Wednesday, June 02, 2010



Rage about Israel but silence about real atrocities

Six million dead over the past ten years. Six. Million. Murdered through barbaric violence and mass starvation. But, oddly enough, not with that weapon of death, the paint ball gun.

Mass rape is a weapon unleashed on thousands of women every single day. Over a million refugees are living in filth, dying of disease and starvation. We're talking about... Congo.
Perhaps the scale of the humanitarian tragedy is too much for people to comprehend, or perhaps the hidden corporate agenda of mainstream media in the United States will not allow this story to see the light of day. The rape and plunder of Congo's resources is behind the great silence which surrounds this story. The proxy armies of Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda serve the international corporate agenda. The story is complicated, and will never be fully understood except within the confines of historical analysis.

Meanwhile, six million are dead in the last ten years, 1,200 people die every day, unspeakable crimes against women's bodies go unreported, and the 1.2 million innocents in refugee camps cannot afford the time to wait for history's analysis of the reasons behind their despair and misery. More than 2,000 rape cases were recorded last month alone in the Democratic Republic of Congo's violent North Kivu province.

But no one questions the legitimacy of the Congo, arguably the most barbaric, dysfunctional country on the face of the earth. The U.N. barely notices Congo.

And all the so-called peace activists on the left who wail and gnash their teeth about non-existent Israeli atrocities are criminally silent when it comes to authentic war crimes; the oceans of innocent blood barely registers in their collective conscience.

You know why? Because there are no Jews in Congo. Because Congo is not the Jewish State.

Because anti-Zionism is the new Jew-hatred. Because Jews were despised when we did not have a state, and now we are despised because we do have a state.

Israel's enemies are not interested in human rights. They are interested in the destruction of the Jewish State, the extermination of the Jewish people. That is the reality.

More HERE (See the original for links)

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Obama and Jewish political stupidity

by Jeff Jacoby

LONG BEFORE his election as president, it was clear that Barack Obama felt little of the traditional American warmth for Israel or any particular repugnance for the enemies that Israel and America have in common. As Commentary's editors suggest, his exceptionally close ties to the man he described as his spiritual mentor, the Israel-bashing Reverend Jeremiah Wright, should have given pause to any pro-Israel voter. So should the persistence with which he vowed to undertake direct presidential diplomacy with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- the virulently anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic president of Iran -- "without preconditions." Yet many American Jews chose to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, telling themselves that he could be numbered, as Alan Dershowitz wrote at the time, "among Israel's strongest supporters."

Only the willfully blind could believe that now. And many American Jews are willfully blind.

Time and again, Obama has made clear both his lack of sympathy for the Jewish state and his keen desire to ingratiate himself with Arab and Muslim autocrats. The disparities in the administration's tone and attitude have been striking. For the prime minister of Israel, there have been humiliating snubs and telephoned harangues; for the rulers of Iran, invitations to "engage" and sycophantic New Year greetings. When Damascus was reported to be arming Hezbollah with Scud missiles, Obama's secretary of state observed mildly that the US "would like to have a more balanced and positive relationship with Syria." When Israel announced plans to build more homes in a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem, by contrast, the secretary of state angrily condemned the announcement as "an insult to the United States."

Even more egregious is Obama's insinuation that American troops are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan because Israel won't agree to peace on the Palestinians' terms. The Israeli-Arab conflict "is costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure," the president said in April -- a claim not just false, but recklessly close to a blood libel. No wonder the number of Israeli Jews who see Obama as pro-Israel is minuscule: just 9 percent, according to the Jerusalem Post.

When the first George Bush was in the White House, he evinced a similar anti-Israel animus, and some of his advisers worried that his Mideast policy would hurt the president with Jewish voters. "F--- the Jews," Secretary of State James Baker notoriously responded, "they don't vote for us anyway." They didn't: When Bush ran for re-election in 1992, he drew only 11 percent of the Jewish vote -- less than a third of those who had voted for him in 1988.

Is it likely that two-thirds of the overwhelming majority of Jews who backed Obama in 2008 would abandon him in 2012, assuming he runs for re-election and his animus toward Israel persists? To ask it another way: Would most American Jews vote against a Democratic nominee out of concern for Israel?

There is no reason to think so. American Jews have been stalwart Democrats for nearly a century, and their partisan affiliation shows no sign of weakening -- not even as the Democratic Party's support for Israel grows steadily weaker. When Gallup earlier this year surveyed Americans on their sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 85 percent of Republicans expressed support for Israel -- but only 48 percent of Democrats did so. Reams of data confirm that solidarity with Israel is now far stronger among Republicans and conservatives than among Democrats and liberals.

That is why if they are forced to choose between standing with Israel and standing with the Democratic Party, many American Jews will simply deny that any choice must be made. As evidence, consider a recent Quinnipiac University poll, in which fully 50 percent of Jews described Obama as a "strong supporter of Israel" -- a far higher proportion than the 19 percent of evangelicals, 23 percent of Protestants, and 35 percent of Catholics who said the same. Denial is not an uncommon response to cognitive dissonance, and a goodly number of Jewish Democrats will find it easier to keep telling themselves that Obama is strongly pro-Israel than to re-think their party loyalty.

To be sure, in 2012 Obama is unlikely to duplicate the 78 percent of Jewish votes he drew in 2008. But will American Jews turn away from him en masse? Don't bet on it. "F--- the Jews," Obama's advisers can tell him. "They'll vote for us anyway."

SOURCE

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BrookesNews Update

Is the US economy facing stagnation? : When GDP for the last quarter of 2009 came in at 5.2 per cent many people immediately assumed that the upswing had finally arrived. They were wrong. The contrary factors at work were too powerful to resist and they could be getting stronger. This could see the US economy sink even deeper into recession
KPMG's Keynesian quackery is hazardous to your wealth : It is to be regretted that KPMG's economic fallacies are soundly embedded in what passes for economic debate in Australia. What Mr Salt and those like him at the Treasury and in the media have not grasped is that a good economist looks beyond the immediate effects of an economic policy
The left get it wrong again: The market didn't cause the crisis, bad economics and political meddlers did that : Statistics tell us what happened but they don't tell us why it happened. This is why one needs a theory to interpret them. These critics of the market don't have a theory. What they have are prejudices. They nothing about economic history or the history of economic thought (most economists are no better in this respect) and they certainly do not know any basic economics
Castro's supporters: Rockers For Stalinism and segregation! : What is with our celebrity class and their endless love affairs with the vicious Castro. The man is a mass murdering sadist and yet Hollywood celebrities debase themselves in front of and rockers treat him like a god. Where does this moral imbecility come from?
Senator Chris Dodd always seemed to support America's enemies : Christopher Dodd, Democratic Senator from Connecticut, is exiting the Senate, leaving, like so many before him, a very dark stain behind. To understand why American politics is immensely better off and American liberties far safer with the likes of Dodd kept away from the levers of power one needs to only look at one aspect of his political career. It was only recently that he tried to sabotage the war on terrorism?
I've had too much change and I've lost my hope! : Why do Jews continue to vote for the Democrats? In decades and generations gone past, the Jewish communities were poor. They were newcomers to the wealth and civil rights. They appreciated the liberty afforded to them
Do Democrats commit hate crimes against black Republicans? : A display of unmitigated gall describes how Democrats are falsely comparing anti-ObamaCare protestors to the anti-civil rights racists of the 1960's who were Democrats. Democrats get away with this racial hypocrisy because they know with absolute certainty that the true history of civil rights has long been buried, and the racism exhibited today by Democrats against blacks, particularly black Republicans, will be ignored by the mainstream media

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ELSEWHERE

He was supposed to be competent: "I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts. There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his healthcare proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. … The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008.”

Correction: Census workers may NOT enter your apartment: "Last week, former congressman Bob Barr wrote that Census workers can legally demand entrance to any apartment. … The claim got a lot of play on sites like the Drudge Report. The idea is certainly believable given the expansion of government power. And it’s easy to see how Barr got his impression from this law, which states that a census worker may demand the landlord of an apartment building ‘furnish the names of the occupants of such premises, or to give free ingress thereto and egress therefrom to any duly accredited representative …’ But four privacy law experts we called to said that ‘ingress thereto’ refers to the apartment complex, not individual apartments.”

Disclosed partisanship: "DISCLOSE’s partisanship is apparent in its different treatment of corporations and unions. Every major federal campaign-finance-reform effort since 1943 has attempted to treat corporations and unions equally. If a limit applied to corporations, it applied to unions; if unions could form PACs, corporations could too; and so on. DISCLOSE is the first major campaign-finance bill that has not taken this approach. For example, it prohibits corporations with government contracts of as little as $50,000 from making independent expenditures in elections or engaging in ‘electioneering communications.’ This very low threshold would bar not only large contractors such as Boeing but also thousands of small businesses from exercising the rights recognized in Citizens United. Yet no parallel provision exists for unions that bargain with the government for multimillion-dollar benefit packages.”

"Learned helplessness": "That’s a phrase I first learned from Charles Murray. I assume he invented it when writing about the unintended consequences of the Welfare State. Working at ABC, and living in Manhattan, I never imagined American welfare ‘reform’ would pass. My neighbors fervently believed subsidies should only increase. ‘No one can live on welfare,’ was a typical comment. ‘The poor barely scrape by. We must increase subsidies for education, healthcare, housing, etc., to give people a decent shot at life.’ When a Republican Congress persuaded President Clinton to sign welfare reform, my neighbors predicted riots and widespread misery. They have been largely silent about the resulting decrease in the poverty rate. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that Britain’s deficits have forced Britain to rethink its welfare state…. ‘Uninspiring’ is a good word. Now the English may have finally learned that a generous Welfare State breeds helplessness.” [The term "Learned helplessness" was coined by Martin Seligman, as far as I know]

Philosophical versus political correctness: "You will know what I am after here when I tell you how much I dislike it when people talk of ‘her majesty’ or ‘his highness’ as they talk of various pretenders to heads of countries around the globe and throughout human history. For me such terms are like ones out of fairy tales because, well, there are no kings or queens or any such thing except in myths and fabricated political regimes. In other words kings are really not what they pretend to be, namely, God’s chosen leaders here on earth. As with all in-born status that places some above others not in height or even talent but in political authority — some may rule and others will be ruled — the whole monarchical idea is a lie. Yet even now one can encounter references to these pretenders, right here in the United States of America, as if these were the real McCoy! Poppycock. Was it not the American Founders who participated in the revolution that demoted, demythologized these pretenders and declared that no one is by nature the ruler of someone else?” [I don't think Tibor has quite got the idea of a constitutional monarchy. I live in one and find it most congenial]

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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