal with it.

In response to these ongoing actions by the president that clearly enable the strength of Islamic jihadists, and that clearly hurt the interests of America and Israel, Frontpage is running The Glazov Gang’s feature interview with Nonie Darwish on Obama and the Koran, which unveils the curious relationship between the Radical-in-Chief and Islam’s “holy book.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/obama-and-the-koran-on-the-glazov-gang-1/print/

What Are You Really Willing to Do to Stop Terrorists From Entering the U.S.? By Michael Cutler

The question that serves as the title of my commentary today is the question every American, irrespective of political affiliation, must ask their elected senators and congressional representatives.

For all too many of our leaders, while they claim that they would stop at nothing to protect America and Americans, the reality is far different. Despite their claims to the contrary, they will not do anything to truly secure our borders or instill real integrity to the immigration system or the process by which applications for visas or immigration benefits are adjudicated.

This is the dire reality our nation and our citizens face today.

My article today will provide crystal clear evidence that our immigration system has no integrity and that this lack of integrity threatens the survival of our nation and our citizens and that nothing being proposed under the aegis of Comprehensive Immigration Reform will address these deadly vulnerabilities.

The importance of the question about what would our leaders be willing to do to prevent the entry and embedding of terrorists and the issue of terrorism came into sharp focus during the stirring and powerful speech given by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on March 3, 2015 when he addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress to voice his extreme concerns about what the sponsorship of terrorism by Iran not only means for Israel but for the United States as well. Indeed, during his remarks the Prime Minister referred to the unsuccessful attempts, over three years ago, by Iranian-backed terrorists to bomb the Saudi Embassy in Washington, DC and kill the Saudi ambassador. The Israeli embassy in our Capitol was also a potential bombing target for those terrorists.

Dems Spin Furiously for Hillary By Matthew Vadum

Democrats are circling the wagons to shield their likely 2016 presidential nominee after it was revealed that Hillary Clinton transacted sensitive government business using her personal email during her time as America’s top diplomat.

The Benghazi bungler, the nation has learned, set up an email system worthy of a James Bond movie villain when she became U.S. secretary of state in 2009. Mrs. Clinton used private instead of government email and even established her own private email server that has been traced back to her Chappaqua, N.Y., home address.

“You do not need a law degree to have an understanding of how troubling this is. There are chain of custody issues, there are preservation of material and documents issues [and] there spoliation of evidence issues,” said Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), head of the Benghazi select committee. “One should also be concerned about the national security implications of former Secretary Clinton of using exclusively personal email accounts for the conducting of official U.S. foreign policy.”

GROUP-THINK IN HIGHER EDUCATION-GEORGE LEEF

George Mason University economics professor Daniel Klein has written about the phenomenon of groupthink in higher education. That is to say, the tendency for disciplines to get “captured” by a certain outlook and become hostile to scholars who are, as the Maoists would have said, “deviationists.” One of the fields where that has occurred is industrial relations (IR). In today’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Brooklyn College professor Mitchell Langbert discusses the way that discipline, once open to a wide array of perspectives, has over the decades turned into a one party state. The departments, journals, and scholarly societies are now only interested in people who favor unionism and government intervention.Those who argue that free markets would be better are persona non grata

The Audacity of Weakness : Victor Davis Hanson

Obama’s morally confused foreign policy is making the world more dangerous by the day. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Congress on Tuesday to warn Americans of the anti-Western threats from theocratic — and likely to soon be nuclear — Iran. Netanyahu came to the U.S. to outline the Iranian plan to remake the Middle East with a new nuclear arsenal. His warning was delivered over the objections of the Obama administration, which wants to cut a deal with Iran that allows the theocracy to continue to enrich lots of uranium.
Netanyahu received a standing ovation for stating the obvious. Iran is currently the greatest global sponsor of terrorism. Tehran now has de facto control over four Middle East nations: Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Iran has serially ignored all past U.S. deadlines to stop nuclear enrichment. It habitually misled U.N. inspectors. It threatens to spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. At one point the Iranian economy was sputtering due to Western sanctions. Hundreds of thousands of reformers hit the streets of Tehran in 2009 to protest what they believed to be the fraudulent results of a presidential election. The theocracy was worried that its nuclear plans would either cause economic collapse due to the sanctions or prompt some sort of Western military response. But all of that has changed due to the Obama administration’s zeal to conclude an agreement with Iran at any cost.

Petraeus Is Protected by a Politicized Justice Department : Andrew McCarthy….see note please

I am the very model of a modern Major-General, I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral, but this libidinous Surge, I just can’t fight the urge…..rsk
He committed several felony violations but is permitted to plead guilty only to a misdemeanor.
David Petraeus, the former top U.S. military commander and CIA director, is reportedly being permitted by the Obama Justice Department to plead guilty to a misdemeanor in order to end the criminal investigation into his mishandling of highly classified information. It is just another example of Obama’s hyper-politicized administration of justice: One set of rules for government insiders like Petraeus, another set for most Americans, and a third — law as a weapon — for use against Obama’s political detractors and scapegoats. General Petraeus committed several serious felony violations of federal law. And not in a one-off lapse of judgment; this was a series of offenses committed over an extended period of time.
Clearly, Petraeus believed he was a law unto himself. A notorious publicity seeker, he treated journals chronicling his highly classified activities as if they were his own property, to be maintained and exhibited as he saw fit — mainly, for use in burnishing his carefully cultivated image — rather than as federal law dictates. Even after he was caught, he continued to lie, obstruct justice, and put the government that had so elevated him to additional burdens to recover the records he was illegally hoarding. Had he not negotiated a plea, Petraeus should have been charged in a multi-count indictment. If he wanted to dispose of the case without a trial that would have further disgraced him, he should have been required to plead guilty to at least one felony count and to have admitted his lies to government officials — misrepresentations that, under the sentencing guidelines that apply to people who don’t get special treatment, instruct judges to impose a term of incarceration.

Michael Moritz : Into Darkness- A Review of “A Brief Stop on the Road From Auschwitz” by Göran Rosenberg

Taken for slave labor from the lines that led to the ovens at Auschwitz, he travels through the infernal archipelago of the work camps.

Over the course of two years in the early 1940s, my grandparents (a former city magistrate and a nurse) were forced into three progressively smaller apartments in Munich and then herded into wooden shacks strewn with straw in the city’s northern reaches—from which, on the eve of Passover 1942, they were marched to the local freight station, jammed into cattle cars and dispatched to Piaski. This Polish town was a holding pen for the gas chambers of Belzec and Sobibór; it is where my grandparents vanish from official vigilance with a note in the record that says “Tod unbekannt”—death unknown.

I have often wondered what they thought and experienced as the Nazi regime stripped them of every bit of their existence for the sole reason of their Jewishness. Göran Rosenberg, a Swedish journalist, had a similar curiosity, though in a far more intimate way, as it was his parents who endured the horrors of the Holocaust. His father, David, was born in Lodz in Poland and made the rare journey not just to Auschwitz but from it in the final, desperate year of World War II.

Notable & Quotable: M. Stanton Evans ‘That Liberty is Indivisible, and that Political Freedom Cannot Long Exist Without Economic Freedom.’

http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-m-stanton-evans-1425513197

On Sept. 11, 1960, a group of young conservatives who met at the home of William F. Buckley Jr. in Sharon, Conn., issued what became known as the Sharon Statement; written by M. Stanton Evans, who died Tuesday at age 80, the statement asserted these beliefs:

That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;

That liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom;

That the purpose of government is to protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice;

That when government ventures beyond these rightful functions, it accumulates power, which tends to diminish order and liberty;

That the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power;

That the genius of the Constitution—the division of powers—is summed up in the clause that reserves primacy to the several states, or to the people, in those spheres not specifically delegated to the Federal government;

That the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government, and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs;

That when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation; that when it takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both;

That we will be free only so long as the national sovereignty of the United States is secure; that history shows periods of freedom are rare, and can exist only when free citizens concertedly defend their rights against all enemies;

That the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties;

That the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with, this menace; and

That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the just interests of the United States?