Posts Tagged → Israel
Dems Re-Hire God, Maybe
An international gasp awakened rank and file Democrats to the fact that Obama was leading them over a cliff, as a result of, most recently, eliminating the word “God” from the Dem platform and ditching the Jews by the side of the highway.
So this afternoon “God” was reintroduced to the briefly God-less at the DNC convention.
But it’s uncertain just how popular this action was, because if you watch the video (http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/3872849) of the convention floor vote, you can hear and see that the Dems are evenly divided on both God and security for Israel.
Moreover, there’s an Arab Muslim couple that is severely disappointed, the man gesticulating wildly, jumping up and down, yelling. His face and upraised arms are now the symbol of that historic, disagreeable floor vote.
One more thing catches me eye: The mainstream media had that video all over the web two hours ago, and now you can only find it on C-SPAN. Think the mainstream media is in the pocket of the Democratic Party?
Nahhhh…the media burial of this supercharged, radioactive video is purely coincidental.
Really, it is.
And the Democratic Party believes in God, really.
Democrats Fire God
God has been fired by the Democratic Party.
The 2008 DNC platform mentioned “God-given” rights, but that has now been replaced with the phrases ‘faith’ and ‘faith-based’.
And speaking of God, support for Israel has been tossed aside. The people who first found God have also been discarded.
These are not your dad’s Democrats!
Newt Gingrich speaks truth to power
Enough lying about the Middle East. Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich tells the facts about the so-called “Palestinians” and the propaganda war against Israel, the Jews, Christianity, and America.
And Gingrich speaks in contradistinction to candidate Ron Paul, a man whose foreign policy ideas will spell the end of America.
Watch this YouTube clip and smile, enjoying the truth:
Ron Paul’s tinfoil hat
U.S. Congressman Ron Paul is a candidate for the U.S. presidency, a serious endeavor with big implications.
But if you listen to his foreign policy positions, as I did in last night’s Republican debate, you realize that he is not a serious candidate. Ron Paul is in the same category as racist David Duke and other wackos who run for office to promote their extreme, bizarre beliefs, not to win.
Ron Paul blames America for why Muslim leaders around the world hate America. It’s a flawed position, but it plays to a group of angry citizens on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum.
Ron Paul’s position on American foreign policy may be flawed, but it is more than that. It is a potentially fatal flaw that could spell the end of the United States as a nuclear-armed Iran uses conventional and unconventional nuclear bombs to destroy our great nation.
Cartoons that capture Ron Paul’s awkward, dangerous policy positions might show a man wearing a tinfoil hat, the kind of “protection” lunatics need to keep the CIA from reading their minds.
Ron Paul is a cartoon of a candidate. Enjoy your tinfoil hat, congressman. We believe you, sure we do…..
Allen West – Our Hero
Congressman Allen West gives an excellent interview on America, Barack Hussein Obama, and foreign policy
http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=235491
Abandoning the Helm, Here & Afar: How Hypocrisy Has Ended the Moral Claim
Abandoning the Helm, Here & Afar:
How Hypocrisy Has Ended the Moral Claim
© Josh First
July 31, 2011
Time was, for people in need only the local churches helped them. Every frontier town had a church, and its doors were always open to the needy. In a frontier society, the needy are ever-present. Over time, America grew, and seeking America’s promise, the needy increasingly arrived, and the model expanded. Are you hungry, do you need clothes? A local religious group was there to help you or your family. Bethesda Mission, Hebrew Free Loan Association, a myriad of Catholic charities, all served increasingly robust communities and then whole populations of American immigrants from across Europe. Immigrant aid societies flourished, most aimed at their own ethnic or linguistic group.
That model of bare-bones, volunteer-driven organizations advancing and increasingly advocating for the rights, needs, and interests of everyday shlmiel citizens is a uniquely American development. It is something to be proud of. That safety net for newcomers released their potential, increased the opportunity that awaited them, and enhanced their ability to become integrated, productive Americans.
Over decades, mirror image organizations evolved out of more refined social expectations, like human dignity and individual rights, wildlife habitat, environmental protection, and consumer protection. Out of this distinctly private and mostly religiously-based effort came public commissions, bureaucracies, laws, and then government mandates, with increasingly complex goals and symmetrically mixed results. Public health offices aimed at cholera, orphans, and clean water were useful; Prohibition spawned the Mob.
Beating Jim Crow in the South began in the late 1950s, and infused other movements. Responding to the Cold War, international causes became popular in the 1960s, spawning Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others.
Increasing public and private financial resources, and increased economic and individual opportunities across America created more defined political jockeying between these safety net groups. Many eventually morphed into highly tuned political machines with sophisticated interest groups, grassroots armies, funders, political backers, friendly media outlets, and crafted messages, many arriving at their final destination and recognizable form in the 1960s and 1970s. Those two decades are also recognizable as the turning point in American public political activism. Gun control, animal rights and welfare, gay rights, etc., all followed, and the laundry list is now long and well known. The political lines are now well drawn in the sand.
What impelled and set the original “founding” interest groups above, apart, and beyond their original surrounding circumstances was a powerful, convening clarion call that coalesced universal conscience: The moral claim.
The moral claim was based on a distinct and publicly recognizable difference between what was common practice at the time, on the one hand, and what was obviously needed to elevate and fairly improve the human condition, on the other hand. The moral claim was a non-partisan standard that appealed to nearly everyone, rallying and focusing fair-minded citizens from across religious, economic, racial and regional boundaries.
One of the most famous examples of the moral claim is King’s I Have a Dream speech. Dead people in coffins have been widely documented to sit up and cry when it’s replayed in their presence, because it is undeniably powerful medicine for a nation designed for freedoms it hadn’t yet delivered.
Similarly, when the Cuyahoga River actually caught on fire, advocates for environmental quality had one hell of a moral claim, and legitimately aimed at ending a long tradition of egregious pollution that privatized profits and socialized the costs. Three decades later, River Keeper was shutting down the last industrial pipes bleeding privately conjured PCBs and other chartreuse-colored ooze into the Hudson River’s very public waters.
But times change, and thankfully, the vast majority of the moral claims have been settled (more on this later, obviously). The problem is that the well-oiled machines that got those moral claims over the goal line are still running on high octane, and they have to keep going, or die. So they stay in the groove that worked for them, well worn over decades, and the growing differences between their goals, methods, and reality is now making hypocrites out of many of these the now-former bearers of the now-former moral claim. Hypocrites do not make good standard bearers.
For example, here in Pennsylvania this past January, purported environmental activists (self-appointed keepers of the green moral claim) banged drums and shouted into bull horns, doing everything possible to disrupt Governor Tom Corbett’s inaugural speech, occurring three hundred feet away. What was the issue that impelled them into their most moral rage? Why, it was the very most moral issue of natural gas drilling. And not just any gas drilling, but hydrofracturing deep gas wells. You’d think from their behavior that gas drilling is a moral issue found directly in the Constitution and the Bible, or that terrible crimes are occurring.
But it’s not a moral issue. Gas drilling is an every-day issue like plastics or peanut butter, arising from modern social needs, demands, and industrial processes that environmental activists themselves help perpetuate in their individual daily lives. It is subject to scientific analysis, assessments of risk-benefit tradeoffs, and regulations, both sufficient and insufficient. It is not a matter of principle.
But once Tom Corbett became governor, within his first two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, as a matter of fact, the activists turned gas drilling into an artificially manufactured issue of principle. Invoking the moral claim, protestors complained that the new Corbett administration, in office for exactly two minutes and thirty eight seconds, was environmentally immoral.
Uhhh, where were these folks during the eight-year tenure of the immediate past governor, Ed Rendell? You know, the same governor who handed out gas drilling and hydrofracking permits like they were potato chips, for years before Corbett was even a candidate? Rendell got a free pass from these purported keepers of the flame, apparently because he was of a political party that the activists otherwise generally concur with. Holding Corbett accountable for something he hasn’t yet done, while giving a free pass to Rendell who done a lot, makes them partisan, makes the gas drilling issue partisan, employs a double standard, makes the activists hypocrites, which terminates their moral claim.
Looking farther abroad, international human rights groups were once the only lifeline of political prisoners in Soviet, Socialist, and authoritarian gulags around the world. Today, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch disproportionately criticize democratic countries where press freedoms, free movement, and economic comforts make it easy to get access to friendly advocates and information, like Israel and America. And they ignore egregious violations among the harder targets, like Saudi Arabia’s all-encompassing barbarism and summary executions, China’s crushing occupation of Tibet, Iran and Syria’s mass executions of peaceful protestors, and Turkey’s ongoing genocide against the Kurds.
Saudi Arabia, that epitome of cruelty, barbarism, discrimination, lacking basic human freedoms and rights, in fact, has recently become the actual benefactor of Human Rights Watch, and thereby bought off the group. Getting access to authoritarian countries is hard, and if the masters of all things human rights play hardball with authoritarian regimes, they get tossed out. So they withhold full criticism, and instead criticize the enemies of the worst brutes, just to keep the machine running. And they take the brutes’ money, too.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and other supposed watchdog groups, are now such giant hypocrites that their misdeeds have spawned watchdog groups to hold them, the self-appointed human rights organizations, accountable to their own purported standards. Groups like NGO Monitor (www.ngo-monitor.org) and UN Watch (www.unwatch.org), which is “tasked with measuring the UN by the yardstick of its own charter,” are playing backup to maintaining the moral claim, and not allowing it to be watered down in the name of convenient politics.
Internationally, certain pet issues predominate, monopolizing press exposure and the supposed moral claim. Despite a nearly two-to-one ratio of Jewish refugees from Jerusalem, Hebron, and Arab and Muslim countries, versus the number of Arab refugees from Israel in the same time period, today we hear only, hypocritically, about the Arabs. Compensating Jewish refugees, whose farms, homes, religious sites, and businesses remain under Arab colonialist occupation, is not a vogue subject. It’s still not vogue in Poland, either, by the way, another mass event held at the same time.
Similarly, Turkey’s still-smoldering genocide against the Armenians, its ethnic cleansing of the Kurds, its brutal occupation of Cyprus complete with an Islamic Apartheid wall, and its officialization of Islamic imperialism all get no media juice. Being a NATO member has its benefits, I suppose, but where oh where is the moral claim? Hypocrites all, the Human Rights Watches of the world. They are focused on tiny, democratic Israel.
In conclusion, if someone abdicates their self-appointed role and abandons the helm, which had been based on a universal standard, and instead becomes a hypocrite, then their moral claim has been badly cheapened or lost. Since the beginning of modern social activism, based on the early faith-based model, public deference was automatically given to those who made the moral claim, who rallied us around a universal conscience. No longer. We are in the beginning of a historic shift of moral authority away from the partisan establishment grievance groups and back into the hands of wired up, dialed-in citizens, whose blogs aggregate and focus public wrath on the official failure du jure. Tunisia one day, British Petroleum the next. Shifting and diffusing power back into the public venue is an inevitable and necessary cog in the evolution of social activism. Who knows what beautiful things will come out of it? Thankfully, hypocrisy won’t be one of those things, because it doesn’t pass the public’s sniff test.
Originally published by and licensed to www.rockthecapital.com
The Method to the Obama Administration’s Mad Foreign Policy
The Method to the Obama Administration’s Mad Foreign Policy
By Josh First
May 16, 2011
Keeping one’s powder dry for over a month, while Obama’s approval ratings dropped lower and lower with a distinct “Cha-Ching” chime each Friday, and then watching the Obama Administration dance and spin with its friendly mainstream media pals, well…it was tough to stay tight-lipped, and now yours truly feels truly compelled to write. We don’t get this kind of analysis too many other places, just in blogs and small, independent news services, and certainly not in the mainstream media, which appear to be owned by the Obama Administration and who are doing their utmost to officially protect and promote the administration.
So, let’s evaluate the administration’s recent foreign policy by summing up its Attaboys and Awshuckses over the past couple of months, shall we?
Attaboys to the Obama Administration for (1) bombing Libya, and (2) for successfully closing out President Bush’s effort to hunt down Osama Bin Laden and bring him to justice, one way or another. That’s a total of two Attaboys.
But….Awshucks #1 for having pledged to bring Gaddafi to justice without force but with much sweet talk and then scolding, then by using actual force, and then saying the US was out of the Libya effort just as the military force was having an effect, and then saying that, actually, America was back in the military force effort and that the mission was open-ended in time and scope. This three-week-long flip-flop-flip is not good foreign policy. It looks care free and careless, an elliptical byproduct of a pacifist confronted with reality. Or, like a liberal who keeps getting mugged, these several recent times by Islamic countries like Libya. Or, like a liberal who has the silent approval of his array of political allies in Congress and political activists, who otherwise never saw a war, military adventure, or foreign invasion conducted by a Republican that they could support, but who now are whistling while casually looking up at the sky and admiring the nice spring weather.
Awshucks #2 for having held Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak to one quickly developed standard, and then to another standard that was quickly developed by the citizens of Tunisia and Yemen, and then holding him to yet one more: Instead of moving on with his life, Mubarak must stand trial. OK, we get it, President Obama, you are trying to demonstrate that you are committed to the rule of law and freedom. The problem is, your inconsistent messaging has sent confusing signals to both allies and enemies, which is not good foreign policy, and those mixed signals have consequences….
Awshucks #3 is the administration’s continued inconsistency on Bashar Assad of Syria, where as soon as the citizens Syria took to the streets, demanding their own freedom and representative government like their counterparts had in Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt, all of whom had Obama’s support, the Obama Administration went silent, like he did two years ago when Iran’s citizens took to their streets. Syria is the latest missed opportunity for this administration.
Some have speculated that Obama is such an absolute statist that he identifies only with those who hold dictatorial power, and that, therefore, he is disinclined to criticize or undermine dictators, a la Ahmadinejad then and Syria’s thug-in-chief Bashar Assad, now. Some others have simply stated that the Obama administration lacks a cohesive doctrine or position on the Middle East as a whole, a common, convenient fall-back position for political watchers with degrees in political science.
However, based on the totality of Obama’s actions and statements, it is most likely that Obama is unwilling to make the same demands of Assad, or to hold him to the same high standard to which Mubarak, Gaddafi, et al were held, because without Assad (and Iran and Pakistan) pressuring Israel, Obama cannot accomplish his most likely and consistent goal: Undermining Israel and forcing Israel to make suicidal concessions to its homicidal neighbors.
Obama waited to comment while freedom-loving Iranians were being mowed down, tortured, and disappeared and he ultimately did not really criticize Iran’s Ahmadinejad, nor has he stated the obvious about Pakistan: Osama Bin Laden was hiding in plain view in a Pakistani military garrison town, with one AK 47 in his possession, because the Pakistani military was obviously protecting him. Pakistan has nuclear bombs that can be handed off to Iran or Hezbollah or any other enemy of Israel, and therefore, in the unique logic guiding Obama’s mind, it serves a role of pressuring Israel. Egypt went from moderate under Mubarak to now headed toward war with Israel under its current leadership and their likely political heirs, the Muslim Brotherhood (whom Obama has praised). Removing Mubarak served Obama’s larger goal, which is pressuring Israel.
Obama knows of no other way to work with Israel than to pressure it, to force it, to get Israel to make unsustainable concessions. Any nation or actor that has the potential to directly pressure Israel either gets a pass from Obama, like Iran, Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Pakistan, or an actual nod, like the new Fatah-Hamas unity government that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist but which is Obama’s choice for peace partner. By allowing Syria to muddle along under Assad, Israel’s arch-enemy Hezbollah keeps its next door ally and stays strong, and actual peace remains elusive. So, what looks like an Awshucks to normal Americans is actually a purposeful decision by Obama.
Thus, even though the Obama Administration gets three negatives to two positives and loses the pitching count, there is actually a method to Obama’s madness; there is careful reasoning behind his apparent indecision in the Middle East. His actual goal is to force and pound and pressure Israel into indefensible submission, and he needs certain countries and regimes around in order to achieve that. And we all know the old Muslim adage that Obama is now living by: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Right now, Obama’s best friends in the Middle East are the Muslim Brotherhood, Syria, Pakistan, and Iran.