Is the U.S. turning into a police state?
For 2012, TSA expands to train stations, ferry docks, subways
The IDF: The Moral Army
by David Meir-Levi:
On October 16, 2009, British Colonel Richard Kemp testified regarding Israel’s behavior in the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead (Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2008-9 ), as part of the UN’s evaluation of the Goldstone Report. Colonel Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, who served with the UN and NATO, commanded British troops in Northern Ireland, led UK forces in Bosnia and Macedonia, participated in Gulf War 1, spent considerable time in Iraq during Gulf War 2, and served on the UK’s joint international commission on terrorism, testified as follows:
“Based on my knowledge and experience, I can say that during Operation Cast Lead, the Israel Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in the combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Israel did so while faced with an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capacities behind the human shields of the civilian population.”
But have we not heard, for decades, from Israel’s critics, detractors, and enemies (including some who call themselves Israel’s friends), from the podia of the UN, Western mainstream media, the college classroom, church pulpits, and human rights organizations that Israel commits war crimes; deploys munitions banned by international law; routinely uses excessive force; targets civilian populations; is a “state terrorist” waging terror war against innocent, helpless, harmless civilians; and in general behaves like a rogue state hell-bent on genocide and ethnic cleansing?
Even a brief overview of Israeli military actions proves these accusations false.
[...]
“A Black Day for Austria”
by Soeren Kern:
An Austrian appellate court has upheld the conviction of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a Viennese housewife and anti-Jihad activist, for “denigrating religious beliefs” after giving a series of seminars about the dangers of radical Islam.
The December 20 ruling shows that while Judaism and Christianity can be disparaged with impunity in postmodern multicultural Austria, speaking the truth about Islam is subject to swift and hefty legal penalties.
Although the case has major implications for freedom of speech in Austria, as well as in Europe as a whole, it has received virtually no press coverage in the American mainstream media.
Sabaditsch-Wolff’s Kafkaesque legal problems began in November 2009, when she presented a three-part seminar about Islam to the Freedom Education Institute, a political academy linked to the Austrian Freedom Party.
A glossy socialist weekly magazine, NEWS — all in capital letters — planted a journalist in the audience to secretly record the first two lectures. Lawyers for the leftwing publication then handed the transcripts over to the Viennese public prosecutor’s office as evidence of hate speech against Islam, according to Section 283 of the Austrian Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB). Formal charges against Sabaditsch-Wolff were filed in September 2010; and her bench trial, presided on by one multicultural judge and no jury, began November 23, 2010.
[...]
Panetta, Friedman and “The Damn Table”
by Shoshana Bryen:
Criticism of Leon Panetta’s demand that Israel “return to the damn table,” and Tom Friedman’s lament that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ovation before Congress “was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby” has been broad and deep. Writers from right to center (forget the left, who applauded both) denounced them, parsed them and tried to put them “in context.” It is the context that is worrisome rather than their less-than-lovely language. The context is that if Israel and the Palestinians would both negotiate seriously, they would get to the “Two State Solution” beloved of the US and the Quartet.
Grant Panetta and Friedman the “damn table” and see what happens:
IF Israel sat at the table; IF Netanyahu agreed to a permanent settlement freeze; IF the Palestinians returned to the table; IF the Palestinians came under the “moderate” mandate of Fatah rather than “extremist” mandate of Hamas; IF they started with the 1949 Armistice Lines (the so-called 67 borders); IF they talked themselves blue in the face, they STILL would not get where Panetta, Friedman, et. al. want them to go.
[...]
Defense department agrees to allow Muslim cadets to wear hijabs
Defense department agrees to allow Muslim cadets to wear hijabs
The Iranian Schindler: How thousands of Iranian Jews in America owe their lives to Paris diplomat
By Daily Mail:
Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who employed over a thousand Jews during the Holocaust in an effort to save them from concentration camps, was memorialized in a famous book and Academy Award winning movie.
His Iranian equivalent, Abdol-Hossein Sardari, is now getting some of his due press.
In a book that troves through archival material, the story of how Mr Sardari used his diplomatic position in Paris at the time of the Nazi occupation to get passports for Iranian Jews and wove tall tales of faux-scientific stories to help evade the German authorities.
[...]
If only one man can make this much difference then imagine what we can do.
It’s Called ‘Christmas,’ Stupid
by Abraham H. Miller:
Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee has designated the traditional state Christmas tree as the “holiday tree.” So, what holiday does the tree represent — Kwanzaa, Chanukah, New Years, or Eid al-Fitr? Are our holidays now interchangeable, or are they one big homogeneous politically correct melting pot? Imagine walking through Macy’s and hearing, “Silver bells, silver bells. It’s Kwanzaa time in the city. Ring-a-ling, soon it will be Eid al-Fitr.”
It’s a Christmas tree, not a holiday tree. It has always been a Christmas tree, and you can call it a holiday tree, but every two-year-old knows it’s a Christmas tree. No one is being fooled. Those afraid to mouth the word “Christmas,” as if it were some sort of obscenity, just appear foolish.
The University of California, Berkeley, provides a prayer room in the student union for Muslim students, and the University of Michigan-Dearborn has installed footbaths for Muslim students, as have a dozen other universities. A technical school in Minnesota has installed footbaths, but the coffee cart’s Christmas music has been turned off as a violation of the separation of church and state and, perhaps, insulting to those taking a footbath.
[...]
Senior Hamas official: “Anyone who thinks Hamas has changed its positions is living in an illusion.”
Senior Hamas official: “Anyone who thinks Hamas has changed its positions is living in an illusion.”
Islamist militants kill dozens in Nigerian Christmas Day church bombings
Islamist militants kill dozens in Nigerian Christmas Day church bombings
Ancient Jewish rituals confirmed by discovery of purity seal, Israeli archaeologists say
Ancient Jewish rituals confirmed by discovery of purity seal, Israeli archaeologists say
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Merry Christmas to all my readers.
- For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God. – John 3:16-21
Elisabeth’s Barrenness and Ours
Mark Steyn:
Our lesson today comes from the Gospel according to Luke. No, no, not the manger, the shepherds, the wise men, any of that stuff, but the other birth: “But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.”
That bit of the Christmas story doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s in there — Luke 1:13, part of what he’d have called the backstory, if he’d been a Hollywood screenwriter rather than a physician. Of the four gospels, only two bother with the tale of Christ’s birth, and only Luke begins with the tale of two pregnancies. Zacharias is surprised by his impending paternity — “for I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years.” Nonetheless, an aged, barren woman conceives and, in the sixth month of Elisabeth’s pregnancy, the angel visits her cousin Mary and tells her that she, too, will conceive. If you read Luke, the virgin birth seems a logical extension of the earlier miracle — the pregnancy of an elderly lady. The physician-author had no difficulty accepting both. For Matthew, Jesus’s birth is the miracle; Luke leaves you with the impression that all birth — all life — is to a degree miraculous and God-given.
We now live in Elisabeth’s world — not just because technology has caught up with the Deity and enabled women in their 50s and 60s to become mothers, but in a more basic sense. The problem with the advanced West is not that it’s broke but that it’s old and barren. Which explains why it’s broke.
[...]
UNESCO to stop support for Palestinian (pro-Adolf Hitler) magazine
By JORDANA HORN, JERUSALEM POST:
After protests from the US Ambassador to UNESCO, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the American Jewish Committee to UNESCO’s director-general over a UNESCO-assisted Palestinian children’s magazine that published an essay extolling Adolf Hitler, UNESCO agreed to withdraw its support from the publication Thursday.
UNESCO had provided funds to an NGO, Zayzafouna, which published a magazine of the same name. The magazine Zayzafouna, as reported by Palestinian Media Watch, published an article in February 2011 by a 10- year-old Palestinian girl who recounted a dream in which Hitler told her: “Yes. I killed them [the Jews] so you would all know that they are a nation who spreads destruction all over the world.”
[...]
How very enlightened of them …
Will Desperate Egyptian Christians Seek Refuge In The US?
Walter Russell Mead:
As political and economic conditions in Egypt deteriorate, a new kind of refugee is beginning to appear, one that will test America’s character. Violence against Christians is growing; bad economic times, the inability or unwillingness of security forces and police to keep order, and the growing tide of Islamist political and religious mobilizations is making life increasingly insecure for Egypt’s eight million Christians.
An article in the Wall Street Journal offers a harrowing picture of a minority that is beginning to come under siege. Christians are being threatened with violence if they fail to convert; women who do not cover their hair are harassed, harangued and threatened on the street; churches are burned and the wall of isolation around this ancient community deepens every day.
Under US and international law, growing numbers of Egyptian Christians will qualify as refugees if these conditions continue to worsen.
For Americans, the persecution of religious believes in other countries is more than a foreign policy problem. Russian persecution of the Jews in the 19th century led millions of Jews to immigrate to the United States between 1880 and the start of World War One. Religious and ethnic minorities fled to the US from all over Europe and the Middle East in the old days. One reason that so few Christians remain in most of the Middle East is that the United States primarily, but other western countries as well, have allowed millions of Christian Arabs to escape — in some cases looking for security and an end to persecution, and in others for better economic opportunity and the absence of discrimination.
[...]
Apologists For Communist Totalitarianism: I Hate Those Guys
by Pejman Yousefzadeh:
One would think that the deaths of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong Il would prompt universal condemnation for the dictatorial communist regimes the former so bravely fought against, and the latter used for self-aggrandizement at the expense of his own citizens. One would be wrong; the condemnation of dictatorial communist regimes is blessedly widespread, but it is by no means universal.
Consider first Neil Clark, who informs us of the following regarding Havel’s struggle:
[...]
ht instapundit
Nuke expert: Time to attack Iran
Yitzhak Benhorin:
A former special adviser on Iran policy to the Obama Administration said that a US-perpetrated strike on the Islamic Republic on is the “least bad” option in dealing with its nuclear threat.
“The truth is that a military strike intended to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, if managed carefully, could spare the region and the world a very real threat and dramatically improve the long-term national security of the United States,” Matthew Kroenig, a nuclear security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as a strategist under Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said in an article published by Foreign Affairs Magazine.
[...]
The George Soros Plot to Destroy Israel
by Sam Blumenfeld:
If you’re wondering who’s funding the network of left-wing, non-government organizations in Israel, which aim to topple Netanyahu’s government and turn Israel into an Arab majority state, it turns out to be the same man who’s funding the Occupy Wall Street mobs: George Soros. Tel Aviv has had to contend with the same left-wing protests, tents and all, obviously all coordinated by one central global puppeteer.
That is why the Israeli Knesset passed the NGO Funding Transparency Bill by 40 to 34 in February. It was a hard-fought battle. But despite its neutered state, the bill survived and was enacted. It is a declaration of war by the conservative Likud Party against the shadow NGO empire being used by George Soros to shape the future of Israel. Its liberal opponents called it a “threat to democracy.”
Dan Greenfield writes in FrontPage Magazine, 9/22/2011:
[...]
Silent Night
By Mark Steyn:
On this Christmas Eve, one of the great unreported stories throughout what we used to call Christendom is the persecution of Christians around the world.
[...]
Not merely the media but Christian leaders in the west seem to be embarrassed by behavior that doesn’t conform to their dimwitted sappiness about “Facebook Revolutions”. It took a Jew to deliver this line:
[...]
Turkish warships shell narrow water between Israeli and Cypriot gas fields
DEBKAfile:
Cypriot President Demetris Christofias has warned Turkey to stop its warships shelling the strip of water dividing the Cypriot and Israeli gas exploration zones in the eastern Mediterranean.
debkafile’s military forces report that Wednesday, Dec. 21, Turkish warships began turning their guns on the strip dividing Israel’s Leviathan gas field from Block 12 of Cyprus’s Exclusive Economic Zone-EEZ, where a large gas field was recently discovered.
Neither Israel nor Cyprus reported the Turkish attacks which are staged in international waters, but both reinforced their naval units around the gas fields. It was the Cypriot president who broke the silence Friday, Dec. 23 with a warning: “If Turkey does not change its gunboat diplomacy and stop playing the part of regional police officer, there will be consequences which, for sure, will not be good – either for the whole region or the Turkish people and first and foremost for Turkish Cypriots,” he said.
On Dec. 22, Israel canceled the $90 million sale to the Turkish Air Force of Elbit’s hi-tech LOROP-Long Range Oblique Photography military surveillance system.Israeli defense sources said the transaction was cancelled lest SAR radar or LOROP technology find their way into the hands of Israel’s enemies, such as Iran.
According to our military sources, Israel timed the deal’s cancellation as a warning to Ankara to back off from its campaign of harassment in and around Israel’s gas fields.
[...]
A prayer for brothers and sisters
By David Warren:
When Lord Sacks, chief rabbi in England, rose in the House of Lords to speak about the persecution of Christians, he quoted Martin Luther King. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
This in turn was quoted in an excellent article in the Daily Telegraph this week. Fraser Nelson asked all the pertinent questions about the indifference displayed by the British Foreign Office to the persecution of Christians (along with other minorities) in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria; indeed, throughout the Middle East. Why do our diplomats refuse even to raise the issue with their counterparts in these countries?
The same could be asked of most western foreign ministries. Germany is an exception, and apparently Angela Merkel has, to her credit, interceded discreetly but forcefully to get some restrictions lifted on Catholics in Turkey. If Canada is doing something, it is even more discreet.
But of course, formal restrictions on Christian life and worship in Muslim countries – which would be considered outrageous if they were applied to Muslims in any western country – are endemic. They vary not so much in content, as in enforcement, and as a rule, become heavier when any society is in convulsion, lighter when it is not. In other words, Christians, formerly Jews (before their general exodus, when Israel was founded), and other minorities such as Shia Muslims in Sunni lands, are accustomed to becoming scapegoats when things having nothing to do with them go wrong.
And this is the case now.
[...]
How the Left sees the Life of Vaclav Havel, and why they Do Not Mourn his Passing
by Ron Radosh:
PJ Media readers know why we mourn the passing of Vaclav Havel. On this site, Michael Ledeen beautifully laid out the reasons why the world knows it has lost one of its greatest leaders. Ledeen put it in these words: “he was one of a handful of people who changed the world by fighting totalitarian Communism and then, having defeated it, inspired his people to rejoin the Western world, embrace capitalism, and support democratic dissidents everywhere.”
But now that a week or more have passed since Havel’s death, some on the Western Left have decided to let their true feelings about Havel out. Despite having to give some lip service to Havel’s integrity and what he accomplished, these men of the Left quickly get to what they really think: Havel helped destroy the great ideal of Communism as a worthy goal, and for that, he cannot be forgiven.
The most egregious is the article in the British paper The Guardian. The headline to Neil Clark’s article reads, “Another Side of the Story.” Clark immediately ties Havel up with another individual who has just passed way, Christopher Hitchens, whose “consecration” he strongly objects to. For Hitchens was, he writes, “ another ‘progressive’ opponent of the communist regimes of eastern Europe who found favour with Washington’s neocons.”
[...]
Krauthammer blames Obama Iraq troop pullout for latest violence in Iraq
by The Right Scoop:
After Baghdad plunged back into violence a few days ago on the heels of an arrest order for Iraq’s Sunni vice president by Iraq’s Shi’ite Prime Minister, with 65 dead and almost 200 wounded, Krauthammer placed the blame squarely on the Obama administration for ignoring what the generals on the ground were saying and pulling US troops out of Iraq:
[...]
Are Our Nuclear Secrets Safe In Obama’s Hands?
IBD:
The administration is considering reviving a ’90s-era nuclear scientist exchange program with China. Does no one in the White House remember how much damage the previous arrangement caused?
Of the many regrettable initiatives dreamed up by the Clinton administration, few were as perverse as the nuclear scientist exchange program. The arrangement turned out to be a gift to the Chinese, who were able to steal U.S. nuclear secrets virtually in plain sight.
Either unable or unwilling to learn from the past, the Obama administration wants to bring the program back. The Washington Times reports that “Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel B. Poneman is working on a major Obama administration initiative that would renew scientist exchanges between U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories and Chinese nuclear facilities.”
The 1990s version of the exchanges yielded unprecedented espionage. How bad was it? An internal lab document obtained and reported by IBD in 1999 indicated that “during the Clinton administration, the number of Chinese nationals working” at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico had “catapulted 411%.”
[...]
Krauthammer blasts Holder as one of the most incompetent AGs in US history
by The Right Scoop:
In a blistering opinion, Krauthammer blasted Holder as one of the most incompetent Attorneys General in US History and said that his use of the race card in defense of himself over Fast and Furious was, to use Holder’s own words, “a cowardly use of the race card”:
[...]
Obama Derangement Syndrome?
by Victor Davis Hanson:
I’d say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you’ve lost your mind. — John Edwards
When does the legitimate “I oppose Obama” descend into the illegitimate “I hate Obama”?
It is popular now to suggest that conservatives in general and congressional Republicans in particular suffer from an obsession characterized by an uncontrolled antipathy for Barack Obama — personal and visceral — that warps their entire political outlook. No doubt some do experience the same obsessions that infected the Left in their furor at George W. Bush. One can find unhinged posters at anti-Obama rallies similar to those at anti-Bush demonstrations. Bloggers can show hatred for Obama in the manner one found them despising Bush. Perhaps for Howard Dean’s rants about Bush’s supposed foreknowledge of 9/11, we have Donald Trump insisting on a fraudulent Obama birth certificate. Truthers are analogous to Birthers. And for every conspiracy theory that Bush was continuing a long family tradition of profiting from Nazi trade, there was a suggestion that Obama was a Manchurian candidate planted here by Islamic interests to destroy from the inside the United States.
But again, I am not talking about conspiracy rants and raves, but a general psychiatric affliction that infects the influential political class — politicians, journalists, and those in popular culture and the arts.
So how does one distinguish natural political opposition from a psychotic state? In other words, when will we know that popular opposition to Obama’s worldview and a dislike at the way he seeks to divide the country degenerate into the paranoid venom that was unleashed against Bush?
Here are some things to watch on the national scene to warn us:
[...]
Dear America: Get help — Your friends in Canada are worried about you
By Lorrie Goldstein:
As for you Democrats, including you, President Obama, have you gone collectively insane with regard to your energy policies?
You don’t seem to want our oilsands oil from Alberta, or Mideast oil, or offshore oil, or to drill for oil.
Where then, do you plan on getting your oil, which you’re going to need for decades to come until someone can figure out how to make wind turbine and solar power work on an industrial scale?
Do you seriously prefer tankers carrying oil from dictatorial regimes like Venezuela (isn’t Obama pretty ticked off with Hugo Chavez right now?) leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, as opposed to oilsands oil delivered with far less risk by pipeline from a reliable ally like Canada?
If you’re worried about climate change, stop ranting about the oilsands, which account for one-10th of 1% of global carbon dioxide emissions, and start worrying that you generate almost half your electricity from coal, which has an impact on the planet up to 70 times greater than the oilsands.
(In Canada, by the way, we get almost 75% of our electricity from non-emitting sources, mainly hydro power, at 59%).
[...]
New Middle East will be paradise for Muslim men, hell for women and Jews
Giulio Meotti:
In Tunisia, the country that had the highest percentage of mini-skirts in the Arab world, Islamism got 40% of the vote. In Morocco, which was once considered a pillar of Arab secularism, the Islamists won 30%. Meanwhile, some 70% of Egypt’s new Parliament is in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood and the salafists, who praised Osama bin Laden last April.
In Libya, Islamic law supporters and former al-Qaeda bosses took power after Gaddafi’s fall. The Syrian National Council, the opposition group to Assad’s rule, has 19 members: 15 Islamists, 2 Christians and 2 Druze.
It’s possible that in the coming years the Arab masses will revolt against their new Islamic rulers. Today it’s the turn of Sayid Qutb’s children. The Islamic revolutionaries are offering to the Middle Eastern people a proud and totalitarian way of life. They are much stronger than their secularist fellows.
[...]
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