President Obama‘s speech on the national debt at George Washington University wasn’t exactly a barn-burner. In fact, I think I’ve heard it before… several times. I’ll give you three guesses as to who he blamed for the debt crisis. There is so much in the speech to tear limb from limb it was hard to pick a topic (“paying” for tax cuts, bipartisanship, his warped idea of America and what makes it great, not to mention his stupid view of personal debt.) But when he lobbied for one of the worst and most wasteful public programs out there, while in the same speech talking about responsibility, I nearly lost my lunch.
If the Republicans are looking for a debt-cutting target, Obama’s favorite pet project, Head Start, is a great place to begin. This program is supposed to take preschool aged children considered “at risk” who are from low-income families and give them a preschool “head start.” Like most social programs, it has become a very expensive federally funded babysitting program with no measurable value to anyone but possibly the tired mommies who need a break. read more…
We can’t expect to defeat the Left if we don’t take the time to reflect on the state of the Right. One of conservatism’s biggest inter-movement issues, the race between mainstream conservatives and the radical paleo-libertarian alliance represented by Ron Paul, recently caught the attention of Keith William Neely, a Vanderbilt University student who wrote a Huffington Post article identifying the “Radical Right” as the “real threat to conservatives on college campuses.”
Don’t let that headline fool you; it may sound like the start of another by-the-numbers HuffPo hit piece, but Neely’s piece is really a substantive take on a serious problem facing the Right: read more…
The press tour of Itamar I participated in, in the aftermath of the murder of five members of the Fogel family, included, among the couple dozen of European journalists, the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent, Harriet Sherwood.
The Guardian's Harriet Sherwood
Like my understanding of the community itself, a mere couple hours spent in the company of Sherwood didn’t provide me with a complete picture of the journalist, but listening to the questions she posed to our hosts – Itamar’s mayor, Rabbi Moshe Goldsmith, and his wife, and community spokesperson, Leah – at least provided a glimpse into what informs her view from Jerusalem.
Sherwood’s prose has always lacked the anger – and ideologically driven animosity towards Israel – which seems to animate Rachel Shabi, and she doesn’t seem to possess the puerile artistic naiveté of Mya Guarnieri, and indeed her disposition and conduct while in Itamar seemed to conform with this assessment.
Though it would be easy to make more of Sherwood’s gaffe – she asked the Rebbetzin if she considered herself a “Messianic Jew” – than it warrants, it seemed an apt illustration of her unfamiliarity not just with Judaism, but with the political, moral, and historical terrain of the nation she’s covering.
Her pejorative depictions of Israeli “settlers”, which went so far as to suggest a moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorists and residents of Itamar (as illustrated by Medusa), as with her broader bias against Israel (as documented by Israelinurse), suggests a reporter in tuned with conventional thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the UK, rather than someone with a keen interest in the region or a desire to challenge her readers’ biases.
As Guardian Assistant Editor Michael White acknowledged in a frank and revealing comment on his blog:
“The Guardian has] always sensed liberal, middle class ill-ease in going after stories about immigration…about welfare fraud or the less attractive tribal habits of the working class, which is more easily ignored altogether….Christians, especially popes, governments of Israel..are more straightforward targets….[The Guardian is] striving much of the time to tell you what you’d rather know rather than challenge your prejudices and make you cross.”
Of course, none of this is to suggest that Sherwood’s habitual bias against Israel is any less injurious to the state’s moral legitimacy than if she was motivated by the malice of Shabi (or other CiF contributors, such as Ben White, Khaled Diab, or Omar Barghouti), merely that what struck me most about Sherwood while with her in Itamar was her evident lack of even the hint of gravitas.
The ugly Israeli caricature which Sherwood’s pen consistently conjures – the “dark, mythical Israel”, as Jonathan Spyer so aptly coined it – is in tuned with the attitudes of polite, liberal society in the UK.
Sherwood no doubt fancies herself refined, sophisticated, and, as she no doubt views the I-P Conflict through the prism of Palestinian victimhood, informed by liberal instinct to side with the underdog.
Yet, in her selective empathy, she fails spectacularly at understanding Jewish concerns – our hopes, fears, and national aspirations.
There was so much I wished I had told Sherwood about the brutal murders of Udi, Ruth, Yoav, Elad, and Hadas.
Yes, I wanted her to understand their humanity, the real life story which bears little or no resemblance to the tales she is told, and dutifully retells, about “extremists”, “hardliners”, and “zealots”, but I wanted to tell her so much more.
I wanted to tell her that such brutal acts of violence, the continuing physical threats from state and no-state actors, and the more amorphous moral threats posed by campaigns of delegitimization (efforts to characterize us as a nation beyond the pale) – the dramas that are dutifully reported by Sherwood and her colleagues at the Guardian – are seen by most Israelis through the much wider lens: thousands of years of Jewish history.
The moral sobriety which Israelis possess is informed by a connection with generations of Jews who came before us: from our Biblical traditions – our patriarchs, matriarchs, prophets and kings, heroes and villains.
We’re inspired by the wisdom of Esther, the courage of Judah Maccabee, the defiance in the face of overwhelming Roman power at Masada, and the unimaginable resolve of our ancestors who resisted the cross during the Crusades.
We recall with indescribable anguish the two thousand years of expulsions, pogroms, and massacres: the masses who met their end in the gas chambers of Bergen-Belsen, the humanity thrown in an open fire in Matthausen and Sobibor, the living thousands who dug and were buried in mass grave at Babi Yar – the helplessness of statelessness.
But, I also wish I could have told her, far from wallowing in our past, we mostly remember to understand. We remember to understand the imperative of Jewish sovereignty, and to know that we’ll forever be in the debt of those brave few who fought and sacrificed so much so that we could miraculously arise from the ashes to be born anew in Israel – our old-new land – and to continue the struggle so that we’re never again subject to the goodwill, the whims and wishes, of those not informed by our history, those not invested in our collective destiny.
I wanted to tell her that the Fogels aren’t “settlers”.
We are the Fogels, and the Fogels are us.
Harriet Sherwood could have heard these words and completely understood the story.
But she’ll never really understand our story.
It’s true. Women in America make less money than men throughout their lifetime; they constitute a mere 17 percent of the national legislature; and according to a new report from the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., only a handful of women has ascended to the top rung of the corporate ladder. To most Americans, these facts are neither surprising nor concerning. But to a certain powerful segment of our society, they’re a downright travesty.
Not So Tickle Me Elmo
Secret documents uncovered by Fingersmalloy.com have unveiled a plot concocted by Representative Nancy Pelosi to, under the guise of a budget cutting measure, merge Planned Parenthood with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
The purpose of this maneuver would not only be to secure funding for both entities–but also to begin providing sex education for children as young as two. read more…
Its not very often that Senator John Kerry gets something correct–especially about the Middle East. Lets face it, this is the guy who, when running for President in 2004, tried to get the Jewish vote by announcing that he would make Jimmy Carter or James “F**k the Jews they won’t vote for us anyway” Baker as his Middle East negotiator. But I have to give credit where credit is due–this time the Massachusetts senator and heir to his wife’s ketchup fortune got it half right.
In a speech on Tuesday Kerry said that the approach taken by President Obama to seek peace between Israel and the Palestinians was a waste of time. He also said that Obama’s approach may have caused the gridlock in negotiations happening today.
“I was opposed to the prolonged effort on the settlements in a public way because I never thought it would work and, in fact, we have wasted a year and a half on something that for a number of reasons was not achievable,” Kerry told the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, organized by the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center. “I think it sort of put the cart ahead of the horse in a way here. The key is to get to the security and borders definition and if you can get the borders definition you’ve solved the problem of the settlements. But we can’t get that discussion right now.”
Not content with quitting while he was ahead, Kerry continued by saying that the president will step out very soon with a new initiative that might break the gridlock, forgetting the fact that it takes “two to tango.”
“I suspect that it’s very possible that President Obama will even step out ahead of that and will possibly–I say possibly–make his own contribution to where he thinks the process ought to go in the meantime. Conceivably, that can come together in a responsible effort that produces a transition here,” Kerry said. “I think we can get to borders and the fundamental issues fairly quickly and its conceivable that between now and September we will do that.”
By September, Sen. Kerry is talking about the Palestinian Authority’s effort to evade negotiations and get the UN General Assembly to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state with a capital in Jerusalem, within the 1949 armistice lines.
Kerry’s original statement is correct, President Obama’s Middle East policy is in ruins. The U.S. continues to press Israel for a settlement freeze (and a freeze on Jerusalem), even though Obama’s strategy has totally fallen apart. The president’s demands have given the Palestinians an excuse to avoid negotiations and the other Arab nations an excuse to avoid making the “gestures” for which the President is looking.
What the President and his advisers perceived as a minor concession (a settlement freeze) was for Israel, a grave sacrifice. It also broke a Israeli/US agreement allowing the Jewish state to add housing to existing communities. This was a major error by the Obama administration. Their insistence on a freeze and their constant one-sided public berating of the Jewish state has turned the Israeli population against Obama, especially the Israeli left, whom Obama would look to for support.
Why why were the Palestinians so quick to use the “settlement” issue to delay negotiations? Because of something that President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, “Why The Long Face John?” Kerry, and most in the progressive community do not understand: the Palestinian leadership does not want a peace agreement, and never did.
The strategy has always been to look like a moderate in English call for war in Arabic. Its why both Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas each rejected deals which would have given them nearly everything that they were demanding. It is also why the Palestinian Authority continues to praise or downplay terrorists attacks on Israeli civilians.
For example, the closest advisor to the PA prime minister claims the recent attack on an Israeli school bus which critically injured a 16-year-old child was exaggerated by those evil Zionists:
Or the recent ceremony where Palestinian Authority Minister of Prisoners’ Affairs Issa Karake visited the family of the terrorist Abbas Al-Sayid who planned the homicide bombing in 2002, where the bomber entered a hotel in Netanya and detonated his bomb during the Passover seder dinner, killing 30 innocent people. A photo in the PA newspaper shows the minister handing the family an honorary plaque from the PA. As Palestinian Media Watch has reported that honoring terrorists is an integral part of PA policy.
The leadership of the Palestinian Authority continues to demonize Israel and Jews because its good for business.
Arafat and his cronies famously stole billions of dollars of foreign aid slated to help the Palestinian Arab community. Abbas’ government has had similar problems with corruption (which is why Hamas won the PA election in 2006). Only by continuing the incitement against all Israel and Jews, can the PA leadership keep the heat off themselves.
Even today, despite what Kerry said the other day, the Palestinians have no desire to negotiate for peace. And now they don’t have to; they are are just biding their time till September when the UN General Assembly will make a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. While it wont have the authority of a Security Council resolution, it will give the PA legitimacy, without having to make territorial, security, or any other kind so concessions to Israel.
John Kerry’s declaration was half right, Obama has spent the first half of his administration screwing up the Middle East peace process by focusing on Israel’s expansion of existing communities in Judea and Samaria as well as the building in Jerusalem. Unfortunately it is too late for the second half of his comments to come true. Why should the Palestinian Authority negotiate for something in May, when four months later they are likely to be handed all that they want on a silver platter?
The Motto of the radical Islamic organization Muslim Brotherhood is:
- Allah is our objective.
- The Prophet is our leader.
- Qur’an is our law.
- Jihad is our way.
- Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.
But the clueless Obama administration’s “faith advisor” Dahlia Mogahed is mimicking Alfred E. Neuman’s line in Mad Magazine: “What, Me Worry?” read more…
This popular post was originally published April 8, 2011.
In a stunning development, a clerical error in Wisconsin has transformed what many expected to be a long, ugly legal battle favoring the Left into an almost certain victory for the Right, outraging leftists like Michael Moore, to the point where the radical “documentarian” has stopped bothering to hide his disdain for the democratic process.
The intense Wisconsin Supreme Court race between the incumbent Republican, Justice David Prosser, and his Democrat challenger, state DNR enforcer JoAnn Kloppenburg, ended Wednesday with the latter declaring victory based on the Associated Press’s calculation of a 204-vote lead. Prosser didn’t budge, and most predicted an onslaught of recounts and vote fraud litigation to ensue.
But on Thursday evening we learned that Waukesha county clerk Kathy Nickolaus had erroneously passed on the county’s data to the AP without the numbers from the city of Brookfield, which shifted the lead to Prosser by more than 7,000 votes. Leftists are predictably outraged that hijacking the judiciary to thwart Governor Scott Walker’s public-sector union reforms won’t work after all, though none have topped the overreaction of Moore, who tweeted last night:
Republicans created the rule: “Whoever declares victory first, wins!” When will Obama Justice Dept impound ballots and stop the shenanigans? read more…
A California State University political science professor named As’ad AbuKhalil addressed an Orange County California anti-Israel conference recently and stated among other things:
But no, never will we recognize the Zionist State of Israel! We must go back to the 1968 PLO charter, not the one engineered by Bill Clinton in Ramallah. We Arabs, Palestinians, cannot be equivocal when it comes to Israel. The Arab world will never prosper until the Zionist regime is removed!”
Who says public radio is boring? We spiced it up Monday by injecting the radical concept of blind justice into a debate over the federal budget deal.
Called upon to bring the Tea Party perspective to a roundtable discussion on NPR affiliate KCRW’s To the Point, I joined host Warren Olney, Mother Jones’ David Corn, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin and others. The panel was asked to consider who came out of the budget deal a winner.
The exchange began with politics-as-usual. Rubin and Corn agreed that House Speaker John Boehner had emerged as the political victor, though they parted on whether that was a good thing. I brought a different take. read more…
Gender IS NOT a social construct. Let me repeat that, because it’s important. Gender IS NOT a social construct. In fact, believing that gender is just a social construct is an exceptionally stupid belief that ironically, is often held by very smart people.
It’s surprisingly similar in many ways to the error that Leftists make with communism. The thinking there goes that mankind’s behavior can be changed by conditioning. That’s true. Unfortunately, Leftists came to believe that with enough conditioning, we could completely rewrite the way human beings behaved. That’s not true and untold misery was caused by the attempt. read more…
From Accuracy in Media‘s Cliff Kincaid:
Media figures David Gregory of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” David Brooks of The New York Times, Fareed Zakaria of CNN’s “GPS,” Margaret Warner of PBS’s “Newshour,” and Riz Khan of Al-Jazeera English are among the speakers at the eighth Annual U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Washington, D.C. this week. The event is “held in partnership” with Qatar, the Middle East dictatorship that funds and sponsors the terror channel Al-Jazeera and has links to al-Qaeda.
The forum is co-sponsored by the liberal Brookings Institution, headed by former Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbott. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is a speaker.
The official program guide for the conference features greetings from President Obama. “I appreciate your efforts to help advance the new beginning I called for between the United States and Muslim communities around the world,” he says.
However, the 9/11 commission demonstrated (page 90) that Qatar has been protecting terrorists, including the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. A recently released cable from WikiLeaks goes further, saying that Qatari nationals were involved in 9/11 and may still be on the loose.
Meantime, Sultan al-Khalaifi, who is a Qatari blogger and the founder of a human rights organization, was apprehended on March 1 by Qatar’s dreaded security forces and has not been heard of since. Human rights organizations fear that he is being tortured for speaking out against the dictatorship in Qatar.
At a Monday press conference, under the auspices of the forum, at the National Press Club, to release poll results supposedly demonstrating support for Islamist and anti-American revolutions in the Middle East, two academics from the University of Maryland admitted they didn’t know anything about the plight of the blogger.
Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, said, “Personally, I’m not aware of this.” He went on to say, however, that the arrest of any reporter by a government in the Middle East is not acceptable.
Steve Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, said he wasn’t aware of the blogger’s plight either but that Arabs favor freedom of the press.
Asked specifically if he would endorse free elections and human rights in Qatar, Telhami said that while he did favor those things, the news conference wasn’t about that “and I welcome any additional questions” and moved on.
The U.S.-Islamic Forum also features Muslim Democrat Rep. Bruce Ellison, a vocal opponent of recent congressional hearings into the radicalization of Muslims in the U.S., and representatives of such groups as the Islamic Society of North America and the Muslim American Society. Officials of the repressive Qatari government are sprinkled on various panels throughout the three-day conference.
While Secretary of State Clinton is speaking to the conference and treating Qatar as a friend, secret cables released by WikiLeaks demonstrate that officials of the State Department do not regard the regime as helping the U.S. in the war on terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda.
One cable says that the regime has “adopted a largely passive approach to cooperating with the U.S. against terrorist financing” and that terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda “exploit Qatar as a fundraising locale.” The cable goes on, “Although Qatar’s security services have the capability to deal with direct threats and occasionally have put that capability to use, they have been hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the U.S. and provoking reprisals.”
Another cable says that “Qatar will continue to use Al Jazeera as a bargaining tool to repair relationships with other countries, particularly those soured by Al Jazeera’s broadcasts, including the United States.” It also says, “Anecdotal evidence suggests, and former Al Jazeera board members have affirmed, that the United States has been portrayed more positively since the advent of the Obama administration.”
