by David Horowitz and Robert Spencer
READ HEAR
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future
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
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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Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Obama’s Patronage Pigs Can’t Fly
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 |
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
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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Monday, September 5, 2011
Obama's demagoguery with foul implications
John Podhoretz in COMMENTARY MAGAZINE makes good point:
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.
Obama’s “Country Before Party” NonsenseWhy 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.
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.
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
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
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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Sunday, September 4, 2011
NEW PRO-JEWISH NYC CAMPAIGN: ‘PRESIDENT OBAMA IS NOT PRO-ISRAEL’
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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Saturday, September 3, 2011
Golda Sought Bombing of Auschwitz
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
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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Thursday, September 1, 2011
Yiddishkeit
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
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 »
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
The Center for American Progress’s Jewish Conspiracy Theory
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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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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Tuesday, August 30, 2011
WHITE HOUSE’S 9/11 ANNIVERSARY GUIDELINES ASK OFFICIALS TO ‘MINIMIZE REFERENCES TO AL QAEDA’
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
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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Mitt Romney facing fund-raising challenge from Jewish donors who mistakenly think 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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Republicans to Unveil Bill to Force Major Changes at the UN
Bloomberg
The bill by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, would require the UN to adopt a voluntary budget model in which countries selectively fund UN agencies rather than according to a set formula. It would end funding for Palestinian refugees, limit use of U.S. funds to only purposes outlined by Congress and stop contributions to peacekeeping operations until management changes are made.
The legislation represents the leading edge of Republican moves against the world body at a time when the Obama administration is increasingly building its foreign policy around multilateral institutions, making the alliance-based approach central to its stance on Libya. The bill may advance in the Republican-controlled House but is likely to hit opposition in the Senate and from President Barack Obama.
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Monday, August 29, 2011
Obama's Pretend Counterterrorism Policy
With trumpets and drum rolls, the White House in early August released a policy paper on methods to prevent terrorism, said to have been two years in the making. Signed personally by Barack Obama and with rhetoric vaunting "the strength of communities" and the need to "enhance our understanding of the threat posed by violent extremism," the document looks anodyne.
by Daniel Pipes
But beneath the calm lies a counterproductive–and dangerous–approach to counterterrorism. The import of this paper consists in its firm stand on the wrong side of three distinct counterterrorism debates, with the responsible Right (and a few sensible liberals) on one side, and Islamists, leftists, and multiculturalists on the other.
The first debate concerns the nature of the problem. The responsible Right points to one immense threat, Islamism, a global ideological movement that has motivated some 23,000 terror attacks worldwide since 9/11. Islamists deny that their ideology spawns violence, and they categorize those 23,000 attacks as the work of criminals, crazies, or misguided Muslims. Western leftists and multiculturalists concur, bringing their formidable cadres, creativity, funds, and institutions to support the Islamists' denial of responsibility.
Read more »
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| Peter King (left) and Bennie Thompson (right) symbolize the difference in counterterrorism policy outlook. |
But beneath the calm lies a counterproductive–and dangerous–approach to counterterrorism. The import of this paper consists in its firm stand on the wrong side of three distinct counterterrorism debates, with the responsible Right (and a few sensible liberals) on one side, and Islamists, leftists, and multiculturalists on the other.
The first debate concerns the nature of the problem. The responsible Right points to one immense threat, Islamism, a global ideological movement that has motivated some 23,000 terror attacks worldwide since 9/11. Islamists deny that their ideology spawns violence, and they categorize those 23,000 attacks as the work of criminals, crazies, or misguided Muslims. Western leftists and multiculturalists concur, bringing their formidable cadres, creativity, funds, and institutions to support the Islamists' denial of responsibility.
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Comparing Obama’s Performance in Office with that of a Sack of Hammers
by Frank J. Fleming
President Barack Obama is an Ivy League-educated man of considerable intelligence and ambition who has surrounded himself with numerous experts to help in his decision-making. With these advantages, he has tried a number of things to help the country domestically and in the area of foreign affairs. But at the end of the day, how does Obama’s efficacy in office compare to that of a sack of hammers?
It’s somewhat difficult to judge the performance of a president with all the factors that need to be considered and trying to figure out the president’s effect on them, but perhaps the best way to accurately assess the effectiveness of a president is to judge him against the expected performance of a sack of hammers in a similar situation (which is known as the “Coolidge Test”). Basically, the question is: Instead of electing the current president, would the country have been better off taking a burlap sack to Ace Hardware, filling it with approximately one hundred dollars worth of hammers, and placing that in the Oval Office?
As long as it’s an old burlap sack and the hammers were made in America, this is a perfectly constitutional option for president. It’s never been tried, though, so it only exists as a hypothetical. Nevertheless, the nature of a sack of hammers is pretty easy to predict, so we can accurately assess how it would have performed in similar situations versus the more ambitious and active people who tend to be elected president. So let’s go through the issues that Barack Obama has dealt with and, in as fair and balanced a manner as possible, determine whether he has performed better, worse, or about the same as a sack of hammers.
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Sunday, August 28, 2011
The Soros-supported Center for American Progress blames rich Jews for stoking Islamophobia
by Ed Lasky
The Obama-allied Center for American Progress has released a report that blames Islamophobia in America on a small group of Jews and Israel supporters in America, whose views are being backed by millions of dollars. This "network", according to the news release, have "have worked hard to push narratives that Obama might be a Muslim, that mosques are incubators of radicalization, and that "radical Islam" has infiltrated all aspects of American society -- including the conservative movement.
Who are the figures mentioned as the promoters of prejudice? Most of them are prominent Jews and supporters of Israel, such as David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson (the founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism). The eight foundations mentioned as funding this effort include are almost exclusively ones founded and funded by Jewish donors, and lest readers not be aware of this fact, the Center for American Progress lists not only the other beneficiaries of the charities and foundations (most of them having Jewish or Israel in the title) but also goes to the trouble of naming the individuals behind these charities -- not just the donors but also those who serve on the boards.
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Jews Say Yes
Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield
The Partisan's song of the ghettos was a courageous affirmation of life by those who went off to fight in Warsaw and in Jerusalem. And today there are the ugly chants of those who deny that affirmation. Who insist that the Jews are better off dead. Their rhetoric cloaks this agenda in the occupation,
Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner wrote on his blog that, "the Palestinians have the right to use terrorism against us." Of the terrorists who killed eight Israelis last week, "however vile their ideology was, they were justified to attack."
Larry Derfner is honest, if equally vile, he doesn't bother justifying the genocidal Islamism of the post-PLO order, instead he settles for justifying the murders without regard to ideology. It doesn't matter what you believe anymore, or what you're fighting for, the left now extends the right to kill Jews without any belief test. You can be on the left, you can even be on the right, you can have beliefs identical to those of the Nazis, but with an Islamic veneer. It's all good.
Derfner dresses up his murderous permissiveness in talk of resistance, but if the fathers of one of the children killed by Fatah terrorist attacks were to kick Abbas in the shin, he would be the first to call for his head. It's resistance when you kill Jews. It's occupation when Jews fight back.
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Ron Paul: "Those who hate us and would like to kill us, they are motivated by our invasion of their land"
I'm tired of the Rick Perry firestorm. Time for a Ron Paul firestorm. Another Clueless Presidential Candidate Alert: "Ron Paul says U.S. intervention motivated 9/11 attacks," by Josh Hafner for the Des Moines Register, August 27:
WINTERSET, Ia. – Two weeks away from the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, presidential candidate and Texas Rep. Ron Paul says that U.S. intervention in the Middle East is a main motivation behind terrorist hostilities toward America, and that Islam is not a threat to the nation.Yes. When Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, “Have no doubt... Allah willing, Islam will conquer what? It will conquer all the mountain tops of the world,” he was just upset about the U.S. invasion of Iran. When CAIR cofounder and longtime Board chairman Omar Ahmad said in southern California that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth” (he now denies saying this, but the original reporter sticks by her story), he was just angry about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. When the prominent American Muslim leader Siraj Wahhaj said, “if only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate,” he was upset about the U.S. invasion of Dearborn, Michigan. When the most influential Islamic cleric in the world today, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, said that “Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice,” he was upset about the U.S. invasion of Malmö, Sweden.
At a campaign stop on Saturday in Winterset, one man asked Paul how terrorist groups would react if the U.S. removed its military presence in Middle Eastern nations, a move the candidate advocates.
“Which enemy are you worried that will attack our national security?” Paul asked.
“If you’re looking for specifics, I’m talking about Islam. Radical Islam,” the man answered.
“I don’t see Islam as our enemy,” Paul said. “I see that motivation is occupation and those who hate us and would like to kill us, they are motivated by our invasion of their land, the support of their dictators that they hate.”
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Answering Jonathan Alter’s Challenge
Commentary Magazine
by Peter Wehner
Alter tells us he’s not talking here about Obama as a tactician and communicator, and he’s not interested in hearing ad hominem attacks or about people’s generalized “disappointment.” (Neither am I.) He wants to know on a substantive basis why Obama should be judged to have failed so far.
In Alter’s words, “Your mission, Jim [or anyone else for that matter], should you decide to accept it, is to be specific and rational, not vague and visceral.”
Consider the mission accepted.
In one sense, the answer to the Alter challenge is obvious: Obama has failed by his own standards. It’s the Obama administration, not the RNC, that said if his stimulus package was passed unemployment would not exceed 8 percent. It’s Obama who joked there weren’t as many “shovel-ready” jobs as he thought.
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