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| ...No, the chronic and bloody clashes with the Arabs here today were not in the top of the news. Which is not to say the problem of violent goyim was absent. On the contrary, the top concern was this seeming wave of rapes of Jewish women by Africans who have illegally entered our country. I myself have not been through south Tel-Aviv in ages but the reports are repetitive and consistent and believable. For every major horror like these rapes that have been making headlines, there surely have been oodles more that have not. In other words, I believe the reports that in south Tel-Aviv and other areas in Eilat and Arad there are swarms of these Africans who are not political refugees fleeing a dictatorship, each like a fictional Victor Lazlo in Casablanca, freedom fighter against tyranny. They are just guys without work back home looking for work. And not surprisingly, since there are thousands of them here now, statistically they just have to produce an intolerable number of evil ones who are making life in these Jewish communities unlivable. Which is why Minister Eli Yishai burst out yesterday with his desire they all be rounded up and put in detention camps and shipped out of the country; which of course led to some of the Enlightened angrily protesting; those who relish sticking up for these men. Their own self-image as sisters of mercy is more important to them than the lives of their fellow Jews, often poor Jews now suffering from this unacceptable invasion. Eli Yishai is now being sued because some idiot called one of these NGOs with threats to burn it down, as fire-bombs have recently been thrown at such do-gooder groups by people fed up with the miserable deterioration of the lives, preyed upon as they are by these violent goyim who have no legal right to be in Israel and certainly no moral right to embitter our lives here in our own country. So Eli Yishai is being sued as an incendiary provocateur who stimulated this idiot to make this threatening phone call, if indeed that is what happened. It is a miserable situation, with the Enlightened here paralyzed with fear that if Israel does what it should do - round up the men and drive them from the country - Israel will look bad in the eyes of the goyim; be seen as racists. These modern-day post-Zionists like Ehud Barak and Bibi Netanyahu are so unlike their dedicated parents and grandparents who didn’t care what was said about them as they fought to build their homes on barren land and fought off this predatory nation of violent Ishmaelites whose whole history is that of thieves, burglars and barbaric highwaymen. Israel has to gird its loins with belief in itself and its right to the life it wants to live... | |||||||||
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| ...There was more in JPost on Sunday by their Oren Kessler interviewing Raymond Stock, translator of Egypt’s Nobel Prize laureate for Literature Naguib Mahfouz who passed away in 2006. We’ll put up the link. For my money it is as good a take on the situation in Egypt today as anything in the MSM and certainly better than anything written by the obnoxious and always ignorant Thomas L. Friedman, that jackass who reported from Tahrir Square last year on the glorious Arab Spring. Raymond Stock spent 20 years in Egypt until deported two years ago – something Kessler did not mention in his last piece – for having written an article in Foreign Policy magazine about Farouk Hosni in 2009 when he was touted as a candidate to head up UNESCO; about his antisemitism really. As I say this Kessler piece as good as any as analysis of Egypt’s last 12 months and the major players there: the army, Amr Moussa and Abol Fotouh, the two leading candidates in the upcoming presidential election. And as he reported three years ago in Foreign Policy, he focuses on the abysmal antisemitism in Egypt which seems to be the only thing that lights Egyptian passions. Not the miserable economy; not the corruption. He also foresees the scenario I described some weeks back of the Egyptian army making no hostile moves toward Israel, but if and when the growing terrorist infestation in Sinai lad to something that forces a major Israeli counter-strike in self-defense, this will be enough to light that army’s fire. It all sounds reminiscent of what my own many years of reading of Araby taught me and what I saw first-hand in traveling in Arab lands. For centuries visitors from the West have repeatedly used the word “fatalism” to describe Muslim life. In Turkish the word is kismet – the name of a famous Broadway musical based on the Arabian Nights. Broadly translated, it means “fate,” or one’s lot in life against which one can only shrug. It is an attitude that does not lead to a desire for revolutionary change. One traveler in centuries passed described seeing a father watch his son run over in the street by a runway horse and killed, which elicited from the man only a shrug. In other words, for all the poverty and miserable relations between people in Egypt, there is this fatalism, this surrender to the way things are. In other words, don’t look for, as the moron LTF thought he saw, a fire in the belly among social reformers striving for a better tomorrow. The drive to depose Mubarak was not a drive for a revolutionary new system but just a common, generational rebellion against the current corrupt despot. And if this Kessler piece on Raymond Stock has a subtext, it is that the only thing that incites the passions of the Egyptians is their hatred of Al-Yahud, the perennial agent of the Shaitan, of Satan... | |||||||||
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| ...JPost hard copy reported today on an Italian court decision fining an Italian journalist, one Peppino Caldarola, 25,000 euros because he satirized an Italian political cartoonist in the rival newspaper Il Manifesto, one Vauro Senesi who had drawn a caricature of a member of parliament, Fiamma Nirenstein as a hooked-nosed monster wearing a Star of David and fascist symbols. The hard Left Italian judge Emanuela Attura fined Caldarola for satirizing the antisemitic cartoonist. Fiamma Nirenstein, for those who don’t know her, is an Italian daughter of a Jewish father who identifies as a Jew and lived in Israel for many years writing for the Italian press. She speaks fluent Hebrew and has been a fierce defender of Israel since she returned to Italy a few years ago and entered politics. She is a contemporary of mine, a child of the 1960s. She, though, unlike me, was a full-blown Communist in those days but like, say, David Horowitz, she woke up to the nonsense of the Left and especially its antisemitism expressed in its vicious hatred of Israel. Hence the caricature of her. Ironically, the journalist fined may even still be a Communist for all I know. He writes for the rival newspaper “L’Unita of the Communist Party, but at least he appears to be, if still a Communist, a sober one who knows an antisemite when he sees one, as he did in this cartoonist and evidently ridiculed him in print, which led to this fine. The Italian Jewish community is outraged. Abe Foxman has been on the case since 2008 when the cartoon first appeared - and one can only wish that Israeli politicians, starting with our prime minister, joined the fight. But Israelis like him almost never do. For them, antisemitism abroad is something they turn away from in part because their secular Zionist doctrine sees antisemitism has a problem for Jews in the Diaspora which plays no role in Israel’s life. In other words, we are back to where we started this evening: the inability of Israelis to see the world-wide consensus that we Jews have no right to Judea and Samaria, ergo, we must not challenge the world; challenge the US, the Europeans when it comes their adamant rejection of the right of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria; to keep Judea and Samaria. Hence, the cabinet decision today when Bibi & Co. made it known they want no trouble and are willing to bow down to the dictates of the world which dictate no permanent Israeli rule in Judea and Samaria. Not even an Israeli prime minister opening his mouth to declare that the “Palestinian’ claim is bogus, an antisemitic lie, and our claim the just, authentic, and legal one... | |||||||||
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| ...I cannot let the day go by without some response to the extraordinary, historic milestone in Washington, DC yesterday when the President of the United States of America came out in support of holy matrimony for Sodomites. Only time will tell, if at all, of the weird connection in his mind of the loss the day before in North Carolina of a referendum on this - what the Bible calls abomination - and the vote against what he just came out in support of. Now 32 states, I believe, have voted against this craziness, thank G-d, but Emir Barack Hussein is now in favor? What could he be thinking? Or has HaShem guided his mind in this direction to bring him down in November? Some seven years ago the ultra-Orthodox Shira Leibowitz Schmidt, who lives in Netanya, I think, penned a memorable column in JPost, an educational one in this regard. Citing the Midrash on Genesis, she pointed out that the Midrash there teaches that even though same-sex unions were widespread in the generation of the Great Flood, that generation was not blotted out from the world until people wrote marriage contracts for males and males, males and animals, thus legalizing such practices. Said the Midrash, “The Lord G-d is long-suffering for everything except for such behavior.” In other words, long-suffering even for same-sex unions. It was when people made them legal people stepped over the line. She also pointed to another Midrash in Vayikra/Leviticus which “differentiates conceptually between non-normative behavior itself and the more severe step of legalizing the non-normative behavior, with a reference to Leviticus 18:3 which prohibits the Jews from following the laws of the Canaanites in such matters as males marrying males. Indeed, there is a vast conceptual chasm between rejecting sodomy and tolerating it on the one hand, and legalizing it on the other. The Lord God is long suffering, even forgiving of those suffering powerful, non-normative urges to which they surrender, so long as these non-normative desires and behaviors remained non-normative. But when they are called normal, a line has been crossed. And in the matter of sodomy, there is nothing in the Chumash/the Five Books to compare to what may have been a massive hydrogen-bomb explosion over Sodom and Gomorrah, which story sends a message about abusing the G-d-given and G-d-like capability of human procreation. Man is no more like G-d than in his ability to create more men, and he must never abuse it. Rather, he must certainly never legalize abusing it, for the consequences are potentially catastrophically dire... | |||||||||
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| ...According to Maariv this morning, in the wake of the French election in which Nicholas Sarkozy lost to Francois Hollande, a convention in Paris on Sunday promoting aliyah was attended by 5,000 curious Jews as opposed to the same convention two years ago when only 2,000 showed up. In other words, French Jewry is scared. It has been scared for the past decade as the Muslims have terrified Jews, murdering Ilan Halimi with the same frenzy of satanic cruelty as the Fogel family in Itamar was butchered; we saw the murders in Toulouse, and at its worst I think every day somewhere in France a Jew has been attacked by a Muslim. And now French Jews see in the success of Marine Le Pen yet another symptom that makes them afraid. Likewise Francois Hollande is reported to be no Jew-hater himself but he is, after all, a man of the Left and is expected to put in positions of power numerous Muslims. A week ago in Norway on Mayday Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, head of the Labor Party said nothing about the anti-Israel and antisemitic banners at a Labor Party gathering that he attended that day. And then of course in Greece, there were elections and that country is coming apart at the seams. And not surprisingly in bad times, out-and-out Nazis are on the rise. And in London, Boris Johnson defeated Ken Livingstone for mayor but only by 4 percentage points, 51 to 48. Welcome again to the 1930s redux... | |||||||||
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| ...Think of the forerunners of today’s Ancient Palestinians, the Philistines who thought that by capturing the Ark of the Covenant that they had gotten their hands on some material which would give them power. What they did not understand is that Jewishness is not to be found in material objects but inside oneself. The Ark of the Covenant contained just some words etched in stone whose power was not in the stone but in the spirit and intellect behind the words. The Ark was not some object that anyone could get his hands on like a magic wand and manipulate its power. By the same token, here was Benzion Netanyahu apparently cut off from the Sabbath that he had keep all his life as a duty to his father without ever understanding what it was all about. Ergo, his oddball thesis which other scholars shake their heads at. His thesis was that religion was not a factor in the relationship between the Roman Catholic Spaniards and the Jews. He rightly pointed to the material dimension of the inquisition and the motivations of the Church to burn Jews at the stake because the punishment for being a false Christian, being exposed as a Jew in secret, included the sheer, human, ugly greed of the Church; for in addition to being burnt at the stake, all the victim’s property was confiscated by the Church. The Inquisition brought Spaniards great wealth, as the Holocaust in Germany, besides being another mass burning of Jews, was also the theft of the money, the homes, the cars, the businesses, you name it, of the Six Million... | |||||||||
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| ...Lastly, it seems that the powers that be here, that is, Bibi here has decided to hold elections in early September, 13 months early, though you’ll have find some other opinionator to explain why. Maybe he wants to have an even stronger mandate from the people to attack Iran before the American elections in order to force the Muslim in the Oval Office to help out, provide back-up, political support at the UN, whatever is necessary. Today the Israeli Navy, officers and Ministry of Defense officials were in Germany to formally take possession of Israel’s latest German-built submarine with a nuclear cruise missile capability, though it will be months of sea trials before it becomes operational. Maybe this another part of the same story too. Well, only the powers that be, Bibi and Ehud, know for sure. Anyway, thank G-d for this quiet week. May they all be so quiet... | |||||||||
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| ...For some reason, Israeli journalists love party politics and the wrestling for power and prominence within these parties. I don’t. To be it is boring. Because it has next to no connection to the citizens; because this is a self-proclaimed democracy in which its parliamentary representatives have no constituents and therefore represent no one. What they do represent is their party whose power - Soviet-style - lies in its Central Committee and its leaders. Israeli parliamentarians don’t know what it is to receive a phone call from an irate constituent because the parliamentarian has no constituents that he has to answer to. One irony of the situation is that the worst fate for an Israeli is being a sucker, a frier, which all of them are without knowing it. They are all suckers of their politicians and at the same time they preen themselves on being the only democracy in the Middle East. Yes, such as it is, but that does not change the fact that it is also the worst democracy of the democracies... | |||||||||
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| ...Well, a week ago, you remember, the cabinet after decades signed off on the communities in Judea and Samaria: Bruchin, Sansana and Rechelim, with reactions among the goyim about what you’d expect. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon of the organization that spends a third of its time bashing Israel and pays his nice salary and provides him with a posh apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East side, said that he was “deeply troubled” by the decision. Germany’s Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said he was “very worried about the plan to legalize Israeli settlements in the West Bank.” That was last Tuesday. And then on Thursday the Right Honorable Baroness Catherine of Ashton, foreign policy mastermind for the entire continent of Europe said she was “extremely concerned.” “Deeply troubled,” “very worried’ and “extremely concerned." Ah yes, all of them. And she did not fail to add as she always does, “Settlements are illegal under international law.” This is just pathetic. Ban Ki-moon of course is a hired hand, hired by the largest non-governmental anti-Jew institution on the planet; Westerwelle and Ashton as Europeans have a rich history of antiJew behavior but also in fairness to them, they have every reason to believe that if they were to be less pro-Hamitic and more pro-Semitic the Hamites among them would erupt into waves of terrible urban terrorism. The Europeans have become, these seeds of the Crusaders, after all, an occupied people. No, they were not invaded by uniformed armies of enemy Saracens but civilians willing to do work Europeans were not. And now these Saracens, these Muslims, have a major foothold in Europe, millions of them, and no government wants to stir them up, which they would by taking our side... | |||||||||
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| ...It's the evening of the 4th day, gimmel beIyar, Parashas Acharei Mos-Kedoshim, tav-shin-ayin-bes, the evening of the 3rd day, Tuesday, 24 April, 2012, webcasting from Israel on what is officially now known as Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and the Fallen in Enemy Actions. Interesting how they did not call the latter “terrorism.” The victims of terror. Initially the day’s name was just Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers, but in light of the two intifadas, the name was changed to its current much lengthier one to include really, I think, the victims of antisemitism. But Israelis don’t see things that way. When a Muslim murders a Jew here, the crime’s motivation is labeled “nationalistic.” Though what the other nation's name is, is debatable. Is the nation the Arab nation? More likely, Israelis conceive of the enemy as the “Palestinian nation” which nationality has been a fantasy creation of Jews as much as the world’s antiJews... | |||||||||
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| ...Well, as of this webcast, it remains to be seen, the fate of the Ulpana neighborhood at Beit El. As with Migron, a truly unelected by the people or their representatives High Court is the true decisor of the future of the State of Israel. And it has not helped that Mr. Netanyahu, notorious like his father apparently, for fence sitting attempts always to please both sides. Bibi just a few weeks publically, you may remember, smilingly, told outgoing Chief Justice Dorit Benisch how much he supports the Court and its independence from politics. He didn’t want to talk about changing it. Bibi is too smart for such rubbish. He knows that in the liberal democracies supreme courts are not so independent as to be closed, self-selecting clubs of like-minded people. On the contrary, common sense dictates that a panel of judges should be balanced between left and right, different tendencies and inclinations, because that is the nature of man. HaShem Himself reveals Himself as the G-d of Justice and Power as Elokim, and the God of Mercy - HaShem. And we, His highest creation, have hearts and brains. The human body locates the heart slightly left of center, where it should be, but above it in the middle is the brain. Versus Israel’s almost monolithic panel of mostly Enlightened, progressive, liberal, anti-religionist Illuminati who have transcended the folly of religion and they too believe in the “Palestinians” as the victims of Zionism who must be catered to in order reach peace with them... | |||||||||
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| ...Webcasting from the Israeli State of Israel on its version of Holocaust Remembrance Day. There are three such days. The non-Zionist misnamed ultra-Orthodox - which is as much a misnomer as ultra-pregnant - did not stand still today at 10 a.m. when the sirens wailed because they see the behavior as non-Jewish. They also believe that the Six Million martyrs should be grouped with all Jewish martyrs remembered on the 9th of Av, the granddaddy of a day slated for all the Jews who suffered in history, and some of those people on that day will set aside a psalm just for the Six Million. Then there is the day in January when Nations United Against the Jews Organization chose to remember our Holocaust, International Holocaust Day, and of course all the holocausts, all the genocides, the oppression of people who suffered from their race, religion, sexual orientation and any other collective one can think of in order to dilute the specific associative connection between the term Holocaust and the Jewish people, the only people at the UN discriminated against by barring them de facto from sitting the Security Council. If I were Israel’s ambassador to the UN, I would work for a resolution declaring an International Day of Protest Against Anti-Semitism at the UN. Not that it would pass... | |||||||||
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| ...Lastly, a nice quotation from a sheriff in Luna County, New Mexico, one Raymond Cobos, whose department was alerted to the vandalism of a billboard located in an empty field alongside a road in the town of Deming. I think that is the country seat. The sign declared, “Stand with Israel” and urged passersby to sign a pro-Israel pledge sponsored by Christians United For Israel, one of the nation’s largest pro-Israel groups. CUFI has also posted four other billboards in New Mexico and others in California and Oregon, G-d bless them. County Sheriff Raymond Cobos called the incident an “odd anomaly” and said he had “never heard anybody express anything anti-Israel or anti-Jewish” in his time on the force. “It’s odd, very odd,” he told the Free Beacon, which is a new online conservative newspaper, attributing the vandalism to “borderline morons who have no connection with the real world.” Bravo, Sheriff Cobos. I like that. “Borderline morons,” those who would tear down an advertisement soliciting support for this tiny little country that has contributed so much to humankind. CUFI, Christians United For Israel, has on is executive board Gary Bauer and Pastor John Hagee, and the organizations pledge on its website reads thusly: “We believe that the Jewish people have a right to live in their ancient land of Israel, and that the modern State of Israel is the fulfillment of this historic right. We maintain that there is no excuse for acts of terrorism against Israel and that Israel has the same right as every other nation to defend her citizens from such violent attacks. We pledge to stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel and to speak out on their behalf whenever and wherever necessary until the attacks stop and they are finally living in peace and security with their neighbors.” Amen. And only “borderline morons who have no connection to the real world” would disagree with that... | |||||||||
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| ...Bibi’s letter was a good one, telling them first to go our neighbors and check out the human rights situation in Syria and Iran and in other countries, then report back to Israel on what they learned. But surely there were other options the government could have taken. If I were Bibi, I would have prepared a little sound and light show for them, with aromas to match the spectacle. One might have ushered the ones detained, a few dozen I think, into an auditorium with a big screen and flash photographs on it for hours, the handiwork of Israeli police photographers who appear at terror scenes and take photographs. During the first intifada that suggestion was made to the government but it was rejected. The suggestion was to release to the media the hundreds of crime scene photographs taken when buses explode, or fast food restaurants go up in flame and smoke and noise; or crowded bus stops. You know, the walls dripping with blood and gore, the severed limbs, the severed heads; bodies blown apart. But it was decided back that viewers would not have the perpetrators in mind and be angry with them but the Israelis who showed them these nauseating scenes of horror. Perhaps. Then again, it might be suitable in this situation: showing these people one gruesome picture after another until these idiots, a captive audience, being to vomit. They would surely want leave the auditorium, but we would not let them. Make them throw up in their seats and have the air stink with their puke as a substitute for the smell of burning flesh in all these buses that blew up. The Flytilla, as of this evening, seems be yet another flop for these ultimately juvenile people whose purpose is not to improve the lives of the Arabs but to smear Israel with dirt and guilt for being the last of the racist, imperialist, rapacious Western colonies notorious for stealing whole countries from their ancient owners. I wish Bibi had also found a way to allude to the age-old Jew-hatred lurking beneath the lie of Zionism of these people that Zionism is a racist, imperialist enterprise. Beneath it all, their hatred is ageless... | |||||||||
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| ...Last Friday the weekly Forward newspaper in New York featured a new poll done by an outfit called the Public Religion Research Institute investigating the projected upcoming Jewish vote. This vote said Obama’s Israel policies are not American Jews’ first priority. The economy and social justice are. One Democratic pollster even predicted Obama will add to the 78% of Jews voters who voted for him in 2008. Versus the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition Matthew Brooks who predicted a significant drop down to 62%. I’ll stick with the higher figure remaining up there at almost 80%, which makes perfect sense; perfect Jewish sense. 80% is what the Sages told us the percentage of Jewish slaves in Egypt who chose not to flee the country and therefore perished doing the plague of darkness. The verse in Shmos/Exodus speaks of the Children of Israel going out of Egypt khamushim/armed, but since that word’s root is the same as the number five, they interpreted it to signal that only a fifth of the community fled the country, the surviving fifth around midnight between the 14th and 15th of the month of Nissan. Demographers claim that without all the persecutions and assimilation the Jews have experienced and undergone over thousands years, the Jewish people should be the most numerous on the planet, even more than the Chinese who constitute a fifth of mankind, I believe. Instead, we probably have lost in every generation 80% of our people which accounts for us being as small as we are today. It is Biblically understandable that 80% of American Jewry supported Obama and will support him again, for they are lost to the Jewish people... | |||||||||
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| ...Well, you all know the denouement in Hevron since the last webcast. Yesterday afternoon when most of the Jews living in that disputed house were out and about doing their business, the special police squad bully boys swooped into this house in view of the family plot of the Jewish nation, the Machpelah, and drove the Jews inside - mostly women and little children - out, and then put all the furniture they had put in out, and then, I believe, welded the doors shut. Prime Minister Netanyahu went along with the desire of Ehud Barak and his Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein. We pondered the iconic biography of the former last time who has a record of refusing to fight over religion, but all I know of Weinstein is that in private life he was a hot shot criminal defense lawyer in Tel-Aviv, which suggests he may have a problem with knowing right from wrong. Lawyers like him have that problem. Like Alan Dershowitz they will work for anyone who pays them. For lawyers like this, there is no right and wrong, only different versions of reality and the law is about which lawyer tells the most persuasive story. In a word, Yehuda Weinstein is not a man to seek out on the rightness of Jews living in Hevron or not; living in that house. This latest episode is a wonderful counterpart to the saga of Migron. There the State of Herzlandia has declared that the land under those 50 cottages is the property in perpetuity of individual “Balestinians” and never mind there is not one individual Balestinian who can produce title to those acres. The High Court seemed to be saying “This land is their land forever and ever.” And now in Hebron Israelis like Ehud Barak and Yehuda Weinstein have likewise declared all buildings in Hevron at the moment not occupied by Jews, can never be occupied by Jews. And never mind that in this case there really is paperwork proving the building, actually part of a building, was sold to Jews. What these post-Jewish Israelis are saying about Hebron is that the Jews are not allowed to increase their holdings of immovable property. Their community cannot grow. The Jewish community in Hevron is to be frozen in terms of its physical size forever and ever... | |||||||||
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| ...Lastly, did you see or read about Obama yesterday attacking the Supreme Court for any ruling overturning his healthcare bill which he said was passed with a strong majority. It would be, he said, an example of unprecedented judicial activism. I saw that and was momentarily left speechless. This guy taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago after being editor of the Harvard Law Review? I wanted to weep over the damage affirmation action and political correctness has one to American society. This would never ever gotten anywhere in life were he white because he is just over his head with statements like this. Judicial review, as it is called, was established with Marbury vs. Madison in 1803. No serious survey course of American History does not cover this famous case when the Supreme Court reinforced itself as the conservator of the meaning of the Constitution in the face of future generations of legislators who might write legislation that in the opinion of the court violates the Constitution. This guy Obama...I watched this video clip yesterday and felt like, I don’t know, an outraged wife who has discovered her husband has betrayed her and who screams at him, “Get out! Just get out! Leave!” This guy is either an idiot or like the Arabs, he will say anything to get his way with no fidelity to truth and reality. Come November one must remember on Election Day in the States to pray to Hashem that this charlatan, this nasty piece of work is not just defeated but decisively run out of Washington... | |||||||||
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| ...Lastly, maybe you saw the 35 “Middle East experts” in England moonlighting as actors and actresses and directors with their statement in the Guardian, among them the pathetic English Jew film director Mike Leigh and Emma Thompson demanding that Israel’s national theater be denied the right to perform in London because of Habima’s collaboration in the “colonization” of Ancient Philistia by agreeing to perform in a theater built in Occupied Balestine. These theater and film people are just pathetic in their ignorance. The statement they signed in the Guardian objects to the “illegal colonization” of Occupied Palestinian territory. How bizarre that these people whose stock-in-trade is language should so abuse it. The colonization of Judea and Samaria, they say. Colonies traditionally have been far-flung settlements sent by a Mother Country to remove the natural resources of a distant lands to the benefit of the home country, so just what home country are these “colonies” a/k/a settlements shipping their pilfered natural resources to? What we are talking about in large part are bedroom communities, most in sight of Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem or Haifa, whose bread-winners do not engage in stripping the land of its natural resources for sale in the home country. These are just gated communities built on empty land. They are not colonies. There is no colonization. So stop the antisemitism on display in this Orwellian perversion of language that these artistes are guilty of. These disgusting people... | |||||||||
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| ...On a final note of good news just before the Holy Sabbath: Stanley Fischer, head of the Bank of Israel, presented a 321-page report card on the economy yesterday to the government and he says the economy is in a good shape. Expected growth this year is 3.1%; there is nothing like that, I think, elsewhere in the West. Indeed, in 2011, it was a whopping 4.7%; and unemployment dropped to 5.6%, the lowest level in 30 years. Go figure. The rest of the West is crashing, and we are not. “A people that dwells alone.” | |||||||||
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| ...Finally, two wholly non-political items. One was a fascinating short piece in JPost the other day about brain research underway at Haifa University which has revealed that when reading either Hebrew right to left or English left to right, the brain works in a similar way. But when reading Arabic, it works in a different way, which is strange because Arabic is a cognate of Hebrew likewise written right to left. This is a mystery and I have no explanation, though I have no doubt – read Raphael Patai or David Pryce Jones or John Laffin – that the Arabs think differently than civilized Jews and English speakers. So I look forward to more on this story. And secondly in the New York Times the other day, a piece was entitled “Why Bilinguals are Smarter” which discussed how that capability develops the brain and the mind, and it occurred to me that this may be a factor in the high IQ scores Jews are known to rack up because so many have been bilingual, because in every generation there have been waves of Jewish refugees running from one country to another which produce children raised in the country of refugee who are bilingual: speaking to mommy and daddy in the language they brought with them, speaking with others the language of the new land of refuge. But I’m really anxious to see what that brain research into Arabic leads to. How odd that brain activity appears the same when reading English and Hebrew but not when reading Arabic. No doubt about it. Arabs do think differently... | |||||||||
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