Why do they hate us?

Delayed reforms, soaring unemployment, and constant search for scapegoat led young generation 'that has never known war' to turn its frustration toward State of Israel

Ynetnews 
by Tomer Velmer

During the 32-year peace treaty with Egypt, the relations between Jerusalem and Cairo have seen their ups and downs. What used to be called "cold peace" turned extremely hot over the weekend, when hundreds of Egyptian protesters stormed the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, demolishing the security wall and replacing the Israeli flag with an Egyptian one.

Though the crisis ended fairly well, Dr. Mordechai Kedar, a senior research fellow at the Begin- Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University explains that these are the sort of events that happen when peace is forged between governments, not people.
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Gunwalker Explodes: FBI Hid Weapon, Tax Dollars Subsidized Murder

Pajamas Media  |  by Bob Owens

Fox News investigative reporter William Lajeunesse dropped a pair of bombshells in one article Friday afternoon, revealing: the presence of a third “walked” gun at the scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder, an FBI cover-up of the gun, and the news that your tax dollars funded cartel weapons purchases:

Unlike the two AK-style assault weapons found at the scene, the third weapon could more easily be linked to the informant. To prevent that from happening, sources say, the third gun “disappeared.”

In addition to the emails obtained by Fox News, an audio recording from a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent investigating the Terry case seems to confirm the existence of a third weapon. In that conversation, the agent refers to an “SKS assault rifle out of Texas” found at the Terry murder scene south of Tucson. …

The two AK-type assault rifles were purchased by Jaime Avila from the Lone Wolf Trading Co. outside of Phoenix on Jan. 16, 2010. Avila was recruited by his roommate Uriel Patino. Patino, according to sources, received $70,000 in “seed money” from the FBI informant late in 2009 to buy guns for the cartel.

Every American, regardless of political ideology, should be livid that the FBI gave at least $70,000 of “seed money” to murderous felons so that they could buy firearms. The FBI knew these weapons were destined for narco-terrorists, and that they would be used to target not just other murderous cartels but to terrorize innocents.
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The Five Biggest Reasons Republicans Keep Losing the Propaganda War

It never ceases to confound me, dear readers, how on earth Republicans keep losing America’s propaganda war.

Pajamas Media
by Kyle-Anne Shiver

How do we know they’re losing in the public’s perception? Easy.

Ask yourself: when was the last time you freely discussed any conservative or even moderate political view with friends at work, or on campus, or in public, or at a large social gathering — without hedging your every word? When? Can you identify a single recent instance when you felt your conservative or even moderate views would be tolerated without provoking name-calling or public shaming into the nearest corner of societal oblivion?

Everywhere one goes, save conservative websites, Republicans are widely connoted with tinges of racism, hate, selfishness, greed, war-mongering, and conspiratorial theocratic designs against democracy. Fox News has some opinion shows that try to give an ounce of conservative balance to the airwaves and they’ve paid for it with an all out war declared against them by leftist activists.

And, honey, any way one chooses to slice, dice, puree, or grind to bits this reality, it spells one thing for the Democrats: VICTORY.
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U.S. to veto Palestinian state

Tim Mak - POLITICO.com

The Obama administration has announced for the first time publicly that it will veto any bid by the Palestinians to seek statehood recognition later this month at the United Nations, a move Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called “too late” to stop them.

For some time, President Barack Obama’s policy has been to oppose a unilateral attempt by the Palestinians to seek statehood, but Thursday was the first time that the administration explicitly said it would use its veto power on the U.N. Security Council.
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New York Times Promotes Radical Sources Maligning Israel

A New York Times article about the FBI’s attempts to eavesdrop on the Israeli Embassy in Washington and the resulting leak of wiretapped conversations to a blogger (Scott Shane, “Leak Offers Look at Efforts by U.S. to Spy on Israel,” Sept. 5, 2011) was as much a defense of these actions as it was about the controversial eavesdropping and illegal leak.

Leibowitz (l) and Silverstein (r).

CAMERA  |  by Ricki Hollander

That is because the article was based almost entirely on the comments of extremist, anti-Israel blogger Richard Silverstein justifying the actions of his friend, Shamai Leibowitz, who was sentenced to 20 months of incarceration for illegally transferring wiretapped documents to publicize on Silverstein's blog.

Unsurprisingly, the New York Times article failed to accurately inform readers of the radical anti-Israel agenda of the two. Instead, it identified Silverstein simply as a “blogger” who “gives a liberal perspective on Israel and Israeli American relations” and Leibowitz as “a lawyer with a history of political activism” who shares Silverstein’s “concern about repercussions from a possible Israeli airstrike on nuclear facilities in Iran.”
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Obama 'star' of Palestinian ad

President Barack Obama is the unlikely star of a new Palestinian media campaign.

POLITICO.com  |  by Mackenzie Weinger

Part of a speech Obama gave in 2010 to the United Nations General Assembly is featured in an ad aimed to rally support for the Palestinians upcoming bid for statehood at the United Nations on Sept. 20, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
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The Revered and Reviled Bernard Lewis

A Retrospective Of The Scholar Who Provided The Intellectual Ammunition For The Iraq War

MOMENT MAGAZINE
by Daphna Berman

Bernard Lewis has just moved to a small apartment in the manicured suburbs on Philadelphia’s Main Line. At 95, it was time for the man the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing calls the “most influential postwar historian of Islam and the Middle East” to leave Princeton—his home for more than 35 years—for a senior living facility known for attracting retired academics.

“I’m getting old, I’m no longer sure about dates,” he tells me in his polished British accent, though this moment of self-deprecation is hardly convincing: Our conversation reflects his uncanny ability to recollect dates, time lines and facts—both from his lifetime and several centuries before. As we talk, Lewis recalls the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 as easily as the Turkish elections of 1950. He also regales me with stories, though it is impossible to predict which millennium they will date to. One minute, it’s the Marx Brothers skits he shared with the Shah of Iran in the days before the revolution, the next, an eighth century Arabian joke about a sinful woman praying to Allah for mercy before she dies. And he speaks with eloquence, his ideas organized into complete paragraphs.
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Full text of 'Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future'

by David Horowitz and Robert Spencer

READ HEAR

Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future

The movement seeking to turn “Islamophobia” into a thought crime and to silence all critics of radical Islam is gaining momentum.

FrontPage Magazine

Just recently, Think Progress — an organization created by billionaire George Soros, puppet master of the left wing of the Democratic Party, and John Podesta, former chief of staff in the Clinton White House, put out a report written by Faiz Shakir and others called Fear Inc: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America. Because of his speeches to students warning against the pro-jihadis spreading their message of hate in our universities — in particular the Muslim Students Association — David Horowitz was one of the targets of this smear.  Another was Robert Spencer, author of several courageous books about radical Islam and director of the early warning website jihadwatch.org. Ironically, Horowitz and Spencer are the authors of a new pamphlet, Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future, which unmasks the sinister agenda behind the anti-Islamophobia movement, which Frontpage takes pride in publishing today.
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American Jews and the liberal art of demonization

New York Ninth Congressional District race attracting great attention because it's serving as referendum on Obama’s Israel policies.

JPost  |  by Caroline B. Glick

US election season is clearly upon us as US President Barack Obama has moved into full campaign mode. Part and parcel of that mode is a new bid to woo Jewish voters and donors upset by Obama’s hostility to Israel back in the Democratic Party’s fold.

To undertake this task, the White House turned to its reliable defender, columnist Jeffrey Goldberg. Since 2008, when then-candidate Obama was first challenged on his anti-Israel friends, pastors and positions, Goldberg has willingly used his pen to defend Obama to the American Jewish community.
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Obama’s Patronage Pigs Can’t Fly

As if President Obama didn’t have enough bad news last week, Solyndra, which manufactures solar panels, filed for bankruptcy and laid off almost its entire work force of 1,100. Going down the tubes with it, of course, is a $535 million loan that was guaranteed by the federal government as part of the stimulus program.

Commentary Magazine
by John Steele Gordon

And it seems the White House put pressure on the Department of Energy to OK the loan. As the Washington Post reported:

Frank Rusco, a Government Accountability Office director who helped lead a review of the Solyndra loan and the Energy Department’s loan guarantee program, said the GAO remains “greatly concerned” by its 2010 finding that the agency agreed to back five companies with loans without properly assessing their risk of failure. The companies were not identified in the report, but the GAO has since acknowledged that Solyndra was one of them.

And one of the company’s biggest backers, George Kaiser, is also one of Barack Obama’s biggest backers. That, I’m sure, is another “coincidence,” such as the Republican debate being held at the same time that he chose to address Congress.
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Leak Offers Look at Efforts by U.S. to Spy on Israel

Shamai K. Leibowitz in 2002

WASHINGTON — When Shamai K. Leibowitz, an F.B.I. translator, was sentenced to 20 months in prison last year for leaking classified information to a blogger, prosecutors revealed little about the case. They identified the blogger in court papers only as “Recipient A.” After Mr. Leibowitz pleaded guilty, even the judge said he did not know exactly what Mr. Leibowitz had disclosed.

NYTimes.com  |  by Scott Shane

“All I know is that it’s a serious case,” Judge Alexander Williams Jr., of United States District Court in Maryland, said at the sentencing in May 2010. “I don’t know what was divulged other than some documents, and how it compromised things, I have no idea.”
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Robert Gates Says Israel Is an Ungrateful Ally: Jeffrey Goldberg - Bloomberg

Obama administration got together with Ron Paul election campaign in an admirable fit of bipartisan unity to commission Jeffrey Goldberg to write their joint communique, published on Bloomberg:

It was an extraordinary scene: President Barack Obama, sitting impassively in the Oval Office in May as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lectured him, at considerable length and at times condescendingly, on Jewish history, Arab perfidy and the existential challenges facing his country.

What was extraordinary wasn’t the message -- it was not an untypical Netanyahu sermon. What was notable was that Netanyahu was lecturing the president live on television, during a photo opportunity staged so that the two leaders could issue platitudes about the enduring bonds between their nations.

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When Anti-Zionism becomes Anti-Semitism

Obama's demagoguery with foul implications

John Podhoretz in COMMENTARY MAGAZINE makes good point:

Obama’s “Country Before Party” Nonsense

News reports suggest that on Thursday night, the president will tell Republicans in the House and Senate that they should put “country before party” and endorse his proposals for job creation. The “country before party” line has become Obama’s new theme in the wake of the debt crisis, and the passion with which he invokes it indicates it’s something he actually and truly believes in.

And it’s utter nonsense. Offensive nonsense too. Obama isn’t truly asking Republicans to put country before party. He is asking them to elevate the interests and ideas of the Democratic party higher than their own ideas, their sense of what is best for the nation, and their deeply held convictions about the moral hazard posed by a too-large government and a populace too reliant on it. They won’t do it, and they shouldn’t, and the next time liberals complain that conservatives unfairly impugn their patriotism, Obama’s effort to do just that with his loyal ideological opposition should be thrown in their face.

Why it is demagoguery? Obama is not making an argument about the advantages of his point of view, he is softly coercing.   The opposite side, the Republicans can turn it around 180° and ask Obama to adopt their standpoint "putting country" ahead of his ideology.

The foul implications: they (the Republicans) don't have best interests of the country in mind, and their ideology is self serving and not a different view on what's good for the country. They should be shamed into not being selfish and start thinking about other people.

The Obama Effect

This election highlights a growing phenomenon: non- Jewish Republican candidates outflanking Jewish Democrats in pro-Israel positions.

JPost
By ABRAHAM KATSMAN

When an Orthodox Jewish, kippa-wearing Democratic candidate might lose a congressional election in the most Jewish (and 75% Democratic) congressional district in America – a seat occupied by Democrats for nearly a century – to a non-Jewish Republican, something significant is going on. And Golda Koppelman knows what that something is.

New York’s 9th Congressional District (Brooklyn and Queens) is gearing up for the September 13, 2011 special election to fill the seat vacated by disgraced Democrat Anthony Weiner. Koppelman, a Holocaust survivor who has lived her American life in the district, is a devout Jewish mother and grandmother, with family in both Israel and America. Like many of her generation, she’s also a devout Democrat. Until now.

“I have never voted for a Republican in my life” she says. But in this election, “I don’t even care who the Democrat is; I am voting Republican to show Obama I am upset with his policy on Israel.”
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Obama’s Defilement of 9/11

As the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks approaches, President Obama is again pushing his “National Day of Service” in an effort to pervert the meaning of that terrible day for partisan political purposes.

FrontPage Magazine
by Matthew Vadum

In his weekly address on Aug. 27, Obama urged Americans to do volunteer work this Sept. 11, a day that the administration ought to officially call the “National Day of Ignoring Islamofascism.” The president said Americans should do something to serve their communities on that day “to honor the victims of 9/11 and to reaffirm the strength of our nation with acts of service and charity.”
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NEW PRO-JEWISH NYC CAMPAIGN: ‘PRESIDENT OBAMA IS NOT PRO-ISRAEL’

A new New York City-based, GOP-sponsored, pro-Israel campaign takes aim at President Barack Obama and his stances on the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict.

TheBlaze.com
by Billy Hallowell

In an effort to convince voters that Obama’s stance on Jerusalem — and on Israel as a whole — isn’t palatable to either political party, the Emergency Committee for Israel (run by famed conservative Bill Kristol) is communicating its message through video and newspaper ads, among other venues.

While NYC is certainly a more progressive locality, there may be some breathing room for the group’s conservative views to take hold. Considering that the city is home to the largest number of Jews in America, there is an audience that may be willing to listen. Politico’s Ben Smith writes:

The fact that both candidates in Anthony Weiner’s old Democratic-leaning district have criticized Obama on Israel offers the Emergency Committee for Israel [EIC] some fodder.
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Golda Sought Bombing of Auschwitz

Golda Meir was among Jewish leaders who tried to persuade the United States government to bomb the camp in 1944.

Israel National News
by Dr. Rafael Medoff

Seventy years ago today, the first gassing of prisoners was carried out in the Auschwitz death camp.  Now researchers have found evidence that Golda Meir, the future prime minister of Israel, tried to persuade the United States government to bomb the camp.
On September 3, 1941, the Nazis gassed to death 850 prisoners in Auschwitz. During the next three years, an estimated 1.75-million prisoners, most of them Jews, were murdered in the gas chambers there.

A number of Jewish leaders asked the Roosevelt administration to bomb the camp, or the railways leading to it, in 1944. What was not known until now is that one of those who sought the bombing was a young Zionist leader in Palestine who would later become Israel's prime minister: Golda Meir.
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Column One: Cliché-based foreign policy

Ros-Lehtinen’s bill shows that the foreign policy debate in US is now a fight between those who trust facts and those who trust clichés.

The Jerusalem Post
Caroline B. Glick

US Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, kicked up a political storm this week. On Tuesday, Ros-Lehtinen introduced the United Nations Transparency, Accountability and Reform Act. If passed into law it would place stringent restrictions on US funding of the UN’s budget.

The US currently funds 22 percent of the UN’s general budget. That budget is passed by the General Assembly with no oversight by the US. America’s 22% share of the budget is nonvoluntary, meaning the US may exert no influence over how its taxpayers’ funds are spent.

If Ros-Lehtinen’s act is passed into law, the UN will have two years to enact budgetary reforms that would render a minimum of 80% of its budget financing voluntary. If the UN does not make the required reforms, the US government will be enjoined to withhold 50% of its nonvoluntary UN budget allocations.

Beyond this overarching demand for UN budgetary reform, the act contains several specific actions that are directed against UN institutions that advance anti-American and anti-Israel agendas.
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Yiddishkeit

The last fully realized work by the late Harvey Pekar illuminates the bluntness and delight of American Yiddish in the last century. An excerpt from a new anthology of comics.

Tablet Magazine
by Neal Gabler

Perhaps the greatest difficulty in trying to describe “Yiddishkeit” to an English-speaking audience, as this book attempts to do, is that there is really no English equivalent for the word. “Yiddish culture” comes close, but Yiddishkeit is so large, expansive, and woolly a concept that culture may be too narrow to do it full justice. “Jewish sensibility” comes closer still because it internalizes the notion of Yiddish, places it in the head as well as on the stage and the page, but sensibility is itself a rather loose and elusive idea and within Yiddishkeit there are several sensibilities that, while closely connected, are still not congruent. In effect, Yiddishkeit isn’t a thing or even a set of things, an idea or a set of ideas, which may explain why a book about Yiddishkeit is itself so sprawling, kaleidoscopic, disjointed, eclectic, and just plain messy. You really can’t define Yiddishkeit neatly in words or pictures. You sort of have to feel it by wading into it.
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In the Picture

Bruce Jay Friedman’s darkly comic novels, short stories, and screenplays place him among the past century’s best American writers. In his new memoir, Lucky Bruce, he reminisces about many of them.

Tablet Magazine

Bruce Jay Friedman has been writing across genres and media for more than half a century. Literary types remember Stern, his 1962 breakout book, referred to by one critic as “the first Freudian novel.” Movie buffs know him as the screenwriter of blockbusters like Splash and Stir Crazy. The film The Heartbreak Kid was based on his short story “A Change of Plan.” And then there were his several plays, including the popular 1970 Steambath.
Read more. Listen to Audio »

George Gilder on "The Israel Test," Obama, the Internet...and the Gays?

The Center for American Progress’s Jewish Conspiracy Theory

According to the Center for American Progress, the reason that nearly half of all Americans have a negative view of Islam is because of three and a half Jews and an Irishman. If such an allegation were being made by a Saudi cleric or an Egyptian newspaper, we could laugh it off along with the aphrodisiac gum, the GPS shark and other regional conspiracy theories about the Jews. But that’s not the case here.

FrontPage Magazine
by Daniel Greenfield

Time Magazine described the Center for American Progress as the most influential outside group in the Obama Administration. Run by Clinton’s former Chief of Staff, and funded by shady billionaires, the growing influence of the shadowy organization on the Democratic Party has troubled even the mainstream media.

“It is difficult to overstate the influence in Obamaland of CAP,” Time wrote. It is even more difficult to overstate its influence on the media, which relies on talking points created by the Center and its blog, ThinkProgress. And that makes the CAP’s descent into scapegoating all the more disturbing.
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ADL: 9/11 anti-Semitic theories 'alive and well'

Jewish group shows how conspiracy theories surrounding attacks have grown and evolved over past decade, including claim that Jews or Israel perpetrated attacks instead of al-Qaeda

Ynetnews
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Is BDS campaign working?

It's working in ways the organizers have not intended it to. As it affects primarily commodities (agricultural products, natural resources) it is facilitating Israel's restructuring to high tech economy; which is virtually impossible to boycott (Israel is already producing products that have little competition and the trend will intensity). One other unintended consequence: reduction in demand for low quality labor, and therefore the need for foreign workers and Palestinians. Palestinians are the ones who will really suffer from this boycott as it picks up. As for the Jews: it's a reincarnation of the old prohibition for the Jews to work in agriculture. New form - old substance: we will handle this. If not for the message they are sending I would join the picket lines.
Here is the article:

Anti-Israel boycotters increasingly successful in strangling economy of Jewish state: More than 20 organizations in Europe in 13 countries endorse boycott of Agrexco, Israel’s leading flower exporter

Ynetnews
by Giulio Meotti

Many Israeli agricultural products have been recently targeted by the Israel boycott campaign: tomatoes, peppers, citrus fruit, carrots, melons, strawberries and celery. But the flowers have been the primary obsession of the divestment movement, which wants to strangle the Israeli economy.

Agrexco, Israel’s leading flower exporter, has recently declared bankruptcy, partially due to the global boycott of its produce, according to some reports. More than 20 organizations in Europe in 13 countries endorsed a boycott of Agrexco.
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WHITE HOUSE’S 9/11 ANNIVERSARY GUIDELINES ASK OFFICIALS TO ‘MINIMIZE REFERENCES TO AL QAEDA’

Communist Party Central Committee The White House has provided guidelines to government officials regarding how to observe and discuss the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. While there are certainly some beneficial recommendations held within, some may interpret the disseminated documents as more agenda-driven than not.

TheBlaze

These instructions include information about how to honor the lives lost here in America. Additionally, they call for remembrance of the fact that Al Qaeda and other terror groups have also killed innocent individuals in other localities across the globe. Politico has more:

The guidelines detail what the White House has deemed the important themes that must be discussed, as well as the tone the 9/11 observances should take.
“A chief goal of our communications is to present a positive, forward-looking narrative,” the foreign guidelines state.
Again, these are worthwhile goals and ideals, but they may be viewed as something more sinister by President Obama’s political opponents. The Atlantic writes:
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Poll: Most American Muslims satisfied with Obama

A majority of US Muslims are content with the nation's direction in contrast to many Americans and few Muslims who believe there is support for Islamic extremism, a survey released on Tuesday found.

Ynetnews 

With the 10th anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and the Pentagon approaching, the Pew Research Center found that most Muslims felt ordinary Americans were friendly or neutral toward them.
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Adler & Coren on Ground Zero imam Rauf

Mitt Romney facing fund-raising challenge from Jewish donors who mistakenly think Bachmann is Jewish

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is facing a new challenge: He's having trouble raising money from some Jewish donors who mistakenly believe one of his opponents, Michele Bachmann, is Jewish.

NEW YORK POST
By JOSH MARGOLIN

Some Jewish donors are telling fund-raisers for Romney, a Mormon, that while they like him, they'd rather open their wallets for the "Jewish candidate," who they don't realize is actually a Lutheran, The Post has learned.

"It's a real problem," one Romney fund-raiser said. "We're working very hard in the Jewish community because of Obama's Israel problem. This was surprising."
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