By Alan Caruba
“Trusting in the Rock of Israel we now place our signatures in witness to this proclamation, sitting as the Provisional State Council, on the soil of the homeland, in the city of Tel-Aviv, this day, Friday afternoon, the 5th of Iyar, 5708, the 14th of May, 1948.”
This was the moment of the re-birth of Israel announced by Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel. I would call your attention to the year of the Jewish calendar he cited, 5708. It reaches back over the millennia, deep into the Torah, the Old Testament, with its long history of a people chosen to be “a nation of priests and a holy people.”
This fact alone eviscerates all arguments and lies put forth that the Jews do not have a right and a claim to their own homeland. Historians put the birth of Judaism at approximately two thousand years before the advent of Christianity. When the Roman Empire fell, it was restructured as the Holy Roman Empire with Christianity at its core. Jewish resistance to the Roman Empire shaped much of its early history.
At the heart of the Islamic protestations of modern Israel is their contempt for the two faiths that preceded their own that began in 622 A.D. By then Judaism was already a very ancient faith. To be anything other than a Muslim, then and now, was declared to belong to an inferior faith. Islam is distinguished by its inflexible fixation on Allah, a former moon god worshipped in Mecca, and the cult of Mohammed.
More than a billion of the world’s population is Muslim. More than a billion is Christian. Billions believe in Hinduism and Buddhism. Judaism, which was never an evangelizing faith, existed in small numbers, but for reasons of faith, both Christianity and Islam persecuted the Jews in their midst because their very existence raised questions of spiritual legitimacy.
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Posted by Walt in Middle East, Politics categories at 11:44 PM EDT
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ARLINGTON, Va. April 14 /Standard Newswire/ – U.S. Senator John McCain today issued the following statement on former President Carter's plans to meet with Hamas:
"It is a grave and dangerous mistake for an American leader to meet with a terrorist organization like Hamas. Engaged in a campaign that deliberately targets innocent Israeli civilians, Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. President Carter is wrong to meet with Hamas, a terrorist group that has also killed innocent Americans.
"The very idea that a former President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief would meet with a terrorist organization demands a clear stance from all presidential candidates. Refusing to take a stand, as Senator Obama has done, is not the strong leadership we need today. If Senator Obama is not decisive enough to condemn former President Carter, how can he be strong enough to deal with the threat they pose to America and to our allies?"
Contact: Press Office, 703-650-5550; www.JohnMcCain.com
Posted by Walt in Middle East, Presidential Race, Terrorism categories at 10:00 PM EDT
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By Alan Caruba
Seven years passed 9/11 and five years passed the invasion of Iraq, Americans are still trying to figure out what makes Arabs behave the way they do. There is a vast cultural difference between those in the West and those in an Arab world that fills the Middle East and stretches across the northern tier of Africa. Indeed, military conflict with Arabs goes back to the days of Thomas Jefferson.
In writing about Arabs, it must be acknowledged that one must use generalizations. No group is unanimous in all respects. All have their conservatives, their moderates, and starry-eyed liberals. Every group, however, has widely shared cultural and religious views, and as history teaches us, it is the silence of good people that permits the bad actors among them to dominate events.
In her new book, Sandra Mackey uses the calamity that is Lebanon to provide some useful insights to the Arab world she knows well. “Mirror of the Arab World” is well worth reading with the caveat that Mackey has bought into the view that Israel does not have any right to exist. For her it is always “Zionist” Israel in much the same way Arab news media always refers to “occupied Jerusalem.”
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Posted by Walt in Middle East categories at 9:22 PM EDT
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By Warner Todd Huston
The newest update to a study published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, claims that 655,000 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invaded Iraq. This absurd claim has been hailed around the world as evidence of the evil American empire’s murderous reign in the Mid East. But it turns out that the entire study is not only filled with lies, the creators of the study even tried to hide the fact that George Soros funded the thing.
MSM sources like the AP and the Washington Post, among many others, highlighted the report lending it credence when it came out last month but few of those news outlets revealed the source of the study’s funding. While most did reveal that the study was "controversial," few went into just how far off from the truth the details of this study are.
The real facts, however, are beginning to come out.
Michael Fumento has penned a great expose on how many lies fill the famed Lancet Study on Iraqi war deaths and the UK’s Timesonline also revealed the connection with Soros.
The Times tells of the Soros involvement.
Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.
"The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research," said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.
And Michael Fumento has a great run down on all the spurious mathematics promulgated by the study. When comparing the numbers offered by the Iraq Family Health Survey study to that of the study in the Lancet, some startling differences are seen.
So for that last period, while the IFHS daily figure was 2.3 times higher than that of Iraq Body Count, the Lancet 2006 daily figure was a stunning 7.3 times higher than that of the IFHS and 17 times higher than that of Iraq Body Count.
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Posted by Walt in Middle East, News Media, US Military categories at 8:49 AM EST
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By Erik Rush
"We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahedeen."
Al-Qaeda commander and spokesperson Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid, referencing the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto; Adnkronos International News Service (AKI), December 27, 2007.
Lest I wind up standing back-to-back with actor Will Smith tomorrow morning defending myself against flying produce (Smith is taller, so I might not fare too badly), I’ll insert the disclaimer here: My personal, moral and religious values preclude a belief that any ethnic group is inherently superior or inferior to any other.
That being said, periodically I find it necessary and useful to state that such values do not preclude a belief that a particular culture might be inherently superior or inferior to another, and this is precisely the comparison I am making as regards Western culture versus the retrograde Indo-Arabic culture that spawns the mentality and social convention we glimpse in radical Islam.
True, the West and Western-influenced cultures do produce our share of sick freaks, however one cannot compare the body counts generated by one Jeffrey Dahmer, Jim Jones or even Aum Shinrikyo to that of radical Islamists worldwide or the primal, inhuman barbarity that is the hallmark of so many of their atrocities. Islamic extremists around the globe are currently averaging one People’s Temple-sized massacre each month, according to a cross section of media outlets, both reputable and questionable.
Benazir Bhutto, like many heads of state, particularly in the Third World, was no saint. Though definitely a cut far above her craven killers, this wasn’t Gandhi getting gunned down. In addition to the charges of corruption that plagued Bhutto during her tenure, the former Pakistani prime Minister was party to the repression of religious minorities in Pakistan. As is the case with many foreign politicos America has supported (and perhaps should not have), being an open advocate of cooperation with the West was Bhutto’s chief appeal. It was widely expected that her pro-Western stance would result in a government more cooperative and less duplicitous than that of the Pervez Musharraf regime.
This brings us to the likely course that might have been taken by the Bush administration and whichever administration follows. Was the hope that Bhutto would have immediately allowed NATO forces into northern Pakistan to wipe out Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives – as opposed to sucking another $10 billion in American taxpayers’ money out of the invertebrates in high office as did Musharraf? The scenario is indeed reminiscent of that in Egypt, where a "cooperative" Sadat replaced the anti-West, anti-Israel Gamal Abdel Nasser, with Bhutto being an avatar of the former. As long as the U.S. aid dollars kept flowing, Sadat was willing to come to the table with Israeli leaders. It bears mentioning that he too was gunned down for his political coziness with the West.
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Posted by Walt in Cultural, Middle East, Religon, Terrorism categories at 12:17 AM EST
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by Erik Rush
On Sunday, February 4, 2007, several news agencies reported that Ardeshire Hassanpour, a prize-winning Iranian nuclear physicist, had likely been assassinated by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. These accounts originated from Stratfor (Strategic Forecasting, L.L.C.), a U.S. security company that provides intelligence services to the international businesses community. The details of his death are sketchy, of course, but Hassanpour, a principal in Iran’s current effort to enrich uranium, apparently died under mysterious circumstances due to some sort of gas poisoning.
You may remember my January 16, 2007 column entitled The Law of the Jungle in which I lauded with fond remembrance the days during the ‘Seventies and ‘Eighties when Mossad’s assassination of foreign terrorists in true James Bondian (if perhaps less classy) fashion was a regular occurrence.
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Posted by Walt in Middle East, Terrorism categories at 10:36 PM EDT
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by Thomas E. Brewton
If voters are well enough informed to make the complex decision about pulling out of Iraq, why do we need liberal-socialist-progressive government to tell them how to live their daily lives?
Liberal Republicans and liberal Democrats say that the American people voted in the latest Congressional elections to pull our troops out of Iraq, sooner rather than later. Is that the whole story, and is it a valid basis for forming life-or-death foreign policy?
On the one hand, liberals are, in effect, adopting Ross Perot's idea that all voters should have computers and internet connections that would permit continuous referenda on every policy matter before Congress.
On the other hand, liberals' stock-in-trade is the firm conviction that voters need to be protected from their follies and must be coddled and comforted by government, from cradle to grave. Why does government have to keep such purportedly well informed voters from eating the wrong things, driving the wrong automobiles, and borrowing money on terms they can't meet?
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Posted by Walt in Middle East, Politics categories at 11:00 PM EST
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by Michael Bresciani
In August of 2006 CNN News conducted a poll that was meant to see how the average American viewed the Hezbollah. The result would leave anyone with an ounce of political savvy in a state of disbelief.
The poll concluded that forty seven percent of those polled think Hezbollah is friendly toward America. Leaving aside the generally accepted idea that our allies’ enemies are our enemies you’ve got to wonder if those polled have a clue.
Did the pollsters remind those polled that Hezbollah is solidly backed by Iran. And have those Americans forgotten the Ayatollah Khomeini or the Iranian hostage crisis? Have they forgotten that Iran is openly and defiantly bent on creating enriched uranium from its nuclear facilities to make nuclear bombs with? Have they forgotten all this or did they ever know it to begin with.
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Posted by Walt in Middle East, Terrorism categories at 10:45 PM EST
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by Jim Kouri, CPP
A Gold Star Mother is urging American troops to snub Sen. John Kerry during his visit to Iraq. "I'm asking our men and women in Iraq to not allow themselves to be forced to pose with Kerry during his photo ops," said Debra Bastian, who lost her son in Iraq in 2005.
"This man is a disgrace. He should be shunned by those serving in Iraq. He is not their friend. They [the soldiers] should not be forced to pose for pictures with Kerry the way they did when Sen. Hillary Clinton visited Iraq," she said.
The Massachusets senator is in the Middle East reportedly to meet with the presidents of Iran and Syria. While visiting Egypt, he also took a number of swipes at President Bush and his Middle East policy.
While in Egypt, critics say Kerry pandered to hatred for Israel in order to score points with the Egyptians.
"Kerry hasn't changed from his days as a anti-war protester who spouted lies against his fellow soldiers," said the angry Bastian.
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Posted by Walt in Middle East, Politics categories at 8:21 PM EST
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by Thomas E. Brewton
Two of the basic recommendations in the Iraqi Study Group Report are utterly unrealistic. In each case the Study Group, in typical liberal-socialist fashion, bases its proposals upon the theoretical assumption that everyone sees the world as they do.
First, stating that the war in Iraq cannot be won without unified support here in the United States, the Study Group recommends that appropriate steps be taken to gain support from those opposed to the war.
One might as well have called for Hitler's support of the Allies' D-Day invasion in World War II. We are engaged in a cultural civil war in the United States in which fundamental compromise is impossible. Liberal Republicans and Democrats are engaged in a jihad against our founding Judeo-Christian principles, a jihad in which there is no middle ground.
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Posted by Walt in Middle East, Politics, Terrorism categories at 8:02 AM EST
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