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Qatar: The World’s Wealthiest Family-Run Gas Station by Burak Bekdil see note please

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

The cognoscenti pronounce Qatar, quite appropriately as “gutter.”….rsk

Many people describe Qatar’s treatment of expatriate laborers on World Cup sites as “modern day slavery.” Some 1,200 workers have already died and, according to warnings, up to 4,000 could perish before World Cup begins.

“The fact that thousands must die to build 12 fine stadiums for us has nothing to do with football,” said William Kvist of the Danish national team.

“We are committed to helping the destitute,” said Hamad bin Nasser al-Thani of Qatar’s royal family, who is chairman of the Doha-based Qatar Charity. How nice!

Why not promote “Islamic values” by taking in even just a few thousand Syrian refugees, instead of praising Turkey for taking in nearly three million Syrian Muslim refugees and praising it for promoting “Islamic values?”

The proud Gulf state of Qatar boasts human habitation dating back to 50,000 years ago. It may not be the only country across the world with such an impressive historical habitation story. But what makes it unique is its skillfully planned preservation tradition, particularly its persistent touch on medieval, not ancient, history.

Qatar is the world’s wealthiest country, or more of a family-run gas station. It boasts abiding by various aspects of the sharia (Islamic religious law), which, according to its constitution, it considers the main source of its legislation. In Qatar, flogging and stoning are legal forms of punishment. Apostasy (leaving Islam) is a crime punishable by the death penalty.

The Qataris, not knowing that their grandchildren would one day be the best strategic allies of their Ottoman colonialists’ grandchildren, fought the Ottomans to gain their independence in 1915, ending the 44-year-long Ottoman rule in the peninsula. Independence came at last, and lasted for about a year — until 1916, when Qatar became a British protectorate, retaining that status until 1971.

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Iran: Ayatollah Khamenei Plans Next Supreme Leader by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

Since Khamenei took power in 1989, he has shown no deviation from Khomeini’s revolutionary ideologies. Opposing the United States, “the Great Satan,” and the rejection of Israel’s existence are two of the most critical pillars of Iran’s revolutionary ideals — what defines the raison d’être of the Iranian regime, as well as what shapes Khamenei’s ideological and foreign policy.

Other revolutionary core values that Khamenei desires the next supreme leader to hold include supporting Palestinian and Lebanese armed groups against Israel, maintaining Iran’s nuclear program, and being the supreme leader of the entire Islamic world — not only the leader of the Shiites. Khamenei’s official website refers to him as “the Supreme Leader of Muslims,” not the Supreme Leader of “Iran.”

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the past did not seem to wish to discuss topics linked to his successor — — the next Supreme Leader. Nevertheless, recently the trend has altered. Khamenei has begun dictating his policies, preferences, and priorities in what kind of Supreme Leader he would rather the Iranian regime have, and who, after his death, the Assembly of Experts ought to choose.

In a recent meeting, the 76-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei met with some members of the Assembly of Experts, and pointed out that “a supreme leader has to be a revolutionary” and he advised that members not to “be bashful” in selecting the next Supreme Leader.

Iran’s constitution yields the Supreme Leader the greatest authority in the country. The Supreme Leader is the single most crucial figure, the highest-ranking political and religious authority in Iran. He directly or indirectly controls the three branches of the government; the judiciary, the legislature and the executive branch.

But what does a “revolutionary” exactly mean to Khamenei? From Khamenei’s perspective, a revolutionary supreme leader would be someone who forcefully pursues the ideological principles of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, and the core ideals of Iran’s 1979 Revolution.

Since Khamenei took power in 1989, he has shown no deviation from Khomeini’s revolutionary ideologies. Opposing the United States, “the Great Satan,” and the rejection of Israel’s existence are two of the most critical pillars of Iran’s revolutionary ideals — what defines the raison d’être of the Iranian regime, as well as what shapes Khamenei’s ideological and foreign policy.

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The Obama Narrative Goes to Hiroshima: Claudia Rosett

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

This past Friday, President Obama became the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima. There, in that solemn setting, he delivered a speech so grandiose, so full of sophistries, so stuffed with America-denigrating baloney, that on those grounds alone it ought to qualify as historic — except in essence he’s said it all before. I don’t know if White House Boy Wonder Ben Rhodes wrote this particular riff on the The Narrative. But if he did not, we may safely assume that Obama has found another speechwriter who is a perfect replica.

No, Obama did not explicitly apologize for America’s dropping of the atomic bomb. Rather, he worked around to it by implication, stripping the act of almost all historical context, lumping together all civilizations and nations, and all wars — whatever the reasons — in one big stew, and urging, as his solution for the planet (imperfect America included), a “moral revolution” of which he evidently considers himself the prophet.

How humanity might achieve this moral revolution, Obama did not clarify. (I doubt that Moscow, Beijing, Tehran or Pyongyang were chastened by Obama’s urging that “we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.”). Neither did he mention that in the 71 years since America used atomic bombs to end World War II, it has never used them again, and with America standing as guardian of the free world, neither has anyone else — though with Obama’s shrinking of the American military, apology tours for America’s past, snubbing of America’s allies and favors to America’s enemies, the chances of nuclear war are again on the rise.

In his Hiroshima speech, Obama skipped right past such matters as why America entered and fought World War II, what it meant or why it made a difference who won. He made no mention of Pearl Harbor, or the agonizing decisions of his predecessors, or the blood and sacrifice of a generation of Americans who fought for freedom against Nazi fascism and for liberty against the onslaught of Japanese imperial conquest. He said nothing about the colossal benefits that an American-led victory delivered to the world.

Instead, Obama began his speech by conjuring a cosmos in which, out of a blue sky, the bomb dropped itself: CONTINUE AT SITE

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Hillary’s Crooked Defense In Clintonworld, anything that isn’t found criminal becomes permissible.By William McGurn

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

“I’m not a crook.”

In 1973 the sitting president, Richard Nixon, used these words at a news conference to deny allegations he had profited off his public service.

In 2016 an aspiring president, Hillary Clinton, as part of her campaign for the White House, is advancing an aggressive variant of the Nixon defense. It runs like this: Anything that isn’t criminal is permissible—and therefore none of it should be disqualifying for the Oval Office.

This has become the go-to argument for Team Clinton these days. Thus Maryland Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings was quick out of the box last week when the State Department’s inspector general released a damning report finding that then-Secretary of State Clinton had defied the department’s rules by setting up her private email server. Mr. Cummings, ABC News said, pointed out that the inspector general’s report “does not accuse Clinton of any crime.” The implication is that it therefore doesn’t matter.

Chalk it up as one legacy of the first Clinton presidency, which has prepared the way for the second. Because by refusing to resign after being caught out in an affair with an intern, President Bill Clinton successfully lowered the bar for would-be President Hillary.

In his fight to remain in office, Mr. Clinton’s argument was that because sex between two consenting adults—even between the president of the United States and a subordinate 27 years his junior—wasn’t a crime, it was nobody’s business but his and his family’s. In this brave new world, even perjury turned out not to be a crime when Bill Clinton did it, because it was about sex.

Today the No Crime/No Foul defense defines the case for Mrs. Clinton. And she and her defenders have been invoking it for years:

“There were no criminal violations involved here.” The speaker was Clinton Budget Director Leon Panetta in July 1993, putting forward the White House party line on the firing of seven people in the travel office, in which some had detected Hillary’s hand. Three years later, an internal memo would surface confirming Mrs. Clinton as the force behind the sackings.

“As far as even a breath of criminal activity by either the president and the first lady, it will turn out to be nothing at all.” This time it was White House counsel Lloyd Cutler in March 1994, dismissing the inquiry into the smelly Whitewater land deal. The remark came at the same time Mrs. Clinton was explaining to the press that she hadn’t been forthcoming about the details because she had been trying to protect her family’s privacy. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Out-Clintoning the Clintons We’re all semioticians now, trying to decode the meaning of Donald Trump’s doublespeak. Bret Stephens see note please

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

Oh Puleez! The Clintons take the Olympic gold in chicanery, lying, and fraud…..you don’t have to like or vote for Trump…..but nothing beats Hillary for prevarication and poor judgement with respect to Israel (Max Blumenthal’s e-mails), trying to overthrow democracy in Honduras, resetting the button with Russia, Benghazi, blind spots on North Korea, and mum on global jihad….rsk
The other day I briefly caught sight of—who else?— Donald Trump, on—what else?—“The O’Reilly Factor,” talking about the Middle East. The presumptive Republican nominee was airing his opinion that we “should have never gone into Iraq, but when we got out we should have kept the oil.”

Kept the oil? Like, slipped it in our pocket on the way out?

This wasn’t the first time Mr. Trump has expounded on this theme, and frequent repetition has not made his views any more coherent. Mr. Trump says we ought to steer clear of the Middle East’s imbroglios—but then says we should seize its oil fields. He lambastes our allies as freeloaders and military nincompoops who throw down their arms at the first sign of danger—but then says he would expect these same allies to provide perimeter defense for the oil fields we’ve stolen from them.

Point out these contradictions to the candidate, and he’s likely to rejoin that you’re a loser who’s been wrong about everything and doesn’t understand the art of leadership. Point them out to his admirers and apologists, and they’ll say you’re missing the deeper point, which is that Mr. Trump is reflecting the anger of everyday Americans who want a pragmatist in the White House whose instinct is to put America first and negotiate the details later.

What you won’t get is a satisfactory response to the basic question: How, other than massively garrisoning the Middle East, does Mr. Trump propose to keep the oil?

There was a time when there was a price to be paid in American politics for evading questions. “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Sen. Howard Baker famously asked in 1973 of Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal. The country never got a believable answer from the White House, and Nixon resigned the presidency the following year.CONTINUE AT SITE

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SALUTING THE ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCE: RUTHIE BLUM

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

Certain tough choices that the Israeli military regularly faces have been overlooked lately, and it’s no wonder. As the government ironed out its coalition agreements to make way for the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as defense minister — and in the wake of statements made by top brass over the past few months — the focus of discussion has been the “morality” of the IDF.

Though “purity of arms” is not a new topic of debate in Israel, it recently became a particularly hot bone of contention, after an IDF soldier shot and killed a subdued Palestinian terrorist in Hebron. Though the soldier is on trial for manslaughter, and his guilt or innocence will be established in court, his action has been used as an example of what’s wrong with Israeli ethics in general and the dangers of such turpitude infecting the army in particular.

Since this is what the world’s BDS advocates and other anti-Semites have been trying tirelessly to convey in word and deed, they couldn’t have been more pleased to be given unwitting legitimacy by the likes of the IDF chief of staff and his deputy. The former handed them the utter fallacy that poverty leads to terrorism. The latter virtually likened the atmosphere of the Jewish state to that of 1930s Germany. And the now-former defense minister, Moshe Ya’alon, defended both of them, while offering his own warnings about the perils of abandoning societal and military morals.

Meanwhile, although Israelis have been forced to contend with a surge in Palestinian terrorism that came to be called the “lone-wolf intifada,” the international onslaught — from the corridors of the United Nations to the British Labour Party to university campuses across the world — do not restrict their criticism to what is currently going on in Israel. No, they continue to raise the issue of IDF behavior during Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s 2014 war against Hamas in Gaza.

Never mind that the war itself was not only justified, but late in coming, as the bloodthirsty terrorist organization fired rockets, missiles and mortars into Israeli population centers without let-up. Forget that an extensive network of tunnels for the smuggling of weapons and kidnapping of Israelis was revealed prior to and during the incursion. Ignore the fact that the many millions of dollars and euros provided for the subsequent rehabilitation of the Hamas-controlled enclave have been spent on rebuilding tunnel-and-rocket capabilities. And dismiss the glorification of terrorists — as well as the continued calls for the killing of Jews — by Palestinian leaders. In the eyes of the Israel-bashers, all of the above pales in comparison to the ills inherent in and perpetuated by the Jewish state’s flawed democracy.

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Blaming the victim, Part I How Israel is blamed, instead of praised, for not capitulating to Arab demands.Dr. Alex Grobman

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

“I told him that peace in the Middle East was in his hands, that he had a unique opportunity to either bring it into being or kill it….” (U.S. President Jimmy Carter to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin) [1]

Blaming Israel is a common practice in the media and in the West. In a conversation with Professor Graham Allison, at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry attributed the escalation in violence in Israel in 2016 to the “massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years. Now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing.” He feared that “unless we get going, a two-state solution could conceivably be stolen from everybody.” [2]

Kerry’s public rebuke provides the Palestinian Arabs with the justification to pursue their random stabbings, stoning and car-rammings, which they consider to be an inalienable right. The Palestinian Authority is even seeking international recognition for the “right” to kill Israelis. Itamar Marcus, founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch, reports that the PA asserts “it has the right to kill Israeli civilians, and they quote UN resolution 3236 of 1974 which ‘recognizes the right of the Palestinian people to regain its rights by all means.’ The PA interprets ‘all means’ as including violence and killing of civilians.”

Marcus points out the PA deliberately ignores the rest of the resolution that declares “the use of ‘all means’ should be ‘in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations…’ The UN Charter forbids targeting civilians, even in war. [3]

For Kerry, Netanyahu and Israel are the problem. Only pressuring the Israelis will bring about a resolution to the conflict. That the Arabs have never accepted a two-state solution for religious and political reasons has not deterred American administrations from pursuing this fantasy. So long as they deny the independent nation-state status of Israel as a Jewish state, they are the root cause of a dispute that they make inherently impossible to be international in nature, thereby unresolvable under international auspices. Only when the Palestinian Arabs are willing to recognize the right of the Jews to their ancestral homeland, can there be any hope of resolving this dispute.”[4]

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Kristol’s Betrayal Gets Serious David Horowitz

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, Bill Kristol doubled down on his betrayal of this country with a pair of tweets:

“Just a heads up over this holiday weekend: There will be an independent candidate — an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance,” Kristol tweeted.

He also said, “Those accused of betraying GOP by opposing Trump can take heart from P. Henry 251 years ago today: ‘If this be treason, make the most of it!’”

This fatuous invocation of an American patriot to justify the betrayal typifies the arrogant disregard for political realities shared by all those involved in a defection that could produce even greater disasters than the Obama era’s 400,000 deaths by jihad and 20 million refugees across the Middle East.

A week earlier, a “Never Trump” diatribe appeared in National Review, written by Charles Murray. To summarize why “Trump is unfit outside the normal parameters” to be president, Murray cited these words by NY Times columnist David Brooks:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa … He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12.

This is a perfect instance of “Trump derangement syndrome,” the underlying animus that motivates Kristol and his destructive cohorts. Dismissing Trump as an ignoramus and a stunted twelve-year-old is the stuff of schoolyard put-downs, not a serious critique of someone with Trump’s considerable achievements. Yet this is typical of Trump’s diehard opponents on the right. Is Trump more unprepared than Barack Obama whose qualification for the presidency was a lifetime career as a left-wing agitator? And how did that work out? Despite the lacunae in his executive resume, Obama is now regarded as “one of the most consequential presidents in American history” by reasonably qualified experts.

Can Trump be reasonably criticized, and is he something of a loose cannon? Of course he can, and yes he is. But criticisms that focus exclusively on the candidate miss the larger reality of this election, which is not merely a contest between two candidates but a clash between two parties and constituencies with radically differing views of what this country is and should be about, and even more importantly about the threats we face and how to deal with them.

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The Twisting Noose Joan Swirsky

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

When I think about the slow and inexorable––but, of course, inevitable––political demise of Hillary Clinton, I am reminded of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men,” which ends with this haunting refrain:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Hillary’s whimper, it seems clear, will come with an impotently furious last gasp, as the noose that Barack Obama has placed around her neck tightens and tightens and tightens until all we hear is her spasmodic cough, a few hoarse protestations, and a final pitiful bleat––and not the ear-splitting assault of “that voice,” which I described in a previous article.

How could this happen to the woman who former Democrat House Ways and Means Committee Chairman and convicted felon Dan Rostenkowski called “the smartest woman in the world”?

No doubt it started at Wellesley College where Hillary, born to a family of Republicans and an avid supporter herself of the1964 arch-conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, as well as the president of the Wellesley College chapter of College Republicans, was irresistibly attracted to the writings of radical leftist Saul Alinsky, of Rules for Radicals fame, who she wrote her thesis about and also kept in close touch with for years after she graduated.

At her graduation in 1969, Republican Senator Edward Brooke delivered a stirring and enthusiastically received commencement address. Hillary––whose graduation speech followed––exhibited a shocking display of rudeness when she slammed the first black senator to be elected to the U.S. Senate. It would not be the last time she displayed a remarkable aptitude for alienating an audience.

At Yale Law School, she hooked her wagon to the star of fellow student Bill Clinton, and when the roguish good ole boy became governor of Arkansas, Hillary served 12 years as the state’s First Lady, racking up an impressive list of scandals of her very own. The short list includes:

A $100,000 windfall from cattle futures after a $1,000 investment (all the money she had in her account at the time).
The Castle Grande real estate scam.
Her role as attorney for the Rose law firm in what would become the putatively criminal Whitewater affair that would follow her to the White House.
The serial philandering of her husband in which she was either a willing collaborator or, as Donald Trump has said, an “enabler.”

THE SCANDAL QUEEN MOVES UP

Within months of taking up residence in the White House as First Lady of the United States, Hillary put her scandal expertise to work. In May 1993, she was accused of having a central hand in firing several long-time employees of the White House Travel Office in order to give the pricey travel business to her Hollywood pals. A couple of months later, in July 1993, White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster was said to have committed suicide, although the case for this murder has been made persuasively by, among others, Newsmax.com founder Christopher Ruddy, in his 1993 book, “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation.”

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The Liberal Blind Spot Nicholas Kristof

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

CLASSIC liberalism exalted tolerance, reflected in a line often (and probably wrongly) attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

On university campuses, that is sometimes updated to: “I disapprove of what you say, so shut up.”

In a column a few weeks ago, I offered “a confession of liberal intolerance,” criticizing my fellow progressives for promoting all kinds of diversity on campuses — except ideological. I argued that universities risk becoming liberal echo chambers and hostile environments for conservatives, and especially for evangelical Christians.

As I see it, we are hypocritical: We welcome people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

It’s rare for a column to inspire widespread agreement, but that one led to a consensus: Almost every liberal agreed that I was dead wrong.

“You don’t diversify with idiots,” asserted the reader comment on The Times’s website that was most recommended by readers (1,099 of them). Another: Conservatives “are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers.”

Finally, this one recommended by readers: “I am grossly disappointed in you for this essay, Mr. Kristof. You have spent so much time in troubled places seemingly calling out misogyny and bigotry. And yet here you are, scolding and shaming progressives for not mindlessly accepting patriarchy, misogyny, complementarianism, and hateful, hateful bigotry against the LGBTQ community into the academy.”

Mixed in here are legitimate issues. I don’t think that a university should hire a nincompoop who disputes evolution, or a racist who preaches inequality. But as I see it, the bigger problem is not that conservatives are infiltrating social science departments to spread hatred, but rather that liberals have turned departments into enclaves of ideological homogeneity.

Sure, there are dumb or dogmatic conservatives, just as there are dumb and dogmatic liberals. So let’s avoid those who are dumb and dogmatic, without using politics or faith as a shorthand for mental acuity.