I admit it. I like Jeffrey Goldberg.
He is funny and smart. To take just one small example, without his clever exegesis of The Sopranos, I would have gotten lost in the plot, and his insights unveiled for me nuances and allusions that made me the hit of dinner parties.
Most important of all, Goldberg, though a leftist, is a strong advocate for Israel. His is not my version of a secure Israel, but his voice is needed on the Left in the dangerous world of Israel-hatred.
However, sometimes our Jeffrey is a little weird. Just this week, he has become a spokesman for the flaming Israel-basher Tony Kushner, who, to the credit of the City University of New York, was denied an honorary degree. And then there was his Talmudic sermon after the death of bin Laden on not rejoicing at the death of a killer. It’s not the Jewish way, you see. (Ezekiel 18:23 et al.)
The Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the photographic and video evidence taken during the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s Pakistani compound, which would include the photos taken of Bin Laden’s bloodied corpse. Other organizations that have filed FOIAs include Politico, Fox News, Judicial Watch and Citizens United.
The Associated Press’ FOIA request urged President Obama to live up to his campaign pledge
to be the most transparent government in U.S. history
Good luck with that! The Obama administration has been one of the most secretive in modern history. President Obama’s refusal to release the photos of Bin Laden’s corpse is but the latest example of how his transparency campaign promise has long since been thrown out the window. It is also one of the most disturbing examples. read more…
The killing of Osama bin Laden and the subsequent debates by pundits on whether the Bush/Cheney administration was getting too much or too little credit for crafting the initial response to 9/11 and then creating the infrastructure necessary to remove the al-Qaeda leader is worth discussing as it relates to Israel.
As the state of Israel and her friends around the globe celebrate the 63rd anniversary of its founding, it is instructive to see how the left in Israel marginalized the great Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky and his students for generations. What the left in the U.S. did to malign President Bush and Vice-President Cheney while they were in office and since is nothing compared to the campaign of misinformation and outright oppression that the left in Israel conducted for decades against the right there.
Professor Daniel J. Elazar (1934-1999) was a scholar of the Jewish political tradition. Elazar was a professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel and Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and a prolific author.
In the May 15, 1981 edition of the Jewish journal Sh’ma, Elazar recalled Jabotinsky’s legacy and wrote:
“Would there be serious public commemoration of the 100th birthday of Zev Jabotinsky had it not been for the fact that the Likud won the election in Israel in 1977? Not likely. For thirty years and more, Jabotinsky was one of those non-persons in Israel and the Jewish world…. The ruling Labour Party made him a non-person for the same reasons that it portrayed Menachem Begin and his supporters as uncivilized fascists – it is easier to beat the opposition by painting it as irrelevant, intolerable and non-existent, until it is too strong to be dismissed.”
In the intervening elections the next generation of leaders including Ehud Olmert, Benny Begin, Tzipi Livni, Uzi Landau, Dan Meridor and many other central figures in Israel’s political life today (including both Binyamin Netanyahu and J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami) had a parent that was an active supporter of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and was involved with the Irgun paramilitary organization his followers created. It should be noted that Rahm Emanuel’s father too was an Irgunist.
What Jabotinsky would advocate given today’s current events is often debated in Israel.
It is a fair question to ask if Israel would even exist today if it were not for Jabotinsky and the sacrifices of the Irgun. That question would be impossible to ask, though, if Begin had never won power in 1977.
Since 1977 things have really changed in Israel: not only Menachem Begin’s Likud but also the National Union (HaIhud HaLeumi), Kadima and Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home) parties all connect themselves directly to the legacy of Jabotinsky. No party claims to continue in the tradition of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. His secularism and socialism lost all its chic long ago. Perhaps Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party stated it best when it described itself as “a national movement with the clear vision to follow in the brave path of Ze’ev Jabotinsky.”
What is meant by this “brave path?”
Jabotinsky wrote his greatest novel about the Biblical champion Samson. In the most well-known passage of the book Samson declares: “Tell them [the Jewish People] three things in my name, and not two: they must get iron [i.e. weapons]; they must choose a king; and they must learn to laugh.” (See http://www.saveisrael.com/jabo/jabosamson.htm for more excerpts.)
What Jabotinsky meant in part by “learn to laugh” was the necessary development of confidence on a national level. With a rapidly changing Middle East that is comprised of a Hamas/Fatah pact, the killing of bin Laden and the so called “Arab-Spring” both Israelis and Americans need that message now more than ever.
From Accuracy in Media‘s Don Irvine:
The Washington Post Company continues to be battered by a generally weak advertising market and continued troubles at its Kaplan Higher Education Unit, as they reported that profits slid 67% from a year ago.
The Post reported first-quarter net income of $15.2 million, or $1.87 per share. Revenue fell 6.9 percent to $1.06 billion.
Kaplan, which has been the main profit engine of the Post for years, saw operating income fall 73 percent on a 10 percent reduction in revenue. New student enrollment plunged 48 percent and overall enrollment was down 23 percent from the same period a year ago.
The unit, which has come under heavy scrutiny for recruiting techniques and the heavy debt load students carry, started a “Kaplan Commitment” program that allows students to withdraw after one month without paying. But that program has come at a heavy cost to the Post, which estimated that it would reduce revenues by $140 million in 2011.
With Kaplan sinking into oblivion profit-wise, the Post Company may be forced to deal with the ongoing struggles at their flagship paper.
The Post lost almost $13 million in the quarter as circulation at both the daily and Sunday editions continued to drop. Ad revenue also fell, dropping 8 percent from last year’s first quarter.
Yet despite the continued poor performance of the Post, CEO and publisher Donald Graham has done little to try and turn around the fortunes of the paper.
Shareholders, who have seen the stock price drop by more than half since 2007, are powerless to force Graham to do something about the struggling print business because his family controls 70 percent of the voting shares for Post directors.
It’s this stranglehold that allowed Graham to ignore a higher bid last year from the conservative news site Newsmax for the Post’s Newsweek magazine, and instead sold the ailing magazine to to Sid Harman who promised to keep it in the liberal fold.
What Graham is witnessing is the continuing decline of printed newspapers like The Washington Post. But rather than take bold, decisive action to compete in a new environment, he continues to cling to the notion that Washington wants and needs a liberal paper of record. The marketplace seems to be saying otherwise.
It is easier to believe a lie that one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact that no one has heard before.
Revelations that rock the status quo are hard to take. And sometimes people rather lie about the messenger than listen to truth. People didn’t want to hear the earth wasn’t flat, cigarettes weren’t healthy, or pro-wrestling was fake. I still don’t believe the last one! People don’t want to be challenged. And those who challenge are often gagged. That was true this week when the University of California Santa Barbara student council had to vote on allowing David Horowitz to speak on their campus.
Conservatives who are still under the delusion that they can persuade the Left to tone down their rhetorical attacks and play nice would do well to check out Howard Kurtz’s latest column on the Daily Beast, which gives us yet another round of hypocritical finger waving over the Republican Party’s “liability on the fringe.” read more…
This weekend, when I was in D.C., there were a surprising number of ads around the city proclaiming that the Bible says the world’s going to end on May 21. read more…
It’s been several years since Bill O’Reilly began emphasizing the significance of America’s culture war — the one between traditionalists who think America is pretty great and “S-Ps,” or secular-progressives, who have a deep hostility to America and want to change it completely. The culture war is as alive today as when O’Reilly began stressing it, but what he and others fail to hone in on is that the war is driven primarily by women. It is women, specifically, who have thrown a dagger in the one institution that affects the rest: the American family.
That the mainstream media is a left-wing operation consisting of “S-Ps” is scarcely debatable, but it’s the women in the media — the feminist elite — who have the real power. The female professors, lawyers, journalists, writers, judges, actresses, and psychologists we hear from daily are quintessential “S-Ps.” Their primary target is the American family – and the MSM is their bully pulpit.
So it wasn’t surprising that the New York Times would take a perfectly glorious day, Mother’s Day, and publish an op-ed by professor Stephanie Coontz entitled “When We Hated Mom.” Its message is the same tired message women on the left have been making for decades: the 1950s American housewife needed rescuing from her sad lot in life – and feminists were their saviors. Those who argue otherwise – namely, me – are dismissed as clueless.
‘One of the most enduring myths about feminism,’ writes Coontz, ‘is that 50 years ago women who stayed home full time with their children enjoyed higher social status and more satisfying lives than they do today. That myth – repeated in Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly’s new book, The Flipside of Feminism – reflects a misreading of American history.
An hour ago, a letter was emailed to CUNY’s Board of Trustees. The letter, below, defends trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld and his point of view. This letter will be hand-delivered to every trustee later today. The initiators of this letter have chosen not to release the names of the signatories to the public; the likelihood of hate mail and death threats are too great to risk at this time.
As I knew, the heroic Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld is now being defamed and attacked while the playwright Tony Kushner is being defended and supported.
Kushner is the man who believes that the state of Israel was a “mistake.” He is quoted as having said: “I have a problem with the idea of a Jewish state. It would have been better if it never happened.” He has also accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing.” read more…
From Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, by Matthew Vadum (WND Books):
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is part political group, part crime syndicate, part terrorist organization. Much of the time it operates outside the legitimate political process, waging war against the framework of society. ACORN is in the business of subverting the American system, so what Americans saw on the undercover “pimp and pro” videos released in 2009 was just another day at the office at ACORN.
But the darkest side of ACORN has remained largely unexplored – until now. read more…
After getting embarrassed in Wisconsin, Rachel Maddow and the organized Left has turned its attention on Michigan. The focus of their new Chicken Little campaign is the decades-old Emergency Financial Manager statute, mostly used by outdoing Democrat Governor Jennifer Granholm and recently strengthened by new Republican Governor Rick Snyder—because, oh, right the old law wasn’t working very well.
“Tiny Benton Harbor on the shores of Lake Michigan” is Rachel’s new victim célèbre. This “mostly African-American” city is a financial shambles. The True Twit and her echo chamber have acted as though Snyder’s actions are the new invasion of the Sudetenland, a co-opting by force of a “democratically elected local government.”
As though Snyder and the state legislators responsible were not elected?
One big problem for their narrative: a new poll shows that by a margin of 2 to 1, residents of Benton Harbor want the Emergency Financial Manager to knock their elected officials heads together.
HEARALD-PALLADIUM NEWSPAPER: The survey results showed that 51.6 percent of Benton Harbor respondents support the nullification of Benton Harbor’s labor agreements if it would help decrease the city’s deficit, while 27.4 percent don’t support it.
The story also shows that every aspect of Maddow’s rant from the role of Whirlpool Corporation in the city, to the golf course conspiracy she “discovered” is rejected by people who live there by huge numbers.
Oops!
Not only that, every bit of local reporting on the story from Crain’s Detroit Business to—of all places—the website Michigan Liberal have been tearing down Rachel’s narrative—and often not in very respectful disagreement.
You just can’t make this stuff up. No, I mean it, Rachel, stop making this stuff up. read more…
When I first arrived in Israel in 1991, the day before Independence Day was known as Yom HaZikaron l’Chalalei Tzahal (Memorial Day for IDF Casualties). Monday is Yom HaZikaron l’Chalalei Maarchot Yisrael v’Nifgaey Peulot Ha’Eiva (Memorial Day for Casualties of Israel’s Battles and Victims of Hostile [Terror] Attacks) in Israel. How we got from one to the other – and why we have battles every couple of years over expanding the day even more – is a lesson in well-intentioned inclusiveness gone awry. Unfortunately, it’s too late to step back.
The original Memorial Day remembered only the military casualties of Israel’s wars. That was – and largely continues to be – a traditional Memorial Day with graveside ceremonies, reading of thousands of names and tears and flowers.
