Posts
Not a Muslim, but there's certainly legitimate room for concern over Obama's recent repeated actions By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
A new Pew Center poll says nearly one-in-five Americans think Barack Obama is a Muslim. Perhaps that is because of reports like the one blared on the cover of the September 6 edition of the tabloid, The Globe, replete with photos of Mr. Obama in Muslim garb: It found "shocking proof" in a Nile TV interview given earlier this year by the Egyptian Foreign Affairs Minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, disclosing that "the American President told me in confidence that he is a Muslim."
A better explanation is that more Americans are taking note of the accumulating series of statements and actions by the President that display favoritism, or worse, towards Muslims. That would be troubling enough; after all, no chief executive is supposed to support one subset of us over others.
Growing numbers of our countrymen may be on to something else about the Obama presidency, however, that is even more alarming: In instance after instance, Mr. Obama has seemingly bent over backwards to accommodate not just Muslim-Americans, but a deeply problematic organization - the Muslim Brotherhood (or Ikhwan) - that purports to represent their interests here.
In fact, the Brotherhood seeks to do something most Muslims in this country - and needless to say, the rest of us - do not want: According to the organization's mission statement, it is waging "a kind of grand jihad eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and G0D's religion is made victorious over all other religions."
One need not believe that the President of the United States has actually embraced this radical goal to be concerned. It is enough that he has repeatedly said and done things that conform to, or otherwise advance, the Ikhwan's agenda as articulated by the Brotherhood's myriad front organizations in the United States.
Consider the following, necessarily partial listing of actions - some symbolic, some substantive - that can legitimately be seen by the Muslim Brothers as evidence of our President's submission (the literally meaning of "Islam" and the goal of all those who, like the Ikhwan, seek to impose shariah worldwide):
* Mr. Obama declared in his inaugural address that, "The United States is a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers." The ordering of "Muslims" before "Jews" was clearly deliberate, since the latter have been and are in the United States in far larger numbers than the former and have played a much more important role in the nation's history from its founding. Subsequently, he went even further, describing (inaccurately) America as "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."
* In his much-ballyhooed address to "the Muslim world" delivered in Cairo in June 2009, Mr. Obama signaled his determination not only to "reach out" to followers of Islam. He also committed himself to an initiative - clearing the way for Muslims to "fulfill their zakat (tithing for charity) obligations" - that would have the practical effect of giving Brotherhood operatives (whose representatives he insisted be in the audience) more latitude to engage in material support for terrorism and, thereby, wage their "civilization jihad" in and from America.
* In September 2009, the Obama administration co-sponsored a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution eagerly sought by the Muslim Brotherhood and its friends. The resolution called on member nations to "prohibit and criminalize" speech that offends Islam and its followers. Such an accommodation would clearly violate the Constitution's First Amendment guarantees of freedom of expression.
* Speaking of the Constitution, the Obama administration is arguing in federal court that the U.S. government's ownership of AIG, which happens to be the largest purveyor of shariah-compliant insurance products in the world, does not violate the Establishment Clause's separation of church and state.
* We recently learned that, according to President Obama, the NASA Administrator's "foremost" priority is to make Muslims feel better about themselves and their history. Job 1 is not assuring U.S. supremacy in space, or even assured access to it; it's Muslim outreach and therapy.
* Then, last month, President Obama endorsed the megamosque near Ground Zero in a White House Iftar dinner attended by prominent Muslim Brotherhood operatives. Subsequent efforts to distance himself from that stance, in the face of intense criticism from the public and politicians of both parties, has only put into even sharper focus his pandering to this community.
* Now, my Center for Security Policy colleague Christine Brim has broken the story of a major new Obama initiative in that vein. In the words of the largest Muslim Brotherhood organization in the country, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), "A phenomenal next step has been made where government Iftars become coupled with workshops to provide resources and benefit the Muslim community. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (DOA) and the [Muslim Brotherhood-associated] Coordinating Council of Muslim Organizations (CCMO) have paired the first of such events, scheduled for August 31, 2010."
The latest poll suggests that most Americans do not believe Barack Obama is a Muslim. And for the vast majority of us, it would not matter even if he were - provided he does not subscribe to the Brotherhood's creed: "G0d is our objective; the Koran is our law; the Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations."
Still, the public is clearly increasingly, and rightly, concerned about Mr. Obama's policies of favoritism and submission towards the worst elements in Islam. Before tax-dollars are spent to that end, we need a national debate about such policies, and the grave dangers posed by their seeming principal beneficiary: the Muslim Brotherhood.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Are you gonna believe us about Obama or your own lying eyes and ears?
The apparent initiator of the letter is Obama associate Jim Wallis of the Sojourners group, a group funded by atheist George Soros
Censoring Questions about Obama’s Religion
By Cliff Kincaid
In a major liberal initiative to curtail discussion of President Obama’s religious identity, over 70 Christian leaders and denominational heads have signed a letter saying that questions about the religious philosophy of the President of the United Stateshttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/mag-glass_10x10.gif should be ignored and suppressed by the major media.
The letter demands that the media “offer no further support or airtime to those who misrepresent and call into question the President’s Christian faith.”
The apparent initiator of the letter is Obama associate Jim Wallis of the Sojourners group, a group funded by atheist George Soros.
The Eleison Group, which represents the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Wallis’s Sojourners group, arranged the release of the letter and has handled publicity for it. The Eleison Group’s purpose is to mobilize “more traditional progressive ‘base’ faith voters who are often overlooked in Democratic and progressive outreach.”
The president of the Eleison Group, Burns Strider, has served as an adviser to Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and regional Communications Director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Pelosi, a liberal Catholic, invoked St. Joseph, revered for being the foster father of Jesus and the husband of the Virgin Mary, in the successful push for passage of Obama’s socialized medicine plan.
The “airtime” alluded to in the letter has mostly been devoted to the controversy over opinion polls finding that significant numbers of people are confused about Obama’s religious identity and that some believe he is a Muslim.
The questions that have been offered by Accuracy in Media concern Obama’s claims about being baptized in the Christian faith. AIM believes that politicians should be held accountable for the claims they make about themselves, even on personal matters of religious faith.
Obama’s aides have claimed the President is a committed and practicing Christian and that he was baptized in Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ. But he has gone to church only a few times since he became President.
“We understand that these are contentious times,” say the Christian leaders, “but the personal faith of our leaders should not be up for public debate.”
However, the First Amendment expressly permits not only freedom of religion but freedom of the press.
The Christian leaders say, “We believe that questioning, and especially misrepresenting, the faith of a confessing believer goes too far.” They do not identify who has misrepresented Obama’s faith.
But other releases from the Eleison Group attack Fox News, talk radio, and “right-wing misinformation” about Obama’s religious affiliation and views.
Strider and his associate, Eric Sapp, write, “The 4th Estate and reporters and editors who care about the truth need to wake up to what is happening. Bloggers and independent journalists need to rise up and demand accountability (even of those on our side). And all Americans need to hold our news organizations accountable.”
AIM also wants accountability. What AIM has done is quote directly from Obama’s books about his spiritual and political journey. We have pointed out that Obama’s claim about his own baptism, as reported in his second memoir, The Audacity of Hope, is subject to interpretation because of the lack of detail about how and when he was baptized and by whom. It appears, based on information provided by Obama’s own church, that Obama was describing how he became a member of that church.
Obama’s claim of being baptized is presented in the context of discussing the fact that he was not born and baptized a Christian. He describes his Muslim father and grandfather and attendance in a Muslim school as he was growing up. Obama acknowledges that, before he joined Wright’s church, some people regarded him as a Muslim. Wright himself dabbled in Islam before establishing his church, Obama concedes.
The proof of the baptism claim is precisely what is lacking in his book. There is no need or demand for a baptismal certificate, but there is no detail about the ceremony, other than talking about a walk down an aisle and a profession of faith, and no information about who performed the baptism and who attended. Traditionally, water is used in such a ceremony. There is no reference to water in Obama’s book.
To add further to the mystery, AIM cited evidence that Christian baptisms were not required to join Wright’s church, which emphasized liberation theology, and that Muslims were permitted to join and not disavow their faith.
“This is not a political issue,” say the Christian leaders. “The signers of this letter come from different political and ideological backgrounds, but we are unified in our belief in Jesus Christ. As Christian pastors and leaders, we believe that fellow Christians need to be an encouragement to those who call Christ their savior, not question the veracity of their faith.”
However, what is being questioned is not his faith but the veracity of his claim in his book, published as he was preparing his presidential run, that he underwent a baptism. Was this claim inserted into the book to make Obama more politically palatable to the American electorate who would be naturally suspicious about what the media called his “unorthodox” religious background?
Some Christians claim that baptism is not required to become a Christian. Obama could have claimed that he became a Christian in Wright’s church through a simple profession of faith and that a formal baptism was not required. Instead, however, he claimed to have undergone the procedure.
The questions are legitimate because Obama does not have a pristine track record of being open and honest about his background and associates.
For example, in his previous book, Dreams from My Father, he misrepresented the identity of his childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, named in his book only as “Frank.” This individual, who had a major impact on Obama before he went off to college, turned out to be Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Partyhttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/mag-glass_10x10.gif member with a 600-page FBI file.
Claims about a baptism cannot be taken at face value, especially because his statements and actions as President have led so many to believe he has a pro-Muslim bent. These have led to the perceptions, captured in the public opinion polls, that Obama may not be a Christian.
The controversy will not go away just because a few religious leaders demand that the media stop covering it.
Censoring Questions about Obama’s Religion
By Cliff Kincaid
In a major liberal initiative to curtail discussion of President Obama’s religious identity, over 70 Christian leaders and denominational heads have signed a letter saying that questions about the religious philosophy of the President of the United Stateshttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/mag-glass_10x10.gif should be ignored and suppressed by the major media.
The letter demands that the media “offer no further support or airtime to those who misrepresent and call into question the President’s Christian faith.”
The apparent initiator of the letter is Obama associate Jim Wallis of the Sojourners group, a group funded by atheist George Soros.
The Eleison Group, which represents the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Wallis’s Sojourners group, arranged the release of the letter and has handled publicity for it. The Eleison Group’s purpose is to mobilize “more traditional progressive ‘base’ faith voters who are often overlooked in Democratic and progressive outreach.”
The president of the Eleison Group, Burns Strider, has served as an adviser to Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and regional Communications Director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Pelosi, a liberal Catholic, invoked St. Joseph, revered for being the foster father of Jesus and the husband of the Virgin Mary, in the successful push for passage of Obama’s socialized medicine plan.
The “airtime” alluded to in the letter has mostly been devoted to the controversy over opinion polls finding that significant numbers of people are confused about Obama’s religious identity and that some believe he is a Muslim.
The questions that have been offered by Accuracy in Media concern Obama’s claims about being baptized in the Christian faith. AIM believes that politicians should be held accountable for the claims they make about themselves, even on personal matters of religious faith.
Obama’s aides have claimed the President is a committed and practicing Christian and that he was baptized in Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ. But he has gone to church only a few times since he became President.
“We understand that these are contentious times,” say the Christian leaders, “but the personal faith of our leaders should not be up for public debate.”
However, the First Amendment expressly permits not only freedom of religion but freedom of the press.
The Christian leaders say, “We believe that questioning, and especially misrepresenting, the faith of a confessing believer goes too far.” They do not identify who has misrepresented Obama’s faith.
But other releases from the Eleison Group attack Fox News, talk radio, and “right-wing misinformation” about Obama’s religious affiliation and views.
Strider and his associate, Eric Sapp, write, “The 4th Estate and reporters and editors who care about the truth need to wake up to what is happening. Bloggers and independent journalists need to rise up and demand accountability (even of those on our side). And all Americans need to hold our news organizations accountable.”
AIM also wants accountability. What AIM has done is quote directly from Obama’s books about his spiritual and political journey. We have pointed out that Obama’s claim about his own baptism, as reported in his second memoir, The Audacity of Hope, is subject to interpretation because of the lack of detail about how and when he was baptized and by whom. It appears, based on information provided by Obama’s own church, that Obama was describing how he became a member of that church.
Obama’s claim of being baptized is presented in the context of discussing the fact that he was not born and baptized a Christian. He describes his Muslim father and grandfather and attendance in a Muslim school as he was growing up. Obama acknowledges that, before he joined Wright’s church, some people regarded him as a Muslim. Wright himself dabbled in Islam before establishing his church, Obama concedes.
The proof of the baptism claim is precisely what is lacking in his book. There is no need or demand for a baptismal certificate, but there is no detail about the ceremony, other than talking about a walk down an aisle and a profession of faith, and no information about who performed the baptism and who attended. Traditionally, water is used in such a ceremony. There is no reference to water in Obama’s book.
To add further to the mystery, AIM cited evidence that Christian baptisms were not required to join Wright’s church, which emphasized liberation theology, and that Muslims were permitted to join and not disavow their faith.
“This is not a political issue,” say the Christian leaders. “The signers of this letter come from different political and ideological backgrounds, but we are unified in our belief in Jesus Christ. As Christian pastors and leaders, we believe that fellow Christians need to be an encouragement to those who call Christ their savior, not question the veracity of their faith.”
However, what is being questioned is not his faith but the veracity of his claim in his book, published as he was preparing his presidential run, that he underwent a baptism. Was this claim inserted into the book to make Obama more politically palatable to the American electorate who would be naturally suspicious about what the media called his “unorthodox” religious background?
Some Christians claim that baptism is not required to become a Christian. Obama could have claimed that he became a Christian in Wright’s church through a simple profession of faith and that a formal baptism was not required. Instead, however, he claimed to have undergone the procedure.
The questions are legitimate because Obama does not have a pristine track record of being open and honest about his background and associates.
For example, in his previous book, Dreams from My Father, he misrepresented the identity of his childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, named in his book only as “Frank.” This individual, who had a major impact on Obama before he went off to college, turned out to be Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Partyhttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/mag-glass_10x10.gif member with a 600-page FBI file.
Claims about a baptism cannot be taken at face value, especially because his statements and actions as President have led so many to believe he has a pro-Muslim bent. These have led to the perceptions, captured in the public opinion polls, that Obama may not be a Christian.
The controversy will not go away just because a few religious leaders demand that the media stop covering it.
New insanity: tax free muni bonds for Ground Zero Mosque
****Let's be clear: issuing "tax-free" debt costs ALL taxpayers to benefit the issuer.****
Ground Zero Muslim center may get public financingNEW YORK (Reuters) – The Muslim center planned near the site of the World Trade Center attack could qualify for tax-free financing, a spokesman for City Comptroller John Liu said on Friday, and Liu is willing to consider approving the public subsidy.
The Democratic comptroller's spokesman, Scott Sieber, said Liu supported the project. The center has sparked an intense debate over U.S. religious freedoms and the sanctity of the Trade Center site, where nearly 3,000 perished in the September 11, 2001 attack.
"If it turns out to be financially feasible and if they can demonstrate an ability to pay off the bonds and comply with the laws concerning tax-exempt financing, we'd certainly consider it," Sieber told Reuters.
Spokesmen for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor David Paterson and the Islamic center and were not immediately available.
The proposed center, two blocks from the Trade Center site in lower Manhattan, has caused a split between people who lost relatives and friends in the attack, as well as conservative politicians, and those who support the project. Among those who support it are the mayor, civic and religious groups, and some families of victims.
The mosque's backers hope to raise a total of $70 million in tax-exempt debt to build the center, according to the New York Times. Tax laws allow such funding for religiously affiliated non-profits if they can prove the facility will benefit the general public and their religious activities are funded separately.
The bonds could be issued through a local development corporation created for this purpose, experts said.
The Islamic center would have to repay the bonds, which likely would be less expensive than taxable debt.
New York City's Industrial Development Authority could not issue debt for the center because the state civic facilities law, which governed this type of financing for non-profits, was allowed to expire about two years ago.
****Meanwhile, the Greek Orthodox Church which was destroyed on 9-11 has yet to be approved for rebuilding, even with private funds.****
Ground Zero Muslim center may get public financingNEW YORK (Reuters) – The Muslim center planned near the site of the World Trade Center attack could qualify for tax-free financing, a spokesman for City Comptroller John Liu said on Friday, and Liu is willing to consider approving the public subsidy.
The Democratic comptroller's spokesman, Scott Sieber, said Liu supported the project. The center has sparked an intense debate over U.S. religious freedoms and the sanctity of the Trade Center site, where nearly 3,000 perished in the September 11, 2001 attack.
"If it turns out to be financially feasible and if they can demonstrate an ability to pay off the bonds and comply with the laws concerning tax-exempt financing, we'd certainly consider it," Sieber told Reuters.
Spokesmen for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor David Paterson and the Islamic center and were not immediately available.
The proposed center, two blocks from the Trade Center site in lower Manhattan, has caused a split between people who lost relatives and friends in the attack, as well as conservative politicians, and those who support the project. Among those who support it are the mayor, civic and religious groups, and some families of victims.
The mosque's backers hope to raise a total of $70 million in tax-exempt debt to build the center, according to the New York Times. Tax laws allow such funding for religiously affiliated non-profits if they can prove the facility will benefit the general public and their religious activities are funded separately.
The bonds could be issued through a local development corporation created for this purpose, experts said.
The Islamic center would have to repay the bonds, which likely would be less expensive than taxable debt.
New York City's Industrial Development Authority could not issue debt for the center because the state civic facilities law, which governed this type of financing for non-profits, was allowed to expire about two years ago.
****Meanwhile, the Greek Orthodox Church which was destroyed on 9-11 has yet to be approved for rebuilding, even with private funds.****
Friday, August 27, 2010
Ex-CIA says Ground Zero Mosque triumphalist Muslim symbol
http://tinyurl.com/2f5gut5
Ex-CIA Official Says Mosque Is 'Victory' for Terrorists
Michael Scheuer, the former top CIA official charged with hunting down Osama bin Laden, says a ground zero mosque will be a "symbol of victory" to Islamic extremists. In an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV he also warns of growing terror threats to the U.S. and the implications of Iran's nuclear program.
Read the Full Story and See the Video -- Go Here Now ...
Ex-CIA Official Says Mosque Is 'Victory' for Terrorists
Michael Scheuer, the former top CIA official charged with hunting down Osama bin Laden, says a ground zero mosque will be a "symbol of victory" to Islamic extremists. In an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV he also warns of growing terror threats to the U.S. and the implications of Iran's nuclear program.
Read the Full Story and See the Video -- Go Here Now ...
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
British anti-Semitism is ancient and continuing
Shimon Peres versus the Brits by Efraim Karsh
Jerusalem Post August 2, 2010
http://www.meforum.org/2697/shimon-peres-vs-british
Shimon Peres, Israel's 87-year-old president doesn't usually arouse antagonism among Europeans.
A tireless peace advocate for decades, and architect of the Oslo Process for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize, he has long presented Israel's moderate face to the outside world.
Yet last week he provoked anger among British politicians and Anglo-Jewish leaders when he told a Jewish website that the British establishment had always been "deeply pro-Arab ... and anti-Israel," and that this was partly due to endemic anti-Semitic dispositions. "I can understand Mr. Peres' concerns, but I don't recognize what he is saying about England," said James Clappison, vice-chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel. "Things are certainly no worse, as far as Israel is concerned, in this country than other European countries. He got it wrong."//
But did he? While few arguments have resonated more widely, or among a more diverse set of observers, than the claim that Britain has been the midwife of the Jewish state, the truth is that no sooner had Britain been appointed as the mandatory power in Palestine, with the explicit task of facilitating the establishment of a Jewish national home in the country in accordance with the Balfour Declaration, than it reneged on this obligation.
AS EARLY as March 1921, the British government ***Winston Churchill was instrumental in this.***severed the vast and sparsely populated territory east of the Jordan River ("Transjordan") from the prospective Jewish national home and made Abdullah, the emir of Mecca, its effective ruler.****This was to compensate for screwing him out of Saudi Arabia (in favor of the Saudis.)**** In 1922 and 1930, two British White Papers limited Jewish immigration to Palestine – the elixir of life of the prospective Jewish state – and imposed harsh restrictions on land sales to Jews.
Britain's betrayal of its international obligations to the Jewish national cause reached its peak on May 17, 1939, when a new White Paper imposed draconian restrictions on land sales to Jews and limited immigration to 75,000 over the next five years, after which Palestine would become an independent state in which the Jews would comprise no more than one-third of the total population.
Such were the anti-Zionist sentiments within the British establishment at the time that even a life-long admirer of Zionism like prime minister Winston Churchill rarely used his wartime dominance of British politics to help the Zionists (or indeed European Jewry). However appalled by the White Paper he failed to abolish this "low grade gasp of a defeatist hour" (to use his own words), refrained from confronting his generals and bureaucrats over the creation of a Jewish fighting force in Palestine, which he wholeheartedly supported, and gave British officialdom a free rein in the running of Middle Eastern affairs, which they readily exploited to promote the Arab case. In 1943, for instance, Freya Stark, the acclaimed author, orientalist, and Arabian adventurer, was sent to the US on a seven-month propaganda campaign aimed at undercutting the Zionist cause and defending Britain's White Paper policy.
That this could happen at the height of the Nazi extermination of European Jewry of which Whitehall was keenly aware offered a stark demonstration of the mindset of British officialdom, which was less interested in stopping genocide than in preventing its potential survivors from reaching Palestine after the war.
So much so that senior Foreign Office members portrayed Britain, not Europe's Jews, as the main victim of the Nazi atrocities.
THIS ANTI-ZIONISM was sustained into the postwar years as the Labor Party, which in July 1945 swept to power in a landslide electoral victory, swiftly abandoned its pre-election pro-Zionist platform to become a bitter enemy of the Jewish national cause. The White Paper restrictions were kept in place, and the Jews were advised by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin not "to get too much at the head of the queue" in seeking recourse to their problems.
Tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors who chose to ignore the warning and to run the British naval blockade were herded into congested camps in Cyprus, where they were incarcerated for years.
"Should we accept the view that all the Jews or the bulk of them must leave Germany?" Bevin rhetorically asked the British ambassador to Washington.
"I do not accept that view. They have gone through, it is true, the most terrible massacre and persecution, but on the other hand they have got through it and a number have survived."
Prime Minister Clement Attlee went a step further by comparing Holocaust survivors wishing to leave Europe and to return to their ancestral homeland to Nazi troops invading the continent.
While these utterances resonated with the pervasive anti-Semitism within British officialdom (the last high commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, for instance, said of Zionism, "The forces of nationalism are accompanied by the psychology of the Jew, which it is important to recognize as something quite abnormal and unresponsive to rational treatment"), Britain's Middle Eastern policy also reflected the basic fact that as occupiers of vast territories endowed with natural resources (first and foremost oil) and sitting astride strategic waterways (e.g., the Suez Canal), the Arabs had always been far more meaningful for British interests than the Jews.
As the chief of the air staff told the British cabinet in 1947, "If one of the two communities had to be antagonized, it was preferable, from the purely military angle, that a solution should be found which did not involve the continuing hostility of the Arabs."
One needs look no further than David Cameron's statements on the Middle East to see this anti-Israel mindset is alive and kicking. In the summer of 2006, when thousands of Hizbullah missiles were battering Israel's cities and villages, he took the trouble of issuing a statement from the tropical island on which he was vacationing at the time condemning Israel's "disproportionate use of force."
Four years later, while on an official visit to Turkey, he went out of his way to placate his Islamist host, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, by criticizing Israel's efforts to prevent the arming of the Hamas Islamist group, which, like its Lebanese counterpart, had been lobbing thousands of missiles on Israel's civilian population for years.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Efraim Karsh is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London, editor of the Middle East Quarterly and author, most recently, of Palestine Betrayed.
Jerusalem Post August 2, 2010
http://www.meforum.org/2697/shimon-peres-vs-british
Shimon Peres, Israel's 87-year-old president doesn't usually arouse antagonism among Europeans.
A tireless peace advocate for decades, and architect of the Oslo Process for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize, he has long presented Israel's moderate face to the outside world.
Yet last week he provoked anger among British politicians and Anglo-Jewish leaders when he told a Jewish website that the British establishment had always been "deeply pro-Arab ... and anti-Israel," and that this was partly due to endemic anti-Semitic dispositions. "I can understand Mr. Peres' concerns, but I don't recognize what he is saying about England," said James Clappison, vice-chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel. "Things are certainly no worse, as far as Israel is concerned, in this country than other European countries. He got it wrong."//
But did he? While few arguments have resonated more widely, or among a more diverse set of observers, than the claim that Britain has been the midwife of the Jewish state, the truth is that no sooner had Britain been appointed as the mandatory power in Palestine, with the explicit task of facilitating the establishment of a Jewish national home in the country in accordance with the Balfour Declaration, than it reneged on this obligation.
AS EARLY as March 1921, the British government ***Winston Churchill was instrumental in this.***severed the vast and sparsely populated territory east of the Jordan River ("Transjordan") from the prospective Jewish national home and made Abdullah, the emir of Mecca, its effective ruler.****This was to compensate for screwing him out of Saudi Arabia (in favor of the Saudis.)**** In 1922 and 1930, two British White Papers limited Jewish immigration to Palestine – the elixir of life of the prospective Jewish state – and imposed harsh restrictions on land sales to Jews.
Britain's betrayal of its international obligations to the Jewish national cause reached its peak on May 17, 1939, when a new White Paper imposed draconian restrictions on land sales to Jews and limited immigration to 75,000 over the next five years, after which Palestine would become an independent state in which the Jews would comprise no more than one-third of the total population.
Such were the anti-Zionist sentiments within the British establishment at the time that even a life-long admirer of Zionism like prime minister Winston Churchill rarely used his wartime dominance of British politics to help the Zionists (or indeed European Jewry). However appalled by the White Paper he failed to abolish this "low grade gasp of a defeatist hour" (to use his own words), refrained from confronting his generals and bureaucrats over the creation of a Jewish fighting force in Palestine, which he wholeheartedly supported, and gave British officialdom a free rein in the running of Middle Eastern affairs, which they readily exploited to promote the Arab case. In 1943, for instance, Freya Stark, the acclaimed author, orientalist, and Arabian adventurer, was sent to the US on a seven-month propaganda campaign aimed at undercutting the Zionist cause and defending Britain's White Paper policy.
That this could happen at the height of the Nazi extermination of European Jewry of which Whitehall was keenly aware offered a stark demonstration of the mindset of British officialdom, which was less interested in stopping genocide than in preventing its potential survivors from reaching Palestine after the war.
So much so that senior Foreign Office members portrayed Britain, not Europe's Jews, as the main victim of the Nazi atrocities.
THIS ANTI-ZIONISM was sustained into the postwar years as the Labor Party, which in July 1945 swept to power in a landslide electoral victory, swiftly abandoned its pre-election pro-Zionist platform to become a bitter enemy of the Jewish national cause. The White Paper restrictions were kept in place, and the Jews were advised by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin not "to get too much at the head of the queue" in seeking recourse to their problems.
Tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors who chose to ignore the warning and to run the British naval blockade were herded into congested camps in Cyprus, where they were incarcerated for years.
"Should we accept the view that all the Jews or the bulk of them must leave Germany?" Bevin rhetorically asked the British ambassador to Washington.
"I do not accept that view. They have gone through, it is true, the most terrible massacre and persecution, but on the other hand they have got through it and a number have survived."
Prime Minister Clement Attlee went a step further by comparing Holocaust survivors wishing to leave Europe and to return to their ancestral homeland to Nazi troops invading the continent.
While these utterances resonated with the pervasive anti-Semitism within British officialdom (the last high commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, for instance, said of Zionism, "The forces of nationalism are accompanied by the psychology of the Jew, which it is important to recognize as something quite abnormal and unresponsive to rational treatment"), Britain's Middle Eastern policy also reflected the basic fact that as occupiers of vast territories endowed with natural resources (first and foremost oil) and sitting astride strategic waterways (e.g., the Suez Canal), the Arabs had always been far more meaningful for British interests than the Jews.
As the chief of the air staff told the British cabinet in 1947, "If one of the two communities had to be antagonized, it was preferable, from the purely military angle, that a solution should be found which did not involve the continuing hostility of the Arabs."
One needs look no further than David Cameron's statements on the Middle East to see this anti-Israel mindset is alive and kicking. In the summer of 2006, when thousands of Hizbullah missiles were battering Israel's cities and villages, he took the trouble of issuing a statement from the tropical island on which he was vacationing at the time condemning Israel's "disproportionate use of force."
Four years later, while on an official visit to Turkey, he went out of his way to placate his Islamist host, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, by criticizing Israel's efforts to prevent the arming of the Hamas Islamist group, which, like its Lebanese counterpart, had been lobbing thousands of missiles on Israel's civilian population for years.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Efraim Karsh is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London, editor of the Middle East Quarterly and author, most recently, of Palestine Betrayed.
Premeditation in purchasing the land near Ground Zero.
****While Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama have stressed the right of anyone to build on her PRIVATE PROPERTY, nothing was said about WHEN or HOW or WHY that private property was acquired. It is the case that the land was acquired by a Muslim group after 9-11 with the express purpose of being as close to Ground Zero as possible. When the owners are described as being a "group of investors" that is a bit disingenuous since it is hardly a commercial proposition designed to produce a return (unless there are ancillary uses such as being subleased to Al Qaeda.)It was referred to as the Ground Zero Mosque by the initiators while they were looking and raising funds for a "suitable" property i.e. one associated throughout the world with the 9-11 event.****
Monday, August 23, 2010
GROUND ZERO MOSQUE FACTS
"The last legal hurdle to the proposed Islamic center near the site of the World Trade Center has been removed, but ignorance, bigotry and politics are more formidable obstacles."
-Time Magazine article
A couple of quick points on the Ground Zero Victory Mosque, because its already been covered too much elsewhere:
1) Red State has a useful collection of links to news stories about the Muslim group trying to find property as close as possible to the fallen Twin Towers:
# A December 8th, 2009, New York Times article stated, “The location [next to Ground Zero] was precisely a key selling point for the group of Muslims,” and quoted Rauf as noting that they got a property “where a piece of the [9/11] wreckage fell.” ASMA then touted the piece in its 2009 Year End Report.
# A simple Google search of the Cordoba Initiative’s website reveals the phrase “Ground Zero” to be seeded throughout as a rather inept 1999-era SEO tactic to bring people looking for information about Ground Zero to the mosque promoters’ website.
# On May 5th and 6th, ASMA’s Daisy Khan was on her Twitter account, boasting first that the “new muslim center near ground zero gets unaminous vote of approval from community board one in downtown nyc,” and then that she had a “Media blitz day for ASMA / Cordoba [on the] muslim commuity center near ground zero.”
# On June 15th, Daisy Khan told the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn that “a divine hand” led to the Ground Zero proximity.
2) Imam Rauf said that the 9/11 location is "iconic" in a New York Times article, but they recently edited that line from the article as the Imam has changed his line to say it isn't all that close.
3) Imam Rauf has a bit more radical anti-American background than the left cares to realize, as noted at Atlas Shrugged. Rauf is also a major backer of the Palestinian floatilla that attacked IDF soldiers when it violated the blockade.
4) The name of the Mosque was at first going to be the Cordoba House, but when people started looking up what Cordoba House meant, they changed the name to Park 51, referring to its address, or just the Muslim Community Center.
5) “I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved [the Sept. 11 attacks], but the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened, we have been an accessory to a lot of – of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, it – in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.”
--Imam Feisal Rauf on CBS 60 Minutes on Sept. 30, 2001.
6) When asked to build the structure somewhere else, the backers utterly refused.
7) Imam Rauf insisted funds for the building would be from the US, but later said that the money would come from Muslim Arabic sources, and would not count out Iranian money.
8) UDPATE: "The United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims."
-Imam Rauf (note that qualifier innocent there)
Just some things to consider when you're called a bigot for thinking anyone with noble motives, a desire for outreach and brotherhood, and any sense of honor and sympathy for the victims of 9/11 would build it somewhere else.
posted by Christopher Taylor at 8:16 AM
Monday, August 23, 2010
GROUND ZERO MOSQUE FACTS
"The last legal hurdle to the proposed Islamic center near the site of the World Trade Center has been removed, but ignorance, bigotry and politics are more formidable obstacles."
-Time Magazine article
A couple of quick points on the Ground Zero Victory Mosque, because its already been covered too much elsewhere:
1) Red State has a useful collection of links to news stories about the Muslim group trying to find property as close as possible to the fallen Twin Towers:
# A December 8th, 2009, New York Times article stated, “The location [next to Ground Zero] was precisely a key selling point for the group of Muslims,” and quoted Rauf as noting that they got a property “where a piece of the [9/11] wreckage fell.” ASMA then touted the piece in its 2009 Year End Report.
# A simple Google search of the Cordoba Initiative’s website reveals the phrase “Ground Zero” to be seeded throughout as a rather inept 1999-era SEO tactic to bring people looking for information about Ground Zero to the mosque promoters’ website.
# On May 5th and 6th, ASMA’s Daisy Khan was on her Twitter account, boasting first that the “new muslim center near ground zero gets unaminous vote of approval from community board one in downtown nyc,” and then that she had a “Media blitz day for ASMA / Cordoba [on the] muslim commuity center near ground zero.”
# On June 15th, Daisy Khan told the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn that “a divine hand” led to the Ground Zero proximity.
2) Imam Rauf said that the 9/11 location is "iconic" in a New York Times article, but they recently edited that line from the article as the Imam has changed his line to say it isn't all that close.
3) Imam Rauf has a bit more radical anti-American background than the left cares to realize, as noted at Atlas Shrugged. Rauf is also a major backer of the Palestinian floatilla that attacked IDF soldiers when it violated the blockade.
4) The name of the Mosque was at first going to be the Cordoba House, but when people started looking up what Cordoba House meant, they changed the name to Park 51, referring to its address, or just the Muslim Community Center.
5) “I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved [the Sept. 11 attacks], but the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened, we have been an accessory to a lot of – of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, it – in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.”
--Imam Feisal Rauf on CBS 60 Minutes on Sept. 30, 2001.
6) When asked to build the structure somewhere else, the backers utterly refused.
7) Imam Rauf insisted funds for the building would be from the US, but later said that the money would come from Muslim Arabic sources, and would not count out Iranian money.
8) UDPATE: "The United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims."
-Imam Rauf (note that qualifier innocent there)
Just some things to consider when you're called a bigot for thinking anyone with noble motives, a desire for outreach and brotherhood, and any sense of honor and sympathy for the victims of 9/11 would build it somewhere else.
posted by Christopher Taylor at 8:16 AM
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
It's hard to believe Obama is sincere about any religion but ...
http://tinyurl.com/28qgvc7
****While it's easy to buy Obama being extraordinarily deferential to the Muslim world. sincere religious adherence is harder to swallow. This is the guy, after all, who supposedly was a devout member of Rev Jeremiah Wright's church for 20 years and never heard the Reverend make statements that he presumably made weekly, and memorialized for everyone by putting them on DVDs sold in the church.****
****While it's easy to buy Obama being extraordinarily deferential to the Muslim world. sincere religious adherence is harder to swallow. This is the guy, after all, who supposedly was a devout member of Rev Jeremiah Wright's church for 20 years and never heard the Reverend make statements that he presumably made weekly, and memorialized for everyone by putting them on DVDs sold in the church.****
Friday, August 20, 2010
Does it even matter whether or not Obama is officially Muslim?
****Who knows what is in his heart and if, and how, he actually prays? Ostensibly, the converted to Christianity as an adult, possibly being baptized by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. What is clear is that he is more deferential to Islam and Muslims than any previous President, he avoids giving offense even to those who are clearly terrorists and enemies of the U.S. and the extent of his "Islmaophilia" is great and myriad. The best argument against his actually being Muslim is that, if he were, he would avoid such obvious pandering and preference. He makes claims about the Muslim nature of the U.S. which are absurd but fatuity has no special religious home. The "facts" are no more known to those in the White House than the crazies who are sure of the contrary. What counts is not words but actions.***
Obama a Muslim? Rumors Gain Steam, Defying Facts
"President Obama is a Muslim." "He's not an American citizen." "He wasn't even born here." None of this is true. But to surprising levels, it is believed.
Blame it on the media, or on human nature. All presidents deal with image problems — that they're too weak or too belligerent, too far left or far right. But Obama also faces questions over documented facts, in part because some people identify more with the rumormongers than the debunkers.
"Trust and distrust — that explains almost all of it," says Nicholas DiFonzo, professor of psychology at the Rochester Institute of Technology and an expert on rumor and gossip research. "We are in such a highly polarized political environment. Our country is sorting itself into more closely knit, opposing factions each year" — factions, DiFonzo suggests, that in turn become "echo chambers" for factoids that aren't fact at all.
Nearly one in five people, or 18 percent, said they think Obama is Muslim, up from the 11 percent who said so in March 2009, according to a poll released Thursday. The proportion who correctly say he is a Christian is just 34 percent, down from 48 percent in March of last year. ****The author speaks with no more authority than the rumormongers.Is he now? Was he ever? If yes, how can he change? Does he act justly to the Islamic world and Muslims, unjustly or grants them preference over others? Actions speak louder than words. He denies that "we" are at war with Islam; however, is Islam at war with us?
The White House even felt compelled to respond with a terse knockdown from spokesman Bill Burton: "The president is obviously a Christian. He prays every day."
Obama is the Christian son of a Kenyan Muslim father and a Kansas mother. Born in Hawaii, he lived from ages 6 to 10 in predominantly Muslim Indonesia with his mother and Indonesian stepfather. His full name, Barack Hussein Obama, sounds Muslim to many.
Confusion about Obama's religion was common, and sometimes encouraged, during the 2008 campaign. An Associated Press photograph that circulated on the Internet, and was posted on The Drudge Report, showed Obama dressed in traditional local garments — a white turban and a wraparound white robe — during a visit to Kenya in 2006. Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton may have contributed through her response to a question, during a "60 Minutes" interview, about whether he was a Muslim. "There's nothing to base that on," she said. "As far as I know."
Others have helped keep rumors about Obama's religion and birth alive. Conservative commentators including radio talk show host Michael Savage have repeated debunked claims that Obama attended a radical Muslim madrassa in Indonesia. Rush Limbaugh has facetiously referred to "Imam Obama" in recent days, and last year praised a woman who at a Delaware town hall meeting questioned Obama's citizenship. Lou Dobbs gave significant air time to such "birther" claims on CNN — despite his own insistence that he believed Obama was born in the U.S.
The new survey, conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and its affiliated Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, is based on interviews conducted before the controversy over whether Muslims should be permitted to construct a mosque near the World Trade Center site. Obama has said he believes Muslims have the right to build an Islamic center there, though he's also said he won't take a position on whether they should actually build it.
We have never been without misperceptions, but they are speeded and multiplied in the Internet age. Last month, right-wing bloggers — citing unnamed sources within the Laredo Police Department in Texas — reported that the Mexican drug cartel Zetas had captured two Laredo ranches. The story was picked up by author-pundit Michelle Malkin and other conservatives.
Inquiries from local media and the liberal Web site Talking Points Memo turned up different news: The raids never happened.
"The Internet has made it worse," says Lori Robertson, managing editor of the website FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan project run under the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. "Any of these rumors are more rampant, and there's more stuff about them — blogs writing about conspiracy theories. People are exposed to it more."
Robertson says her organization has been asked hundreds of times about Obama's religion, even after FactCheck published an explanatory article in early 2008 called "Sliming Obama." It focused on the chain e-mail that many believe helped spread the lie.
Despite what the e-mail claimed, FactCheck.org has noted that Obama was sworn into office as a U.S. senator using the Bible instead of the Quran; a photograph was posted to prove it. FactCheck also posted videos of Obama reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in the Senate, in an attempt to counter claims that he refused.
Still, the questions about Obama's faith didn't stop.
"Did Obama order creation of a postage stamp to honor a Muslim holiday?" FactCheck.org's answer: "The first class stamp honoring Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha was first issued eight years ago. Obama has followed Bush's practice of reaching out to Muslims on Ramadan."
Superstitions and myths are timeless and universal, and so are the people who exploit them, whether Holocaust deniers, race supremacists or conspiracy theorists.
Misinformation in the mass media age was captured by the author-columnist Walter Lippman in his classic "Public Opinion," published in 1922. Finding that world events were driven by a tiny minority manipulating the rest, Lippman noted "the comparatively meager time available in each day for paying attention to public affairs, the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world."
The problem wasn't only with the media, but with the public.
"People, he wrote, "live in the same world, but think and feel in different ones." Lippman believed many "suffer from anemia, from lack of appetite and curiosity for the human scene."
And so millions have thought that the country was overrun with communists, that John F. Kennedy was taking orders from the pope, that AIDS spreads through casual contact, that Saddam Hussein or even the George W. Bush administration helped plan the Sept. 11 attacks. In the 1990s, when the government was running a surplus under the Clinton administration, a poll showed substantial numbers of people thought it was running a deficit.
DiFonzo was stunned when he heard one of those rumors stated as fact in his upper-level social psychology class last year. A student raised her hand and insisted, "But George Bush was behind the bombings of Sept. 11."
"She was serious," DiFonzo said, adding that he believes she accepted the rumor because other people in her life gave her the impression that it was plausible.
"This isn't a partisan thing," he said. "It's not a characteristic of Democrats or of Republicans. It's a human characteristic. It's a place that we happen to be at in our culture today. What seems outlandish is often based on what we think may be plausible."
——
Obama a Muslim? Rumors Gain Steam, Defying Facts
"President Obama is a Muslim." "He's not an American citizen." "He wasn't even born here." None of this is true. But to surprising levels, it is believed.
Blame it on the media, or on human nature. All presidents deal with image problems — that they're too weak or too belligerent, too far left or far right. But Obama also faces questions over documented facts, in part because some people identify more with the rumormongers than the debunkers.
"Trust and distrust — that explains almost all of it," says Nicholas DiFonzo, professor of psychology at the Rochester Institute of Technology and an expert on rumor and gossip research. "We are in such a highly polarized political environment. Our country is sorting itself into more closely knit, opposing factions each year" — factions, DiFonzo suggests, that in turn become "echo chambers" for factoids that aren't fact at all.
Nearly one in five people, or 18 percent, said they think Obama is Muslim, up from the 11 percent who said so in March 2009, according to a poll released Thursday. The proportion who correctly say he is a Christian is just 34 percent, down from 48 percent in March of last year. ****The author speaks with no more authority than the rumormongers.Is he now? Was he ever? If yes, how can he change? Does he act justly to the Islamic world and Muslims, unjustly or grants them preference over others? Actions speak louder than words. He denies that "we" are at war with Islam; however, is Islam at war with us?
The White House even felt compelled to respond with a terse knockdown from spokesman Bill Burton: "The president is obviously a Christian. He prays every day."
Obama is the Christian son of a Kenyan Muslim father and a Kansas mother. Born in Hawaii, he lived from ages 6 to 10 in predominantly Muslim Indonesia with his mother and Indonesian stepfather. His full name, Barack Hussein Obama, sounds Muslim to many.
Confusion about Obama's religion was common, and sometimes encouraged, during the 2008 campaign. An Associated Press photograph that circulated on the Internet, and was posted on The Drudge Report, showed Obama dressed in traditional local garments — a white turban and a wraparound white robe — during a visit to Kenya in 2006. Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton may have contributed through her response to a question, during a "60 Minutes" interview, about whether he was a Muslim. "There's nothing to base that on," she said. "As far as I know."
Others have helped keep rumors about Obama's religion and birth alive. Conservative commentators including radio talk show host Michael Savage have repeated debunked claims that Obama attended a radical Muslim madrassa in Indonesia. Rush Limbaugh has facetiously referred to "Imam Obama" in recent days, and last year praised a woman who at a Delaware town hall meeting questioned Obama's citizenship. Lou Dobbs gave significant air time to such "birther" claims on CNN — despite his own insistence that he believed Obama was born in the U.S.
The new survey, conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and its affiliated Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, is based on interviews conducted before the controversy over whether Muslims should be permitted to construct a mosque near the World Trade Center site. Obama has said he believes Muslims have the right to build an Islamic center there, though he's also said he won't take a position on whether they should actually build it.
We have never been without misperceptions, but they are speeded and multiplied in the Internet age. Last month, right-wing bloggers — citing unnamed sources within the Laredo Police Department in Texas — reported that the Mexican drug cartel Zetas had captured two Laredo ranches. The story was picked up by author-pundit Michelle Malkin and other conservatives.
Inquiries from local media and the liberal Web site Talking Points Memo turned up different news: The raids never happened.
"The Internet has made it worse," says Lori Robertson, managing editor of the website FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan project run under the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. "Any of these rumors are more rampant, and there's more stuff about them — blogs writing about conspiracy theories. People are exposed to it more."
Robertson says her organization has been asked hundreds of times about Obama's religion, even after FactCheck published an explanatory article in early 2008 called "Sliming Obama." It focused on the chain e-mail that many believe helped spread the lie.
Despite what the e-mail claimed, FactCheck.org has noted that Obama was sworn into office as a U.S. senator using the Bible instead of the Quran; a photograph was posted to prove it. FactCheck also posted videos of Obama reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in the Senate, in an attempt to counter claims that he refused.
Still, the questions about Obama's faith didn't stop.
"Did Obama order creation of a postage stamp to honor a Muslim holiday?" FactCheck.org's answer: "The first class stamp honoring Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha was first issued eight years ago. Obama has followed Bush's practice of reaching out to Muslims on Ramadan."
Superstitions and myths are timeless and universal, and so are the people who exploit them, whether Holocaust deniers, race supremacists or conspiracy theorists.
Misinformation in the mass media age was captured by the author-columnist Walter Lippman in his classic "Public Opinion," published in 1922. Finding that world events were driven by a tiny minority manipulating the rest, Lippman noted "the comparatively meager time available in each day for paying attention to public affairs, the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world."
The problem wasn't only with the media, but with the public.
"People, he wrote, "live in the same world, but think and feel in different ones." Lippman believed many "suffer from anemia, from lack of appetite and curiosity for the human scene."
And so millions have thought that the country was overrun with communists, that John F. Kennedy was taking orders from the pope, that AIDS spreads through casual contact, that Saddam Hussein or even the George W. Bush administration helped plan the Sept. 11 attacks. In the 1990s, when the government was running a surplus under the Clinton administration, a poll showed substantial numbers of people thought it was running a deficit.
DiFonzo was stunned when he heard one of those rumors stated as fact in his upper-level social psychology class last year. A student raised her hand and insisted, "But George Bush was behind the bombings of Sept. 11."
"She was serious," DiFonzo said, adding that he believes she accepted the rumor because other people in her life gave her the impression that it was plausible.
"This isn't a partisan thing," he said. "It's not a characteristic of Democrats or of Republicans. It's a human characteristic. It's a place that we happen to be at in our culture today. What seems outlandish is often based on what we think may be plausible."
——
Obama the Uniter.
Obama visited Los Angeles and caused an enormous traffic jam. An observer reported that black and white, old and young, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, each and every one, was pissed off.
A remark from the not-too-distant past.
****Evidence has emerged that Obama is Christian. When proclaiming his Christianity, he was observed to have his fingers CROSSED.****
May 12, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
President Apostate? By EDWARD N. LUTTWAK
BARACK OBAMA has emerged as a classic example of charismatic leadership — a figure upon whom others project their own hopes and desires. The resulting emotional intensity adds greatly to the more conventional strengths of the well-organized Obama campaign, and it has certainly sufficed to overcome the formidable initial advantages of Senator Hillary Clinton.
One danger of such charisma, however, is that it can evoke unrealistic hopes of what a candidate could actually accomplish in office regardless of his own personal abilities. Case in point is the oft-made claim that an Obama presidency would be welcomed by the Muslim world.
This idea often goes hand in hand with the altogether more plausible argument that Mr. Obama’s election would raise America’s esteem in Africa — indeed, he already arouses much enthusiasm in his father’s native Kenya and to a degree elsewhere on the continent.
But it is a mistake to conflate his African identity with his Muslim heritage. Senator Obama is half African by birth and Africans can understandably identify with him. In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith.
As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.
Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.
His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).
With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings. (Some may point to cases in which lesser punishments were ordered — as with some Egyptian intellectuals who have been punished for writings that were construed as apostasy — but those were really instances of supposed heresy, not explicitly declared apostasy as in Senator Obama’s case.)
It is true that the criminal codes in most Muslim countries do not mandate execution for apostasy (although a law doing exactly that is pending before Iran’s Parliament and in two Malaysian states). But as a practical matter, in very few Islamic countries do the governments have sufficient authority to resist demands for the punishment of apostates at the hands of religious authorities.
For example, in Iran in 1994 the intervention of Pope John Paul II and others won a Christian convert a last-minute reprieve, but the man was abducted and killed shortly after his release. Likewise, in 2006 in Afghanistan, a Christian convert had to be declared insane to prevent his execution, and he was still forced to flee to Italy.
Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.
At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad.
That an Obama presidency would cause such complications in our dealings with the Islamic world is not likely to be a major factor with American voters, and the implication is not that it should be. But of all the well-meaning desires projected on Senator Obama, the hope that he would decisively improve relations with the world’s Muslims is the least realistic.
Edward N. Luttwak, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is the author of “Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace.”
May 12, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
President Apostate? By EDWARD N. LUTTWAK
BARACK OBAMA has emerged as a classic example of charismatic leadership — a figure upon whom others project their own hopes and desires. The resulting emotional intensity adds greatly to the more conventional strengths of the well-organized Obama campaign, and it has certainly sufficed to overcome the formidable initial advantages of Senator Hillary Clinton.
One danger of such charisma, however, is that it can evoke unrealistic hopes of what a candidate could actually accomplish in office regardless of his own personal abilities. Case in point is the oft-made claim that an Obama presidency would be welcomed by the Muslim world.
This idea often goes hand in hand with the altogether more plausible argument that Mr. Obama’s election would raise America’s esteem in Africa — indeed, he already arouses much enthusiasm in his father’s native Kenya and to a degree elsewhere on the continent.
But it is a mistake to conflate his African identity with his Muslim heritage. Senator Obama is half African by birth and Africans can understandably identify with him. In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith.
As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.
Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.
His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).
With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings. (Some may point to cases in which lesser punishments were ordered — as with some Egyptian intellectuals who have been punished for writings that were construed as apostasy — but those were really instances of supposed heresy, not explicitly declared apostasy as in Senator Obama’s case.)
It is true that the criminal codes in most Muslim countries do not mandate execution for apostasy (although a law doing exactly that is pending before Iran’s Parliament and in two Malaysian states). But as a practical matter, in very few Islamic countries do the governments have sufficient authority to resist demands for the punishment of apostates at the hands of religious authorities.
For example, in Iran in 1994 the intervention of Pope John Paul II and others won a Christian convert a last-minute reprieve, but the man was abducted and killed shortly after his release. Likewise, in 2006 in Afghanistan, a Christian convert had to be declared insane to prevent his execution, and he was still forced to flee to Italy.
Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.
At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad.
That an Obama presidency would cause such complications in our dealings with the Islamic world is not likely to be a major factor with American voters, and the implication is not that it should be. But of all the well-meaning desires projected on Senator Obama, the hope that he would decisively improve relations with the world’s Muslims is the least realistic.
Edward N. Luttwak, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is the author of “Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace.”
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Muslims are not treated the same as others; they are being treated BETTER!
If Obama is, in fact, not a Muslim, he is clearly their biggest supporter and apologist in the U.S. Whether he was baptized or not seems irrelevant by comparison.
Why can't the Greek church at Ground Zero be rebuilt? By The Scribe
If the Greek Orthodox had flown a stolen airliner into the World Trade Center would they have had an easier time getting permission to rebuild their church?
If the issue really was freedom of religion as mosque supporters claim shouldn't NY officials and President Obama support the rebuilding of this church? Of course they should but as we all know freedom of religion is not the real issue at play in this controversy.
From Fox News....
The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America accused New York officials on Tuesday of turning their backs on the reconstruction of the only church destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks, while the controversial mosque near Ground Zero moves forward.
The sidelined project is the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, a tiny, four-story building destroyed in 2001 when one of the World Trade Center towers fell on top of it. Nobody from the church was hurt in the attack, but the congregation has for the past eight years been trying to rebuild its house of worship.
A church that was actually destroyed in the Islamic attack in 2001 is no longer wanted by NYC officials. It's been 8 long years and they have been unable to get permission to rebuild. It's certainly not that they haven't tried but NY officials have refused to even meet with them to discuss rebuilding their church.
Candidate for Congress, George Demos, has now written to President Obama requesting he give the same support to the church that was already at Ground Zero as he has given to the mosque that is to be build there.
In part he said the following:
While we may disagree on the appropriateness of the Mosque, we can surely agree that it is an issue of national importance that the only house of worship actually destroyed on September 11, 2001, the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, be rebuilt. For the last year, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has refused to meet with Church officials and has placed bureaucratic roadblocks in way of rebuilding St. Nicholas Church.
The world is watching to see if the humble Church that stood as a quiet refuge at the crossroads of commerce will rise from the ashes of that fateful September morning and become a vibrant symbol of our faith and resiliency as a nation.//
****What is the pressing need for an enormous Muslim community center in the proposed lcoation? There is not an existing community of Muslims needing service; there is even an existing mosque within two blocks of the proposed site.The imam and developers do not preclude getting funding from Saudi Arabia, Iran or even Osama bin Laden! It is triumphalism, plain and simple.
Let the mosque proceed: it will be a continuing reminder to Americans of both the jihadist nature of world-wide Islam and the insensitivity and probable support on the part of American muslims for jihad. This might be the wake-up call needed to the danger Islam presents to Western Civilization and American values.*****
Read more: http://www.gopusa.com/fresh-ink/2010/08/why-cant-the-greek-church-at-ground-zero-be-rebuilt.php#ixzz0x5f69pbk
Why can't the Greek church at Ground Zero be rebuilt? By The Scribe
If the Greek Orthodox had flown a stolen airliner into the World Trade Center would they have had an easier time getting permission to rebuild their church?
If the issue really was freedom of religion as mosque supporters claim shouldn't NY officials and President Obama support the rebuilding of this church? Of course they should but as we all know freedom of religion is not the real issue at play in this controversy.
From Fox News....
The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America accused New York officials on Tuesday of turning their backs on the reconstruction of the only church destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks, while the controversial mosque near Ground Zero moves forward.
The sidelined project is the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, a tiny, four-story building destroyed in 2001 when one of the World Trade Center towers fell on top of it. Nobody from the church was hurt in the attack, but the congregation has for the past eight years been trying to rebuild its house of worship.
A church that was actually destroyed in the Islamic attack in 2001 is no longer wanted by NYC officials. It's been 8 long years and they have been unable to get permission to rebuild. It's certainly not that they haven't tried but NY officials have refused to even meet with them to discuss rebuilding their church.
Candidate for Congress, George Demos, has now written to President Obama requesting he give the same support to the church that was already at Ground Zero as he has given to the mosque that is to be build there.
In part he said the following:
While we may disagree on the appropriateness of the Mosque, we can surely agree that it is an issue of national importance that the only house of worship actually destroyed on September 11, 2001, the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, be rebuilt. For the last year, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has refused to meet with Church officials and has placed bureaucratic roadblocks in way of rebuilding St. Nicholas Church.
The world is watching to see if the humble Church that stood as a quiet refuge at the crossroads of commerce will rise from the ashes of that fateful September morning and become a vibrant symbol of our faith and resiliency as a nation.//
****What is the pressing need for an enormous Muslim community center in the proposed lcoation? There is not an existing community of Muslims needing service; there is even an existing mosque within two blocks of the proposed site.The imam and developers do not preclude getting funding from Saudi Arabia, Iran or even Osama bin Laden! It is triumphalism, plain and simple.
Let the mosque proceed: it will be a continuing reminder to Americans of both the jihadist nature of world-wide Islam and the insensitivity and probable support on the part of American muslims for jihad. This might be the wake-up call needed to the danger Islam presents to Western Civilization and American values.*****
Read more: http://www.gopusa.com/fresh-ink/2010/08/why-cant-the-greek-church-at-ground-zero-be-rebuilt.php#ixzz0x5f69pbk
Whether Obama is actually a Muslim is irrelevant; he is amazingly Islamophilic, in any event.
Obama's Choice, Boy Scouts or Islam By Michael Reagan
President Obama couldn't bring himself to observe the National Day of Prayer or spend time with the Boy Scouts of America, but God forbid, he couldn't miss the Muslim Iftar Ramadan dinner, or pass up a chance to praise an Islamic center a stone's throw away from Ground Zero.He later backed down -- a bit.
One has to wonder exactly who is this Barack Obama? Is he the Muslim-educated student who has repeatedly proclaimed his Christian beliefs while finding himself unable to put a foot in a Christian church in Washington he can call his own, or is he an adult still motivated by the Muslim faith he learned and practiced as a young man?
This is a serious question, especially since Obama has gone out of his way to befriend a community, many of whom bear a deep hatred for the United States and a fanatical belief in the inevitability of supremacy of Islam over the United States.
Daniel Pipes writes that the Muslim population in this "country is not like any other group, for it includes within it a substantial body of people who desire, ultimately, to transform it into a nation living under the strictures of militant Islam."
He cites the case of Siraj Wahaj, a black convert to Islam and the recipient of some of the American Muslim community's highest honors, who in June 1991 had the privilege of becoming the first Muslim to deliver the daily prayer in the U.S. House of Representatives.
A little over a year later, addressing an audience of New Jersey Muslims, the same Wahaj said that "if only Muslims were more clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.
Said Wahaj: "If we were united and strong, we'd elect our own emir [leader] and give allegiance to him. . . . [T]ake my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us." ****Part of this is the continual lie overestimating the number of Muslims in the U.S. They may be loud and demanding but are not as numerous as they claim.*****
This is "the religion of peace"? ****Certainly not all Muslims are active terrorists but it does seem that most, if not all, active terrorists are Muslim. More importantly, the masses of American Muslims do NOT disavow the actions of the bad guys except when they are playing a role for the non-Muslim media. It is even incredible how forthright they are even here letting their arrogance trump being diplomatic. Parse the words of the Victory Mosque imam, even in a book directed at non-Muslims, and unAmerican attitudes are present.*****
Writing in the August 5 Washington Times, Jeffery T. Kuhner warns that the decision to build a 13-story mosque and Muslim cultural center 600 feet from the site of Ground Zero represents the surrender of the United States to radical Islam. He insists that most New Yorkers and Americans do not want this mosque erected and warns that it will be "a symbolic monument to the triumph of Islamism in the Unites States."
Kuhner notes that the attacks on 9/11 were "committed by Muslim extremists in the name of holy war against the West... [using] the Koran and Islamic principles to justify their actions." Their ultimate goal, he warns, is "to impose a world Muslim empire based on Shariah law."
"Ground Zero," he explains, "is where the war came home to America," and supporters of the mosque project push forward to make sure "the mosque will cast a giant, dark shadow over Ground Zero," a constant reminder of Islam's victory. "If Islamism can impose its will near the site of Sept. 11, then it can impose its will anywhere."
Unfortunately, it appears that Islam is also imposing its will and casting a shadow over the Obama White House.
---
Read more: http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/2010/08/reagan-obamas-choice-boy-scouts-or-islam.php#ixzz0x5b4ydPP
President Obama couldn't bring himself to observe the National Day of Prayer or spend time with the Boy Scouts of America, but God forbid, he couldn't miss the Muslim Iftar Ramadan dinner, or pass up a chance to praise an Islamic center a stone's throw away from Ground Zero.He later backed down -- a bit.
One has to wonder exactly who is this Barack Obama? Is he the Muslim-educated student who has repeatedly proclaimed his Christian beliefs while finding himself unable to put a foot in a Christian church in Washington he can call his own, or is he an adult still motivated by the Muslim faith he learned and practiced as a young man?
This is a serious question, especially since Obama has gone out of his way to befriend a community, many of whom bear a deep hatred for the United States and a fanatical belief in the inevitability of supremacy of Islam over the United States.
Daniel Pipes writes that the Muslim population in this "country is not like any other group, for it includes within it a substantial body of people who desire, ultimately, to transform it into a nation living under the strictures of militant Islam."
He cites the case of Siraj Wahaj, a black convert to Islam and the recipient of some of the American Muslim community's highest honors, who in June 1991 had the privilege of becoming the first Muslim to deliver the daily prayer in the U.S. House of Representatives.
A little over a year later, addressing an audience of New Jersey Muslims, the same Wahaj said that "if only Muslims were more clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.
Said Wahaj: "If we were united and strong, we'd elect our own emir [leader] and give allegiance to him. . . . [T]ake my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us." ****Part of this is the continual lie overestimating the number of Muslims in the U.S. They may be loud and demanding but are not as numerous as they claim.*****
This is "the religion of peace"? ****Certainly not all Muslims are active terrorists but it does seem that most, if not all, active terrorists are Muslim. More importantly, the masses of American Muslims do NOT disavow the actions of the bad guys except when they are playing a role for the non-Muslim media. It is even incredible how forthright they are even here letting their arrogance trump being diplomatic. Parse the words of the Victory Mosque imam, even in a book directed at non-Muslims, and unAmerican attitudes are present.*****
Writing in the August 5 Washington Times, Jeffery T. Kuhner warns that the decision to build a 13-story mosque and Muslim cultural center 600 feet from the site of Ground Zero represents the surrender of the United States to radical Islam. He insists that most New Yorkers and Americans do not want this mosque erected and warns that it will be "a symbolic monument to the triumph of Islamism in the Unites States."
Kuhner notes that the attacks on 9/11 were "committed by Muslim extremists in the name of holy war against the West... [using] the Koran and Islamic principles to justify their actions." Their ultimate goal, he warns, is "to impose a world Muslim empire based on Shariah law."
"Ground Zero," he explains, "is where the war came home to America," and supporters of the mosque project push forward to make sure "the mosque will cast a giant, dark shadow over Ground Zero," a constant reminder of Islam's victory. "If Islamism can impose its will near the site of Sept. 11, then it can impose its will anywhere."
Unfortunately, it appears that Islam is also imposing its will and casting a shadow over the Obama White House.
---
Read more: http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/2010/08/reagan-obamas-choice-boy-scouts-or-islam.php#ixzz0x5b4ydPP
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Buying bonds is a sucker's bet.
Yields are historically low and possibly negative in real terms. The only way for bonds to pay off is to contemplate a virulent deflation and Helicopter Ben wouldn't let that happen. Whatever the short-term fluctuations, the debasement of the U.S. currency proceeds apace and the unsustainable U.S. debt has to be monetized ( at the expense of the dollar continuing as a reserve currency forever.) The authors make a point that seems not to be as widely obvious as stated: productivity is the most important determinant of economic growth. This is shockingly deviant from Keynesian demand-side-ism (albeit correct! )Not only is this administration ( and, admittedly, the Bushmen to some, if lesser, extent )running up enormous and unsustainable debt: worst is the diversion of resources from the more productive to the less productive members of society. Everything points to this trend from transferring wealth from bondholders to the auto unions, from taxing the job-creating elements of society to an immigration strategy that encourages unscreened, low-value-adding immigrants over immigrating professionals and entrepreneurs. The U.S. is a nation of immigrants but not illegal ones and not ones with only the minimal initiative to walk across the border. The hurdle of crossing the ocean was, itself, a filter with a proper Darwinian effect. American agriculture is not competitive in the world because of the availability of cheap stoop labor.****
http://tinyurl.com/2bc7q2a
The Great American Bond Bubble
If 10-year interest rates, which are now 2.8%, rise to 4% as they did last spring, bondholders will suffer a capital loss more than three times the current yield. By JEREMY SIEGEL AND JEREMY SCHWARTZ
Ten years ago we experienced the biggest bubble in U.S. stock market history—the Internet and technology mania that saw high-flying tech stocks selling at an excess of 100 times earnings. The aftermath was predictable: Most of these highfliers declined 80% or more, and the Nasdaq today sells at less than half the peak it reached a decade ago.
A similar bubble is expanding today that may have far more serious consequences for investors. It is in bonds, particularly U.S. Treasury bonds. Investors, disenchanted with the stock market, have been pouring money into bond funds, and Treasury bonds have been among their favorites. The Investment Company Institute reports that from January 2008 through June 2010, outflows from equity funds totaled $232 billion while bond funds have seen a massive $559 billion of inflows...
http://tinyurl.com/2bc7q2a
The Great American Bond Bubble
If 10-year interest rates, which are now 2.8%, rise to 4% as they did last spring, bondholders will suffer a capital loss more than three times the current yield. By JEREMY SIEGEL AND JEREMY SCHWARTZ
Ten years ago we experienced the biggest bubble in U.S. stock market history—the Internet and technology mania that saw high-flying tech stocks selling at an excess of 100 times earnings. The aftermath was predictable: Most of these highfliers declined 80% or more, and the Nasdaq today sells at less than half the peak it reached a decade ago.
A similar bubble is expanding today that may have far more serious consequences for investors. It is in bonds, particularly U.S. Treasury bonds. Investors, disenchanted with the stock market, have been pouring money into bond funds, and Treasury bonds have been among their favorites. The Investment Company Institute reports that from January 2008 through June 2010, outflows from equity funds totaled $232 billion while bond funds have seen a massive $559 billion of inflows...
PuffHost defenders of imam mislead .
http://tinyurl.com/23nyzvo
'Ground Zero Mosque' Imam Helped FBI With Counterterrorism Efforts Sam Stein HuffPost
****From the headline, one might expect to learn that the imam helped expose terrorists and avert potential terrorism. Nothing could be further from the truth. All the imam's efforts are directed at...non-Muslims.**** In March 2003, federal officials were being criticized for disrespecting the rights of Arab-Americans in their efforts to crack down on domestic security threats in the post-9/11 environment. Hoping to calm the growing tempers, FBI officials in New York hosted a forum on ways to deal with Muslim and Arab-Americans without exacerbating social tensions. The bureau wanted to provide agents with "a clear picture," said Kevin Donovan, director of the FBI's New York office.
Brought in to speak that morning -- at the office building located just blocks from Ground Zero -- was one of the city's most respected Muslim voices: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. The imam offered what was for him a familiar sermon to those in attendance. "Islamic extremism for the majority of Muslims is an oxymoron," he said. "It is a fundamental contradiction in terms."... ****One wonders how one got to be a "...respected Muslim voice." Perhaps one with a big constituency of ...Muslims. Just going on Sam Stein's quote, what assurance is that soundbite. It is likely an oxymoron since for a majority of Muslims there is no limits to how extreme one's Islamicism can be. Rather more non-committal than the PuffHost is claiming. ****
'Ground Zero Mosque' Imam Helped FBI With Counterterrorism Efforts Sam Stein HuffPost
****From the headline, one might expect to learn that the imam helped expose terrorists and avert potential terrorism. Nothing could be further from the truth. All the imam's efforts are directed at...non-Muslims.**** In March 2003, federal officials were being criticized for disrespecting the rights of Arab-Americans in their efforts to crack down on domestic security threats in the post-9/11 environment. Hoping to calm the growing tempers, FBI officials in New York hosted a forum on ways to deal with Muslim and Arab-Americans without exacerbating social tensions. The bureau wanted to provide agents with "a clear picture," said Kevin Donovan, director of the FBI's New York office.
Brought in to speak that morning -- at the office building located just blocks from Ground Zero -- was one of the city's most respected Muslim voices: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. The imam offered what was for him a familiar sermon to those in attendance. "Islamic extremism for the majority of Muslims is an oxymoron," he said. "It is a fundamental contradiction in terms."... ****One wonders how one got to be a "...respected Muslim voice." Perhaps one with a big constituency of ...Muslims. Just going on Sam Stein's quote, what assurance is that soundbite. It is likely an oxymoron since for a majority of Muslims there is no limits to how extreme one's Islamicism can be. Rather more non-committal than the PuffHost is claiming. ****
Economics FOREcasts are not to be believed; it's not even clear where we've BEEN.
This administration has it made: good-news statements are made with great fanfare about how rosy things are; revisions downward of past putative performance are made quietly with little notice; then current descriptions are made with great improvement over the (downward-adjusted) previous results. It's no wonder that Obama and his flacks lie with such abandon: they really think we are all stupid ( and a lot of us are, certainly those who voted for Obama and Biden.)Still, one has to wonder how one can maintain in public and without obvious embarrassment that, for example, 32Million people can be added to healthcare without increasing costs and that $500Billion can be removed from Medicare without deteriorating quality. As Grouch Marx used to say, "A five-year old could tell..." "Get me a five-year-old!" ****
http://tinyurl.com/29fvxcy
Industrial Production: July Up, But June Is Now Negative Daryl Montgomery The Fed reported that industrial production was up 1.1% in July and this got all the media headline attention. Stocks rallied on the bullish news implying economic recovery. Buried in the coverage was that June's number, originally reported as an increase, was downwardly revised to minus 0.5%.
The government's handling and media reporting of the industrial production numbers are similar to many other economic reports. Good news is reported in the initial release. Mainstream media gives the good news big headlines and coverage that is so glowing that it is amazing there aren't cheerleaders in the background waving brightly colored pompoms and shouting "Go US economy, Go US economy, Rah, Rah, Rah" while jumping up and down...
http://tinyurl.com/29fvxcy
Industrial Production: July Up, But June Is Now Negative Daryl Montgomery The Fed reported that industrial production was up 1.1% in July and this got all the media headline attention. Stocks rallied on the bullish news implying economic recovery. Buried in the coverage was that June's number, originally reported as an increase, was downwardly revised to minus 0.5%.
The government's handling and media reporting of the industrial production numbers are similar to many other economic reports. Good news is reported in the initial release. Mainstream media gives the good news big headlines and coverage that is so glowing that it is amazing there aren't cheerleaders in the background waving brightly colored pompoms and shouting "Go US economy, Go US economy, Rah, Rah, Rah" while jumping up and down...
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Amazing! Fareed was right: the US State Dept funds mosques around the world
***It's a bit strange that this Muslim commentator knew something that was not widely known. Had it been, it would certainly have raised questions about First Amendment rights and separation of church and state. Now the State Dept is funding Imam Rauf's fund-raising junket through the Middle East to raise money for the Victory Mosque. Note the article: one of the mosques restored with U.S. taxpayer funds was an example of just such a "triumphalist" mosque. The message to the Muslim world is clear: 9-11 was a victory for them and the U.S. is so weak and stupid that American taxpayers are even paying for it. I think American Muslims, separate from those outside the U.S., are starting to see a downside to this insulting project: there will be realization by Americans about what Islam is really like and what a threat it presents to Western Civilization.***
Washington Times: US Government Pays For Mosques Around the World
The State Department is sending Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf - the mastermind of the Ground Zero Mosque - on a trip through the Middle East to foster "greater understanding" about Islam and Muslim communities in the United States. However, important questions are being raised about whether this is simply a taxpayer-funded fundraising jaunt to underwrite his reviled project, which is moving ahead in Lower Manhattan.
Mr. Rauf is scheduled to go to Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Qatar, the usual stops for Gulf-based fundraising. The State Department defends the five-country tour saying that Mr. Rauf is "a distinguished Muslim cleric," but surely the government could find another such figure in the United States who is not seeking millions of dollars to fund a construction project that has so strongly divided America.
By funding the trip so soon after New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission gave the go-ahead to demolish the building on the proposed mosque site, the State Department is creating the appearance that the U.S. government is facilitating the construction of this shameful structure. It gives Mr. Rauf not only access but imprimatur to gather up foreign cash. And because Mr. Rauf has refused to reveal how he plans to finance his costly venture, the American public is left with the impression it will be a wholly foreign enterprise. This contradicts the argument that a mosque is needed in that part of New York City to provide services for a burgeoning Muslim population. If so many people need the mosque so badly, presumably they could figure out a way to pay for it themselves.
Americans also may be surprised to learn that the United States has been an active participant in mosque construction projects overseas. In April, U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania Alfonso E. Lenhardt helped cut the ribbon at the 12th-century Kizimkazi Mosque, which was refurbished with assistance from the United States under a program to preserve culturally significant buildings. The U.S. government also helped save the Amr Ebn El Aas Mosque in Cairo, which dates back to 642. The mosque's namesake was the Muslim conqueror of Christian Egypt, who built the structure on the site where he had pitched his tent before doing battle with the country's Byzantine rulers. For those who think the Ground Zero Mosque is an example of "Muslim triumphalism" glorifying conquest, the Amr Ebn El Aas Mosque is an example of such a monument - and one paid for with U.S. taxpayer funds.
The mosques being rebuilt by the United States are used for religious worship, which raises important First Amendment questions. U.S. taxpayer money should not be used to preserve and promote Islam, even abroad. In July 2009, the Office of the Inspector General published an audit of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) faith-based and community initiatives that examined whether government funds were being used for religious activities. The auditors found that while USAID was funding some religious activities, officials were "uncertain of whether such uses of Agency funding violate Agency regulations or the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution" when balanced against foreign-policy objectives.
For example, our government rebuilt the Al Shuhada Mosque in Fallujah, Iraq, expecting such benefits as "stimulating the economy, enhancing a sense of pride in the community, reducing opposition to international relief organizations operating in Fallujah, and reducing incentives among young men to participate in violence or insurgent groups." But Section 205.1(d) of title 22 of the Code of Federal Regulations prohibits USAID funds from being used for the rehabilitation of structures to the extent that those structures are used for "inherently religious activities." It is impossible to separate religion from a mosque; any such projects will necessarily support Islam.
The State Department is either wittingly or unwittingly using tax money to support Mr. Rauf's efforts to realize his dream of a supersized mosque blocks away from the sacred ground of the former World Trade Center, which was destroyed by Islamic fanaticism. This ill-considered decision will raise the ire of millions of Americans and illustrates the limits of what the denizens of Foggy Bottom know about diplomacy.
Washington Times: US Government Pays For Mosques Around the World
The State Department is sending Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf - the mastermind of the Ground Zero Mosque - on a trip through the Middle East to foster "greater understanding" about Islam and Muslim communities in the United States. However, important questions are being raised about whether this is simply a taxpayer-funded fundraising jaunt to underwrite his reviled project, which is moving ahead in Lower Manhattan.
Mr. Rauf is scheduled to go to Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Qatar, the usual stops for Gulf-based fundraising. The State Department defends the five-country tour saying that Mr. Rauf is "a distinguished Muslim cleric," but surely the government could find another such figure in the United States who is not seeking millions of dollars to fund a construction project that has so strongly divided America.
By funding the trip so soon after New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission gave the go-ahead to demolish the building on the proposed mosque site, the State Department is creating the appearance that the U.S. government is facilitating the construction of this shameful structure. It gives Mr. Rauf not only access but imprimatur to gather up foreign cash. And because Mr. Rauf has refused to reveal how he plans to finance his costly venture, the American public is left with the impression it will be a wholly foreign enterprise. This contradicts the argument that a mosque is needed in that part of New York City to provide services for a burgeoning Muslim population. If so many people need the mosque so badly, presumably they could figure out a way to pay for it themselves.
Americans also may be surprised to learn that the United States has been an active participant in mosque construction projects overseas. In April, U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania Alfonso E. Lenhardt helped cut the ribbon at the 12th-century Kizimkazi Mosque, which was refurbished with assistance from the United States under a program to preserve culturally significant buildings. The U.S. government also helped save the Amr Ebn El Aas Mosque in Cairo, which dates back to 642. The mosque's namesake was the Muslim conqueror of Christian Egypt, who built the structure on the site where he had pitched his tent before doing battle with the country's Byzantine rulers. For those who think the Ground Zero Mosque is an example of "Muslim triumphalism" glorifying conquest, the Amr Ebn El Aas Mosque is an example of such a monument - and one paid for with U.S. taxpayer funds.
The mosques being rebuilt by the United States are used for religious worship, which raises important First Amendment questions. U.S. taxpayer money should not be used to preserve and promote Islam, even abroad. In July 2009, the Office of the Inspector General published an audit of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) faith-based and community initiatives that examined whether government funds were being used for religious activities. The auditors found that while USAID was funding some religious activities, officials were "uncertain of whether such uses of Agency funding violate Agency regulations or the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution" when balanced against foreign-policy objectives.
For example, our government rebuilt the Al Shuhada Mosque in Fallujah, Iraq, expecting such benefits as "stimulating the economy, enhancing a sense of pride in the community, reducing opposition to international relief organizations operating in Fallujah, and reducing incentives among young men to participate in violence or insurgent groups." But Section 205.1(d) of title 22 of the Code of Federal Regulations prohibits USAID funds from being used for the rehabilitation of structures to the extent that those structures are used for "inherently religious activities." It is impossible to separate religion from a mosque; any such projects will necessarily support Islam.
The State Department is either wittingly or unwittingly using tax money to support Mr. Rauf's efforts to realize his dream of a supersized mosque blocks away from the sacred ground of the former World Trade Center, which was destroyed by Islamic fanaticism. This ill-considered decision will raise the ire of millions of Americans and illustrates the limits of what the denizens of Foggy Bottom know about diplomacy.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Obama supports "Victory mosque" - a useful reminder for the rest of us of the attitudes of both Muslims and Obama.
http://tinyurl.com/2ewoaog
Obama Defends Plan for Mosque Near Ground Zero... By DEVLIN BARRETT And JONATHAN WEISMAN
WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama defended the plan to build a mosque near the site of the 2001 terror attacks in New York, telling Muslim guests at a Ramadan dinner at the White House that the nation's commitment to freedom of religion "must be unshakable."President Obama speaks at an Iftar meal, the breaking of the Ramadan fast, at the White House. Mr. Obama's remarks came after weeks of the White House sidestepping the debate that has roiled New York and the nation since developers announced plans to build a $100 million, 13-story mosque and Islamic cultural center just two blocks from the World Trade Center site...
****Freedom of religion does not include the right to take a property off the tax rolls and convert it to some tax-free purpose without zoning approval. This is not an issue of freedom of religion since Muslims are able to build mosques equally with any other religion ( but subject to the same approval constraints!). It is, however, a matter of taste and sensitivity with demands for the latter coming from the most insensitive group one can imagine. Where are such freedoms as religion ( in Muslim-controlled enclaves) or speech ( even in our country) such that Princeton University Press doesn't dare publish the actual cartoons in a book on the controversy in Denmark? It is especially interesting that a nearby Greek Orthodox church that was destroyed on 9/11 has not yet received approval to rebuild.( "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." )
Nevertheless, this is merely another example of Obama's disdain for most of his fellow citizens as well as his overweening Islamophilia. The Victory Mosque may serve as a triumphalist symbol of a murderous success to Muslims all over the world; to Americans it will serve as a reminder of who committed the atrocity of 9/11 and those who support them.
One can only hope that the City of New York will not be responsible for the costs of protecting the 13-story structure. Since it will contain a Sunni mosque, one might expect that Shia Muslims might be interested in seeing this high-profile edifice come down. It might even be convenient for them to have 13-stories worth of Sunnis collected in one place.****
Obama further elaborated on his remarks to Muslims at the White House:
...The White House had not previously taken a stand on the mosque, which would be part of a $100 million Islamic community center two blocks from where nearly 3,000 people perished when hijacked jetliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001. Press secretary Robert Gibbs had insisted it was a local matter.
It was already much more than that, sparking debate around the country as top Republicans including Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich announced their opposition. So did the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group.
Obama elevated it to a presidential issue Friday without equivocation. ****Yet again he panders to the world Muslim community while thumbing his nose r at a majority of Americans. Yet again, he chooses the path of divisiveness over community interchange. It is absurd to think that this will foster better relations between the American Muslim community and other Americans and Obama doesn't even pretend that it will. **** While insisting that the place where the twin towers once stood was indeed "hallowed ground," Obama said that the proper way to honor it was to apply American values.
Harkening back to earlier times when the building of synagogues or Catholic churches also met with opposition, Obama said: "Time and again, the American people have demonstrated that we can work through these issues, and stay true to our core values and emerge stronger for it. So it must be and will be today." ****As an attempt at compromise, New York Governor Patterson offered equivalent state land nearby but further from Ground Zero for the 13-story structure. The offer was summarily turned down by proponents and supporters of the Victory Mosque ( insufficiently provocative?).****
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent who has been a strong supporter of the mosque, welcomed Obama's words as a "clarion defense of the freedom of religion."
But some victims' advocates and Republicans were quick to pounce.
"Barack Obama has abandoned America at the place where America's heart was broken nine years ago, and where her true values were on display for all to see," said Debra Burlingame, a spokeswoman for some Sept. 11 victims' families and the sister of one of the pilots killed in the attacks.
Building the mosque at ground zero, she said, "is a deliberately provocative act that will precipitate more bloodshed in the name of Allah."
Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son was killed at the World Trade Center, said the president had failed to understand the issue. "As an Obama supporter, I really feel that he's lost sight of the germane issue, which is not about freedom of religion," she said. "It's about a gross lack of sensitivity to the 9/11 families and to the people who were lost."
Added Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y.: "President Obama is wrong. It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero."
Entering the highly charged election-year debate, Obama surely knew that his words would not only make headlines in the U.S. but be heard by Muslims worldwide. The president has made it a point to reach out to the global Muslim community, and the over 100 guests at Friday's dinner in the State Dining Room included ambassadors and officials from numerous nations where Islam is observed, including Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.
While his pronouncement concerning the mosque might find favor in the Muslim world, Obama's stance runs counter to the opinions of the majority of Americans, according to polls.
Opponents, including some Sept. 11 victims' relatives, see the prospect of a mosque so near the destroyed trade center as an insult to the memory of those killed by Islamic terrorists in the 2001 attacks.
Obama Defends Plan for Mosque Near Ground Zero... By DEVLIN BARRETT And JONATHAN WEISMAN
WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama defended the plan to build a mosque near the site of the 2001 terror attacks in New York, telling Muslim guests at a Ramadan dinner at the White House that the nation's commitment to freedom of religion "must be unshakable."President Obama speaks at an Iftar meal, the breaking of the Ramadan fast, at the White House. Mr. Obama's remarks came after weeks of the White House sidestepping the debate that has roiled New York and the nation since developers announced plans to build a $100 million, 13-story mosque and Islamic cultural center just two blocks from the World Trade Center site...
****Freedom of religion does not include the right to take a property off the tax rolls and convert it to some tax-free purpose without zoning approval. This is not an issue of freedom of religion since Muslims are able to build mosques equally with any other religion ( but subject to the same approval constraints!). It is, however, a matter of taste and sensitivity with demands for the latter coming from the most insensitive group one can imagine. Where are such freedoms as religion ( in Muslim-controlled enclaves) or speech ( even in our country) such that Princeton University Press doesn't dare publish the actual cartoons in a book on the controversy in Denmark? It is especially interesting that a nearby Greek Orthodox church that was destroyed on 9/11 has not yet received approval to rebuild.( "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." )
Nevertheless, this is merely another example of Obama's disdain for most of his fellow citizens as well as his overweening Islamophilia. The Victory Mosque may serve as a triumphalist symbol of a murderous success to Muslims all over the world; to Americans it will serve as a reminder of who committed the atrocity of 9/11 and those who support them.
One can only hope that the City of New York will not be responsible for the costs of protecting the 13-story structure. Since it will contain a Sunni mosque, one might expect that Shia Muslims might be interested in seeing this high-profile edifice come down. It might even be convenient for them to have 13-stories worth of Sunnis collected in one place.****
Obama further elaborated on his remarks to Muslims at the White House:
...The White House had not previously taken a stand on the mosque, which would be part of a $100 million Islamic community center two blocks from where nearly 3,000 people perished when hijacked jetliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001. Press secretary Robert Gibbs had insisted it was a local matter.
It was already much more than that, sparking debate around the country as top Republicans including Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich announced their opposition. So did the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group.
Obama elevated it to a presidential issue Friday without equivocation. ****Yet again he panders to the world Muslim community while thumbing his nose r at a majority of Americans. Yet again, he chooses the path of divisiveness over community interchange. It is absurd to think that this will foster better relations between the American Muslim community and other Americans and Obama doesn't even pretend that it will. **** While insisting that the place where the twin towers once stood was indeed "hallowed ground," Obama said that the proper way to honor it was to apply American values.
Harkening back to earlier times when the building of synagogues or Catholic churches also met with opposition, Obama said: "Time and again, the American people have demonstrated that we can work through these issues, and stay true to our core values and emerge stronger for it. So it must be and will be today." ****As an attempt at compromise, New York Governor Patterson offered equivalent state land nearby but further from Ground Zero for the 13-story structure. The offer was summarily turned down by proponents and supporters of the Victory Mosque ( insufficiently provocative?).****
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent who has been a strong supporter of the mosque, welcomed Obama's words as a "clarion defense of the freedom of religion."
But some victims' advocates and Republicans were quick to pounce.
"Barack Obama has abandoned America at the place where America's heart was broken nine years ago, and where her true values were on display for all to see," said Debra Burlingame, a spokeswoman for some Sept. 11 victims' families and the sister of one of the pilots killed in the attacks.
Building the mosque at ground zero, she said, "is a deliberately provocative act that will precipitate more bloodshed in the name of Allah."
Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son was killed at the World Trade Center, said the president had failed to understand the issue. "As an Obama supporter, I really feel that he's lost sight of the germane issue, which is not about freedom of religion," she said. "It's about a gross lack of sensitivity to the 9/11 families and to the people who were lost."
Added Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y.: "President Obama is wrong. It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero."
Entering the highly charged election-year debate, Obama surely knew that his words would not only make headlines in the U.S. but be heard by Muslims worldwide. The president has made it a point to reach out to the global Muslim community, and the over 100 guests at Friday's dinner in the State Dining Room included ambassadors and officials from numerous nations where Islam is observed, including Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.
While his pronouncement concerning the mosque might find favor in the Muslim world, Obama's stance runs counter to the opinions of the majority of Americans, according to polls.
Opponents, including some Sept. 11 victims' relatives, see the prospect of a mosque so near the destroyed trade center as an insult to the memory of those killed by Islamic terrorists in the 2001 attacks.
Friday, August 13, 2010
How does he fail me? Let me count the ways.
http://tinyurl.com/39ut42d
The stunning decline of Barack Obama: 10 key reasons why the Obama presidency is in meltdown by Nile Gardiner (Telegraph, UK )...
The stunning decline of Barack Obama: 10 key reasons why the Obama presidency is in meltdown by Nile Gardiner (Telegraph, UK )...
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Are you going to believe what Ahmadinejad tells you or your own lying eyes?
Response to A‘jad’s Holocaust Denial: Imams’ Tears at Auschwitz by Hillel Fendel
A group of American Muslim leaders made a first-of-its-kind visit to Nazi concentration camps this week, prompting tears from at least one of them.
Eight imams made a three-day trip Dachau and Auschwitz this week, co-sponsored by a German think tank and the New Jersey-based Center for Interreligious Understanding, and strongly supported by the United States government.
The trip, as reported in the Jewish Forward, was the brainchild of law professor Marshall Breger, an Orthodox Jew and former senior official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Breger said, “There is a view that there is growing anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, reinforced by people like President [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, that there is growing Holocaust denial in the Muslim world. In light of that, the idea was to offer education to those who might not have the kind of knowledge that we’ve had about World War II and the Jewish community, and to do this in a public way.”
The imams prayed at Dachau, with a concluding prayer by Muzammil Siddiqi, imam of the Islamic Society of Orange County, California: “We pray to G-d that this will not happen to the Jewish people or to any people anymore.”
Suhaib Webb, an imam from Santa Clara in the Bay Area, grew up in a white Christian household in Oklahoma and later converted to Islam. Walking around Auschwitz with tears in his eyes, he said, “It was far worse than I imagined.”
“No Muslim in his right mind, female or male, should deny the Holocaust,” said Mohamed Magid, imam and executive director of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society. “When you walk the walk of the people who have been taken to be gassed, to be killed, how can a person deny physical evidence, something that’s beyond doubt?”
Just a few days earlier, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad reiterated his claim that the Jews "made up" the "so-called Holocaust."
The delegates’ level of knowledge about the Holocaust prior to the trip seemed to be fairly low, the Forward reported. When they met with Max Mannheimer, a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, they appeared to particularly affected by seeing the number the Nazis had tattooed on his arm, and asked many questions.
The delegation’s youngest member was Yasir Qadhi, 35, dean of academics at Al Maghrib Institute, in New Haven, Conn. Qadhi has since recanted, both vocally and in print, his Holocaust-denial claims, explaining that he had been ignorant and exposed to materials such as the anti-Semitic “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” “That’s why I was very happy to come on this trip,” he said, “because I wanted to see for myself how wrong I was.”
Breger told the Forward, “These imams all have significant constituents in American Muslim communities as recognized legal scholars, people with mega-mosques, people with radio shows, people on the web, people who reach out to youth.” He said that the Jewish community, in contrast, often looks to engage with Muslims who meet specified criteria but do not have large constituencies.
A group of American Muslim leaders made a first-of-its-kind visit to Nazi concentration camps this week, prompting tears from at least one of them.
Eight imams made a three-day trip Dachau and Auschwitz this week, co-sponsored by a German think tank and the New Jersey-based Center for Interreligious Understanding, and strongly supported by the United States government.
The trip, as reported in the Jewish Forward, was the brainchild of law professor Marshall Breger, an Orthodox Jew and former senior official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Breger said, “There is a view that there is growing anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, reinforced by people like President [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, that there is growing Holocaust denial in the Muslim world. In light of that, the idea was to offer education to those who might not have the kind of knowledge that we’ve had about World War II and the Jewish community, and to do this in a public way.”
The imams prayed at Dachau, with a concluding prayer by Muzammil Siddiqi, imam of the Islamic Society of Orange County, California: “We pray to G-d that this will not happen to the Jewish people or to any people anymore.”
Suhaib Webb, an imam from Santa Clara in the Bay Area, grew up in a white Christian household in Oklahoma and later converted to Islam. Walking around Auschwitz with tears in his eyes, he said, “It was far worse than I imagined.”
“No Muslim in his right mind, female or male, should deny the Holocaust,” said Mohamed Magid, imam and executive director of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society. “When you walk the walk of the people who have been taken to be gassed, to be killed, how can a person deny physical evidence, something that’s beyond doubt?”
Just a few days earlier, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad reiterated his claim that the Jews "made up" the "so-called Holocaust."
The delegates’ level of knowledge about the Holocaust prior to the trip seemed to be fairly low, the Forward reported. When they met with Max Mannheimer, a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, they appeared to particularly affected by seeing the number the Nazis had tattooed on his arm, and asked many questions.
The delegation’s youngest member was Yasir Qadhi, 35, dean of academics at Al Maghrib Institute, in New Haven, Conn. Qadhi has since recanted, both vocally and in print, his Holocaust-denial claims, explaining that he had been ignorant and exposed to materials such as the anti-Semitic “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” “That’s why I was very happy to come on this trip,” he said, “because I wanted to see for myself how wrong I was.”
Breger told the Forward, “These imams all have significant constituents in American Muslim communities as recognized legal scholars, people with mega-mosques, people with radio shows, people on the web, people who reach out to youth.” He said that the Jewish community, in contrast, often looks to engage with Muslims who meet specified criteria but do not have large constituencies.
The essence of Bibi in the context of Barack
http://tinyurl.com/2fa48tm
Israel's anti-Obama by George Will
...no two leaders are less alike...Netanyahuk, the former commando and fierce nationalist, and Barack Obamak, the former professor ****Actually, he never was, only arrogating the pretensions of an academic without the title or scholarship; "would-be professor" would be more precise.**** and post-nationalist.****Their offices could not be more different: Obama got rid of a bust of Churchill, rudely returning it to the British Embassy when he first entered the Oval Office; Netanyahu has a picture of Churchill, along with Theodor Herzl, as one of only two pictures in his office.Will points out that the Obama administration shows no understanding of Netanyahu's although the latter is all too aware of the former. Two clues to understanding Bibi: one is a stone from a signet ring only two hundred years younger than Jerusalem ( i.e. 2800 years old) bearing the name of an official from that ancient time: Netanyahu. Will closes with an admonition from Netanyahu to a U.S. diplomat:**** "You live in Chevy Chase. Don't play with our future."
Israel's anti-Obama by George Will
...no two leaders are less alike...Netanyahuk, the former commando and fierce nationalist, and Barack Obamak, the former professor ****Actually, he never was, only arrogating the pretensions of an academic without the title or scholarship; "would-be professor" would be more precise.**** and post-nationalist.****Their offices could not be more different: Obama got rid of a bust of Churchill, rudely returning it to the British Embassy when he first entered the Oval Office; Netanyahu has a picture of Churchill, along with Theodor Herzl, as one of only two pictures in his office.Will points out that the Obama administration shows no understanding of Netanyahu's although the latter is all too aware of the former. Two clues to understanding Bibi: one is a stone from a signet ring only two hundred years younger than Jerusalem ( i.e. 2800 years old) bearing the name of an official from that ancient time: Netanyahu. Will closes with an admonition from Netanyahu to a U.S. diplomat:**** "You live in Chevy Chase. Don't play with our future."
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Comment is unnecessary
Saudis Want 'Mecca Time' to Replace GMT
Lauren Frayer
(Aug. 11) -- For centuries, an astronomy observatory in Greenwich, London -- the namesake of Greenwich Mean Time -- has been the reference point for lines of longitude, ships' navigation on the world's seas and the time zones used today.
But Saudi Arabia wants to change that. It's building what it calls the largest clock in the world, atop the second-largest skyscraper in the world, in the Islamic holy city of Mecca -- in hopes of replacing GMT with "Mecca Time."
The clock dwarfs London's Big Ben, with four huge faces each about 130 feet in diameter and inscribed with the Arabic words "God is greatest." Only one of the clock's faces has been completed so far, covered with 98 million pieces of glass mosaics. Details were first released by the Saudi official news agency and picked up by several foreign media.
It's still under construction atop a nearly 2,000-foot-tall building overlooking Mecca's Grand Mosque, the point where Muslims around the world turn toward during their five daily prayers. Millions of faithful visit the site as part of the Muslim hajj voyage and other pilgrimages each year.
"We in Mecca hope to be the world's central time zone, and not just have a clock to look at, to show off," Mecca resident Hani al-Wajeeh told Agence France-Presse.
"Putting Mecca time in the face of Greenwich Mean Time, this is the goal," Mohammed Al-Arkubi, general manager of Royal Makkah Tower Hotel, told the Arab News, a Saudi newspaper.
An observatory deck is planned for the base of the clock, which will also be topped with a 75-foot wide golden crescent moon hoisted on a spire 200 feet above the clock. From there projectors will send 15 beams of light streaming up into the sky. The tower will be visible from more than 16 miles away, and the light beams beyond that.... The project cost about $800 million, designed by German and Swiss engineers and is being built by the Saudi Binladen Group, a construction company originally founded by Osama bin Laden's father. The al-Qaida leader split from his family decades ago, and has criticized their wealth and connections with the Saudi government, which he considers corrupt and apostate.
Lauren Frayer
(Aug. 11) -- For centuries, an astronomy observatory in Greenwich, London -- the namesake of Greenwich Mean Time -- has been the reference point for lines of longitude, ships' navigation on the world's seas and the time zones used today.
But Saudi Arabia wants to change that. It's building what it calls the largest clock in the world, atop the second-largest skyscraper in the world, in the Islamic holy city of Mecca -- in hopes of replacing GMT with "Mecca Time."
The clock dwarfs London's Big Ben, with four huge faces each about 130 feet in diameter and inscribed with the Arabic words "God is greatest." Only one of the clock's faces has been completed so far, covered with 98 million pieces of glass mosaics. Details were first released by the Saudi official news agency and picked up by several foreign media.
It's still under construction atop a nearly 2,000-foot-tall building overlooking Mecca's Grand Mosque, the point where Muslims around the world turn toward during their five daily prayers. Millions of faithful visit the site as part of the Muslim hajj voyage and other pilgrimages each year.
"We in Mecca hope to be the world's central time zone, and not just have a clock to look at, to show off," Mecca resident Hani al-Wajeeh told Agence France-Presse.
"Putting Mecca time in the face of Greenwich Mean Time, this is the goal," Mohammed Al-Arkubi, general manager of Royal Makkah Tower Hotel, told the Arab News, a Saudi newspaper.
An observatory deck is planned for the base of the clock, which will also be topped with a 75-foot wide golden crescent moon hoisted on a spire 200 feet above the clock. From there projectors will send 15 beams of light streaming up into the sky. The tower will be visible from more than 16 miles away, and the light beams beyond that.... The project cost about $800 million, designed by German and Swiss engineers and is being built by the Saudi Binladen Group, a construction company originally founded by Osama bin Laden's father. The al-Qaida leader split from his family decades ago, and has criticized their wealth and connections with the Saudi government, which he considers corrupt and apostate.
Fouad Ajami pricks and buries the balloon that is Obama.
http://tinyurl.com/2eyl5rk
The Obsolescence of Barack Obama The magic of 2008 can't be recreated, and good riddance to it.By FOUAD AJAMI
...it is to Lyndon B. Johnson's unhappy presidency that Democratic strategist Robert Shrum compares the stewardship of Mr. Obama...His fall from political grace has been as swift as his rise a handful of years ago. He had been hot political property in 2006 and, of course, in 2008...The vaunted Obama economic stimulus,...has failed. ... But the American people are in open rebellion against an economic strategy of public debt, higher taxes and unending deficits. We're not all Keynesians, it turns out. The panic that propelled Mr. Obama to the presidency has waned....He had been a blank slate, and the devotees had projected onto him their hopes and dreams. His victory had not been the triumph of policies he had enunciated in great detail. He had never run anything in his entire life. He had a scant public record, but oddly this worked to his advantage. If he was going to begin the world anew, it was better that he knew little about the machinery of government. He pronounced on the American condition with stark, unalloyed confidence. He had little if any regard for precedents. He could be forgiven the thought that America's faith in economic freedom had given way and that he had the popular writ to move the nation toward a super-regulated command economy. An "economic emergency" was upon us, and this would be the New New Deal.
...Big as Reagan's mandate was, in two elections, the man was never bigger than his country. There was never narcissism or a bloated sense of personal destiny in him. He gloried in the country, and drew sustenance from its heroic deeds and its capacity for recovery....Mr. Obama will mark time, but henceforth he will not define the national agenda. He will not be the repository of its hopes and sentiments. The ambition that his would be a "transformational" presidency—he rightly described Reagan's stewardship in these terms—is for naught.... Personality is doubtless an obstacle to his recovery. The detachment of Mr. Obama need not be dwelled upon at great length, so obvious it is now even to the pundits who had a "tingling sensation"...It is in the nature of charisma that it rises out of thin air, out of need and distress, and then dissipates when the magic fails....There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.
The Obsolescence of Barack Obama The magic of 2008 can't be recreated, and good riddance to it.By FOUAD AJAMI
...it is to Lyndon B. Johnson's unhappy presidency that Democratic strategist Robert Shrum compares the stewardship of Mr. Obama...His fall from political grace has been as swift as his rise a handful of years ago. He had been hot political property in 2006 and, of course, in 2008...The vaunted Obama economic stimulus,...has failed. ... But the American people are in open rebellion against an economic strategy of public debt, higher taxes and unending deficits. We're not all Keynesians, it turns out. The panic that propelled Mr. Obama to the presidency has waned....He had been a blank slate, and the devotees had projected onto him their hopes and dreams. His victory had not been the triumph of policies he had enunciated in great detail. He had never run anything in his entire life. He had a scant public record, but oddly this worked to his advantage. If he was going to begin the world anew, it was better that he knew little about the machinery of government. He pronounced on the American condition with stark, unalloyed confidence. He had little if any regard for precedents. He could be forgiven the thought that America's faith in economic freedom had given way and that he had the popular writ to move the nation toward a super-regulated command economy. An "economic emergency" was upon us, and this would be the New New Deal.
...Big as Reagan's mandate was, in two elections, the man was never bigger than his country. There was never narcissism or a bloated sense of personal destiny in him. He gloried in the country, and drew sustenance from its heroic deeds and its capacity for recovery....Mr. Obama will mark time, but henceforth he will not define the national agenda. He will not be the repository of its hopes and sentiments. The ambition that his would be a "transformational" presidency—he rightly described Reagan's stewardship in these terms—is for naught.... Personality is doubtless an obstacle to his recovery. The detachment of Mr. Obama need not be dwelled upon at great length, so obvious it is now even to the pundits who had a "tingling sensation"...It is in the nature of charisma that it rises out of thin air, out of need and distress, and then dissipates when the magic fails....There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
" Marie Antoinette", perhaps but certainly NOUVEAU BITCH.
Michelle Obama's pretentiousness, arrogance, insensitivity and self-aggrandizing taste for expensive goods and services, deserves a neologism that encompasses several of the dimensions of this person. Our candidate? Nouveau Bitch.
The friend of my (stupid) friend can be my enemy. (And with friends like that ...)
August 10, 2010
Three attacks on Israel last week don't seem to bother the international community. It's time to let them know the attacks—and the hypocrisy—bother us!
Last week, as Israeli soldiers were trimming a tree in Israeli territory near its northern border, a sniper from the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) killed one of the soldiers and wounded another, starting a firefight. Eventually, three Lebanese were killed---two soldiers and a journalist who had apparently been invited to report on the ambush.****The Israelis had, in fact, even informed UNIFIL in advance so UNIFIL must have participated in this ambush.****
Last week the Israeli city of Ashkelon was attacked by missiles fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza.
Last week a rocket fired from Egyptian territory, intended to hit the southern Israeli resort city of Eilat, misfired and landed in Jordan. Egypt reported that the missile was launched by Palestinians.
How do United Nations members feel about these three unprovoked attacks on Israel in one week? It's hard to say, since the incidents have hardly been reported in the international press, and no government except Israel has issued a formal protest.
What blatant, outrageous hypocrisy!
When Hizbollah attacked Israeli cities from Lebanon in 2006 with thousands of rockets and Israel retaliated, the Jewish state was criticized for using "disproportionate force." When Hamas aimed thousands more rockets from Gaza at Israeli civilians in 2008 and Israel responded, many world leaders and a U.N. commission criticized Israel for "war crimes." Most recently, when Israel had to use force to stop a rogue ship determined to break a legal Israeli blockade of Gaza, Israel was pilloried by the world's nations after nine armed militants on the ship were killed.
So it's OK for Hizbollah, Lebanon and Hamas to attack Israel with no risk of notice, let alone condemnation. But when Israel responds with legitimate force to defend its citizens from violent provocation, it's the Jewish state that is guilty?
In response to the latest attacks, however, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did issue a statement, which highlights this horrible, hateful double standard. Here's what he said:
"For years many in the international community have remained silent when rockets have been fired at Israeli civilians, and when unprovoked attacks have been launched against our soldiers. Expressions of outrage have largely been reserved for Israel's response to those attacks. Firing missiles on civilians is a war crime, and unprovoked attacks on soldiers are blatant acts of aggression. Israel expects the international community to condemn such attacks in the strongest possible terms. All those in the international community committed to peace should support Israel's right to defend itself against those who attack the innocent and seek to destroy peace."
We know that if Israel continues to be attacked by its Arab neighbors---and it appears likely this will happen---Israel will respond, as she must. We can also expect many world leaders to condemn her, as they have in the past.What's worse, as the article below by Carolyn Glick exposes, the United States is guilty of supporting the Lebanese Armed Forces with ammunition and hundreds of millions of dollars . . . just as it supports the Palestinian armed forces.
Now's the time to speak out, at least in our own country. We must call on our elected representatives to cry out against these recent attacks and call for proactive support of Israel's right to defend herself. We must also demand that the U.S. stop supporting armies that attack Israel.
Won't you take just a few minutes to write the President, your Senators and Representative, letting them know how you feel? To give President Obama your opinion about these violent attacks on Israel, please write the President---immediately. To identify and contact your Senators and Representative, go to contacting the Congress. (You'll need your nine [5+4] digit zip code to find your Representative.) Please do your part to help Israel today. And please use the Forward to a Friend button at the bottom of this email to encourage others to do the same.
Best Regards,Jim Sinkinson Director, FLAME
It wasn't a US Army sniper who killed the Israeli soldier and seriously wounded another one on the Lebanon border . . . but did the US help? by Carolyn Glick, Jerusalem Post, August 5, 2010
It wasn't a US Army sniper who killed IDF Lt.- Col. Dov Harari and seriously wounded Capt. Ezra Lakia on Tuesday. But the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) sniper who shot them owes a great deal to the generous support the LAF has received from America.
For the past five years, the LAF has been the second largest recipient of US military assistance per capita after Israel. A State Department press release from late 2008 noted that between 2006 and 2008, the LAF received 10 million rounds of ammunition, Humvees, spare parts for attack helicopters, vehicles for its Internal Security Forces "and the same frontline weapons that US military troops are currently using, including assault rifles, automatic grenade launchers, advanced sniper systems, anti-tank weapons and the most modern urban warfare bunker weapons."
Since 2006, the US has provided Lebanon some $500 million in military assistance. And there is no end in sight. After President Barack Obama's meeting with Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri in June, the White House proclaimed Obama's "determination to continue US efforts to support and strengthen Lebanese institutions such as the Lebanese Armed Forces and the Internal Security Forces."
And indeed, in late June, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates informed Congress that the Pentagon intends to provide the LAF with 24 120mm mortars, 24 M2 .50 caliber machine guns, 1 million rounds of ammunition, and 24 humvees and trailers. The latest orders should be delivered by the end of 2011.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the administration has already allocated $100m. in military assistance to Lebanon for 2011.
According to Lebanon's As-Safir newspaper, in written testimony to Congress, last week Obama's nominee to head the US Central Command, Gen. James Matthis, claimed that relations between US Central Command and the LAF focus on building the LAF's capabilities "to preserve internal stability and protect borders."
And how is that border protection going? Tuesday's unprovoked LAF ambush of Lt.-Col. Harari's battalion within Israeli territory showed that the LAF is fully prepared to go to war against the US's closest ally in the region, in order to deter IDF units from crossing the border.
Indeed, they are willing to commit unprovoked acts of illegal aggression to harm Israel.
As The Jerusalem Post reported on Wednesday, there is no reason to be surprised by what happened.
Since 2009, LAF men have frequently pointed their rifles at IDF soldiers operating along the border. In recent months they have also cocked their rifles while aiming them at IDF forces. It was just a matter of time before they started shooting.
The same aggressive border protection is completely absent, however, along Lebanon's border with Syria. Since 2006, the LAF has taken no actions to seal off that border from weapons transfers to Hizbullah. It has taken no steps to protect Lebanese sovereignty from the likes of Syria and Iran that are arming Hizbullah's army with tens of thousands of missiles.
Then there's Centcom's (editor: US Central Command's) "internal stability."
For the past four years, in open breach of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which set the terms for the cease-fire that ended the Second Lebanon War, the LAF has done nothing to block Hizbullah from remilitarizing and reasserting control over southern Lebanon.
Moreover, the institution that the State Department views as the anchor of a multiethnic, independent Lebanon did not lift a finger against Hizbullah when Hizbullah staged a coup against the Saniora government in 2008.
In a sense, by effectively collaborating with Hizbullah, the LAF did ensure "internal stability."
But it is hard to see how such "internal stability" advances US interests.
In stark contrast, as the Los Angeles Times reported last week, the US-supported Lebanese Internal Security Forces have used US signals equipment to help Hizbullah ferret out Israeli agents. According to the Times, "A strengthening Lebanese government is helping Hizbullah bust alleged spy cells, sometimes using tools and tradecraft acquired from Western nations eager to build up Lebanon's security forces as a counterweight to the Shi'ite group."
The US has refused to reckon with the consequences of its actions. As the Times reported, last week Assistant Secretary of Defense Alexander Vershbow visited Beirut and said that continued US aid and training to the LAF would allow the Lebanese Army to "prevent militias and other nongovernmental organizations" from undermining the government.
It bears recalling that Hizbullah has been a partner in the Lebanese government since 2005. Since its successful coup in 2008, Hizbullah has held a veto over all the decisions of the Lebanese government.
It also bears recalling that during the 2006 war, the LAF provided Hizbullah commanders with targeting data for their missiles and rockets.
The LAF also announced on its official Web site that it would award pensions to families of Hizbullah fighters killed in the war.
Unfortunately, the LAF is not the only military organization aligned with Israel's enemies that the US is arming and training. There is also the US-trained Palestinian army.
As Israel Radio's Arab Affairs commentator Yoni Ben-Menachem reported last month, the IDF is deeply concerned about the US-trained Palestinian force. Ben-Menachem recalled that since 1996, Palestinians security forces have repeatedly taken leading roles in organizing and carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel.
Hundreds of Israelis have been murdered and maimed in these attacks.
The Palestinian force being trained by the US Army represents a disturbing, qualitative upgrade in Palestinian military capabilities.
OC Central Command Maj.-Gen. Avi Mizrahi warned IDF ground forces about the new USPalestinian threat in May.
As Mizrahi put it in a speech at Tze'elim training base cited by Ben-Menachem, "This is a well-trained force, better equipped than its predecessors and trained by the US. The significance of this is that at the start of a new battle [with the Palestinians] the price that we will pay will be higher. A force like this one can shut down a built-up area with four snipers. This is deadly. These aren't the fighters we faced in Jenin [in 2002]. This is an infantry force that will be fighting us and we need to take this into account. They have offensive capabilities and we aren't expecting them to give up."
The IDF assesses that the US-trained force will be capable of overrunning small IDF outposts and isolated Israeli communities.
To date, the US has spent $400m. on the Palestinian army. The Obama administration has allocated an additional $100m. for the next year.
And the US is demanding that Israel support its efforts. In a General Accounting Office report issued in May, Israel was excoriated for hampering US efforts to build the Palestinian forces.
The GAO railed against Israel's refusal to permit the transfer of a thousand AK-47 assault rifles to the Palestinian forces. It criticized Israel's rejection of US plans to train a Palestinian counterterror force. It complained that Israel does not give freedom of movement to US military advisers to the Palestinian forces in Judea and Samaria.
The US claims that what it is doing cultivates stability. It argues that the Palestinian and Lebanese failure to prevent terror armies from attacking Israel is due to their lack of institutional capacity to rein in terrorism rather than the absence of institutional will to do so. The US claims that pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into these Lebanese and Palestinian armies will enable them to become stabilizing forces in the region that will engender peace. What the administration ignores, however, is the fact that the members and commanders of these US-trained forces share the terrorists' dedication to Israel's destruction.
To its undying shame, Israel has publicly supported, or, at best failed to oppose these American initiatives. By doing so, Israel has provided political cover for these US initiatives that endanger its security. Although it is crucial to call the US out for its sponsorship of terror-aligned armies, it is also important to understand Israel's role in these nefarious enterprises.
Israel has gone along with these US programs for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it has been due to domestic politics. Sometimes it owed to Israel's desire to be a team player with the US government. But generally the Israeli rationale for not loudly and vociferously objecting to US assistance to enemy armies has been the same as Israel's rationale for embracing Yassir Arafat and the PLO in 1993 and for every other Israeli act of appeasement toward its enemies and allies alike.
Successive Israeli governments have claimed that by supporting actions that strengthen Israel's enemies, they gain leverage for Israel, or, at a minimum, they mitigate the opprobrium directed against Israel when it takes actions to defend itself. In Lebanon, for instance, Israel agreed to the US plan to support the Hizbullah-dominated Saniora government in the hopes that by agreeing to give the Lebanese government immunity from IDF attack, the US would support Israel's moves to defeat Hizbullah.
But this did not happen. Indeed, it could not happen. The pro-Western Lebanese government ministers are beholden to Hizbullah.
Whether they wish to or not, former prime minister Fuad Saniora and his successor Hariri both act as Hizbullah's defenders to the US.
And once the US committed itself to the falsehood that the Sanioras and Hariris of Lebanon are independent actors, it inevitably became Hizbullah's advocate against Israel as well. The logic of appeasement moves in one direction only — toward one's enemies.
The same holds for the Palestinians. Israel believed that once it capitulated to international pressure to recognize the PLO the US, the EU and the UN would hold the PLO to account if it turned out that Arafat and his minions had not changed their ways. But when Arafat ordered his lieutenants to wage a terror war against Israel rather than accept statehood, the US, the EU and the UN did not rally to Israel's side.
They had become so invested in their delusion of Palestinian peacefulness that they refused to abandon it. Instead, at most, they pinned the full blame on Arafat and demanded that Israel support their efforts to "strengthen the moderates."
And so, in this demented logic, it made sense for the US to build a Palestinian army after the Palestinians elected Hamas to lead them.
And so on and so forth. In every single instance, Israel's willingness to embrace lies about the nature of its enemies has come back to haunt it. Never has Israel gained any ground by turning a blind eye to the hostility of the likes of Salam Fayyad and Saad Hariri.
It is true; the US is abetting and aiding the war against Israel by supporting the LAF and the Palestinian military. But it is also true that the US will not stop until Israel demands that it stop. And Israel will not demand that the US stop building armies for its enemies until Israel abandons the notion that by accepting a lie told by a friend, it will gain that friend's loyalty.//
****Several things that the Obama administration is doing are along the same line of bolstering Israel's enemies. Egypt is in intensive negotiations to change the program of American aid to an "endowment" so as to sever the relation to the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement that underlay the aid in the first place. At present, Congress has oversight and if ( as seems inevitable with the passing of Mubarek )Egypt disavows even the very cold peace it has with Israel, Congress is likely to withdraw aid. Changing to an "endowment" would take that oversight from Congress and allow the Executive to support an Egypt hostile to Israel. Much of the aid to Egypt has been for high-tech weaponry although it is hard to think of any adversary Egypt needs it for except for Israel. The common argument for building up the Palestinians, the Lebanese Army, the Egyptians, the Saudis, etc is to provide a bulwark against Iran. However, it is not at all clear that these regimes, recipients of advanced weaponry eroding Israel's qualitative advantage ( heretofore a pillar of Congressional U.S. policy ), are trust-worthy. The Oslo Accords, endorsed by Clinton and Rahm Emanuel especially, intended to create a police capability for the Palestinian not a modern, U.S.-trained army capable of confronting the IDF.Just this week, it was announced that 100 F-15 advanced fighters will be sold to Saudi Arabia, not the most stable of governments. It is highly likely that much or all of this U.S. weaponry will eventually be deployed against Israel.****
Three attacks on Israel last week don't seem to bother the international community. It's time to let them know the attacks—and the hypocrisy—bother us!
Last week, as Israeli soldiers were trimming a tree in Israeli territory near its northern border, a sniper from the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) killed one of the soldiers and wounded another, starting a firefight. Eventually, three Lebanese were killed---two soldiers and a journalist who had apparently been invited to report on the ambush.****The Israelis had, in fact, even informed UNIFIL in advance so UNIFIL must have participated in this ambush.****
Last week the Israeli city of Ashkelon was attacked by missiles fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza.
Last week a rocket fired from Egyptian territory, intended to hit the southern Israeli resort city of Eilat, misfired and landed in Jordan. Egypt reported that the missile was launched by Palestinians.
How do United Nations members feel about these three unprovoked attacks on Israel in one week? It's hard to say, since the incidents have hardly been reported in the international press, and no government except Israel has issued a formal protest.
What blatant, outrageous hypocrisy!
When Hizbollah attacked Israeli cities from Lebanon in 2006 with thousands of rockets and Israel retaliated, the Jewish state was criticized for using "disproportionate force." When Hamas aimed thousands more rockets from Gaza at Israeli civilians in 2008 and Israel responded, many world leaders and a U.N. commission criticized Israel for "war crimes." Most recently, when Israel had to use force to stop a rogue ship determined to break a legal Israeli blockade of Gaza, Israel was pilloried by the world's nations after nine armed militants on the ship were killed.
So it's OK for Hizbollah, Lebanon and Hamas to attack Israel with no risk of notice, let alone condemnation. But when Israel responds with legitimate force to defend its citizens from violent provocation, it's the Jewish state that is guilty?
In response to the latest attacks, however, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did issue a statement, which highlights this horrible, hateful double standard. Here's what he said:
"For years many in the international community have remained silent when rockets have been fired at Israeli civilians, and when unprovoked attacks have been launched against our soldiers. Expressions of outrage have largely been reserved for Israel's response to those attacks. Firing missiles on civilians is a war crime, and unprovoked attacks on soldiers are blatant acts of aggression. Israel expects the international community to condemn such attacks in the strongest possible terms. All those in the international community committed to peace should support Israel's right to defend itself against those who attack the innocent and seek to destroy peace."
We know that if Israel continues to be attacked by its Arab neighbors---and it appears likely this will happen---Israel will respond, as she must. We can also expect many world leaders to condemn her, as they have in the past.What's worse, as the article below by Carolyn Glick exposes, the United States is guilty of supporting the Lebanese Armed Forces with ammunition and hundreds of millions of dollars . . . just as it supports the Palestinian armed forces.
Now's the time to speak out, at least in our own country. We must call on our elected representatives to cry out against these recent attacks and call for proactive support of Israel's right to defend herself. We must also demand that the U.S. stop supporting armies that attack Israel.
Won't you take just a few minutes to write the President, your Senators and Representative, letting them know how you feel? To give President Obama your opinion about these violent attacks on Israel, please write the President---immediately. To identify and contact your Senators and Representative, go to contacting the Congress. (You'll need your nine [5+4] digit zip code to find your Representative.) Please do your part to help Israel today. And please use the Forward to a Friend button at the bottom of this email to encourage others to do the same.
Best Regards,Jim Sinkinson Director, FLAME
It wasn't a US Army sniper who killed the Israeli soldier and seriously wounded another one on the Lebanon border . . . but did the US help? by Carolyn Glick, Jerusalem Post, August 5, 2010
It wasn't a US Army sniper who killed IDF Lt.- Col. Dov Harari and seriously wounded Capt. Ezra Lakia on Tuesday. But the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) sniper who shot them owes a great deal to the generous support the LAF has received from America.
For the past five years, the LAF has been the second largest recipient of US military assistance per capita after Israel. A State Department press release from late 2008 noted that between 2006 and 2008, the LAF received 10 million rounds of ammunition, Humvees, spare parts for attack helicopters, vehicles for its Internal Security Forces "and the same frontline weapons that US military troops are currently using, including assault rifles, automatic grenade launchers, advanced sniper systems, anti-tank weapons and the most modern urban warfare bunker weapons."
Since 2006, the US has provided Lebanon some $500 million in military assistance. And there is no end in sight. After President Barack Obama's meeting with Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri in June, the White House proclaimed Obama's "determination to continue US efforts to support and strengthen Lebanese institutions such as the Lebanese Armed Forces and the Internal Security Forces."
And indeed, in late June, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates informed Congress that the Pentagon intends to provide the LAF with 24 120mm mortars, 24 M2 .50 caliber machine guns, 1 million rounds of ammunition, and 24 humvees and trailers. The latest orders should be delivered by the end of 2011.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the administration has already allocated $100m. in military assistance to Lebanon for 2011.
According to Lebanon's As-Safir newspaper, in written testimony to Congress, last week Obama's nominee to head the US Central Command, Gen. James Matthis, claimed that relations between US Central Command and the LAF focus on building the LAF's capabilities "to preserve internal stability and protect borders."
And how is that border protection going? Tuesday's unprovoked LAF ambush of Lt.-Col. Harari's battalion within Israeli territory showed that the LAF is fully prepared to go to war against the US's closest ally in the region, in order to deter IDF units from crossing the border.
Indeed, they are willing to commit unprovoked acts of illegal aggression to harm Israel.
As The Jerusalem Post reported on Wednesday, there is no reason to be surprised by what happened.
Since 2009, LAF men have frequently pointed their rifles at IDF soldiers operating along the border. In recent months they have also cocked their rifles while aiming them at IDF forces. It was just a matter of time before they started shooting.
The same aggressive border protection is completely absent, however, along Lebanon's border with Syria. Since 2006, the LAF has taken no actions to seal off that border from weapons transfers to Hizbullah. It has taken no steps to protect Lebanese sovereignty from the likes of Syria and Iran that are arming Hizbullah's army with tens of thousands of missiles.
Then there's Centcom's (editor: US Central Command's) "internal stability."
For the past four years, in open breach of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which set the terms for the cease-fire that ended the Second Lebanon War, the LAF has done nothing to block Hizbullah from remilitarizing and reasserting control over southern Lebanon.
Moreover, the institution that the State Department views as the anchor of a multiethnic, independent Lebanon did not lift a finger against Hizbullah when Hizbullah staged a coup against the Saniora government in 2008.
In a sense, by effectively collaborating with Hizbullah, the LAF did ensure "internal stability."
But it is hard to see how such "internal stability" advances US interests.
In stark contrast, as the Los Angeles Times reported last week, the US-supported Lebanese Internal Security Forces have used US signals equipment to help Hizbullah ferret out Israeli agents. According to the Times, "A strengthening Lebanese government is helping Hizbullah bust alleged spy cells, sometimes using tools and tradecraft acquired from Western nations eager to build up Lebanon's security forces as a counterweight to the Shi'ite group."
The US has refused to reckon with the consequences of its actions. As the Times reported, last week Assistant Secretary of Defense Alexander Vershbow visited Beirut and said that continued US aid and training to the LAF would allow the Lebanese Army to "prevent militias and other nongovernmental organizations" from undermining the government.
It bears recalling that Hizbullah has been a partner in the Lebanese government since 2005. Since its successful coup in 2008, Hizbullah has held a veto over all the decisions of the Lebanese government.
It also bears recalling that during the 2006 war, the LAF provided Hizbullah commanders with targeting data for their missiles and rockets.
The LAF also announced on its official Web site that it would award pensions to families of Hizbullah fighters killed in the war.
Unfortunately, the LAF is not the only military organization aligned with Israel's enemies that the US is arming and training. There is also the US-trained Palestinian army.
As Israel Radio's Arab Affairs commentator Yoni Ben-Menachem reported last month, the IDF is deeply concerned about the US-trained Palestinian force. Ben-Menachem recalled that since 1996, Palestinians security forces have repeatedly taken leading roles in organizing and carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel.
Hundreds of Israelis have been murdered and maimed in these attacks.
The Palestinian force being trained by the US Army represents a disturbing, qualitative upgrade in Palestinian military capabilities.
OC Central Command Maj.-Gen. Avi Mizrahi warned IDF ground forces about the new USPalestinian threat in May.
As Mizrahi put it in a speech at Tze'elim training base cited by Ben-Menachem, "This is a well-trained force, better equipped than its predecessors and trained by the US. The significance of this is that at the start of a new battle [with the Palestinians] the price that we will pay will be higher. A force like this one can shut down a built-up area with four snipers. This is deadly. These aren't the fighters we faced in Jenin [in 2002]. This is an infantry force that will be fighting us and we need to take this into account. They have offensive capabilities and we aren't expecting them to give up."
The IDF assesses that the US-trained force will be capable of overrunning small IDF outposts and isolated Israeli communities.
To date, the US has spent $400m. on the Palestinian army. The Obama administration has allocated an additional $100m. for the next year.
And the US is demanding that Israel support its efforts. In a General Accounting Office report issued in May, Israel was excoriated for hampering US efforts to build the Palestinian forces.
The GAO railed against Israel's refusal to permit the transfer of a thousand AK-47 assault rifles to the Palestinian forces. It criticized Israel's rejection of US plans to train a Palestinian counterterror force. It complained that Israel does not give freedom of movement to US military advisers to the Palestinian forces in Judea and Samaria.
The US claims that what it is doing cultivates stability. It argues that the Palestinian and Lebanese failure to prevent terror armies from attacking Israel is due to their lack of institutional capacity to rein in terrorism rather than the absence of institutional will to do so. The US claims that pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into these Lebanese and Palestinian armies will enable them to become stabilizing forces in the region that will engender peace. What the administration ignores, however, is the fact that the members and commanders of these US-trained forces share the terrorists' dedication to Israel's destruction.
To its undying shame, Israel has publicly supported, or, at best failed to oppose these American initiatives. By doing so, Israel has provided political cover for these US initiatives that endanger its security. Although it is crucial to call the US out for its sponsorship of terror-aligned armies, it is also important to understand Israel's role in these nefarious enterprises.
Israel has gone along with these US programs for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it has been due to domestic politics. Sometimes it owed to Israel's desire to be a team player with the US government. But generally the Israeli rationale for not loudly and vociferously objecting to US assistance to enemy armies has been the same as Israel's rationale for embracing Yassir Arafat and the PLO in 1993 and for every other Israeli act of appeasement toward its enemies and allies alike.
Successive Israeli governments have claimed that by supporting actions that strengthen Israel's enemies, they gain leverage for Israel, or, at a minimum, they mitigate the opprobrium directed against Israel when it takes actions to defend itself. In Lebanon, for instance, Israel agreed to the US plan to support the Hizbullah-dominated Saniora government in the hopes that by agreeing to give the Lebanese government immunity from IDF attack, the US would support Israel's moves to defeat Hizbullah.
But this did not happen. Indeed, it could not happen. The pro-Western Lebanese government ministers are beholden to Hizbullah.
Whether they wish to or not, former prime minister Fuad Saniora and his successor Hariri both act as Hizbullah's defenders to the US.
And once the US committed itself to the falsehood that the Sanioras and Hariris of Lebanon are independent actors, it inevitably became Hizbullah's advocate against Israel as well. The logic of appeasement moves in one direction only — toward one's enemies.
The same holds for the Palestinians. Israel believed that once it capitulated to international pressure to recognize the PLO the US, the EU and the UN would hold the PLO to account if it turned out that Arafat and his minions had not changed their ways. But when Arafat ordered his lieutenants to wage a terror war against Israel rather than accept statehood, the US, the EU and the UN did not rally to Israel's side.
They had become so invested in their delusion of Palestinian peacefulness that they refused to abandon it. Instead, at most, they pinned the full blame on Arafat and demanded that Israel support their efforts to "strengthen the moderates."
And so, in this demented logic, it made sense for the US to build a Palestinian army after the Palestinians elected Hamas to lead them.
And so on and so forth. In every single instance, Israel's willingness to embrace lies about the nature of its enemies has come back to haunt it. Never has Israel gained any ground by turning a blind eye to the hostility of the likes of Salam Fayyad and Saad Hariri.
It is true; the US is abetting and aiding the war against Israel by supporting the LAF and the Palestinian military. But it is also true that the US will not stop until Israel demands that it stop. And Israel will not demand that the US stop building armies for its enemies until Israel abandons the notion that by accepting a lie told by a friend, it will gain that friend's loyalty.//
****Several things that the Obama administration is doing are along the same line of bolstering Israel's enemies. Egypt is in intensive negotiations to change the program of American aid to an "endowment" so as to sever the relation to the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement that underlay the aid in the first place. At present, Congress has oversight and if ( as seems inevitable with the passing of Mubarek )Egypt disavows even the very cold peace it has with Israel, Congress is likely to withdraw aid. Changing to an "endowment" would take that oversight from Congress and allow the Executive to support an Egypt hostile to Israel. Much of the aid to Egypt has been for high-tech weaponry although it is hard to think of any adversary Egypt needs it for except for Israel. The common argument for building up the Palestinians, the Lebanese Army, the Egyptians, the Saudis, etc is to provide a bulwark against Iran. However, it is not at all clear that these regimes, recipients of advanced weaponry eroding Israel's qualitative advantage ( heretofore a pillar of Congressional U.S. policy ), are trust-worthy. The Oslo Accords, endorsed by Clinton and Rahm Emanuel especially, intended to create a police capability for the Palestinian not a modern, U.S.-trained army capable of confronting the IDF.Just this week, it was announced that 100 F-15 advanced fighters will be sold to Saudi Arabia, not the most stable of governments. It is highly likely that much or all of this U.S. weaponry will eventually be deployed against Israel.****
Monday, August 9, 2010
The Fareed Screed Revisited-- WHOA there, Kemo Sabe! What the hell did you say?
http://tinyurl.com/36xab66
Build the Ground Zero Mosque I believe we should promote Muslim moderates right here in America. And why I'm returning an award to the ADL. Fareed Zakaria in NEWSWEEK
Ever since 9/11, liberals and conservatives have agreed that the lasting solution to the problem of Islamic terror is to prevail in the battle of ideas and to discredit radical Islam, the ideology that motivates young men to kill and be killed. ****FZ starts off with a fallacy: there is no possible "battle of ideas" with fanatics who believe that Allah has spoken on an issue. The phrase "Our young men love death more than you love life" has been repeated over and over since the seventh century. It seems part of mainstream Islam, much as Westerners find this hard to believe.****
Victory in the war on terror will be won when a moderate, mainstream version of Islam—one that is compatible with modernity—fully triumphs over the world view of Osama bin Laden.
As the conservative Middle Eastern expert Daniel Pipes put it, “The U.S. role [in this struggle] is less to offer its own views than to help those Muslims with compatible views, especially on such issues as relations with non-Muslims, modernization, and the rights of women and minorities.” To that end, early in its tenure the Bush administration began a serious effort to seek out and support moderate Islam. Since then, Washington has funded mosques, schools, institutes, and community centers that are trying to modernize Islam around the world. Except, apparently, in New York City....****Say WHAT?*** ugust 08, 2010
Newsweek columnist says US funding mosque construction Lee DeCovnick The American Thinker
Truth, even in the tightly controlled prison of the Obama media complex, occasionally bursts forth like a swordfish cavorting on the waves of a golden August afternoon.
Newsweek, the Washington Post's former progressive stepchild, published an op-ed by Fareed Zakaria, the in-house lapdog for the Administration, extolling the virtues of building the Ground Zero Mosque. A couple of sentences demand a great deal more explanation.
"To that end, early in its tenure the Bush administration began a serious effort to seek out and support moderate Islam. Since then, Washington has funded mosques, schools, institutes, and community centers that are trying to modernize Islam around the world. We should be encouraging groups like the one behind this project, not demonizing them. Were this mosque being built in a foreign city, chances are that the U.S. government would be funding it..."
Perhaps we all missed the memo where US taxpayers are gleefully funding Islamic "mosques, schools, institutes, and community centers" around the globe. Of course, US troops have restored hundreds of schools and community centers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but mosques and Islamic institutes? This seems very difficult to believe.
So, as an enraged and curious taxpaying citizen, I have a few questions for Mr. Zakaria, our Congress and this Administration. What are the locations, costs, and dates of construction of these US taxpayer-funded mosques and Islamic institutes? If some of these mosques were built in the America, didn't anyone contact the ACLU? (I would pay real money to be in "the room" during that discussion.) What particular piece of Congressional legislation authorized US taxpayer dollars to be spent on these mosques and Islamic institutes? Did our government apportion these funds fairly and equally between the Shi'a, Sunni, and Sufi sects of Islam?
The Constitution states "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" I'm damn sure spending US taxpayer dollars on constructing mosques was not envisioned by the Founding Fathers nor by the overwhelming majority of American citizens.
Build the Ground Zero Mosque I believe we should promote Muslim moderates right here in America. And why I'm returning an award to the ADL. Fareed Zakaria in NEWSWEEK
Ever since 9/11, liberals and conservatives have agreed that the lasting solution to the problem of Islamic terror is to prevail in the battle of ideas and to discredit radical Islam, the ideology that motivates young men to kill and be killed. ****FZ starts off with a fallacy: there is no possible "battle of ideas" with fanatics who believe that Allah has spoken on an issue. The phrase "Our young men love death more than you love life" has been repeated over and over since the seventh century. It seems part of mainstream Islam, much as Westerners find this hard to believe.****
Victory in the war on terror will be won when a moderate, mainstream version of Islam—one that is compatible with modernity—fully triumphs over the world view of Osama bin Laden.
As the conservative Middle Eastern expert Daniel Pipes put it, “The U.S. role [in this struggle] is less to offer its own views than to help those Muslims with compatible views, especially on such issues as relations with non-Muslims, modernization, and the rights of women and minorities.” To that end, early in its tenure the Bush administration began a serious effort to seek out and support moderate Islam. Since then, Washington has funded mosques, schools, institutes, and community centers that are trying to modernize Islam around the world. Except, apparently, in New York City....****Say WHAT?*** ugust 08, 2010
Newsweek columnist says US funding mosque construction Lee DeCovnick The American Thinker
Truth, even in the tightly controlled prison of the Obama media complex, occasionally bursts forth like a swordfish cavorting on the waves of a golden August afternoon.
Newsweek, the Washington Post's former progressive stepchild, published an op-ed by Fareed Zakaria, the in-house lapdog for the Administration, extolling the virtues of building the Ground Zero Mosque. A couple of sentences demand a great deal more explanation.
"To that end, early in its tenure the Bush administration began a serious effort to seek out and support moderate Islam. Since then, Washington has funded mosques, schools, institutes, and community centers that are trying to modernize Islam around the world. We should be encouraging groups like the one behind this project, not demonizing them. Were this mosque being built in a foreign city, chances are that the U.S. government would be funding it..."
Perhaps we all missed the memo where US taxpayers are gleefully funding Islamic "mosques, schools, institutes, and community centers" around the globe. Of course, US troops have restored hundreds of schools and community centers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but mosques and Islamic institutes? This seems very difficult to believe.
So, as an enraged and curious taxpaying citizen, I have a few questions for Mr. Zakaria, our Congress and this Administration. What are the locations, costs, and dates of construction of these US taxpayer-funded mosques and Islamic institutes? If some of these mosques were built in the America, didn't anyone contact the ACLU? (I would pay real money to be in "the room" during that discussion.) What particular piece of Congressional legislation authorized US taxpayer dollars to be spent on these mosques and Islamic institutes? Did our government apportion these funds fairly and equally between the Shi'a, Sunni, and Sufi sects of Islam?
The Constitution states "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" I'm damn sure spending US taxpayer dollars on constructing mosques was not envisioned by the Founding Fathers nor by the overwhelming majority of American citizens.
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