Officer won’t sign order for troop indoctrination
By Brian Fitzpatrick:
President Obama’s repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is already damaging the U.S. military.
An Army lieutenant colonel has asked to be relieved of command rather than order his troops to go through pro-homosexual indoctrination following the repeal of the policy, which required homosexuals to keep silent about their sexual preference.
Currently the commander of a battalion-sized unit in the Army National Guard, the officer also has threatened to resign his commission rather than undergo “behavior modification” training intended to counter his religious convictions about homosexuality.
[...]
US, EU Support Violations of Human Rights as Palestinian Authority Escalates Repression, Brutality
by Khaled Abu Toameh:
On a number of occasions over the past two years, Palestinians who protested in public against the policies of the Palestinian Authority have been assaulted and beaten by US-trained Palestinian policemen. Palestinian journalists and human rights activists who tried to document these assaults have also been beaten.
Abbas and Fayyad have not hesitated to use violence against their critics. Many of those who spent time in Palestinian prisons and detention centers in the West Bank say they were subjected there to various methods of torture.
One can understand why a radical movement like Hamas would want to crack down on freedoms in the Gaza Strip, but what one cannot understand is why the Palestinian Authority, which relies heavily on US and EU taxpayer money for its survival, is allowed to get away with human rights violations.
In the West Bank, the Western-funded government of Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad has been waging a campaign aimed at silencing the opposition and intimidating journalists. The Palestinian Authority claims that the crackdown is necessary to thwart any attempt by Hamas to extend its control to the West Bank.
As a result of this campaign, hundreds — some says thousands — of Palestinians are being held without trial in Palestinian Authority prisons in the West Bank. Among the detainees are university students and lecturers, journalists and political activists suspected of being affiliated with Hamas and other Palestinian opposition groups.
[...]
Conservative Organizations Slam Law Center for Labeling Them ‘Hate’ Groups
By Stephen Clark:
Outraged conservatives, led by the Family Research Council, have launched an online petition called “start debating, stop hating,” which was published as a full page advertisement in the print editions of Politico and the Washington Examiner.
“Tell the radical Left it is time to stop spreading hateful rhetoric attacking individuals and organizations merely for expressing ideas with which they disagree,” the petition reads. “Our debates can and must remain civil – but they must never be suppressed through personal assaults that aim only to malign an opponent’s character.”
More than 150 leaders have signed the petition, including incoming House Speaker John Boehner, Republican South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint and 20 other members of Congress as well as potential GOP presidential candidates Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty.
The petition criticizes the SPLC for attacking groups “that uphold Judeo-Christian moral views” by labeling them hate groups without debate.
[...]
Voters elected Republicans to end Obamaism, not expand it
Washington Examiner:
It has probably escaped the attention of all but the few who make it their business to pay attention to such things, so we note here that a subtle but dangerous piece of revisionism about the meaning of the November election crept into the national political conversation this week.
Nowhere was that revisionism more evident than in President Obama’s comments late Wednesday in lauding the just-ended 111th Congress, and in particular its lame-duck conclusion: “A lot of folks in this town predicted that after the midterm elections, Washington would be headed for more partisanship and more gridlock. And instead, this has been a season of progress for the American people. That progress … is a reflection of the message that voters sent in November, a message that said it’s time to find common ground on challenges facing our country.” A few paragraphs later, it became clear that Obama wants us to believe that voters meant for congressional Democrats and Republicans to find that common ground so they can do more of what made the 111th Congress “the most productive two years that we’ve had in generations.”
[...]
Britain redisovers its architectural heritage
Theodore Dalrymple:
Yet matters have improved greatly in the last few years. Acts of official vandalism are rarer, and when attempted cause a public outcry. Citizens have formed groups to protect what remains of their heritage and no longer stand by watching the destruction of whole townscapes. Old buildings are routinely adapted to new purposes (as civilized people have known how to do for centuries) instead of being treated as impediments to progress or to traffic. Victorian buildings are cleaned up instead of demolished, and the architectural detail beneath the grime has come as a revelation to many who previously might have held the Victorians in contempt. London’s remaining Victorian railway stations have been modernized, keeping their basic features, so that the elegance and beauty of the ironwork is obvious to all. St. Pancras station, a masterpiece of Victorian Gothic architecture, has been lovingly (and, admittedly, expensively) restored and made the terminus of the train to Paris. Fittingly, the concourse has a statue of the poet Sir John Betjeman, whose protests helped save the station from demolition and replacement—perhaps by something as ugly as the new Euston station, a few hundred yards up the road, which took the place of the magnificently neoclassical original Euston station. The open space around Euston, probably not coincidentally, is as dirty as anywhere in London: people vote with their litter.
Not only has the official vandalism been much reduced; architecture and urbanization have considerably improved. Cities such as Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester have undergone something of a revival, though it is too late to save the parts of them destroyed in the frenzy of self-hatred, utopianism, social engineering, and financial corruption that I have described.
[...]
When Reason Fades — From Illegal Immigration to Jeffrey Sachs
by Victor Davis Hanson:
Illegal Immigration, Race, and Chauvinism
There is nothing about illegal immigration that should ipso facto involve matters of race, culture or ethnicity, given that it is a legal issue at heart. I think the great majority of opponents of open borders would be equally worried should 12 million illegal immigrants come here from a now bankrupt Ireland, Greece, or Portugal. That an illegal alien from a European country would claim my allegiance or empathy on the basis of ethnic solidarity would have zero currency.
So for most of us, the question is primarily a legal one — if federal statutes are not followed, what sanctity is left in the law itself? I am reminded of that classic exchange between Crito and Socrates, when the former urges the latter to break out of jail, disobey the law and its death sentence, and ignore what they both feel was an unfair verdict. Socrates, inter alia, reminds Crito that the individual cannot pick and choose his own level of compliance with those statutes he finds distasteful or inconvenient.
[...]
Montreal Joins the War against Israel
by David Solway, FrontPage:
Montreal is a diverse and cosmopolitan city, primarily French speaking but with an exotic mix of many of the world’s languages and cultures enlivening the atmosphere. There’s a bit of New York here, a soupçon of Paris, the flavor of pre-Katrina New Orleans, perhaps a touch of London before it became Londonistan. A big city with a congenial small-town feel, it is a nice place to live. Or at least, it was a nice place to live until, as in many other Western cities, Islam began making its muscular presence felt—less so, clearly, than in Hamburg or Malmo or Amsterdam, but the census is not encouraging,
For Montreal—like Canada in general—has not been immune to the demographic invasion of immigrants from Muslim countries. Many of these newcomers have integrated peacefully into mainstream culture; nevertheless a significant radical presence has concentrated in the city. Journalist Fabrice de Pierrebourg’s 2007 book Montréalistan profiles a veritable Who’s Who of terrorist plotters who have settled here. “All the ingredients of radical Islamism are present in Montreal,” he says. (One can listen to an informative French interview with the author on the Jeremaykovka blog site.)
[...]
Happy/Merry Christmas etc.
To my readers:
I tend to be a bit Scroogey about Christmas which means I put little religious value in it. That is not to say I devalue God’s gift of redemption through faith in the shed blood of Jesus/Yeshua. I am more interested in the Jewish observances. I therefore never get weepy or wistful at Christmastime. No maudlin meanderings here about ‘the true meaning of Christmas’ and all that codswallop. What I will say is I really appreciate those of you who come here. I do this for you. I want my readers to be informed. They are free to disagree but at least they will get exposed to perhaps a new or different take on the news that bombards us in today’s multidimensional media-saturated world.
So to all of you I say most sincerely: Thank you! And I wish you a truly very Merry Christmas and the happiest New Year to come. May God grant you health above all things.
Tim
Unethical: Bloomberg/Rauf Collusion
By Pamela Geller:
They’re emailing each other?
The New York Daily News reported Thursday that “Mayor Bloomberg’s top deputies went to great lengths to help those trying to build a mosque at Ground Zero – even drafting a letter to the community board for them, newly released documents show. City Hall on Thursday released a flurry of emails between its brass and Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam pushing to build a mosque near the sensitive site, and his supporters.”
It’s worse than we imagined.
The release of these documents, emails and various exchanges between Mayor Bloomberg’s office and the radical Imam Rauf and his motley crew of Islamic supremacists shows evidence of collusion, inappropriate political support for the Ground Zero mega mosque, and favoritism given to the project.
[...]
More evidence emerging that that Constitution supporters are considered “domestic threats
By Douglas Hagmann & Judi McLeod:
A report published today by Kurt Nimmo states that a Department of Homeland Security fusion center in Florida conducted surveillance on Ron Paul supporters and other political groups. A law enforcement sensitive bulletin dated 4 June 2010, issued by the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange, identified one event hosted by Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty that was subjected to official intelligence monitoring by that arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Nimmo notes that the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange was established with the assistance of an $850,000 Department of Homeland Security grant, which is your tax dollars at work. The center is specifically tasked with looking for terrorist leads.
As we detailed in our report dated 19 April 2009 , over a year before the Ron Paul event and today’s article, we informed readers of the existence of a FBI directive issued in March, 2009 that tasked FBI field offices to collect specific times, dates and locations of TEA party and other similar patriotic events. A second directive was issued the following month directing domestic intelligence agencies to perform covert video surveillance and data collection of the participants of the TEA parties. The directive instructed that surveillance was to be performed from “discreet fixed or mobile positions” and was to be performed “independently and outside of the purview of local law enforcement.”
[...]
Middle East Bloody Endgame
By Lee DeCovnick:
Describing the barbarity of a Civil War prison. Benson Lossing wrote in 1868, “Seventeen feet from the inner stockade was the ‘dead-line,’ over which no man could pass and live.” Lossing could well be describing the inevitable bloody endgame of the Israeli- Iran conflict during the final twenty-four months of the Obama administration. Both sides are acutely aware of this “dead- line”, Iran more so than Israel. Iran’s “dead-line” awareness reaches back 31 years to the release of 52 American hostages held for 444 days, just 20 minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President. (And after Jimmy Carter previously agreed to release $8 billion in frozen Iranian assets.)
[...]
The Palestinians’ brilliant ”peace’ strategy — Drive a big wedge between the U.S. and Israel
Leo Rennert:
You’ve got to give credit to the diplomatic and political savvy of the Palestinian Authority and its Fatah leaders, now only left with rule in the West Bank, while Hamas holds sway in Gaza.
Not wishing to be outdone by Hamas in taking a hard line against Israel, PA President Mahmoud Abbas seized an opportunity, when President Obama took his turn at U.S. mediation last year, by insisting that, even before negotiations were resumed, Israel had to freeze all Jewish construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
With Obama siding so conspicuously with the Palestinian side, Abbas saw no need to engage at all, and instead left it to the Americans to arm-wrestle with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and pressure him to go along with unilateral concessions. In turn, this created a predictable rift between Washington and Israel, which was not about to give up the store without anything in return.
Letting Obama and Netanyahu sweat it out for nearly two years suited Abbas just fine.
[...]
Union Visits Private Home To Intimidate, Local Media Calls It “Caroling”
by Dana Loesch:
From WGEM, and the only thing funnier than their headline is the thought that WGEM likely receives a lot of ad money from the union in advertising.
It’s Christmas caroling with a message.Wednesday night, locked out workers from Roquette America in Keokuk staged a very unique protest.
They took a break from the picket lines to go caroling outside the homes of top Roquette executives who live in Quincy.
[...]
They took a break from the picket lines to go caroling outside the homes of top Roquette executives who live in Quincy.
The union workers have been off the job for almost three months now.
Roquette locked them out on September 28th, and contract negotiations have pretty much stalled ever since.
Are you kidding me? A caravan of 80 people to sing insults and, according to eyewitnesses, shouting “F*CK YOU” at various houses right before Christmas? This isn’t “caroling,” this is intimidation. On private property. I’m told by locals that one of the houses they visited was down a private lane of an elderly couple whose granddaughter often stays with them (and luckily wasn’t the night the union struck) – the union trespassed.
[....]
Remembering Christians who are persecuted for their faith
Paul Marshall , National Review Online:
For Christians, Christmas commemorates a time not only of joy, but also of threat. At Jesus’s birth, Herod conspired to kill him and murdered all the newborn boys in and around Bethlehem. In recounting this, Matthew’s gospel compares it with “Rachel weeping for her children” after massacres by the Assyrians.
Herod has his current imitators. In 1991, China’s state-run press noted the role of the churches in undercutting Communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, adding that if China did “not want such a scene to be repeated in its land, it must strangle the baby while it is still in the manger.” Al-Qaeda has declared that all Middle Eastern Christians should be killed, and many Christians in Iraq have cancelled their Christmas celebrations lest they be targeted.
Others, while less explicit, have similar ends. Iran has passed a death sentence on Yousef Nadarkhani, pastor of the Full Gospel Church of Iran congregation in the northern city of Rasht. Nadarkhani became a Christian 16 years ago and was arrested on October 12, 2009, after protesting a government decision that his son must study the Koran. On Sept. 21 and 22, 2010, the Eleventh Chamber of the Assizes Court of Gilan Province said that he was guilty of apostasy and sentenced him to death for leaving Islam. (Apostasy is not a crime under any Iranian statute — the judges simply referred to the opinions of Iranian legal scholars).Another Iranian Christian pastor, Behrouz Sadegh-Khanjani, may face a similar fate. He was arrested on June 6, 2010, and is still being held even though his detention order expired in October.
[...]
Christmas Unwrapped: How angels fell from their pedestals
Charles Lewis:
When the archangel Gabriel landed in Nazareth 2,000 years ago to meet the woman who would become the Mother of God, as told in the New Testament, his greetings included necessary words of assurance: “Be not afraid.”
Despite myriad artistic depictions through the ages that show Gabriel looking like the most serene of creatures, Mary may have been shocked out of her wits by his presence. Being a Jew of her times, she would have known about the angels of the Old Testament, and so would have had good reason to fear. Angels were serious business in those days, even terrifying. They often carried flaming swords or their faces appeared to emit lightning. They were not the feathery sweet angels of today that hang from Christmas trees or appear in school plays. They certainly were not “Smiley the Angel,” an image that puts wings on the ubiquitous “smiley face” logo.
Indeed, only months before, a relation of Mary’s was struck dumb for having the audacity to doubt Gabriel’s words. So after greeting Mary with, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women,” the angel of the Lord needed to reassure her that all would be well.
“If you read early depictions of angels, they are complicated, frightening and wondrous beings that are extremely difficult to explain,” says Danielle Trussoni, author of the New York Times notable book Angelology.
[...]
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