Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Another Sanctuary City
Below is a column by a well informed man concerning Immigration.
"Sanctuary Cities" are basically cities that are controlled by Liberals.
What do Liberals give you? An entitlement mindset that the workers of the United States owe you a living and all the trappings that go with it. If they refuse, take 'em to court and get a Marxist judge who law school was steeped in Socialistic dogma to give it to you.
"Sanctuary City" means that some authority figure in that city [Mayor, councilman, Chief of Police] has issued guarantees to the Illegal Alien population that they will not be apprehended, arrested, or deported.
Those people drawing "Government Benefits" , i.e, Welfare and food stamps, do not have a bountiful lifestyle. They are content to exist on the meager hand-outs that come from a government agency. To me they are like cows or chickens. Both are penned up, fed only what they need and in return expected to give milk and eggs. Those that live off "Government Benefits" are expected to give up a vote every two to four years.
Since we are talking about Illegal Aliens here, some would retort, "But they can't vote". Right now--not in Arizona. But in California, voters appearing at polls do not have their voter validity challenged.
Right now, Attorney General Holder has filed ANOTHER lawsuit against Arizona, saying thaty we can't ask for ID at the polls.
The first election that I was aware of that the Democrat candidate was voted in by Illegal Aliens was Loretta Sanchez, who defeated Bob Dornan for the Legislative district around Santa Ana, California. An investigation later showed that the Illegals had been organized and instructed by a Hispanic arm of ACORN, who had returned to Mexico before investigators learned of their crime.
Maenwhile, Santa Ana City Council had sent a resolution to the Border Patrol demanding that BP not enter Santa Ana as their presence terrified their "Constituents".
On the other side of politics is the Republican Party, Chamber of Commerce, and Club for Growth. They don't want the Illegals disturbed as they are "Cheap Labor", and their profit margin increases.
Both sides ignore the "Culture" of most of the Illegals.
In Mexico:
There is no law against drunk driving. The more alcohol you can drink, the greater "Macho" you are.
The more brutal you are, the more "Macho" you are.
You don't take any back talk from a woman. If she tries, you slap her around until she falls in line.
Their cops are usually appointed because they are the worst thug in town. The salary is very low, because the appointing authority expects that cop to "Shake down" almost everyone he contacts. (You can see that respect for law is not taught nor expected)
==============================================================================
Nothing new here. Just another good American life thrown away to bolster world government.
by Don Hank
http://laiglesforum.com/police-officer-sacrificed-on-the-altar-of-integration/2524.htm
Kevin Will, a Houston area traffic cop, was run down and killed yesterday in the Houston area for the sake of the North American Union.
That’s right. In plain words, his life was sacrificed so that the US, Mexico and Canada can all be integrated into a single nation for the purposes of “security” and “prosperity,” or in other words to create a supranational unit based on the EU model, which is now proving to be a disaster in Europe and has led to an unaccountable supreme government – a de facto dictatorship, that has supplanted democracy throughout Europe. The US government wants this disaster for you and is cheerfully sacrificing your safety and your lives to achieve it.
In official statements, the US government pays lip service to protecting our borders and keeping us safe from the bad guys. Janet Napolitano says our borders are “safer than ever.” But even long before the savage killing of rancher Robert Krentz in March of 2010, most people living along the border have felt unsafe, and the fear is only getting worse. Prior to that, for example, in July of 2009, border patrol agent Robert Rosas was shot and killed by illegal aliens in San Diego County, CA. Following Krentz’s murder, Pinal Country Sheriff Paul Babeu said in an interview that several of his agents had been killed by illegal aliens. In August of 2010, the hit-and-run killing of a nun by an illegal alien drew attention to the fact that federal authorities were failing to properly detain alien criminals. Years earlier, in June of 2007, in an article showing how the federal government promotes alien criminals while discouraging honest visa applicants, I became the first to report that our government had built a visa processing center on the grounds of a federal prison used to house alien criminals, thereby inviting criminal types to stay in the US.
In October of 2010, US citizen David Hartley was shot to death by Mexican pirates while fishing in a border lake. Border patrol agent Brian Terry was then killed in December of 2010.
Back in 2006, US Rep. Steve King had reported that, based on government statistics, 25 Americans die daily at the hands of illegal aliens, and that number can only have increased. And yet, the vast majority of politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to lament that returning illegal aliens to their home countries would cause an undue hardship to them. But what about us?
However, American civilians and law enforcement officers aren’t the only ones sacrificed for the sake of putting the entire world under one government run by a small group of extraordinarily rich white men. I have shown how our US military is now sacrificing the lives of young men to support the UN, the EU and NATO in waging undeclared and illegal wars in the name of “democracy” in the Middle East, supporting groups of Islamic radical thugs, including known terrorists, whose ultimate aim is to destroy Israel and eliminate Christianity in their countries, all in the name of “democracy.”
From a Texas based contact, here is an amazing report on the illegal alien who killed Kevin Will in Houston:
The 5 pm news is now on here in my part of TX.
The Fox affiliate described finding federal documents verifying that this most recent illegal alien perpetrator was previously arrested and deported, in one incident, claiming to be a Texas citizen by producing a TDL, and convicted, sentenced to time served, and released with a $10 fine, only to return.
It also described his rantings on his facebook page, and in particular, a description of how to dispose of a firearm used in a crime.
Nice guy.
FWIW:
This is almost a mirror of the incident with HPD Officer Rodney Johnson, there, shot and killed by an illegal alien during a traffic stop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Joseph_Johnson
[end quote]
In addition, one of my readers just wrote and wondered why our politicians almost all seem to welcome the invasion from Mexico. He said he couldn’t figure out how in the world any of our politicians want the illegals here and speculated it was because they have no conscience and are only concerned about re-election.
Here is my response to this reader:
I think it is much worse than that. It is beyond political. Our politicians follow the mandates of the New World Order, which wants to eliminate the borders of the US and create a North American Union.
When Bush tried to meet with the Canadian and Mexican leaders near the end of his last term, he was caught in the act and forced to back down. That project was the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), as you may recall.
That name was never used again because of the failure to keep it secret.
So they are going with plan B, namely, behaving as if there are no borders by allowing an almost unlimited number of aliens to cross without papers and making a huge stink about how families are being torn apart by sending some back. Any politician who fails to go along with this NWO agenda is threatened by the establishment. The GOP is 100% pro-invasion at the highest levels.
In reality, almost none are sent back, and when the most hardened felons among them are, as in the case of cop killer Johoan Rodriguez, they just cross the border illegally and wind up back here anyway.
Every American needs to know this.
Every candidate needs to be drilled on his/her stand on illegal immigration, although in most cases, we know they are for the invasion based on their past actions and on their immigration grades issued by NumbersUSA. Around 90% are for it and apparently are unwilling to send back any Mexicans who have entered the country illegally.
That goes for ex-cons, as I had shown here:
http://laiglesforum.com/wanted-a-few-bad-men/98.htm
Of course, you may ask: who the heck is Don Hank and why should we listen to him?
Good question, and many people don’t listen to me. But there are a few excellent reasons why you should:
For years I have been watching the way the New World Order operates on both sides of the Atlantic. I was one of the first Americans to warn of the de facto EU dictatorship and how it seized power by stealth. Every day I receive emails from activists in Germany and the UK, telling me about how the EU is destroying their nations.
I correlate what happens there to what is happening here and see the same identical behavior, eg, destruction of the banking system through disastrous lending policies obviously aimed at destroying the entire system; the importation of millions upon millions of Muslims who refuse to integrate and who have increased the crime rates in their adopted homelands exponentially over time; blatantly anti-Christian policies.
The excuse for importing Muslims and giving them special treatment is the same as our excuse for supporting illegal Mexican “immigration”: humanitarian reasons. In the US, exponents of unlimited immigration evoke images of innocents suffering at the hands of the cartel. In Europe, the image is one of masses escaping tyranny. The media in both regions ignore the untold suffering of the benefactors of these often hostile immigrants, including major crime increases and school children being literally driven from their schools by hordes of hostile Muslim kids mercilessly persecuting them.
Excuse me, Folks, but you need to know that this commentary is still under construction. New details are coming in. Here, for example, are 2 emails from radio host Dave Levine:
email #1:
I fully agree! Excellent points by you. While the SPP was dropped, the NAU has gone full speed ahead with Soetoro-Obama’s meetings with Canada’s PM and Presidente Calderon. The TTC–the NAFTA Superhighway under Bush and the prime plan under Governor Perry–has been renamed The I-35 Corridor and The I-69 Corridor plans. These are also with the Spanish conglomerate CINTRA (also renamed, I’m told) and I’m sure with RINO Rudy Giuliani’s law firm backing them. Instead of just one I-35 TTC, the plan now is for TWO superhighways carving up Texas and bringing not only a port to Mexico in Kansas City but also truckloads of illegals and drugs via these two planned, private superhighways.
We’re not hearing enough cries against these roads. The anti-TTC folks haven’t been vocal enough lately. Time to re-contact them!
email #2:
Here’s Jerome Corsi’s report on the TTC’s rebirth as the I-35 and I-69 Corridor Plans:
http://jeromecorsi.com/article.php?id=72
….
Please send this out to all who may have missed it.
Here are some anti-TTC sites, this one not updated since March:
http://transtexascorridor.blogspot.com
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?9329-Trans-national-Corridor-I-69-Cutting-Through-the-U.S.
Thanks to everyone who helped with this article. Please help keep it going.
The narrative will not be over until we either are slaves to the NAU or have succeeded in turning public opinion against it.
We – a tiny few of us — have only just begun to fight.
"Sanctuary Cities" are basically cities that are controlled by Liberals.
What do Liberals give you? An entitlement mindset that the workers of the United States owe you a living and all the trappings that go with it. If they refuse, take 'em to court and get a Marxist judge who law school was steeped in Socialistic dogma to give it to you.
"Sanctuary City" means that some authority figure in that city [Mayor, councilman, Chief of Police] has issued guarantees to the Illegal Alien population that they will not be apprehended, arrested, or deported.
Those people drawing "Government Benefits" , i.e, Welfare and food stamps, do not have a bountiful lifestyle. They are content to exist on the meager hand-outs that come from a government agency. To me they are like cows or chickens. Both are penned up, fed only what they need and in return expected to give milk and eggs. Those that live off "Government Benefits" are expected to give up a vote every two to four years.
Since we are talking about Illegal Aliens here, some would retort, "But they can't vote". Right now--not in Arizona. But in California, voters appearing at polls do not have their voter validity challenged.
Right now, Attorney General Holder has filed ANOTHER lawsuit against Arizona, saying thaty we can't ask for ID at the polls.
The first election that I was aware of that the Democrat candidate was voted in by Illegal Aliens was Loretta Sanchez, who defeated Bob Dornan for the Legislative district around Santa Ana, California. An investigation later showed that the Illegals had been organized and instructed by a Hispanic arm of ACORN, who had returned to Mexico before investigators learned of their crime.
Maenwhile, Santa Ana City Council had sent a resolution to the Border Patrol demanding that BP not enter Santa Ana as their presence terrified their "Constituents".
On the other side of politics is the Republican Party, Chamber of Commerce, and Club for Growth. They don't want the Illegals disturbed as they are "Cheap Labor", and their profit margin increases.
Both sides ignore the "Culture" of most of the Illegals.
In Mexico:
There is no law against drunk driving. The more alcohol you can drink, the greater "Macho" you are.
The more brutal you are, the more "Macho" you are.
You don't take any back talk from a woman. If she tries, you slap her around until she falls in line.
Their cops are usually appointed because they are the worst thug in town. The salary is very low, because the appointing authority expects that cop to "Shake down" almost everyone he contacts. (You can see that respect for law is not taught nor expected)
==============================================================================
Nothing new here. Just another good American life thrown away to bolster world government.
by Don Hank
http://laiglesforum.com/police-officer-sacrificed-on-the-altar-of-integration/2524.htm
Kevin Will, a Houston area traffic cop, was run down and killed yesterday in the Houston area for the sake of the North American Union.
That’s right. In plain words, his life was sacrificed so that the US, Mexico and Canada can all be integrated into a single nation for the purposes of “security” and “prosperity,” or in other words to create a supranational unit based on the EU model, which is now proving to be a disaster in Europe and has led to an unaccountable supreme government – a de facto dictatorship, that has supplanted democracy throughout Europe. The US government wants this disaster for you and is cheerfully sacrificing your safety and your lives to achieve it.
In official statements, the US government pays lip service to protecting our borders and keeping us safe from the bad guys. Janet Napolitano says our borders are “safer than ever.” But even long before the savage killing of rancher Robert Krentz in March of 2010, most people living along the border have felt unsafe, and the fear is only getting worse. Prior to that, for example, in July of 2009, border patrol agent Robert Rosas was shot and killed by illegal aliens in San Diego County, CA. Following Krentz’s murder, Pinal Country Sheriff Paul Babeu said in an interview that several of his agents had been killed by illegal aliens. In August of 2010, the hit-and-run killing of a nun by an illegal alien drew attention to the fact that federal authorities were failing to properly detain alien criminals. Years earlier, in June of 2007, in an article showing how the federal government promotes alien criminals while discouraging honest visa applicants, I became the first to report that our government had built a visa processing center on the grounds of a federal prison used to house alien criminals, thereby inviting criminal types to stay in the US.
In October of 2010, US citizen David Hartley was shot to death by Mexican pirates while fishing in a border lake. Border patrol agent Brian Terry was then killed in December of 2010.
Back in 2006, US Rep. Steve King had reported that, based on government statistics, 25 Americans die daily at the hands of illegal aliens, and that number can only have increased. And yet, the vast majority of politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to lament that returning illegal aliens to their home countries would cause an undue hardship to them. But what about us?
However, American civilians and law enforcement officers aren’t the only ones sacrificed for the sake of putting the entire world under one government run by a small group of extraordinarily rich white men. I have shown how our US military is now sacrificing the lives of young men to support the UN, the EU and NATO in waging undeclared and illegal wars in the name of “democracy” in the Middle East, supporting groups of Islamic radical thugs, including known terrorists, whose ultimate aim is to destroy Israel and eliminate Christianity in their countries, all in the name of “democracy.”
From a Texas based contact, here is an amazing report on the illegal alien who killed Kevin Will in Houston:
The 5 pm news is now on here in my part of TX.
The Fox affiliate described finding federal documents verifying that this most recent illegal alien perpetrator was previously arrested and deported, in one incident, claiming to be a Texas citizen by producing a TDL, and convicted, sentenced to time served, and released with a $10 fine, only to return.
It also described his rantings on his facebook page, and in particular, a description of how to dispose of a firearm used in a crime.
Nice guy.
FWIW:
This is almost a mirror of the incident with HPD Officer Rodney Johnson, there, shot and killed by an illegal alien during a traffic stop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Joseph_Johnson
[end quote]
In addition, one of my readers just wrote and wondered why our politicians almost all seem to welcome the invasion from Mexico. He said he couldn’t figure out how in the world any of our politicians want the illegals here and speculated it was because they have no conscience and are only concerned about re-election.
Here is my response to this reader:
I think it is much worse than that. It is beyond political. Our politicians follow the mandates of the New World Order, which wants to eliminate the borders of the US and create a North American Union.
When Bush tried to meet with the Canadian and Mexican leaders near the end of his last term, he was caught in the act and forced to back down. That project was the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), as you may recall.
That name was never used again because of the failure to keep it secret.
So they are going with plan B, namely, behaving as if there are no borders by allowing an almost unlimited number of aliens to cross without papers and making a huge stink about how families are being torn apart by sending some back. Any politician who fails to go along with this NWO agenda is threatened by the establishment. The GOP is 100% pro-invasion at the highest levels.
In reality, almost none are sent back, and when the most hardened felons among them are, as in the case of cop killer Johoan Rodriguez, they just cross the border illegally and wind up back here anyway.
Every American needs to know this.
Every candidate needs to be drilled on his/her stand on illegal immigration, although in most cases, we know they are for the invasion based on their past actions and on their immigration grades issued by NumbersUSA. Around 90% are for it and apparently are unwilling to send back any Mexicans who have entered the country illegally.
That goes for ex-cons, as I had shown here:
http://laiglesforum.com/wanted-a-few-bad-men/98.htm
Of course, you may ask: who the heck is Don Hank and why should we listen to him?
Good question, and many people don’t listen to me. But there are a few excellent reasons why you should:
For years I have been watching the way the New World Order operates on both sides of the Atlantic. I was one of the first Americans to warn of the de facto EU dictatorship and how it seized power by stealth. Every day I receive emails from activists in Germany and the UK, telling me about how the EU is destroying their nations.
I correlate what happens there to what is happening here and see the same identical behavior, eg, destruction of the banking system through disastrous lending policies obviously aimed at destroying the entire system; the importation of millions upon millions of Muslims who refuse to integrate and who have increased the crime rates in their adopted homelands exponentially over time; blatantly anti-Christian policies.
The excuse for importing Muslims and giving them special treatment is the same as our excuse for supporting illegal Mexican “immigration”: humanitarian reasons. In the US, exponents of unlimited immigration evoke images of innocents suffering at the hands of the cartel. In Europe, the image is one of masses escaping tyranny. The media in both regions ignore the untold suffering of the benefactors of these often hostile immigrants, including major crime increases and school children being literally driven from their schools by hordes of hostile Muslim kids mercilessly persecuting them.
Excuse me, Folks, but you need to know that this commentary is still under construction. New details are coming in. Here, for example, are 2 emails from radio host Dave Levine:
email #1:
I fully agree! Excellent points by you. While the SPP was dropped, the NAU has gone full speed ahead with Soetoro-Obama’s meetings with Canada’s PM and Presidente Calderon. The TTC–the NAFTA Superhighway under Bush and the prime plan under Governor Perry–has been renamed The I-35 Corridor and The I-69 Corridor plans. These are also with the Spanish conglomerate CINTRA (also renamed, I’m told) and I’m sure with RINO Rudy Giuliani’s law firm backing them. Instead of just one I-35 TTC, the plan now is for TWO superhighways carving up Texas and bringing not only a port to Mexico in Kansas City but also truckloads of illegals and drugs via these two planned, private superhighways.
We’re not hearing enough cries against these roads. The anti-TTC folks haven’t been vocal enough lately. Time to re-contact them!
email #2:
Here’s Jerome Corsi’s report on the TTC’s rebirth as the I-35 and I-69 Corridor Plans:
http://jeromecorsi.com/article.php?id=72
….
Please send this out to all who may have missed it.
Here are some anti-TTC sites, this one not updated since March:
http://transtexascorridor.blogspot.com
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?9329-Trans-national-Corridor-I-69-Cutting-Through-the-U.S.
Thanks to everyone who helped with this article. Please help keep it going.
The narrative will not be over until we either are slaves to the NAU or have succeeded in turning public opinion against it.
We – a tiny few of us — have only just begun to fight.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Confirming what we know-No respect for Obama from Military
Active military and veterans hold less favorable view of Obama’s performance as president
Published: 8:25 AM 05/30/2011
http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/30/active-military-and-veterans-hold-less-favorable-view-of-obamas-performance-as-president/#ixzz1Nrz2v0zO
By Alexis Levinson
Approval for Barack Obama’s job performance as president is lower among veterans and active US military than it is among non-military, according to a poll released Monday by Gallup.
The results, which came from data from Gallup’s daily tracking poll of Obama’s job approval, are based on interviews with over 238,000 respondents between January 2010 and April 2011.
On average, 48 percent of non-military personnel surveyed over that time period approved of the job Obama was doing, while just 37 percent of active military or veterans approved.
That trend persists among all age groups, the analysis found. The spread is most pronounced among 18 to 29 year olds, a group that tends to have a highly favorable view of this president’s performance. 58 percent of non-military in that age group approves of the job Obama is doing, but just 44 percent of veterans or active military felt that way.
The lowest spread is among those aged 80 to 99, where 43 percent of the general public approves of the job Obama is doing, compared to 37 percent of veterans or active military personnel – presumably mostly veterans in that age group.
Gallup notes that those currently serving active duty in the military have a noticeably higher likelihood of declining to state an opinion on Obama’s job performance. For instance, 21 percent of active duty military aged 18 to 29 did not express an opinion, compared to just 10 percent of non-military. A possible factor in this, Gallup Editor in Chief Frank Newport writes, is the military culture of nonpartisanship, especially when dealing with the Commander in Chief. Alternatively, “[t]hose on active duty may in general be less involved in current affairs and thus less likely to hold an opinion on Obama.”
Women are more likely to approve of Obama’s performance. However, in any given age group surveyed by Gallup, no more than 3 percent of military personnel or veterans were women. Older age groups are more likely to be active or former military – a fact that seems likely due to the existence of the draft before 1973.
Current or former members of the military are more likely to be Republicans, the poll notes.
The results come from analysis of polls conducted before President Obama ordered the successful killing of Osama Bin Laden. The president received a bump in his approval ratings from the general public after that, and it seems likely that the same would be true – potentially more so – among veterans or active military
Published: 8:25 AM 05/30/2011
http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/30/active-military-and-veterans-hold-less-favorable-view-of-obamas-performance-as-president/#ixzz1Nrz2v0zO
By Alexis Levinson
Approval for Barack Obama’s job performance as president is lower among veterans and active US military than it is among non-military, according to a poll released Monday by Gallup.
The results, which came from data from Gallup’s daily tracking poll of Obama’s job approval, are based on interviews with over 238,000 respondents between January 2010 and April 2011.
On average, 48 percent of non-military personnel surveyed over that time period approved of the job Obama was doing, while just 37 percent of active military or veterans approved.
That trend persists among all age groups, the analysis found. The spread is most pronounced among 18 to 29 year olds, a group that tends to have a highly favorable view of this president’s performance. 58 percent of non-military in that age group approves of the job Obama is doing, but just 44 percent of veterans or active military felt that way.
The lowest spread is among those aged 80 to 99, where 43 percent of the general public approves of the job Obama is doing, compared to 37 percent of veterans or active military personnel – presumably mostly veterans in that age group.
Gallup notes that those currently serving active duty in the military have a noticeably higher likelihood of declining to state an opinion on Obama’s job performance. For instance, 21 percent of active duty military aged 18 to 29 did not express an opinion, compared to just 10 percent of non-military. A possible factor in this, Gallup Editor in Chief Frank Newport writes, is the military culture of nonpartisanship, especially when dealing with the Commander in Chief. Alternatively, “[t]hose on active duty may in general be less involved in current affairs and thus less likely to hold an opinion on Obama.”
Women are more likely to approve of Obama’s performance. However, in any given age group surveyed by Gallup, no more than 3 percent of military personnel or veterans were women. Older age groups are more likely to be active or former military – a fact that seems likely due to the existence of the draft before 1973.
Current or former members of the military are more likely to be Republicans, the poll notes.
The results come from analysis of polls conducted before President Obama ordered the successful killing of Osama Bin Laden. The president received a bump in his approval ratings from the general public after that, and it seems likely that the same would be true – potentially more so – among veterans or active military
Russ Vaughn
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/05/allen_west_all_the_way_someday.html
It's not often this old Airborne line doggie (that's a paratrooper infantryman for those of you unfamiliar with military lingo) gets a thrill up his leg, to borrow a phrase from someone I'm sure knows absolutely nothing about military lingo. But for the past year or two, my old soldier's heart has been going pitter-pat every time retired Army Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) and now Florida Congressman Allen West is featured on one or other of the FOX News shows or on one of the more hostile liberal media venues. Listening to the basic common sense that flows from this man, my eyes always drift to his left lapel where are pinned what I would wager are the only master parachutist wings ever worn in the hallowed halls of the United States Congress by one of its members. Those wings are a silver badge of courage, accomplishment and honor, a small shiny symbol of the wearer's willingness to have repeatedly (65 jumps being the qualifying minimum) stood in the open door of an aircraft in flight and leaped into the turbulent prop blast, leading his troops to the ground to conduct ground operations.
One has to wonder whether any other members of Congress (or our ping pong playing president) would be willing to do this just once and not hundreds of times as LTC West has likely done.
Congressman West's interviews are typically marked by a calm demeanor and spot-on assessments of the issues put to him. In this he reminds me of the many excellent, no B/S, Airborne officers I served under during my six years of active duty in various assignments from company level to battalion and then brigade staff, both in peacetime and ground combat in Vietnam. That ability to remain composed, even serene, when all hell is breaking loose all about you, is what separates the merely good officers and NCO's from the great ones. As an infantry radio operator, squad leader and staff NCO, I served closely with some of the best as well as a couple who didn't measure up; I've seen the difference. Allen West is one of the good ones.
The United States Army, in yet another example of the madness of political correctness infecting our military, chose to punish LTC West for forcefully interrogating an Iraqi detainee suspected of possessing information about an ambush planned for West's battalion. The colonel's egregious offense was to drag this terrorist suspect outside the command post and fire two rounds from the Colonel's service pistol beside the recalcitrant's ear in an effort to make him divulge the location of potential ambushes, which he then did. There are mixed reports as to whether the ear-splitting blasts actually revealed significant intelligence; it most certainly however resulted in West being disciplined by what old Vietnam warrior and paratrooper Colonel David Hackworth, RIP, referred to as the Army's perfumed princes.
Well, as the saying goes, you can't keep a good man down and for sure you can't keep a good paratrooper down. West is doing what all good combat commanders have always done, he's aggressively taking the fight to those he will ultimately defeat. In a classic airborne maneuver, he has jumped behind enemy lines by joining the all-Democrat Congressional Black Caucus, making that bunch of race-exploiting liberals collectively gag on the very thought of a Black Republican operating within their midst.
While the Army foolishly passed on the opportunity to nourish and promote an excellent future general, the American public will not be so hamstrung by political correctness. Allen West is looking to be a major player in American politics, someone who may someday be the boss of those very generals who misplayed their hands. While I do not yet think he's politically experienced enough to serve as vice-president as some here at American Thinker have wished, it would give me and millions of warriors and ex-warriors deep satisfaction to see Allen West, sporting those shiny, silver master jumper's wings on his lapel, become Secretary of the Army in the incoming Republican administration, then after a couple of years, move up to Secretary of Defense. I'd wager a lot of the politically correct foolishness we now see being imposed upon our young warriors by the perfumed princes in the Pentagon would come to a screeching halt.
Who knows where Allen West could ascend to after that. After all, the paratrooper motto is:
All the way!
SSGT (E-6) Vaughn, Russ
U.S. Army 1959-1962, 1964-1967
2d Bn, 327th Parachute Infantry Regiment
101st Airborne Division
Vietnam 65-66
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/05/allen_west_all_the_way_someday.html
It's not often this old Airborne line doggie (that's a paratrooper infantryman for those of you unfamiliar with military lingo) gets a thrill up his leg, to borrow a phrase from someone I'm sure knows absolutely nothing about military lingo. But for the past year or two, my old soldier's heart has been going pitter-pat every time retired Army Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) and now Florida Congressman Allen West is featured on one or other of the FOX News shows or on one of the more hostile liberal media venues. Listening to the basic common sense that flows from this man, my eyes always drift to his left lapel where are pinned what I would wager are the only master parachutist wings ever worn in the hallowed halls of the United States Congress by one of its members. Those wings are a silver badge of courage, accomplishment and honor, a small shiny symbol of the wearer's willingness to have repeatedly (65 jumps being the qualifying minimum) stood in the open door of an aircraft in flight and leaped into the turbulent prop blast, leading his troops to the ground to conduct ground operations.
One has to wonder whether any other members of Congress (or our ping pong playing president) would be willing to do this just once and not hundreds of times as LTC West has likely done.
Congressman West's interviews are typically marked by a calm demeanor and spot-on assessments of the issues put to him. In this he reminds me of the many excellent, no B/S, Airborne officers I served under during my six years of active duty in various assignments from company level to battalion and then brigade staff, both in peacetime and ground combat in Vietnam. That ability to remain composed, even serene, when all hell is breaking loose all about you, is what separates the merely good officers and NCO's from the great ones. As an infantry radio operator, squad leader and staff NCO, I served closely with some of the best as well as a couple who didn't measure up; I've seen the difference. Allen West is one of the good ones.
The United States Army, in yet another example of the madness of political correctness infecting our military, chose to punish LTC West for forcefully interrogating an Iraqi detainee suspected of possessing information about an ambush planned for West's battalion. The colonel's egregious offense was to drag this terrorist suspect outside the command post and fire two rounds from the Colonel's service pistol beside the recalcitrant's ear in an effort to make him divulge the location of potential ambushes, which he then did. There are mixed reports as to whether the ear-splitting blasts actually revealed significant intelligence; it most certainly however resulted in West being disciplined by what old Vietnam warrior and paratrooper Colonel David Hackworth, RIP, referred to as the Army's perfumed princes.
Well, as the saying goes, you can't keep a good man down and for sure you can't keep a good paratrooper down. West is doing what all good combat commanders have always done, he's aggressively taking the fight to those he will ultimately defeat. In a classic airborne maneuver, he has jumped behind enemy lines by joining the all-Democrat Congressional Black Caucus, making that bunch of race-exploiting liberals collectively gag on the very thought of a Black Republican operating within their midst.
While the Army foolishly passed on the opportunity to nourish and promote an excellent future general, the American public will not be so hamstrung by political correctness. Allen West is looking to be a major player in American politics, someone who may someday be the boss of those very generals who misplayed their hands. While I do not yet think he's politically experienced enough to serve as vice-president as some here at American Thinker have wished, it would give me and millions of warriors and ex-warriors deep satisfaction to see Allen West, sporting those shiny, silver master jumper's wings on his lapel, become Secretary of the Army in the incoming Republican administration, then after a couple of years, move up to Secretary of Defense. I'd wager a lot of the politically correct foolishness we now see being imposed upon our young warriors by the perfumed princes in the Pentagon would come to a screeching halt.
Who knows where Allen West could ascend to after that. After all, the paratrooper motto is:
All the way!
SSGT (E-6) Vaughn, Russ
U.S. Army 1959-1962, 1964-1967
2d Bn, 327th Parachute Infantry Regiment
101st Airborne Division
Vietnam 65-66
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Enemedia disses Sarah again
Last night, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and Lauren Stephenson reported that the veterans group Rolling Thunder had not invited Sarah Palin to their annual ride taking place this weekend and were dumbfounded when Palin announced her participation as the start of her bus tour. Under the headline “Stealing Their Thunder,” Mitchell suggested that Palin was hijacking their “very serious purpose” with her participation. The piece hinges on an interview with Rolling Thunder’s Ted Shpak, who called Palin’s announcement “a big distraction”:
One day after Sarah Palin announced her bus tour, a group sponsoring a Memorial Day weekend event she plans to attend said they never invited her.
“She wasn’t invited. We heard yesterday she came out with a press release she was coming to Rolling Thunder,” Ted Shpak, national legislative director of Rolling Thunder, told “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” Shpak is one of three members of Rolling Thunder’s current leadership who says he had no idea Palin was coming until it was posted on her website.
On Thursday, the former governor of Alaska and potential GOP presidential candidate announced her bus tour on her political action committee’s website, Sarahpac.com. The tour is to begin in Washington, D.C., where Palin plans to participate in the Sunday motorcycle rally sponsored by Rolling Thunder Inc., a group that raises awareness of prisoners of war and those missing in action.
“She’s not invited to speak. We’re not endorsing her … (but) we can’t stop her from coming to ride, if she wants to ride,” Shpak continued.
There’s a problem with this story, but to be fair to everyone, it seems to be an honest case of an internal miscommunication at Rolling Thunder. After I read this story last night, I got in contact with Christine Colborne, who handles the media for Rolling Thunder. She explained that Shpak didn’t know that Palin had been indeed invited to ride at the event. The invitation came from a retired board member, Michael DiPaolo, who had connections in Alaska and got Palin to agree to attend.
Requests for high-profile personalities to attend the event are not new. Colborne mentioned that actor Robert Patrick (Terminator 2: Judgment Day) attended at least one of the Rolling Thunder events, as have other celebrities, usually just to ride with a lower profile. Most times, though, those requests don’t even get responses, let alone acceptances. That’s a shame, because the Rolling Thunder event highlights the issues surrounding American POWs and MIAs from the Vietnam War and later conflicts, as well as providing support to their families, who really need the emotional support they get from this group of volunteer veterans.
Colborne spoke with me on the phone in the middle of an all-night car ride to Washington DC, and explained that the last-minute RSVP didn’t get communicated through the echelons of Rolling Thunder. Everyone is either in transit or already in DC, and internal communication broke down as often happens before a major event. Shpak (and Colborne) were taken by surprise by Palin’s announcement. Shpak does have the authority to speak for the organization, Colborne says, but he had no idea that Palin was invited by DiPaolo, and Shpak worried that Palin’s arrival might be a “big distraction” from the issues on which Rolling Thunder wants people to focus. Obviously, Shpak — a Vietnam veteran himself — feels passionate about defending the organization, but went on NBC with faulty information. Shpak, Colborne, and almost everyone else at Rolling Thunder are volunteers, just ordinary people doing extraordinary work, and that means they get the occasional hiccup.
Palin will indeed be welcomed to the Rolling Thunder event. It’s a good organization with a worthy mission, so don’t let a miscommunication distract people from its purpose, either. Be sure to check out the web site, the merchandise that helps support the group, and other ways in which we can all assist them in that mission.
One day after Sarah Palin announced her bus tour, a group sponsoring a Memorial Day weekend event she plans to attend said they never invited her.
“She wasn’t invited. We heard yesterday she came out with a press release she was coming to Rolling Thunder,” Ted Shpak, national legislative director of Rolling Thunder, told “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” Shpak is one of three members of Rolling Thunder’s current leadership who says he had no idea Palin was coming until it was posted on her website.
On Thursday, the former governor of Alaska and potential GOP presidential candidate announced her bus tour on her political action committee’s website, Sarahpac.com. The tour is to begin in Washington, D.C., where Palin plans to participate in the Sunday motorcycle rally sponsored by Rolling Thunder Inc., a group that raises awareness of prisoners of war and those missing in action.
“She’s not invited to speak. We’re not endorsing her … (but) we can’t stop her from coming to ride, if she wants to ride,” Shpak continued.
There’s a problem with this story, but to be fair to everyone, it seems to be an honest case of an internal miscommunication at Rolling Thunder. After I read this story last night, I got in contact with Christine Colborne, who handles the media for Rolling Thunder. She explained that Shpak didn’t know that Palin had been indeed invited to ride at the event. The invitation came from a retired board member, Michael DiPaolo, who had connections in Alaska and got Palin to agree to attend.
Requests for high-profile personalities to attend the event are not new. Colborne mentioned that actor Robert Patrick (Terminator 2: Judgment Day) attended at least one of the Rolling Thunder events, as have other celebrities, usually just to ride with a lower profile. Most times, though, those requests don’t even get responses, let alone acceptances. That’s a shame, because the Rolling Thunder event highlights the issues surrounding American POWs and MIAs from the Vietnam War and later conflicts, as well as providing support to their families, who really need the emotional support they get from this group of volunteer veterans.
Colborne spoke with me on the phone in the middle of an all-night car ride to Washington DC, and explained that the last-minute RSVP didn’t get communicated through the echelons of Rolling Thunder. Everyone is either in transit or already in DC, and internal communication broke down as often happens before a major event. Shpak (and Colborne) were taken by surprise by Palin’s announcement. Shpak does have the authority to speak for the organization, Colborne says, but he had no idea that Palin was invited by DiPaolo, and Shpak worried that Palin’s arrival might be a “big distraction” from the issues on which Rolling Thunder wants people to focus. Obviously, Shpak — a Vietnam veteran himself — feels passionate about defending the organization, but went on NBC with faulty information. Shpak, Colborne, and almost everyone else at Rolling Thunder are volunteers, just ordinary people doing extraordinary work, and that means they get the occasional hiccup.
Palin will indeed be welcomed to the Rolling Thunder event. It’s a good organization with a worthy mission, so don’t let a miscommunication distract people from its purpose, either. Be sure to check out the web site, the merchandise that helps support the group, and other ways in which we can all assist them in that mission.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
SEN. Grassley vows to block nominees until he gets answers on gun sales
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is vowing to block President Obama’s nominations until he gets detailed answers on a controversial program that resulted in drug cartels acquiring more than 1,300 firearms from the U.S.
Grassley is pressing the Department of Justice (DOJ) on who initiated the “Gun Runner” program that authorized the sale of guns to people acting as straw purchasers for drug cartels in Mexico. Gun Runner might have contributed to the death of at least one federal agent.
As the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Grassley has been working closely with House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) for the past several months, gathering documents and conducting interviews with DOJ officials and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents in an attempt to find out who gave the order for the operation.
Sources note that unlike Grassley, Issa has subpoena power.
Gun Runner and another operation called Fast and Furious were designed to dismantle the gun-smuggling routes that drug cartels use to ferry high-powered assault rifles from the U.S. into Mexico. By allowing people to illegally purchase large quantities of the weapons from gun dealers, officials hoped to trace the firearms to the drug cartel members and prosecute them. But ATF whistleblowers allege that officials lost track of the guns.
Two of the guns from the operation were found at the scene of an Arizona gun battle in December between U.S. law enforcement and members of a drug gang. The firefight killed Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, but officials have not revealed whether the bullet that struck him came from the guns the ATF was supposed to be tracking.
Attorney General Eric Holder has denied knowing of Gun Runner and launched an Inspector General (IG) investigation into the matter earlier this year.
Obama, in an interview with the Spanish-language television network Univision in March, said that neither he nor Holder had any knowledge of the program’s existence before allegations arose from whistleblowers within the ATF.
Grassley told The Hill that the DOJ officials have not been forthcoming on his requests for documents. If they continue to be unresponsive, Grassley said, he will hold Obama’s judicial nominations hostage.
“We’re just getting stonewalled,” Grassley said in an interview. “The next step is we’re going to hold up nominations until we get their attention.”
Grassley, who has irritated Democratic and Republican administrations with his aggressive oversight, did not specify which Obama nominations he is targeting.
Grassley and Issa separately grilled Holder earlier this month before their respective committees.
“At best, the ATF was careless in authorizing the sale of thousands of guns to straw purchasers,” said Grassley. “At worst, our own government knowingly participated in arming criminals, drug cartels and those who later killed federal agents.”
Holder stressed the seriousness with which the DOJ was treating the issue, noting the IG investigation.
Issa told The Hill recently that he was not satisfied with Holder’s testimony before his panel.
“They stonewalled us on a subpoena,” Issa said, claiming that documents shown to his committee were heavily redacted. “So they’ve made no sufficient response to our subpoena. We consider that it continues to be a cover-up at the highest level of Justice.”
A Republican aide on Issa’s committee this week said DOJ has since increased its level of assistance and has been more accommodating to the panel’s requests for documents and interviews with DOJ and ATF officials.
Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said. “We want to be sure that whatever investigation there is, is thorough, but that it does not interfere with Justice’s investigations.
“I think Justice has made reasonable efforts to extend themselves to us and ask us to work with them so that we can still get the information we want and at the same time they can protect their witnesses. I think the problem here is, is the question … How deeply is Justice itself implicated?” he added.
Asked why the department was not providing more information to Congress, a DOJ spokeswoman referred The Hill to separate letters Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich sent to Grassley and Issa at the beginning of this month.
In the letters, Weich said that the DOJ could not deliver the entirety of the information Issa requested because of “pending criminal investigations and the prosecution of 20 individuals” relating to Project Gun Runner and Operation Fast and Furious. The requested information could jeopardize the prosecution, he said.
Weich added that “the executive branch over many administrations has taken the position that only a chairman can speak for a committee when conducting oversight.”
Grassley objected and pointed to a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling from 1979, which found that the White House has no authority to restrict Congress’s requests for information.
The Iowa Republican has been able to get some of his requested DOJ documents through Issa, who subpoenaed the ATF for records in April.
Source:
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/163095-grassley-vows-to-block-nominations-until-he-gets-answers-on-gun-program
--
Grassley is pressing the Department of Justice (DOJ) on who initiated the “Gun Runner” program that authorized the sale of guns to people acting as straw purchasers for drug cartels in Mexico. Gun Runner might have contributed to the death of at least one federal agent.
As the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Grassley has been working closely with House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) for the past several months, gathering documents and conducting interviews with DOJ officials and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents in an attempt to find out who gave the order for the operation.
Sources note that unlike Grassley, Issa has subpoena power.
Gun Runner and another operation called Fast and Furious were designed to dismantle the gun-smuggling routes that drug cartels use to ferry high-powered assault rifles from the U.S. into Mexico. By allowing people to illegally purchase large quantities of the weapons from gun dealers, officials hoped to trace the firearms to the drug cartel members and prosecute them. But ATF whistleblowers allege that officials lost track of the guns.
Two of the guns from the operation were found at the scene of an Arizona gun battle in December between U.S. law enforcement and members of a drug gang. The firefight killed Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, but officials have not revealed whether the bullet that struck him came from the guns the ATF was supposed to be tracking.
Attorney General Eric Holder has denied knowing of Gun Runner and launched an Inspector General (IG) investigation into the matter earlier this year.
Obama, in an interview with the Spanish-language television network Univision in March, said that neither he nor Holder had any knowledge of the program’s existence before allegations arose from whistleblowers within the ATF.
Grassley told The Hill that the DOJ officials have not been forthcoming on his requests for documents. If they continue to be unresponsive, Grassley said, he will hold Obama’s judicial nominations hostage.
“We’re just getting stonewalled,” Grassley said in an interview. “The next step is we’re going to hold up nominations until we get their attention.”
Grassley, who has irritated Democratic and Republican administrations with his aggressive oversight, did not specify which Obama nominations he is targeting.
Grassley and Issa separately grilled Holder earlier this month before their respective committees.
“At best, the ATF was careless in authorizing the sale of thousands of guns to straw purchasers,” said Grassley. “At worst, our own government knowingly participated in arming criminals, drug cartels and those who later killed federal agents.”
Holder stressed the seriousness with which the DOJ was treating the issue, noting the IG investigation.
Issa told The Hill recently that he was not satisfied with Holder’s testimony before his panel.
“They stonewalled us on a subpoena,” Issa said, claiming that documents shown to his committee were heavily redacted. “So they’ve made no sufficient response to our subpoena. We consider that it continues to be a cover-up at the highest level of Justice.”
A Republican aide on Issa’s committee this week said DOJ has since increased its level of assistance and has been more accommodating to the panel’s requests for documents and interviews with DOJ and ATF officials.
Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said. “We want to be sure that whatever investigation there is, is thorough, but that it does not interfere with Justice’s investigations.
“I think Justice has made reasonable efforts to extend themselves to us and ask us to work with them so that we can still get the information we want and at the same time they can protect their witnesses. I think the problem here is, is the question … How deeply is Justice itself implicated?” he added.
Asked why the department was not providing more information to Congress, a DOJ spokeswoman referred The Hill to separate letters Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich sent to Grassley and Issa at the beginning of this month.
In the letters, Weich said that the DOJ could not deliver the entirety of the information Issa requested because of “pending criminal investigations and the prosecution of 20 individuals” relating to Project Gun Runner and Operation Fast and Furious. The requested information could jeopardize the prosecution, he said.
Weich added that “the executive branch over many administrations has taken the position that only a chairman can speak for a committee when conducting oversight.”
Grassley objected and pointed to a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling from 1979, which found that the White House has no authority to restrict Congress’s requests for information.
The Iowa Republican has been able to get some of his requested DOJ documents through Issa, who subpoenaed the ATF for records in April.
Source:
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/163095-grassley-vows-to-block-nominations-until-he-gets-answers-on-gun-program
--
Congress Gets an American President -- For a Day
By Rabbi Aryeh Spero
It was fitting that Barack Obama was out of the country on the day when a leader walked into a joint session of Congress and spoke the way an American President should.
Benjamin Netanyahu's speech extolled America and the ideals for which it stands. The enthusiasm of the members of both the House and Senate was born not only of their admiration and love for the State of Israel, but also because a man of stature stood before them and announced something they haven't heard during the last two years, namely, that America represents the best the world has ever seen. Unlike President Obama, who has reminded us that American values may not be suitable for most countries, Mr. Netanyahu spoke of his pride that his country, Israel, mirrors the idealism and nobility of America. Contrary to Barack Obama, Netanyahu believes in American exceptionalism.
Having actually been in the House Chamber to witness the event, I was able to see a panorama that one doesn't see on television. The thrill and excitement on the faces, in the applause, in the thirty standing ovations, was internalized by all those who had the privilege of being an immediate participant in this historic moment. They loved the Prime Minister and they loved his speech because he showed his love for America.
When speaking of justice and liberty, Netanyahu spoke about them as enduring principles of the American personality, as opposed to the current President who speaks of them in terms of class warfare, not to mention an America at fault for those within our country he claims have not yet received justice or liberty. He spoke with awe when referring to our Founders and their inscriptions on the monuments that line the Potomac, America's River Jordan. There was nothing in his remarks, unlike the President, that appeared ambivalent about these great men. For Mr. Netanyahu and the members of Congress who rapturously drank in his words of praise about America, it was a refreshing moment.
When speaking of the narrative of his country, Israel, he found no better model than that of America's own narrative. They cheered because, on that spot, where Presidents normally deliver an annual message to our citizens, stood a man who they knew revered what they revere and finds precious what is precious in the hearts of the countrymen whom they represent.
He spoke truth and he spoke as a statesman -- as a leader. Finally, the people's representatives heard a leader casting Iran as the foremost threat to civilization. He spoke of a world divided between liberty and tyranny. The public has starved over the last two years for words of moral clarity. What it has received, instead, has been diplomatic, U.N.-type language that speaks about Iran as if it is but a problem in need of a solution, as opposed to the cataclysmic and moral challenge that it really is. Mr. Netanyahu speaks of ultimate victory, intoning a self-confident righteousness in our cause, whereas Mr. Obama uses the standard, lipid political jargon characteristic of bureaucrats dealing with problems of "de-stabilization".
Instead of a president continually dodging the ideological threat that is Islam and, worse, denying the danger it poses, Mr. Netanyahu spoke forthrightly about the worldwide threat of extreme Islam. He did not speak like a community organizer, nor did he speak as one whose priority is to protect particular constituencies or befriend him to diplomats who populate the United Nations. Unlike the present occupant of the White House, Mr. Netanyahu spoke as a world-class statesman, at times Reagan-esque, and even Churchill-ian.
I saw the faces, the body language, the enthusiasm, the immediacy on each of those filling the seats of august ancestors. Remember, a man such as Eric Cantor, for example, does not simply represent Culpepper, Virginia, but is heir to the seat of James Madison himself. And so it is with so many of our current representatives who are scions of great predecessors. For one hour on May, 24, 2011, our representatives, most of whom see themselves first as Americans, were allowed to imbibe feelings of America's majesty. Finally, the joint session of Congress was not victim of chastisement from a haughty overseer, but a recipient of sweet and reinforcing acknowledgment of our country's greatness. Today, no Supreme Court Justice was reviled, instead the justice of America was extolled.
It was evident from Mr. Netanyahu that not only does he love America, but also loves Americans. Over the last two years, the America people have heard how they "cling to their religion and their guns." They have been forced to listen how their police, such as in Cambridge, are "stupid." They have been humiliated by a man who has gone across the world apologizing for America and its precipitation of so many of the world's ills. They have heard their own president characterize this nation as "sometimes arrogant". Perhaps, worst of all, they have had to endure a nauseating rewriting of their own history and sacrifice by a President who errantly speaks of the great contributions that Islam made from early on in our history in the development of this country. Today Mr. Netanyahu came in front of the entire Congress of the United States "not to bury her, but to praise her." It was as if for one day we had an American President again.
Rabbi Spero is president of Caucus For America, and can be reached at (212) 252-6861, or caucusforamerica.com
NAME ONE other Public Figure who has brought this up
Obama’s Strange Strategy: Borrow Foreign Money to Give to Foreign Countries
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150193243058435
Should we be borrowing money from China to turn around and give it to the Muslim Brotherhood?
Given that we are running massive deficits and are drowning in more than $14 trillion in debt, and despite not knowing who will rule Egypt until its election this fall, this strange strategy may be the end result given President Obama’s announcement that he is committing $2 billion to Egypt’s “new government.” It’s part of a $20 billion foreign aid package laid out with the Group of 8 countries in Europe today.
Now, given that Egypt has a history of corruption when it comes to utilizing American aid, it is doubtful that the money will really help needy Egyptian people. Couple that with the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is organized to have a real shot at taking control of Egypt’s government, and one has to ask why we would send money (that we don’t have) into unknown Egyptian hands?
Throwing borrowed money around is not sound economic policy. And throwing borrowed money around the developing world is not sound foreign policy. Foreign assistance should go to American allies that need it and appreciate it, and for humanitarian purposes when it can truly make a difference.
Considering the Obama Administration’s continued strange strategies on the economy and foreign policy has us counting down the days to the next election. November 2012 can’t come soon enough.
- Sarah Palin
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150193243058435
Should we be borrowing money from China to turn around and give it to the Muslim Brotherhood?
Given that we are running massive deficits and are drowning in more than $14 trillion in debt, and despite not knowing who will rule Egypt until its election this fall, this strange strategy may be the end result given President Obama’s announcement that he is committing $2 billion to Egypt’s “new government.” It’s part of a $20 billion foreign aid package laid out with the Group of 8 countries in Europe today.
Now, given that Egypt has a history of corruption when it comes to utilizing American aid, it is doubtful that the money will really help needy Egyptian people. Couple that with the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is organized to have a real shot at taking control of Egypt’s government, and one has to ask why we would send money (that we don’t have) into unknown Egyptian hands?
Throwing borrowed money around is not sound economic policy. And throwing borrowed money around the developing world is not sound foreign policy. Foreign assistance should go to American allies that need it and appreciate it, and for humanitarian purposes when it can truly make a difference.
Considering the Obama Administration’s continued strange strategies on the economy and foreign policy has us counting down the days to the next election. November 2012 can’t come soon enough.
- Sarah Palin
Friday, May 27, 2011
The Dreamer Goes Down For The Count
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
HTTP://BLOGS.THE-AMERICAN-INTEREST.COM/WRM/2011/05/25/THE-DREAMER-GOES-DOWN-FOR-THE-COUNT/
I had never thought there were many similarities between the pleasure-loving Charles II of England and the more upright Barack Obama until this week. Listening to his speeches on the Middle East at the State Department, US-Israel relations at the AIPAC annual meeting and most recently his address to the British Parliament the comparison becomes irresistible.
“Here lies our sovereign king,” wrote the Earl of Rochester about King Charles:
Whose word no man relies on.
Who never said a foolish thing
Or ever did a wise one.
This seems to capture President Obama’s Middle East problems in a nutshell. The President’s descriptions of the situation are comprehensive and urbane. He correctly identifies the forces at work. He develops interesting policy ideas and approaches that address important political and moral elements of the complex problems we face. He crafts approaches that might, with good will and deft management, bridge the gaps between the sides. He reads thoughtful speeches full of sensible reflections.
But the last few weeks have cast him as the least competent manager of America’s Middle East diplomatic portfolio in a very long time. He has infuriated and frustrated long term friends, but made no headway in reconciling enemies. He has strained our ties with the established regimes without winning new friends on the Arab Street. He has committed our forces in the strategically irrelevant backwater of Libya not, as he originally told us, for “days, not weeks” but for months not days.
Where he has failed so dramatically is in the arena he himself has so frequently identified as vital: the search for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. His record of grotesque, humiliating and total diplomatic failure in his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu has few parallels in American history. Three times he has gone up against Netanyahu; three times he has ingloriously failed. This last defeat — Netanyahu’s deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama’s foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties — may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American President a foreign leader has ever delivered.
Netanyahu beat Obama like a red-headed stepchild; he played him like a fiddle; he pounded him like a big brass drum. The Prime Minister of Israel danced rings around his arrogant, professorial opponent. It was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters go up against the junior squad from Miss Porter’s School; like watching Harvard play Texas A&M, like watching Bambi meet Godzilla — or Bill Clinton run against Bob Dole.
The Prime Minister mopped the floor with our guy. Obama made his ’67 speech; Bibi ripped him to shreds. Obama goes to AIPAC, nervous, off-balance, backing and filling. Then Bibi drops the C-Bomb, demonstrating to the whole world that the Prime Minister of Israel has substantially more support in both the House and the Senate than the President of the United States.
President Obama’s new Middle East policy, intended to liquidate the wreckage resulting from his old policy and get the President somehow onto firmer ground, lies in ruins even before it could be launched. He had dropped the George Mitchell approach, refused to lay out his own set of parameters for settling the conflict, and accepted some important Israeli red lines — but for some reason he chose not to follow through with the logic of these decisions and offer Netanyahu a reset button.
As so often in the past, but catastrophically this time, he found the “sour spot”: the position that angers everyone and pleases none. He moved close enough to the Israelis to infuriate the Palestinians while keeping the Israelis at too great a distance to earn their trust. One can argue (correctly in my view) that US policy must at some level distance itself from the agendas of both parties to help bring peace. But that has to be done carefully, and to make it work one first needs to win their trust. Obama lost the trust of the Israelis early in the administration and never earned it back; he lost the Palestinians when he was unable to deliver Israeli concessions he led them to expect.
The President is now wandering across Europe seeking to mend fences with allies (Britain, France, Poland) he had earlier neglected and/or offended; at home, his authority and credibility have been holed below the waterline. Everyone who followed the events of the last week knows that the President has lost control of the American-Israeli relationship and that he has no near-term prospects of rescuing the peace process. The Israelis, the Palestinians and the US Congress have all rejected his leadership. Peace processes are generally good things even if they seldom bring peace; one hopes the President can find a way to relaunch American diplomacy on this issue but for now he seems to have reached a dead end — and to have allowd himself to be fatally tagged as too pro-Israel to win the affection of the Europeans and Arabs, and too pro-Palestinian to be trusted either by Israel or by many of the Americans who support it.
Internationally, this matters a great deal; domestically it matters even more. The President has significantly less capacity to act than he did a week ago. The Bin Laden dividend, already cruelly diminished by what The Daily Caller said was the administration’s “victory lap in a clown car”, is now history. The GOP, in trouble recently as voters recoil from what many see as Republican extremism on issues like Medicare and public unions, will be able to use the national security card in new and potent ways.
As the stunning and overwhelming response to Prime Minister Netanyahu in Congress showed, Israel matters in American politics like almost no other country on earth. Well beyond the American Jewish and the Protestant fundamentalist communities, the people and the story of Israel stir some of the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the American soul. The idea of Jewish and Israeli exceptionalism is profoundly tied to the idea of American exceptionalism. The belief that God favors and protects Israel is connected to the idea that God favors and protects America.
It means more. The existence of Israel means that the God of the Bible is still watching out for the well-being of the human race. For many American Christians who are nothing like fundamentalists, the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land and their creation of a successful, democratic state after two thousand years of oppression and exile is a clear sign that the religion of the Bible can be trusted.
Being pro-Israel matters in American mass politics because the public mind believes at a deep level that to be pro-Israel is to be pro-America and pro-faith. Substantial numbers of voters believe that politicians who don’t ‘get’ Israel also don’t ‘get’ America and don’t ‘get’ God. Obama’s political isolation on this issue, and the haste with which liberal Democrats like Nancy Pelosi left the embattled President to take the heat alone, testify to the pervasive sense in American politics that Israel is an American value. Said the Minority Leader to the Prime Minister: “I think it’s clear that both sides of the Capitol believe you advance the cause of peace.”
President Obama probably understands this intellectually; he understands many things intellectually. But what he can’t seem to do is to incorporate that knowledge into a politically sustainable line of policy. The deep American sense of connection to and, yes, love of Israel limits the flexibility of any administration. Again, the President seems to know that with his head. But he clearly had no idea what he was up against when Bibi Netanyahu came to town.
As a result, he’s taking another ride in the clown car, and this time it isn’t a victory lap. I hope I’m wrong, but I think the next intifada got a lot closer this week.
Editor’s Note: For further information see WRM on last night’s episode of Charlie Rose
HTTP://BLOGS.THE-AMERICAN-INTEREST.COM/WRM/2011/05/25/THE-DREAMER-GOES-DOWN-FOR-THE-COUNT/
I had never thought there were many similarities between the pleasure-loving Charles II of England and the more upright Barack Obama until this week. Listening to his speeches on the Middle East at the State Department, US-Israel relations at the AIPAC annual meeting and most recently his address to the British Parliament the comparison becomes irresistible.
“Here lies our sovereign king,” wrote the Earl of Rochester about King Charles:
Whose word no man relies on.
Who never said a foolish thing
Or ever did a wise one.
This seems to capture President Obama’s Middle East problems in a nutshell. The President’s descriptions of the situation are comprehensive and urbane. He correctly identifies the forces at work. He develops interesting policy ideas and approaches that address important political and moral elements of the complex problems we face. He crafts approaches that might, with good will and deft management, bridge the gaps between the sides. He reads thoughtful speeches full of sensible reflections.
But the last few weeks have cast him as the least competent manager of America’s Middle East diplomatic portfolio in a very long time. He has infuriated and frustrated long term friends, but made no headway in reconciling enemies. He has strained our ties with the established regimes without winning new friends on the Arab Street. He has committed our forces in the strategically irrelevant backwater of Libya not, as he originally told us, for “days, not weeks” but for months not days.
Where he has failed so dramatically is in the arena he himself has so frequently identified as vital: the search for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. His record of grotesque, humiliating and total diplomatic failure in his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu has few parallels in American history. Three times he has gone up against Netanyahu; three times he has ingloriously failed. This last defeat — Netanyahu’s deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama’s foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties — may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American President a foreign leader has ever delivered.
Netanyahu beat Obama like a red-headed stepchild; he played him like a fiddle; he pounded him like a big brass drum. The Prime Minister of Israel danced rings around his arrogant, professorial opponent. It was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters go up against the junior squad from Miss Porter’s School; like watching Harvard play Texas A&M, like watching Bambi meet Godzilla — or Bill Clinton run against Bob Dole.
The Prime Minister mopped the floor with our guy. Obama made his ’67 speech; Bibi ripped him to shreds. Obama goes to AIPAC, nervous, off-balance, backing and filling. Then Bibi drops the C-Bomb, demonstrating to the whole world that the Prime Minister of Israel has substantially more support in both the House and the Senate than the President of the United States.
President Obama’s new Middle East policy, intended to liquidate the wreckage resulting from his old policy and get the President somehow onto firmer ground, lies in ruins even before it could be launched. He had dropped the George Mitchell approach, refused to lay out his own set of parameters for settling the conflict, and accepted some important Israeli red lines — but for some reason he chose not to follow through with the logic of these decisions and offer Netanyahu a reset button.
As so often in the past, but catastrophically this time, he found the “sour spot”: the position that angers everyone and pleases none. He moved close enough to the Israelis to infuriate the Palestinians while keeping the Israelis at too great a distance to earn their trust. One can argue (correctly in my view) that US policy must at some level distance itself from the agendas of both parties to help bring peace. But that has to be done carefully, and to make it work one first needs to win their trust. Obama lost the trust of the Israelis early in the administration and never earned it back; he lost the Palestinians when he was unable to deliver Israeli concessions he led them to expect.
The President is now wandering across Europe seeking to mend fences with allies (Britain, France, Poland) he had earlier neglected and/or offended; at home, his authority and credibility have been holed below the waterline. Everyone who followed the events of the last week knows that the President has lost control of the American-Israeli relationship and that he has no near-term prospects of rescuing the peace process. The Israelis, the Palestinians and the US Congress have all rejected his leadership. Peace processes are generally good things even if they seldom bring peace; one hopes the President can find a way to relaunch American diplomacy on this issue but for now he seems to have reached a dead end — and to have allowd himself to be fatally tagged as too pro-Israel to win the affection of the Europeans and Arabs, and too pro-Palestinian to be trusted either by Israel or by many of the Americans who support it.
Internationally, this matters a great deal; domestically it matters even more. The President has significantly less capacity to act than he did a week ago. The Bin Laden dividend, already cruelly diminished by what The Daily Caller said was the administration’s “victory lap in a clown car”, is now history. The GOP, in trouble recently as voters recoil from what many see as Republican extremism on issues like Medicare and public unions, will be able to use the national security card in new and potent ways.
As the stunning and overwhelming response to Prime Minister Netanyahu in Congress showed, Israel matters in American politics like almost no other country on earth. Well beyond the American Jewish and the Protestant fundamentalist communities, the people and the story of Israel stir some of the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the American soul. The idea of Jewish and Israeli exceptionalism is profoundly tied to the idea of American exceptionalism. The belief that God favors and protects Israel is connected to the idea that God favors and protects America.
It means more. The existence of Israel means that the God of the Bible is still watching out for the well-being of the human race. For many American Christians who are nothing like fundamentalists, the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land and their creation of a successful, democratic state after two thousand years of oppression and exile is a clear sign that the religion of the Bible can be trusted.
Being pro-Israel matters in American mass politics because the public mind believes at a deep level that to be pro-Israel is to be pro-America and pro-faith. Substantial numbers of voters believe that politicians who don’t ‘get’ Israel also don’t ‘get’ America and don’t ‘get’ God. Obama’s political isolation on this issue, and the haste with which liberal Democrats like Nancy Pelosi left the embattled President to take the heat alone, testify to the pervasive sense in American politics that Israel is an American value. Said the Minority Leader to the Prime Minister: “I think it’s clear that both sides of the Capitol believe you advance the cause of peace.”
President Obama probably understands this intellectually; he understands many things intellectually. But what he can’t seem to do is to incorporate that knowledge into a politically sustainable line of policy. The deep American sense of connection to and, yes, love of Israel limits the flexibility of any administration. Again, the President seems to know that with his head. But he clearly had no idea what he was up against when Bibi Netanyahu came to town.
As a result, he’s taking another ride in the clown car, and this time it isn’t a victory lap. I hope I’m wrong, but I think the next intifada got a lot closer this week.
Editor’s Note: For further information see WRM on last night’s episode of Charlie Rose
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Bibi Netanyahu 28 years old
n a remarkable video from 1978, 28 year old MIT grad Benjamin Netanyahu debates whether there should be a Palestinian state created on the West Bank and Gaza. Netanyahu argues that such a state would have but one goal: to destroy the Jewish state of Israel. He reviews the history from 1948 to 1967, when Gaza was controlled by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan and there were no calls to end the occupation, or for national sovereignty for the Palestinians.
But one thing was similar in that period and today: terror attacks against Israeli Jews. Netanyahu went by the name of Benjamin Nitay at the time. His brother, Yonatan was an Israeli commando who led the Entebbe raid on July 4, 1976 during which he died. Netanyahu chose to use the name Nitay at MIT, where he was one year behind me, in large part for security reasons due to his brother's notoriety and the spate of Palestinian terror attacks aimed at Israelis all over the world.
CHRISTIAN AND JEWISH LEADERS RESPOND TO OBAMA'S ATTACK ON ISRAEL
http://www.israelyourenotalone.com/images/ISRAEL_AD_WSJ_FINAL_5-18-11.pdf
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/05/christian-and-jewish-leaders-respond-to-obamas-attack-on-israel.html
I just got back from a press conference earlier today at the National Press Club, of Christian and Jewish leaders responding to Obama's attack on Israel. This coalition of leadership, representing millions of Americans, is kicking off a media campaign across the country to proudly stand with Israel. I will write it up and post snaps later, but clearly Obama has galvanized the right, the righteous and the non-Muslim world.
Christian and Jewish leaders have gone on the offense and announced an ad campaign. Obama has no idea of the unified movement he just created.
"ISRAEL YOU'RE NOT ALONE" TELEVISION CAMPAIGN BEGINS THIS WEEK
Christian and Jewish leaders representing millions of Americans announced the next phase of the "Israel: You're Not Alone" campaign -- with television ads to stand with Israel..
The television commercial responding to the attack on Israel:
VO: "THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS IN ISRAEL WHEN THEY GIVE AWAY LAND FOR "PEACE."
The video shows children running for shelter as the rockets explode around them.
"DON'T LET HAMAS MOVE THEIR ROCKETS ANY CLOSER TO INNOCENT ISRAELI FAMILIES."
Graphic shows the words, "Trading land for Peace?" Israel, We Stand With You. www.IsraelYoureNotAlone.com "
"The Prime Minister will know that millions stand with him and against Obama's pressure to give half of their nation over to those who don't even recognize their right to exist." said Janet Porter.
Fifty leaders also ran full page ads to encourage Israel in the Wall Street Journal and Jerusalem Post last week, including: Dr. James Dobson, Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association, Bill McCartney of Promise Keepers, Governor Mike Huckabee, Judge Roy Moore, Jimmy Draper of LifeWay, James Robison, Rick Joyner, and Bishop Earl Jackson.
The television commercial and full print ad can be seen at: www.IsraelYoureNotAlone.com.
Among those present were General "Jerry" Boykin, Mike Gottfried, Janet Porter of Faith2Action (who sent Prime Minister Netanyahu 30,000 yellow "friendship" roses last year in a show of support), William Murray of the Religious Freedom Coalition, Pastor Paul Blair of Reclaiming America for Christ, Bishop E.W. Jackson, the head of STAND for America (Staying True to America's National Destiny), Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition, Pastor Aaron Fruh of Knollwood Church, Rabbi Aryeh Spero, and Dr. Rick Scarborough of Vision America, among others.
In concert with the media offensive, Pastory Hagee mobilized his righteous army:
Christian Zionists Send More Than 50,000 Emails of Support to Netanyahu
WASHINGTON – Since late Friday evening, more than 50,000 members of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the nation’s largest pro-Israel organization, sent emails of support to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Israelis are concerned that the pre-1967 borders are indefensible. I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu is right to stress this point,” said CUFI founder and Chairman Pastor John Hagee. “CUFI believes strongly in supporting the democratically elected government of Israel as it seeks to deliver peace and security to its people.”
“The response of the Christian Zionist community has been overwhelming. America’s Christian Zionists are firmly behind Israel’s right to determine for itself how best to achieve peace and security,” Hagee said.
“Given Israel’s repeated risks for peace over the years, we believe America must respect Israel’s democratically elected government and the will of the Israeli people,” said David Brog, CUFI’s executive director. “We believe that this outpouring of support makes clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu that Christians across America are standing firmly with Israel.”
Christians United for Israel is the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States and one of the leading Christian grassroots movements in the world. CUFI spans all fifty states and reaches millions with its message. Each year CUFI holds hundreds of pro-Israel events in cities around the country. And each July, thousands of pro-Israel Christians gather in Washington, D.C. to participate in the CUFI Washington Summit and make their voices heard in support of Israel and the Jewish people.
CUFI’s mission is to provide a national association through which every pro-Israel church, parachurch organization, ministry or individual in America can speak and act with one voice in support of Israel.
UPDATE: Here is a statement from Pastor E.W. Jackson, the head of STAND for America (Staying True to America's National Destiny), opposing President Obama's call for Israel to return to her 1967 borders. Bishop Jackson is a candidate for the United States Senate in Virginia.
Last Thursday the President of the United States broke with 50 years of American foreign policy and betrayed our closest ally in the Middle East. Presidents Johnson, Carter and Reagan opposed what President Obama now supports. More importantly, the American people oppose President Obama’s new Middle East peace policy. He made the unilateral declaration that negotiations for peace should begin with the 1967 borders of Israel - which would leave Israel again vulnerable to a fatal attack; which would allow an invading Army to reach Tel Aviv after traveling only 9 miles into Israeli territory; and which would leave a divided Jerusalem. He made this radical shift in policy on the eve of the visit by Prime Minister Netanyahu without consulting either the Prime Minister of Israel or the Congress of the United States. The 1967 borders of Israel are carte blanch to Israel’s enemies to accomplish what they have long sought – the destruction of Israel. Why the President would give aid and comfort to those who want Israel destroyed is beyond comprehension.
What is even more shocking and incomprehensible is that the President would do this immediately following the merging of Hamas - a terrorist organization - and Fatah, the Palestinian Authority. This new unification of the Palestinian leadership reaffirms what everyone except the President seems to know. Palestinian leaders do not want peace. They want Israel destroyed. Therefore, America must be unwavering in support of our vital ally. No American President or government has the right to dictate Israel’s surrender or demand Israel’s suicide. The security of Israel is nonnegotiable. While President Obama has broken America’s trust and betrayed Israel, we are here to say that as citizens and Christians and clergy, we remain committed to Israel’s security and to making sure that American foreign policy and the leaders we elect in the future will uphold this historic commitment. We stand with the Israel and the Jewish people in saying, “never again.”
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/05/christian-and-jewish-leaders-respond-to-obamas-attack-on-israel.html
I just got back from a press conference earlier today at the National Press Club, of Christian and Jewish leaders responding to Obama's attack on Israel. This coalition of leadership, representing millions of Americans, is kicking off a media campaign across the country to proudly stand with Israel. I will write it up and post snaps later, but clearly Obama has galvanized the right, the righteous and the non-Muslim world.
Christian and Jewish leaders have gone on the offense and announced an ad campaign. Obama has no idea of the unified movement he just created.
"ISRAEL YOU'RE NOT ALONE" TELEVISION CAMPAIGN BEGINS THIS WEEK
Christian and Jewish leaders representing millions of Americans announced the next phase of the "Israel: You're Not Alone" campaign -- with television ads to stand with Israel..
The television commercial responding to the attack on Israel:
VO: "THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS IN ISRAEL WHEN THEY GIVE AWAY LAND FOR "PEACE."
The video shows children running for shelter as the rockets explode around them.
"DON'T LET HAMAS MOVE THEIR ROCKETS ANY CLOSER TO INNOCENT ISRAELI FAMILIES."
Graphic shows the words, "Trading land for Peace?" Israel, We Stand With You. www.IsraelYoureNotAlone.com "
"The Prime Minister will know that millions stand with him and against Obama's pressure to give half of their nation over to those who don't even recognize their right to exist." said Janet Porter.
Fifty leaders also ran full page ads to encourage Israel in the Wall Street Journal and Jerusalem Post last week, including: Dr. James Dobson, Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association, Bill McCartney of Promise Keepers, Governor Mike Huckabee, Judge Roy Moore, Jimmy Draper of LifeWay, James Robison, Rick Joyner, and Bishop Earl Jackson.
The television commercial and full print ad can be seen at: www.IsraelYoureNotAlone.com.
Among those present were General "Jerry" Boykin, Mike Gottfried, Janet Porter of Faith2Action (who sent Prime Minister Netanyahu 30,000 yellow "friendship" roses last year in a show of support), William Murray of the Religious Freedom Coalition, Pastor Paul Blair of Reclaiming America for Christ, Bishop E.W. Jackson, the head of STAND for America (Staying True to America's National Destiny), Andrea Lafferty of the Traditional Values Coalition, Pastor Aaron Fruh of Knollwood Church, Rabbi Aryeh Spero, and Dr. Rick Scarborough of Vision America, among others.
In concert with the media offensive, Pastory Hagee mobilized his righteous army:
Christian Zionists Send More Than 50,000 Emails of Support to Netanyahu
WASHINGTON – Since late Friday evening, more than 50,000 members of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the nation’s largest pro-Israel organization, sent emails of support to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Israelis are concerned that the pre-1967 borders are indefensible. I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu is right to stress this point,” said CUFI founder and Chairman Pastor John Hagee. “CUFI believes strongly in supporting the democratically elected government of Israel as it seeks to deliver peace and security to its people.”
“The response of the Christian Zionist community has been overwhelming. America’s Christian Zionists are firmly behind Israel’s right to determine for itself how best to achieve peace and security,” Hagee said.
“Given Israel’s repeated risks for peace over the years, we believe America must respect Israel’s democratically elected government and the will of the Israeli people,” said David Brog, CUFI’s executive director. “We believe that this outpouring of support makes clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu that Christians across America are standing firmly with Israel.”
Christians United for Israel is the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States and one of the leading Christian grassroots movements in the world. CUFI spans all fifty states and reaches millions with its message. Each year CUFI holds hundreds of pro-Israel events in cities around the country. And each July, thousands of pro-Israel Christians gather in Washington, D.C. to participate in the CUFI Washington Summit and make their voices heard in support of Israel and the Jewish people.
CUFI’s mission is to provide a national association through which every pro-Israel church, parachurch organization, ministry or individual in America can speak and act with one voice in support of Israel.
UPDATE: Here is a statement from Pastor E.W. Jackson, the head of STAND for America (Staying True to America's National Destiny), opposing President Obama's call for Israel to return to her 1967 borders. Bishop Jackson is a candidate for the United States Senate in Virginia.
Last Thursday the President of the United States broke with 50 years of American foreign policy and betrayed our closest ally in the Middle East. Presidents Johnson, Carter and Reagan opposed what President Obama now supports. More importantly, the American people oppose President Obama’s new Middle East peace policy. He made the unilateral declaration that negotiations for peace should begin with the 1967 borders of Israel - which would leave Israel again vulnerable to a fatal attack; which would allow an invading Army to reach Tel Aviv after traveling only 9 miles into Israeli territory; and which would leave a divided Jerusalem. He made this radical shift in policy on the eve of the visit by Prime Minister Netanyahu without consulting either the Prime Minister of Israel or the Congress of the United States. The 1967 borders of Israel are carte blanch to Israel’s enemies to accomplish what they have long sought – the destruction of Israel. Why the President would give aid and comfort to those who want Israel destroyed is beyond comprehension.
What is even more shocking and incomprehensible is that the President would do this immediately following the merging of Hamas - a terrorist organization - and Fatah, the Palestinian Authority. This new unification of the Palestinian leadership reaffirms what everyone except the President seems to know. Palestinian leaders do not want peace. They want Israel destroyed. Therefore, America must be unwavering in support of our vital ally. No American President or government has the right to dictate Israel’s surrender or demand Israel’s suicide. The security of Israel is nonnegotiable. While President Obama has broken America’s trust and betrayed Israel, we are here to say that as citizens and Christians and clergy, we remain committed to Israel’s security and to making sure that American foreign policy and the leaders we elect in the future will uphold this historic commitment. We stand with the Israel and the Jewish people in saying, “never again.”
Palin's Secret Weapon: New Film to Premiere in June
By Scott Conroy
Shortly after Republicans swept last November to a historic victory in which Sarah Palin was credited with playing a central role, the former Alaska governor pulled aside her close aide, Rebecca Mansour, to discuss a hush-hush assignment: Reach out to conservative filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon with a request. Ask him if he would make a series of videos extolling Palin's governorship and laying to rest lingering questions about her controversial decision to resign from office with a year-and-a-half left in her first term. It was this abdication, Palin knew, that had made her damaged goods in the eyes of some Republicans who once were eager to get behind her potential 2012 presidential campaign.
The response was more positive than Palin could have hoped for. He'd make a feature-length movie, Bannon told Mansour, and he insisted upon taking complete control and financing it himself -- to the tune of $1 million.
The fruits of that initial conversation are now complete. The result is a two-hour-long, sweeping epic, a rough cut of which Bannon screened privately for Sarah and Todd Palin last Wednesday in Arizona, where Alaska's most famous couple has been rumored to have purchased a new home. When it premieres in Iowa next month, the film is poised to serve as a galvanizing prelude to Palin's prospective presidential campaign -- an unconventional reintroduction to the nation that she and her political team have spent months eagerly anticipating, even as Beltway Republicans have largely concluded that she won't run.
Bannon, a former naval officer and ex-Goldman Sachs banker, sees his documentary as the first step in Palin's effort to rebuild her image in the eyes of voters who may have soured on her, yet might reconsider if old caricatures begin to fade. The film will also appeal to staunch Palin supporters who have long celebrated her biting rhetoric and conservative populism yet know little about her record in Alaska and have perhaps written her off as presidential material.
"This film is a call to action for a campaign like 1976: Reagan vs. the establishment," Bannon told RealClearPolitics. "Let's have a good old-fashioned brouhaha."
RealClearPolitics was recently given an exclusive screening of a rough cut of the now finished film, which Bannon designed, in part, to help catapult Palin from the presidential afterthought she has become in the eyes of many pundits directly to the front lines of the 2012 GOP conversation.
Palin initially learned about Bannon's work after she saw one of his previous films about the origins of the tea party movement, "Generation Zero," which premiered last year in Nashville and was later aired in prime time on the Fox News Channel. Impressed, Palin promoted "Generation Zero" via Twitter before later reaching out to Bannon about creating something to highlight her record in Alaska, where her performance in office was overshadowed by her resignation eight months after the 2008 presidential election.
Though she did not have any editorial role in the project, Palin facilitated access for Bannon and his film crew to key Alaskan defenders who were involved with the major achievements of her administration, and the filmmaker spent several weeks in the 49th state gathering archival film and conducting research and interviews for the project. He and his team took extraordinary measures to keep their endeavor secret.
When they requested from Alaska's TV news stations footage that was shot during Palin's political rise, they asked for additional tapes containing subject matters that were irrelevant to their project, in order not to raise suspicions. And rather than staying at the well-appointed Hotel Captain Cook in Anchorage, they instead took up temporary residence in low-key motels.
"We shot on the weekends, and we shot in locations that weren't being used during those weekends," Bannon said. "I did it with a handpicked crew of people I know and trust, and we were able to stay under the radar. The planning for the secrecy of this took many, many weeks."
Bannon originally titled his film "Take a Stand," which was the campaign slogan for Palin's 2006 gubernatorial run when she defeated incumbent Republican Frank Murkowski in the primary before cruising in the general election to become Alaska's youngest -- and first female -- chief executive. But in order to give it a more triumphant punch, the filmmaker changed the title to "The Undefeated."
Bannon acquired the audio rights to Palin's 2009 bestseller, "Going Rogue," and the former vice-presidential nominee's voice guides the film through the various stages of her career in Alaska.
Although Palin is not interviewed directly, the film features on-camera interviews and commentaries from 10 Alaskans who played different roles in her political rise, as well as six Lower 48 denizens who defend her in more visceral terms, including prominent conservative firebrands Mark Levin, Andrew Breitbart and Tammy Bruce.
Divided into three acts, the film makes the case that despite the now cliched label, Palin was indeed a maverick who confronted the powerful forces lined up against her to achieve wide-ranging success in a short period of time. The second part of the film's message is just as clear, if more subjective: that Sarah Palin is the only conservative leader who can both build on the legacy of the Reagan Revolution and bring the ideals of the tea party movement to the Oval Office.
Rife with religious metaphor and unmistakable allusions to Palin as a Joan of Arc-like figure, "The Undefeated" echoes Palin's "Going Rogue" in its tidy division of the world between the heroes who are on her side and the villains who seek to thwart her at every turn.
To convey Bannon's view of the pathology behind Palin-hatred, the film begins with a fast-paced sequence of clips showing some of the prominent celebrities who have used sexist, derogatory and generally vicious language to describe her.
Rosie O'Donnell, Matt Damon, Bill Maher, David Letterman, and Howard Stern all have brief cameos before comedian Louis C.K. goes off on a particularly ugly anti-Palin riff.
"I hate her more than anybody," C.K. says at the end of his tirade, the rest of which is unfit to print here.
Bannon intends to release two versions of the film. An unrated edition will contain some obscene anti-Palin language and imagery, while the other is targeted to a general audience and will seek a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America.
The Making of a Politician
After a brief interlude featuring some old Palin family home video footage, Act 1 begins with Sarah as narrator, recalling the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, when she was a young pregnant wife married to a blue-collar husband working on the North Slope.
"I hadn't yet envisioned running for elected office," Palin says in the audio taken from "Going Rogue," as images of the environmental disaster unfold on the screen. "But looking back, I could see that tragedy planted a seed in me. If I ever had a chance to serve my fellow citizens, I would do so."
Over the next hour, the crux of the narrative is taken over by Palin's Alaska backers, with former spokesperson Meg Stapleton and attorney Tom Van Flein leading the charge. Other more unfamiliar faces who uphold Palin's Alaska legacy include former Wasilla Deputy Mayor Judy Patrick, former gas pipeline adviser Marty Rutherford, longtime confidantes Kristan Cole and Judy Patrick, and former state Sen. Gene Therriault -- one of the few Alaska legislators who has remained vocal and consistent in his praise of Palin.
The recounting of Palin's earliest years in public office relies on a treasure trove of rare and never-before-seen video obtained by Bannon, including shots of Palin breaking ground on a construction project with her fellow Wasilla City Councilors, waving signs for her mayoral reelection campaign, and reacting acidly to a comment made by John Stein -- her predecessor in the mayor's office and one of the film's villains, who compared her to a "Spice Girl."
As the documentary transitions to Palin's ascent to statewide office, it dramatizes the culture of corruption that permeated Alaska, with images of fat men smoking cigars in dark rooms and the infamous Suite 604 at the Baranof Hotel in Juneau, where the FBI secretly videotaped executives of the oil services company VECO in a corruption scandal that would shake the foundations of Alaska government just as Palin was making a name for herself as an ethics crusader.
"The Undefeated" conveys the dramatic extent to which Palin's world has changed in just a few years, as it shows her announcing her gubernatorial campaign not at a massive rally but at a sparsely attended press conference in her kitchen. Those unfamiliar with Palin's political background will be surprised to learn that the woman who has become one of the nation's most boisterous press critics was once such a media darling that two of the Alaska TV news correspondents whose highly favorable reports are shown in the film ended up leaving their jobs to join the Palin administration.
Palin's charisma has in recent years often been overshadowed by the more unforgiving side of her personality, but one scene from the film illustrates how she has long used her personal charm to disarm and discombobulate her competitors.
"Oh, this will be fun," Palin says to her soon-to-be vanquished Democratic gubernatorial opponent, Tony Knowles, during a brief encounter in Anchorage on primary night in 2006. Knowles remains speechless, while Palin smiles and adds an "Oh, golly" for good measure.
Mining the ‘Maverick' Label
Palin's stint as a hard-charging reformer in Juneau won her approval ratings that consistently topped 80 percent and made her the most popular governor in America, catching the eye of the McCain campaign. It was the "maverick" label that piqued McCain's interest in 2008 -- far more than Palin's supposed purity on social issues -- just as it does the filmmaker's.
The movie focuses on Palin's triumphs on fiscal and energy matters, while ignoring hot-button topics like abortion. Indeed, although she was always identified as a staunch social conservative, Palin often worked more closely with Democrats than Republicans in Juneau and largely avoided ideological fights during her first two years in office.
Yet Palin the Fighter is an ever-present theme in the documentary; one of its most memorable moments occurs when Meg Stapleton recalls an encounter at the Fairbanks airport when Palin literally stared down an oil executive who told her, "You don't know who you're messing with."
The film's third act puts a positive spin on Palin's 2008 vice presidential run, reminding viewers of her initially valuable impact on the McCain campaign by showing the Gallup poll trend lines that had the Republican ticket taking its first lead over the Democrats before the collapse of Lehman Brothers on Sept. 15.
It also gives an extended treatment to Palin's speech at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., her finest hour politically.
"The Undefeated" eschews less flattering topics, such as the Troopergate saga -- which had little effect on the VP campaign but left a lastingly negative impression of Palin in the eyes of many Alaskans -- and her unimpressive series of interviews with Katie Couric.
Bannon dramatizes the theme of Palin's persecution at the hands of her enemies in the media and both political parties, a notion the former governor has long embraced. Images of lions killing a zebra and a dead medieval soldier with an arrow sticking in his back dramatize the ethics complaints filed by obscure Alaskan citizens, which Palin has cited as the primary reason for her sudden resignation in July of 2009.
Fighting Words
The film's coda is introduced with an on-screen caption that reads, "From here, I can see November." It is here that Mark Levin alludes to Ronald Reagan as a Palin-like insurgent who was also once distrusted by the GOP establishment.
Palin is then shown firing up a rally that occurred just last month on the steps of the state capitol in Wisconsin. "What we need is for you to stand up, GOP, and fight," Palin, in vintage campaign form, shouts to the crowd. "Maybe I should ask some of the Badger women's hockey team -- those champions -- maybe I should ask them if we should be suggesting to GOP leaders they need to learn how to fight like a girl!"
Following an extended in-your-face riff by Andrew Breitbart in which he repeatedly denounces as "eunuchs" the male Republican leaders who decline to defend Palin, the film ends with one last scene from the April rally in Madison: "Mr. President, game on!" Palin shouts before a martial drumbeat ushers in a closing quotation by Thomas Paine, which also appeared in "Going Rogue." The implication is neither subtle nor easy to dismiss.
In a telling sign of how the film's message has already resonated with her own thought process, Palin made reference to the Paine quotation during an appearance on Greta Van Susteren's Fox News show last week shortly after she viewed a rough cut of the film for the first time.
"It's like Thomas Paine said, Greta, one of our founders. He said, ‘If there be trouble, let it be in my day that my child may have peace,'" Palin said. "I think of that when I consider whether running for office or not."
SarahPAC's treasurer Tim Crawford confirmed that "The Undefeated" was a hit with Palin.
"The governor thought it was great," Crawford said.
Bannon's film also resonated with members of Palin's staff, including Mansour.
"I'm a huge fan of Steve's work," Mansour said in a statement to RCP on Tuesday. "His film on President Reagan, ‘In the Face of Evil,' is my favorite documentary, and his ‘Generation Zero' was a rallying cry for the Tea Party movement early on. I think his new film really captures the essence of Governor Palin's stewardship of Alaska, and I think people will be really surprised by it. It shatters so many false stereotypes because it shows what she actually accomplished as governor. You can't leave it thinking the same way about Sarah Palin."
In the last couple of months, Palin has delivered major policy speeches, hired a chief of staff, made a well-publicized foreign trip that included a visit with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, all the while remaining consistent about her vow -- first made just days after the 2008 campaign ended -- that she would "crash through" any of the "open doors" that might lead to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Bannon intends to premiere the film in Iowa late next month before expanding the release to New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. After the initial rollout in the four early voting states, the filmmaker will eventually release it to somewhere between 50 and 100 markets nationwide.
Palin aides have not yet decided whether the former governor will play an active role in the film's premiere, but there has been some preliminary discussion of purchasing copies of the film from Bannon to distribute as gifts to SarahPAC donors.
Bannon is also working out a video-on-demand deal that will make the movie more widely accessible.
Palin has been tight-lipped about which way she is leaning in regard to running for president next year, but her team of advisers is operating under the notion that they are laying the groundwork for a future campaign, until they are told otherwise.
Palin's future presidential bid might be based in the Phoenix area -- where Bristol Palin also recently purchased a new home -- but Palin's aides have yet to reach out to potential venues for a campaign headquarters in Arizona.
Despite Palin's apparent desire to wait as long as possible before making her decision, aides acknowledge that they will soon have to establish a more campaign-like operation in order to begin a more concerted effort to raise money and take other steps that would be required -- even for a potential candidate as unconventional as Palin.
Meanwhile, the news about Palin's initial effort to commission a film project to highlight her political record is sure to put additional pressure on Fox News to demand an answer from one of their star contributors on whether she intends to run for president or continue working as a political analyst on the network that may soon find itself reporting on her campaign.
Palin and her aides have appeared to recognize that despite some recent polls showing her near the top of the prospective Republican field, she still has substantial problems with independent voters and large swaths of the GOP. Even more daunting will be finding a way to explain persuasively just how it was that ethics complainers and liberal bloggers -- whom other politicians in her shoes might have largely dismissed as relatively minor nuisances -- succeeded in forcing her of office.
But coming on the heels of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's decision not to join the fray, many grassroots conservatives are clamoring for a candidate who has both the stature and the sizzle to compete with President Obama.
If she does decide to run, "The Undefeated" will be the key element to her initial coming-out party. The film's impending release -- and the frenzied media attention that it is sure to generate -- will serve as a vivid wake-up call that despite the many obstacles in front of her, Palin's entry into the race would turn the campaign on its head in an instant, just as it did in 2008.
As she mulls her decision in the coming weeks, the other Republican candidates in the field will be left to prepare for a hibernating grizzly who appears poised to rise up once again.
‹‹Previous Page |1 | 2 | 3 |
Scott Conroy is a national political reporter for RealClearPolitics. He can be reached at sconroy@realclearpolitics.com.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/05/25/palins_secret_weapon_new_film_to_premiere_in_june_109949-full.html at May 24, 2011 - 07:18:57 PM PDT
Shortly after Republicans swept last November to a historic victory in which Sarah Palin was credited with playing a central role, the former Alaska governor pulled aside her close aide, Rebecca Mansour, to discuss a hush-hush assignment: Reach out to conservative filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon with a request. Ask him if he would make a series of videos extolling Palin's governorship and laying to rest lingering questions about her controversial decision to resign from office with a year-and-a-half left in her first term. It was this abdication, Palin knew, that had made her damaged goods in the eyes of some Republicans who once were eager to get behind her potential 2012 presidential campaign.
The response was more positive than Palin could have hoped for. He'd make a feature-length movie, Bannon told Mansour, and he insisted upon taking complete control and financing it himself -- to the tune of $1 million.
The fruits of that initial conversation are now complete. The result is a two-hour-long, sweeping epic, a rough cut of which Bannon screened privately for Sarah and Todd Palin last Wednesday in Arizona, where Alaska's most famous couple has been rumored to have purchased a new home. When it premieres in Iowa next month, the film is poised to serve as a galvanizing prelude to Palin's prospective presidential campaign -- an unconventional reintroduction to the nation that she and her political team have spent months eagerly anticipating, even as Beltway Republicans have largely concluded that she won't run.
Bannon, a former naval officer and ex-Goldman Sachs banker, sees his documentary as the first step in Palin's effort to rebuild her image in the eyes of voters who may have soured on her, yet might reconsider if old caricatures begin to fade. The film will also appeal to staunch Palin supporters who have long celebrated her biting rhetoric and conservative populism yet know little about her record in Alaska and have perhaps written her off as presidential material.
"This film is a call to action for a campaign like 1976: Reagan vs. the establishment," Bannon told RealClearPolitics. "Let's have a good old-fashioned brouhaha."
RealClearPolitics was recently given an exclusive screening of a rough cut of the now finished film, which Bannon designed, in part, to help catapult Palin from the presidential afterthought she has become in the eyes of many pundits directly to the front lines of the 2012 GOP conversation.
Palin initially learned about Bannon's work after she saw one of his previous films about the origins of the tea party movement, "Generation Zero," which premiered last year in Nashville and was later aired in prime time on the Fox News Channel. Impressed, Palin promoted "Generation Zero" via Twitter before later reaching out to Bannon about creating something to highlight her record in Alaska, where her performance in office was overshadowed by her resignation eight months after the 2008 presidential election.
Though she did not have any editorial role in the project, Palin facilitated access for Bannon and his film crew to key Alaskan defenders who were involved with the major achievements of her administration, and the filmmaker spent several weeks in the 49th state gathering archival film and conducting research and interviews for the project. He and his team took extraordinary measures to keep their endeavor secret.
When they requested from Alaska's TV news stations footage that was shot during Palin's political rise, they asked for additional tapes containing subject matters that were irrelevant to their project, in order not to raise suspicions. And rather than staying at the well-appointed Hotel Captain Cook in Anchorage, they instead took up temporary residence in low-key motels.
"We shot on the weekends, and we shot in locations that weren't being used during those weekends," Bannon said. "I did it with a handpicked crew of people I know and trust, and we were able to stay under the radar. The planning for the secrecy of this took many, many weeks."
Bannon originally titled his film "Take a Stand," which was the campaign slogan for Palin's 2006 gubernatorial run when she defeated incumbent Republican Frank Murkowski in the primary before cruising in the general election to become Alaska's youngest -- and first female -- chief executive. But in order to give it a more triumphant punch, the filmmaker changed the title to "The Undefeated."
Bannon acquired the audio rights to Palin's 2009 bestseller, "Going Rogue," and the former vice-presidential nominee's voice guides the film through the various stages of her career in Alaska.
Although Palin is not interviewed directly, the film features on-camera interviews and commentaries from 10 Alaskans who played different roles in her political rise, as well as six Lower 48 denizens who defend her in more visceral terms, including prominent conservative firebrands Mark Levin, Andrew Breitbart and Tammy Bruce.
Divided into three acts, the film makes the case that despite the now cliched label, Palin was indeed a maverick who confronted the powerful forces lined up against her to achieve wide-ranging success in a short period of time. The second part of the film's message is just as clear, if more subjective: that Sarah Palin is the only conservative leader who can both build on the legacy of the Reagan Revolution and bring the ideals of the tea party movement to the Oval Office.
Rife with religious metaphor and unmistakable allusions to Palin as a Joan of Arc-like figure, "The Undefeated" echoes Palin's "Going Rogue" in its tidy division of the world between the heroes who are on her side and the villains who seek to thwart her at every turn.
To convey Bannon's view of the pathology behind Palin-hatred, the film begins with a fast-paced sequence of clips showing some of the prominent celebrities who have used sexist, derogatory and generally vicious language to describe her.
Rosie O'Donnell, Matt Damon, Bill Maher, David Letterman, and Howard Stern all have brief cameos before comedian Louis C.K. goes off on a particularly ugly anti-Palin riff.
"I hate her more than anybody," C.K. says at the end of his tirade, the rest of which is unfit to print here.
Bannon intends to release two versions of the film. An unrated edition will contain some obscene anti-Palin language and imagery, while the other is targeted to a general audience and will seek a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America.
The Making of a Politician
After a brief interlude featuring some old Palin family home video footage, Act 1 begins with Sarah as narrator, recalling the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, when she was a young pregnant wife married to a blue-collar husband working on the North Slope.
"I hadn't yet envisioned running for elected office," Palin says in the audio taken from "Going Rogue," as images of the environmental disaster unfold on the screen. "But looking back, I could see that tragedy planted a seed in me. If I ever had a chance to serve my fellow citizens, I would do so."
Over the next hour, the crux of the narrative is taken over by Palin's Alaska backers, with former spokesperson Meg Stapleton and attorney Tom Van Flein leading the charge. Other more unfamiliar faces who uphold Palin's Alaska legacy include former Wasilla Deputy Mayor Judy Patrick, former gas pipeline adviser Marty Rutherford, longtime confidantes Kristan Cole and Judy Patrick, and former state Sen. Gene Therriault -- one of the few Alaska legislators who has remained vocal and consistent in his praise of Palin.
The recounting of Palin's earliest years in public office relies on a treasure trove of rare and never-before-seen video obtained by Bannon, including shots of Palin breaking ground on a construction project with her fellow Wasilla City Councilors, waving signs for her mayoral reelection campaign, and reacting acidly to a comment made by John Stein -- her predecessor in the mayor's office and one of the film's villains, who compared her to a "Spice Girl."
As the documentary transitions to Palin's ascent to statewide office, it dramatizes the culture of corruption that permeated Alaska, with images of fat men smoking cigars in dark rooms and the infamous Suite 604 at the Baranof Hotel in Juneau, where the FBI secretly videotaped executives of the oil services company VECO in a corruption scandal that would shake the foundations of Alaska government just as Palin was making a name for herself as an ethics crusader.
"The Undefeated" conveys the dramatic extent to which Palin's world has changed in just a few years, as it shows her announcing her gubernatorial campaign not at a massive rally but at a sparsely attended press conference in her kitchen. Those unfamiliar with Palin's political background will be surprised to learn that the woman who has become one of the nation's most boisterous press critics was once such a media darling that two of the Alaska TV news correspondents whose highly favorable reports are shown in the film ended up leaving their jobs to join the Palin administration.
Palin's charisma has in recent years often been overshadowed by the more unforgiving side of her personality, but one scene from the film illustrates how she has long used her personal charm to disarm and discombobulate her competitors.
"Oh, this will be fun," Palin says to her soon-to-be vanquished Democratic gubernatorial opponent, Tony Knowles, during a brief encounter in Anchorage on primary night in 2006. Knowles remains speechless, while Palin smiles and adds an "Oh, golly" for good measure.
Mining the ‘Maverick' Label
Palin's stint as a hard-charging reformer in Juneau won her approval ratings that consistently topped 80 percent and made her the most popular governor in America, catching the eye of the McCain campaign. It was the "maverick" label that piqued McCain's interest in 2008 -- far more than Palin's supposed purity on social issues -- just as it does the filmmaker's.
The movie focuses on Palin's triumphs on fiscal and energy matters, while ignoring hot-button topics like abortion. Indeed, although she was always identified as a staunch social conservative, Palin often worked more closely with Democrats than Republicans in Juneau and largely avoided ideological fights during her first two years in office.
Yet Palin the Fighter is an ever-present theme in the documentary; one of its most memorable moments occurs when Meg Stapleton recalls an encounter at the Fairbanks airport when Palin literally stared down an oil executive who told her, "You don't know who you're messing with."
The film's third act puts a positive spin on Palin's 2008 vice presidential run, reminding viewers of her initially valuable impact on the McCain campaign by showing the Gallup poll trend lines that had the Republican ticket taking its first lead over the Democrats before the collapse of Lehman Brothers on Sept. 15.
It also gives an extended treatment to Palin's speech at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., her finest hour politically.
"The Undefeated" eschews less flattering topics, such as the Troopergate saga -- which had little effect on the VP campaign but left a lastingly negative impression of Palin in the eyes of many Alaskans -- and her unimpressive series of interviews with Katie Couric.
Bannon dramatizes the theme of Palin's persecution at the hands of her enemies in the media and both political parties, a notion the former governor has long embraced. Images of lions killing a zebra and a dead medieval soldier with an arrow sticking in his back dramatize the ethics complaints filed by obscure Alaskan citizens, which Palin has cited as the primary reason for her sudden resignation in July of 2009.
Fighting Words
The film's coda is introduced with an on-screen caption that reads, "From here, I can see November." It is here that Mark Levin alludes to Ronald Reagan as a Palin-like insurgent who was also once distrusted by the GOP establishment.
Palin is then shown firing up a rally that occurred just last month on the steps of the state capitol in Wisconsin. "What we need is for you to stand up, GOP, and fight," Palin, in vintage campaign form, shouts to the crowd. "Maybe I should ask some of the Badger women's hockey team -- those champions -- maybe I should ask them if we should be suggesting to GOP leaders they need to learn how to fight like a girl!"
Following an extended in-your-face riff by Andrew Breitbart in which he repeatedly denounces as "eunuchs" the male Republican leaders who decline to defend Palin, the film ends with one last scene from the April rally in Madison: "Mr. President, game on!" Palin shouts before a martial drumbeat ushers in a closing quotation by Thomas Paine, which also appeared in "Going Rogue." The implication is neither subtle nor easy to dismiss.
In a telling sign of how the film's message has already resonated with her own thought process, Palin made reference to the Paine quotation during an appearance on Greta Van Susteren's Fox News show last week shortly after she viewed a rough cut of the film for the first time.
"It's like Thomas Paine said, Greta, one of our founders. He said, ‘If there be trouble, let it be in my day that my child may have peace,'" Palin said. "I think of that when I consider whether running for office or not."
SarahPAC's treasurer Tim Crawford confirmed that "The Undefeated" was a hit with Palin.
"The governor thought it was great," Crawford said.
Bannon's film also resonated with members of Palin's staff, including Mansour.
"I'm a huge fan of Steve's work," Mansour said in a statement to RCP on Tuesday. "His film on President Reagan, ‘In the Face of Evil,' is my favorite documentary, and his ‘Generation Zero' was a rallying cry for the Tea Party movement early on. I think his new film really captures the essence of Governor Palin's stewardship of Alaska, and I think people will be really surprised by it. It shatters so many false stereotypes because it shows what she actually accomplished as governor. You can't leave it thinking the same way about Sarah Palin."
In the last couple of months, Palin has delivered major policy speeches, hired a chief of staff, made a well-publicized foreign trip that included a visit with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, all the while remaining consistent about her vow -- first made just days after the 2008 campaign ended -- that she would "crash through" any of the "open doors" that might lead to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Bannon intends to premiere the film in Iowa late next month before expanding the release to New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. After the initial rollout in the four early voting states, the filmmaker will eventually release it to somewhere between 50 and 100 markets nationwide.
Palin aides have not yet decided whether the former governor will play an active role in the film's premiere, but there has been some preliminary discussion of purchasing copies of the film from Bannon to distribute as gifts to SarahPAC donors.
Bannon is also working out a video-on-demand deal that will make the movie more widely accessible.
Palin has been tight-lipped about which way she is leaning in regard to running for president next year, but her team of advisers is operating under the notion that they are laying the groundwork for a future campaign, until they are told otherwise.
Palin's future presidential bid might be based in the Phoenix area -- where Bristol Palin also recently purchased a new home -- but Palin's aides have yet to reach out to potential venues for a campaign headquarters in Arizona.
Despite Palin's apparent desire to wait as long as possible before making her decision, aides acknowledge that they will soon have to establish a more campaign-like operation in order to begin a more concerted effort to raise money and take other steps that would be required -- even for a potential candidate as unconventional as Palin.
Meanwhile, the news about Palin's initial effort to commission a film project to highlight her political record is sure to put additional pressure on Fox News to demand an answer from one of their star contributors on whether she intends to run for president or continue working as a political analyst on the network that may soon find itself reporting on her campaign.
Palin and her aides have appeared to recognize that despite some recent polls showing her near the top of the prospective Republican field, she still has substantial problems with independent voters and large swaths of the GOP. Even more daunting will be finding a way to explain persuasively just how it was that ethics complainers and liberal bloggers -- whom other politicians in her shoes might have largely dismissed as relatively minor nuisances -- succeeded in forcing her of office.
But coming on the heels of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's decision not to join the fray, many grassroots conservatives are clamoring for a candidate who has both the stature and the sizzle to compete with President Obama.
If she does decide to run, "The Undefeated" will be the key element to her initial coming-out party. The film's impending release -- and the frenzied media attention that it is sure to generate -- will serve as a vivid wake-up call that despite the many obstacles in front of her, Palin's entry into the race would turn the campaign on its head in an instant, just as it did in 2008.
As she mulls her decision in the coming weeks, the other Republican candidates in the field will be left to prepare for a hibernating grizzly who appears poised to rise up once again.
‹‹Previous Page |1 | 2 | 3 |
Scott Conroy is a national political reporter for RealClearPolitics. He can be reached at sconroy@realclearpolitics.com.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/05/25/palins_secret_weapon_new_film_to_premiere_in_june_109949-full.html at May 24, 2011 - 07:18:57 PM PDT
Obama’s Malignant Obsession with Jews and Israel
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/36846
Obama’s Malignant Obsession with Jews and Israel
Joan Swirsky, CFP.com
Jew hatred comes in many forms, all of them irrational and unsupported by empirical fact, but all of them powerful and largely effective in deflecting personal and political failures onto a tiny people, which by their mere existence highlight the glaring deficiencies that exist in their adversaries. Like a deadly systemic infection, be it viral or bacterial, Jew hatred comes in many strains.
STRAIN #1—THE DUMB FACTOR
This strain is based mostly on ignorance. In short, a dim-witted parent, family member, friend, teacher or coach—who was “schooled” by another dimwit—tells an innocent child that everything that is wrong with his or her life is because of “the Jew” who lives down the street or employs his or her parent or publishes the local newspaper whatever.
“They may look like you and me,” the critic says, “but underneath that head of hair are horns, and by the way they bake their Passover holiday bread-substitute with the blood of kids like you and your sister, and you should know that they control all the money in the world, and never forget that they killed Jesus.” Then the kid gets older and his actual life experience contradicts what he’s heard as he or she studies or socializes or works with Jews and sometimes falls in love and marries one.
But the Dumb Strain, it seems, never quite dissipates as even “reformed” Jew haters brag with genuine pride that their doctors and lawyers and accountants are Jewish! They want other people to consider them intelligent enough to pick “the best” professionals, while they’re also boasting that the last bargain they got was a result of “Jewing down” the store manager. As I said, dumb.
But dumb anti-Semitism is still anti-Semitism, just like dumb stereotypes about tap-dancing blacks or whiskey-guzzling Irish people or can’t-screw-in-a-light-bulb Poles or Mambo-obsessed Hispanics or kemo-sabe-spouting American Indians are still destructive to a decent and respectful social order.
The only difference is that malevolently stereotyping Jews—and, today, Christians—has once again become acceptable, whereas defaming other groups is strictly taboo among the fetishists of political correctness and multiculturalism, selective as they are in what offends their very delicate sensibilities.
Say something even mildly negative about women, gays, Muslim terrorists, or the above-mentioned ethnic groups and the leftists among us go into an orgy of frenzied outrage. But slander a Jew—or murder a Jew—no problem.
Glaring examples emanate daily from the Middle East, where “Palestinian” jihadists not only slit the throats of Israeli babies, but vow to destroy the Jewish state, while the craven Western media scramble to rationalize their bestial acts or, predictably, blame the victims.
But how to explain the Jew hatred that has come to our shores, in, for instance, the egregious non-action of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York City, which this month stopped a plot by two terrorists to bomb the largest synagogue in the Big Apple, but decided not to press charges—to let the jihadists go—because the incident was probably “mischief”?
And that’s only an infinitesimal part of the ongoing and deliberate attempt to marginalize not only Jews in general but the sovereign State of Israel, our most trusted and only democratic ally in the entire Middle East.
STRAIN #2—THE EMOTIONAL FACTOR
There are legions of highly intelligent people—in terms of IQs, advanced college degrees, professional accomplishments, published books, and fancy titles—who are nonetheless driven almost exclusively by their feelings. Ironic that they’ve spent lifetimes honing their razor-sharp intellects, refining their debating skills, priding themselves on scrupulous research—but still, emotion prevails. This is no surprise because, simply, emotions are stronger than the intellect. On PET scans of the brain, anger and fear “light up” significantly more than the higher cognitive processes of reasoning and logic.
The emotional anti-Semite is one into whose brain the thorn of Jew hatred gets stuck, and no amount of rationalizing or higher-center thought can excise it. Even the one who harbors the feelings may wonder about the dissonant “reasoning” that inspires this hatred. But like the Mark of Cain, it’s there for life.
In a very real way, Jew hatred is consoling to this species, analogous to the Xanax that so many people take to alleviate anxiety. Have a problem that is unbearably agitating? It’s the Jews! Aahhh, I feel better. Feeling depressed? I don’t need an anti-depressant like Celexa or Lexapro, it’s the Jews! Aahhh, I feel better.
This type of anti-Semitism is the default position of people who are “smart” enough to reinvent objective history and who purposefully invent events such as the Al Dura hoax or deny that the Holocaust ever existed in order to create an anti-Semitic “reality” out of whole cloth, one that invariably gibes with their intractable, all-consuming hatred of Jews.
Think of a person with childhood-onset diabetes or a seizure disorder. No amount of hoping the condition away has any effect. It’s simply there, deep within, with symptoms that must be treated constantly in order to stem the horrible symptoms that ensue if the condition is not attended to. Emotion-driven anti-Semitism is in this category, incurable but, unlike diabetes, unfortunately untreatable.
STRAIN #3—THE SELF-HATE FACTOR
Okay, you may say, people of other religions may hate Jews, but how is it possible for Jews themselves to hate Jews? Surprisingly, the answer is rather simple: It’s hard to be a Jew, and most people simply aren’t up to it. Yes, they can be proud of their brains and talents, but when it comes to their backbones—that’s another story.
The most universal desire in the world is to be liked and accepted, starting with pre-verbal babies who know by the smiles of strangers that the world is a friendly and welcoming place, and extending to full-grown adults who continue to seek acceptance in intimate relationships as well as in groups, including in the workplace, in recreational activities, and in politics.
For many Jews, being a member of the world’s most historically vilified minority is just “too much” to cope with. In fact, to withstand the relentless onslaught would require them to have an accurate knowledge of Jewish history, a history that the spineless set has abandoned teaching their children. It would require a willingness to correct the constant blitz of misinformation that an anti-Semitic world never tires of perpetuating. It would require a willingness to stand on principle when the entire world is substituting propaganda and violence for righteousness. And it would require a belief that the land of Israel was indeed bequeathed to the Jews by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that their return to Zion after Hitler incinerated six million of their brethren during the Holocaust was the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, and that, perversely and for the first time in world history, they should return the lands won in the belligerent wars waged against them by anti-Semitic Arabs who remain intractably so to this day.
Liberal Jews are not psychologically up to any of these challenges, hence their pathetic over-eagerness to “understand” the people who hate them, to accommodate themselves to the enemies of Israel (which means all Jews), to capitulate to the ever-escalating and invariably-one-sided demands for “compromise,” to slavishly follow Jews like linguist Noam Chomsky and financier George Soros and playwright Tony Kushner who are so suffused with Jew hatred that their entire lives have been devoted to amputating any vestige of Jewish identity from their beings, to vote year after year after year for Israel-loathing leftists like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, and to stand up and applaud Obama at an AIPAC conference not 48 hours after he announced his intention to plunge Israel back to what then-Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban referred to as “the Auschwitz borders” of 1967!
As Boris Shusteff, a Russian immigrant to the United States and a research associate at the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies, writes: “The simple truth is that under the facade of their `progressiveness` there is always a subconsciously hidden attempt to escape from their Jewishness. They use beautiful words and convincing arguments to prove the necessity of fighting for somebody else’s abstract rights instead of proudly defending their own. They say that they ennoble the world community by defending the interests of other nations, while disregarding the fate of their brethren. They rush to a cosmopolitan universe, where all the uniqueness of the nations disappears and where they can call themselves citizens of the universe.”
Aha, the famous “one world order” the progressives among us have embraced, while they demonize Jews like me—and there are millions of us—who prefer not to have their identities blended and bastardized into some amorphous tasteless valueless Godless gruel!
STRAIN #4—THE MOTHER’S MILK FACTOR
This variant is infused into tabula rasa embryos by a loathing so systemic it suggests a DNA aberration. After delivery, infants literally imbibe a particularly toxic brew of anti-Semitism flowing either from their mothers’ breast milk or worldview. And when they have been sufficiently intoxicated, they enter into a family and “culture” that makes the hatred of Jews their entire raison d’√™tre.
This strain has been on vivid display in the Arab world for decades—actually centuries—where toddlers are taught to echo the Jew hatred drummed daily into their developing brains, instead of being taught how to play the piano or play ball or play with dolls, and where young children are taught by the time they’re three-years-old how to strap suicide bombs onto their young bodies.
It is in this “culture,” which has not changed significantly since the seventh century, that “leaders” keep the abhorrence going by inflaming the masses they have purposefully kept poor and ignorant, the better to energize them not by jobs and creativity but by the adrenaline fueled by hatred. These palace-dwelling leaders generously pay the media to perpetuate the hate, and also endlessly “play” the United States of America like a Stradivarius by extorting billions every year to keep a so-called reasonable lid on their Jew hatred.
No wonder Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, said: “We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”
But it’s not just Arabs and Muslims who make the hatred of Jews the virtual centerpiece of their lives. There is the full-blown return of anti-Semitism in Europe, as Guy Milli√®re writes, where citizens have now been effectively Islamized and the entire region is on the way again to being Judenrein, or “cleansed of Jews.” In fact, anti-Semitism has now reached pandemic proportions, right in time for an American “president” to help orchestrate the so-called spontaneous “pro-democracy” uprisings throughout the Arab world, from Tunisia to Yemen to Egypt to Lebanon to Jordan to Syria to Bahrain, on and on.
Yes, orchestrate! And while he’s at it, make a practice out of de facto condoning the butchery and hatred of America’s and Israel’s enemies Iran and Syria, while at the same time punishing America’s longtime allies and Israel’s longtime “cold peace” partners Egypt and Libya.
To what end? Certainly not to encourage democracy, of which the entire world has seen not a hint since this smoke-and-mirrors travesty began, but rather to ferret in the real new world order, in which the virulently anti-Semitic, Nazi-inspired Muslim Brotherhood will reign, with its oft-stated intentions of obliterating Israel and every last Jew who breathes on its land. (During World War II, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt allied himself with Hitler and was active in recruiting Arabs for the Waffen SS).That’s the same Muslim Brotherhood whose terrorist branch Hamas has launched over 12,000 missiles at Israeli civilians. The same Muslim Brotherhood—in Egypt—that condemned Bin Laden’s death and wants to end the peace accord with Israel. The same Muslim Brotherhood that, according to Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, citing an AP report, is about to receive $1 billion from Obama! As Hoft says, “Obama wants to reward them.”
STRAIN #5—THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER FACTOR
According to author and columnist Dennis Prager, the reason that “for thousands of years there has been so much attention paid to Jews and why, today, to Israel, the one Jewish state is that Jews are God’s Chosen People.
Atheists are exempted from this theory, Prager says, because “they don’t believe in a Chooser, so they cannot believe in a Chosen. But for most believing Jews and Christians (most particularly the Founders who saw America as a Second Israel, a second Chosen People), Jewish Chosen-ness has been a given.”
Prager says the proof of this “chosen-ness” is that “evil has consistently targeted the Jews,” for instance:
Nazi Germany was more concerned with exterminating the Jews than with winning World War II.
Throughout its 70-year history, the Soviet Union persecuted its Jews and tried to extinguish Judaism.
The United Nations has spent more time discussing and condemning the Jewish state than any other country in the world.
Much of the contemporary Muslim world—and nearly all the Arab world—is obsessed with annihilating the one Jewish state.
This obsession, he says, “can be best explained only in transcendent terms, namely that God, for whatever reason, chose the Jews.”
But I think of an equally visceral kind of jealousy when I contemplate the Greatest Hatred Ever Known. I think of what it must be like for a huge population of well over 300-million Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East to watch as the straggling remnants of European Jewry—cadaverous, hungry, heartbroken, stupefied by the cruelty they had endured and witnessed—rose up to repel the savage Arab armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria (backed by Saudi Arabia and Yemen)—that tried to annihilate the nascent Jewish State in 1948 and then to defeat them again and again in the many wars the Arabs continued to initiate.
And what must it be like for the immensely wealthy Arab potentates , as well as their serfs, to not only lose war after war to the Jews, but to see the people they call “pigs” literally make long-barren deserts bloom, to have the world’s only thriving economy, to lead the world in technology and science, to create magnificent symphonies and athletic teams and life-saving medical remedies, et al, while the most the Arab world has ever accomplished in the last six decades is to “create” terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and of course those itty bitty suicide bombers.
And further imagine what it must be like to live in these feudal swamps and to know that big bad America—which has sent trillions of dollars to the Arab countries over the years—continues to support the sole democracy in the Middle East, Israel.
It must be eerily like what the black citizens of America and their leftist leaders think when they contemplate the wealth of our country and realize that every program—in education and job-equality and equitable healthcare that the liberals-cum-progressives have magnanimously funded and enacted for over half a century—has failed thunderously.
What do these two things have in common? Again, the answer is so simple—rage and envy. The same things that the Arabs don’t “get” about the roots of genuine success and empowerment are the same things that community organizers—and for that matter the Resident in the White House—don’t “get,” is that self-actualization, certainly for Americans, is not based on a mind-set of victimhood and lifelong entitlement but rather on the reality of plain old nose-to-the-grindstone hard work, resilience in the face of adversity, the strength of family ties, a devotion to the U.S. Constitution, and a belief in the overriding Judeo-Christian ethos that has blessed our country with benevolence and guidance for nearly 235 years.
WHO IS BEHIND OBAMA’S OBSESSION?
That is, his malignant obsession with Jews and with Israel!
Untold numbers of words have been written about the woman and man Obama claims were his mother and father, the far-left Stanley Ann Dunham and the Kenyan-born Marxist, Barack Obama Sr. Then there is the couple he claims were his grandparents, the far-left Madelyn Dunham and Stanley Armour Dunham. I say “claims” because there is still no certifiable birth certificate that attests either to Obama’s parentage or citizenship. But we do know that these people “raised” Obama and along with Frank Marshall Davis, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Rev. Louis Farrakhan, et al, profoundly influenced his hate-whitey, anti-American, and anti-Israel world view.
Last year, to the month, I wrote Obama’s Jewish Problem, in which I remarked that “to prepare for his meeting on May 18 with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama prepared a menu of poison pills—the kind given to people with the same Hobson’s Choice that Mafia attorney Tom Hagen gave to the imprisoned and about-to-testify-before-Congress Frankie Pentangeli in `Godfather Two`—either commit suicide or we’re going to kill you.” Sound familiar?!
In that article, I listed the people—more accurately, collaborators—who aid and abet what Mona Charen calls Obama’s “genocidal hostility toward Israel.” The following is the short list:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who according to Dick Morris has had “relationships with terrorists [that] began in the mid-1980s when she served on the Board of the New World Foundation, which gave funds to the Palestine Liberation Organization [when] the PLO was officially recognized by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization.”
Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who has advocated ending all U.S. military aid to Israel and has inspired dozens of articles with titles like these in Commentary: Susan Rice Is Doing Something at the UN: Targeting Israel and What Was Susan Rice’s Embarrassing Anti-Israel Tirade Supposed to Accomplish?
Lee Hamilton, who Ed Lasky calls the eminence grise of Obama’s Mideast policy and who has suggested that the U.S. should pressure Israel to surrender the Golan Heights and leave the West Bank—but not a word about dismantling Hamas or Hezbollah!
Zbigniew Brzezinski, longtime Israel loather, who suggested that the Obama administration should tell Israel that the U.S. will attack Israeli jets if they try to attack Iran.
John Brennan, Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security, suggests, among other egregious things, that Obama & Co. “reach out” to Hezbollah.
Samantha Power, now on Obama’s National Security Council, has advocated ending all U.S. military aid to Israel and written of her willingness to “alienate a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import [American Jews]...” She has also advocated, Ed Lasky writes, “that America send armed military forces,” “a mammoth protection force” and an “external intervention” to” impose a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.”
Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s Senior Advisor. According to Ulsterman, the by-now infamous Washington Insider, “weeks after widespread Middle East chaos first erupted, and with a growing number of nations now poised to join the likes of Egypt and Libya into all out rebellion, some are finally questioning the role played by the Obama White House in helping to hasten these events. Of primary concern is the reasoning behind Barack Obama’s quick repudiation of Egypt’s Mubarak, and near silence regarding Libya’s Gaddafi. Why such a disparity in tone between one uprising vs another? ...Perhaps the answer to this disparity can be found with President Obama’s closest and most powerful adviser—[Iranian-born Muslim] Valerie Jarrett
In addition, according to Ryan Mauro, founder of WorldThreats.com: “The “most influential Muslim” in the White House is Dalia MogahedShe is a close colleague of John Esposito, a staunch defender of the Muslim Brotherhood and a witness for the defense during the Holy Land Foundation trial. Officials from the Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration, have made a concerted effort to court these Brotherhood affiliates, including senior advisor Valerie Jarrett; chief counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan; Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano; Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough and many other lower-level government officials”
And that is not to omit the aforementioned George Soros, the man who is running not only Barack Obama but just about the entire American media. According to Dan Gainor, Soros “spent $27 million trying to defeat President Bush in 2004 [and today] has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets—including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, NBC and ABC.”
I can’t think of one of Obama’s advisors, czars, even Court Jews who is not floridly anti-Israel, in both word and deed. The belief, indeed conviction, that all of these people have in common is that everything wrong with their lives and with the world would magically disappear if only those damned Jews and their damned country Israel were destroyed. Hence the salami tactics to whittle away territory until Israelis simply cannot defend themselves and so perish at the hands of neighbors who have been promising nothing less than annihilation for decades.
This is Obama’s malignant intention, as well. Hence the 1967 lines!
THE BETRAYAL UNMASKED
This is the title of an article by Paul Schnee, in which he says that the Obama speech “confirmed in the starkest terms why his long held prejudices, cloaked as a foreign policy, have made his Oval Office not only the graveyard for any peace and justice in the Middle East but also the incubator for the next great conflict there.
“Obama’s intentions towards Israel have never been good,” Schnee adds, “but yesterday he proved just how hostile he is to the Jewish state of Israel. One of the most perverse forms of anti-Semitism is to expect Jews to die meekly His speech was a shameful act in a career of shameful acts”
Victor Sharpe, author of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish State, agrees. “Obama parrots the Arab policy of `stages` whereby Israel is forced to commit national suicide through the diabolical euphemism called `land for peace.‘Obama embraces the darkness of the Arab world and chooses—not from ignorance but from hatred—to enact under his watch the eventual annihilation of the Jewish state.”
Is there any light in this bleak picture? According to Professor Barry Rubin, director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, “Israel is not going to allow a president with no credibility, who clearly doesn’t understand what’s at stake, fails to support his Arab allies, is soft on his Iranian and Syrian enemies, doesn’t learn from his past errors, is sacrificing U.S. interests in the region, and pays no attention to what’s happening in Egypt, to determine its future.”
But the last word (at least of this article) has to go to writer and Army veteran J.D. Longstreet, who cites Amos and Jeremiah and Ezekiel in “America’s Betrayal of Israel,” in which he states:
“Let me be very clear here: ISRAEL WILL NOT LOSE. Its enemies WILL lose…as a result of the Obama’s announced policy demanding that Israel return to the pre-1967 war borders.
What Obama, and Israel’s other enemies, fail to understand (or understand it and choose to ignore it) is this: That of all the dry land on this planet earth, there is only one tiny little piece of geography that God, Himself, has designated as belonging to a single people—ISRAEL.
What the evangelical Christian Americans rightly understand is this: When God brought the people of Israel, His people, home and gave them a “state,” a nation, in May of 1948, God had already made it as plain as possible that Israel would never be moved from that land again—forever.
Joan Swirsky
Joan Swirsky Most recent columns
Joan Swirsky is an award winning author and journalist. Her work can be found at joanswirsky.com
Joan can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com
Obama’s Malignant Obsession with Jews and Israel
Joan Swirsky, CFP.com
Jew hatred comes in many forms, all of them irrational and unsupported by empirical fact, but all of them powerful and largely effective in deflecting personal and political failures onto a tiny people, which by their mere existence highlight the glaring deficiencies that exist in their adversaries. Like a deadly systemic infection, be it viral or bacterial, Jew hatred comes in many strains.
STRAIN #1—THE DUMB FACTOR
This strain is based mostly on ignorance. In short, a dim-witted parent, family member, friend, teacher or coach—who was “schooled” by another dimwit—tells an innocent child that everything that is wrong with his or her life is because of “the Jew” who lives down the street or employs his or her parent or publishes the local newspaper whatever.
“They may look like you and me,” the critic says, “but underneath that head of hair are horns, and by the way they bake their Passover holiday bread-substitute with the blood of kids like you and your sister, and you should know that they control all the money in the world, and never forget that they killed Jesus.” Then the kid gets older and his actual life experience contradicts what he’s heard as he or she studies or socializes or works with Jews and sometimes falls in love and marries one.
But the Dumb Strain, it seems, never quite dissipates as even “reformed” Jew haters brag with genuine pride that their doctors and lawyers and accountants are Jewish! They want other people to consider them intelligent enough to pick “the best” professionals, while they’re also boasting that the last bargain they got was a result of “Jewing down” the store manager. As I said, dumb.
But dumb anti-Semitism is still anti-Semitism, just like dumb stereotypes about tap-dancing blacks or whiskey-guzzling Irish people or can’t-screw-in-a-light-bulb Poles or Mambo-obsessed Hispanics or kemo-sabe-spouting American Indians are still destructive to a decent and respectful social order.
The only difference is that malevolently stereotyping Jews—and, today, Christians—has once again become acceptable, whereas defaming other groups is strictly taboo among the fetishists of political correctness and multiculturalism, selective as they are in what offends their very delicate sensibilities.
Say something even mildly negative about women, gays, Muslim terrorists, or the above-mentioned ethnic groups and the leftists among us go into an orgy of frenzied outrage. But slander a Jew—or murder a Jew—no problem.
Glaring examples emanate daily from the Middle East, where “Palestinian” jihadists not only slit the throats of Israeli babies, but vow to destroy the Jewish state, while the craven Western media scramble to rationalize their bestial acts or, predictably, blame the victims.
But how to explain the Jew hatred that has come to our shores, in, for instance, the egregious non-action of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York City, which this month stopped a plot by two terrorists to bomb the largest synagogue in the Big Apple, but decided not to press charges—to let the jihadists go—because the incident was probably “mischief”?
And that’s only an infinitesimal part of the ongoing and deliberate attempt to marginalize not only Jews in general but the sovereign State of Israel, our most trusted and only democratic ally in the entire Middle East.
STRAIN #2—THE EMOTIONAL FACTOR
There are legions of highly intelligent people—in terms of IQs, advanced college degrees, professional accomplishments, published books, and fancy titles—who are nonetheless driven almost exclusively by their feelings. Ironic that they’ve spent lifetimes honing their razor-sharp intellects, refining their debating skills, priding themselves on scrupulous research—but still, emotion prevails. This is no surprise because, simply, emotions are stronger than the intellect. On PET scans of the brain, anger and fear “light up” significantly more than the higher cognitive processes of reasoning and logic.
The emotional anti-Semite is one into whose brain the thorn of Jew hatred gets stuck, and no amount of rationalizing or higher-center thought can excise it. Even the one who harbors the feelings may wonder about the dissonant “reasoning” that inspires this hatred. But like the Mark of Cain, it’s there for life.
In a very real way, Jew hatred is consoling to this species, analogous to the Xanax that so many people take to alleviate anxiety. Have a problem that is unbearably agitating? It’s the Jews! Aahhh, I feel better. Feeling depressed? I don’t need an anti-depressant like Celexa or Lexapro, it’s the Jews! Aahhh, I feel better.
This type of anti-Semitism is the default position of people who are “smart” enough to reinvent objective history and who purposefully invent events such as the Al Dura hoax or deny that the Holocaust ever existed in order to create an anti-Semitic “reality” out of whole cloth, one that invariably gibes with their intractable, all-consuming hatred of Jews.
Think of a person with childhood-onset diabetes or a seizure disorder. No amount of hoping the condition away has any effect. It’s simply there, deep within, with symptoms that must be treated constantly in order to stem the horrible symptoms that ensue if the condition is not attended to. Emotion-driven anti-Semitism is in this category, incurable but, unlike diabetes, unfortunately untreatable.
STRAIN #3—THE SELF-HATE FACTOR
Okay, you may say, people of other religions may hate Jews, but how is it possible for Jews themselves to hate Jews? Surprisingly, the answer is rather simple: It’s hard to be a Jew, and most people simply aren’t up to it. Yes, they can be proud of their brains and talents, but when it comes to their backbones—that’s another story.
The most universal desire in the world is to be liked and accepted, starting with pre-verbal babies who know by the smiles of strangers that the world is a friendly and welcoming place, and extending to full-grown adults who continue to seek acceptance in intimate relationships as well as in groups, including in the workplace, in recreational activities, and in politics.
For many Jews, being a member of the world’s most historically vilified minority is just “too much” to cope with. In fact, to withstand the relentless onslaught would require them to have an accurate knowledge of Jewish history, a history that the spineless set has abandoned teaching their children. It would require a willingness to correct the constant blitz of misinformation that an anti-Semitic world never tires of perpetuating. It would require a willingness to stand on principle when the entire world is substituting propaganda and violence for righteousness. And it would require a belief that the land of Israel was indeed bequeathed to the Jews by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that their return to Zion after Hitler incinerated six million of their brethren during the Holocaust was the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, and that, perversely and for the first time in world history, they should return the lands won in the belligerent wars waged against them by anti-Semitic Arabs who remain intractably so to this day.
Liberal Jews are not psychologically up to any of these challenges, hence their pathetic over-eagerness to “understand” the people who hate them, to accommodate themselves to the enemies of Israel (which means all Jews), to capitulate to the ever-escalating and invariably-one-sided demands for “compromise,” to slavishly follow Jews like linguist Noam Chomsky and financier George Soros and playwright Tony Kushner who are so suffused with Jew hatred that their entire lives have been devoted to amputating any vestige of Jewish identity from their beings, to vote year after year after year for Israel-loathing leftists like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, and to stand up and applaud Obama at an AIPAC conference not 48 hours after he announced his intention to plunge Israel back to what then-Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban referred to as “the Auschwitz borders” of 1967!
As Boris Shusteff, a Russian immigrant to the United States and a research associate at the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies, writes: “The simple truth is that under the facade of their `progressiveness` there is always a subconsciously hidden attempt to escape from their Jewishness. They use beautiful words and convincing arguments to prove the necessity of fighting for somebody else’s abstract rights instead of proudly defending their own. They say that they ennoble the world community by defending the interests of other nations, while disregarding the fate of their brethren. They rush to a cosmopolitan universe, where all the uniqueness of the nations disappears and where they can call themselves citizens of the universe.”
Aha, the famous “one world order” the progressives among us have embraced, while they demonize Jews like me—and there are millions of us—who prefer not to have their identities blended and bastardized into some amorphous tasteless valueless Godless gruel!
STRAIN #4—THE MOTHER’S MILK FACTOR
This variant is infused into tabula rasa embryos by a loathing so systemic it suggests a DNA aberration. After delivery, infants literally imbibe a particularly toxic brew of anti-Semitism flowing either from their mothers’ breast milk or worldview. And when they have been sufficiently intoxicated, they enter into a family and “culture” that makes the hatred of Jews their entire raison d’√™tre.
This strain has been on vivid display in the Arab world for decades—actually centuries—where toddlers are taught to echo the Jew hatred drummed daily into their developing brains, instead of being taught how to play the piano or play ball or play with dolls, and where young children are taught by the time they’re three-years-old how to strap suicide bombs onto their young bodies.
It is in this “culture,” which has not changed significantly since the seventh century, that “leaders” keep the abhorrence going by inflaming the masses they have purposefully kept poor and ignorant, the better to energize them not by jobs and creativity but by the adrenaline fueled by hatred. These palace-dwelling leaders generously pay the media to perpetuate the hate, and also endlessly “play” the United States of America like a Stradivarius by extorting billions every year to keep a so-called reasonable lid on their Jew hatred.
No wonder Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, said: “We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”
But it’s not just Arabs and Muslims who make the hatred of Jews the virtual centerpiece of their lives. There is the full-blown return of anti-Semitism in Europe, as Guy Milli√®re writes, where citizens have now been effectively Islamized and the entire region is on the way again to being Judenrein, or “cleansed of Jews.” In fact, anti-Semitism has now reached pandemic proportions, right in time for an American “president” to help orchestrate the so-called spontaneous “pro-democracy” uprisings throughout the Arab world, from Tunisia to Yemen to Egypt to Lebanon to Jordan to Syria to Bahrain, on and on.
Yes, orchestrate! And while he’s at it, make a practice out of de facto condoning the butchery and hatred of America’s and Israel’s enemies Iran and Syria, while at the same time punishing America’s longtime allies and Israel’s longtime “cold peace” partners Egypt and Libya.
To what end? Certainly not to encourage democracy, of which the entire world has seen not a hint since this smoke-and-mirrors travesty began, but rather to ferret in the real new world order, in which the virulently anti-Semitic, Nazi-inspired Muslim Brotherhood will reign, with its oft-stated intentions of obliterating Israel and every last Jew who breathes on its land. (During World War II, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt allied himself with Hitler and was active in recruiting Arabs for the Waffen SS).That’s the same Muslim Brotherhood whose terrorist branch Hamas has launched over 12,000 missiles at Israeli civilians. The same Muslim Brotherhood—in Egypt—that condemned Bin Laden’s death and wants to end the peace accord with Israel. The same Muslim Brotherhood that, according to Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, citing an AP report, is about to receive $1 billion from Obama! As Hoft says, “Obama wants to reward them.”
STRAIN #5—THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER FACTOR
According to author and columnist Dennis Prager, the reason that “for thousands of years there has been so much attention paid to Jews and why, today, to Israel, the one Jewish state is that Jews are God’s Chosen People.
Atheists are exempted from this theory, Prager says, because “they don’t believe in a Chooser, so they cannot believe in a Chosen. But for most believing Jews and Christians (most particularly the Founders who saw America as a Second Israel, a second Chosen People), Jewish Chosen-ness has been a given.”
Prager says the proof of this “chosen-ness” is that “evil has consistently targeted the Jews,” for instance:
Nazi Germany was more concerned with exterminating the Jews than with winning World War II.
Throughout its 70-year history, the Soviet Union persecuted its Jews and tried to extinguish Judaism.
The United Nations has spent more time discussing and condemning the Jewish state than any other country in the world.
Much of the contemporary Muslim world—and nearly all the Arab world—is obsessed with annihilating the one Jewish state.
This obsession, he says, “can be best explained only in transcendent terms, namely that God, for whatever reason, chose the Jews.”
But I think of an equally visceral kind of jealousy when I contemplate the Greatest Hatred Ever Known. I think of what it must be like for a huge population of well over 300-million Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East to watch as the straggling remnants of European Jewry—cadaverous, hungry, heartbroken, stupefied by the cruelty they had endured and witnessed—rose up to repel the savage Arab armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria (backed by Saudi Arabia and Yemen)—that tried to annihilate the nascent Jewish State in 1948 and then to defeat them again and again in the many wars the Arabs continued to initiate.
And what must it be like for the immensely wealthy Arab potentates , as well as their serfs, to not only lose war after war to the Jews, but to see the people they call “pigs” literally make long-barren deserts bloom, to have the world’s only thriving economy, to lead the world in technology and science, to create magnificent symphonies and athletic teams and life-saving medical remedies, et al, while the most the Arab world has ever accomplished in the last six decades is to “create” terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and of course those itty bitty suicide bombers.
And further imagine what it must be like to live in these feudal swamps and to know that big bad America—which has sent trillions of dollars to the Arab countries over the years—continues to support the sole democracy in the Middle East, Israel.
It must be eerily like what the black citizens of America and their leftist leaders think when they contemplate the wealth of our country and realize that every program—in education and job-equality and equitable healthcare that the liberals-cum-progressives have magnanimously funded and enacted for over half a century—has failed thunderously.
What do these two things have in common? Again, the answer is so simple—rage and envy. The same things that the Arabs don’t “get” about the roots of genuine success and empowerment are the same things that community organizers—and for that matter the Resident in the White House—don’t “get,” is that self-actualization, certainly for Americans, is not based on a mind-set of victimhood and lifelong entitlement but rather on the reality of plain old nose-to-the-grindstone hard work, resilience in the face of adversity, the strength of family ties, a devotion to the U.S. Constitution, and a belief in the overriding Judeo-Christian ethos that has blessed our country with benevolence and guidance for nearly 235 years.
WHO IS BEHIND OBAMA’S OBSESSION?
That is, his malignant obsession with Jews and with Israel!
Untold numbers of words have been written about the woman and man Obama claims were his mother and father, the far-left Stanley Ann Dunham and the Kenyan-born Marxist, Barack Obama Sr. Then there is the couple he claims were his grandparents, the far-left Madelyn Dunham and Stanley Armour Dunham. I say “claims” because there is still no certifiable birth certificate that attests either to Obama’s parentage or citizenship. But we do know that these people “raised” Obama and along with Frank Marshall Davis, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Rev. Louis Farrakhan, et al, profoundly influenced his hate-whitey, anti-American, and anti-Israel world view.
Last year, to the month, I wrote Obama’s Jewish Problem, in which I remarked that “to prepare for his meeting on May 18 with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama prepared a menu of poison pills—the kind given to people with the same Hobson’s Choice that Mafia attorney Tom Hagen gave to the imprisoned and about-to-testify-before-Congress Frankie Pentangeli in `Godfather Two`—either commit suicide or we’re going to kill you.” Sound familiar?!
In that article, I listed the people—more accurately, collaborators—who aid and abet what Mona Charen calls Obama’s “genocidal hostility toward Israel.” The following is the short list:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who according to Dick Morris has had “relationships with terrorists [that] began in the mid-1980s when she served on the Board of the New World Foundation, which gave funds to the Palestine Liberation Organization [when] the PLO was officially recognized by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization.”
Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who has advocated ending all U.S. military aid to Israel and has inspired dozens of articles with titles like these in Commentary: Susan Rice Is Doing Something at the UN: Targeting Israel and What Was Susan Rice’s Embarrassing Anti-Israel Tirade Supposed to Accomplish?
Lee Hamilton, who Ed Lasky calls the eminence grise of Obama’s Mideast policy and who has suggested that the U.S. should pressure Israel to surrender the Golan Heights and leave the West Bank—but not a word about dismantling Hamas or Hezbollah!
Zbigniew Brzezinski, longtime Israel loather, who suggested that the Obama administration should tell Israel that the U.S. will attack Israeli jets if they try to attack Iran.
John Brennan, Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security, suggests, among other egregious things, that Obama & Co. “reach out” to Hezbollah.
Samantha Power, now on Obama’s National Security Council, has advocated ending all U.S. military aid to Israel and written of her willingness to “alienate a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import [American Jews]...” She has also advocated, Ed Lasky writes, “that America send armed military forces,” “a mammoth protection force” and an “external intervention” to” impose a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.”
Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s Senior Advisor. According to Ulsterman, the by-now infamous Washington Insider, “weeks after widespread Middle East chaos first erupted, and with a growing number of nations now poised to join the likes of Egypt and Libya into all out rebellion, some are finally questioning the role played by the Obama White House in helping to hasten these events. Of primary concern is the reasoning behind Barack Obama’s quick repudiation of Egypt’s Mubarak, and near silence regarding Libya’s Gaddafi. Why such a disparity in tone between one uprising vs another? ...Perhaps the answer to this disparity can be found with President Obama’s closest and most powerful adviser—[Iranian-born Muslim] Valerie Jarrett
In addition, according to Ryan Mauro, founder of WorldThreats.com: “The “most influential Muslim” in the White House is Dalia MogahedShe is a close colleague of John Esposito, a staunch defender of the Muslim Brotherhood and a witness for the defense during the Holy Land Foundation trial. Officials from the Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration, have made a concerted effort to court these Brotherhood affiliates, including senior advisor Valerie Jarrett; chief counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan; Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano; Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough and many other lower-level government officials”
And that is not to omit the aforementioned George Soros, the man who is running not only Barack Obama but just about the entire American media. According to Dan Gainor, Soros “spent $27 million trying to defeat President Bush in 2004 [and today] has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets—including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, NBC and ABC.”
I can’t think of one of Obama’s advisors, czars, even Court Jews who is not floridly anti-Israel, in both word and deed. The belief, indeed conviction, that all of these people have in common is that everything wrong with their lives and with the world would magically disappear if only those damned Jews and their damned country Israel were destroyed. Hence the salami tactics to whittle away territory until Israelis simply cannot defend themselves and so perish at the hands of neighbors who have been promising nothing less than annihilation for decades.
This is Obama’s malignant intention, as well. Hence the 1967 lines!
THE BETRAYAL UNMASKED
This is the title of an article by Paul Schnee, in which he says that the Obama speech “confirmed in the starkest terms why his long held prejudices, cloaked as a foreign policy, have made his Oval Office not only the graveyard for any peace and justice in the Middle East but also the incubator for the next great conflict there.
“Obama’s intentions towards Israel have never been good,” Schnee adds, “but yesterday he proved just how hostile he is to the Jewish state of Israel. One of the most perverse forms of anti-Semitism is to expect Jews to die meekly His speech was a shameful act in a career of shameful acts”
Victor Sharpe, author of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish State, agrees. “Obama parrots the Arab policy of `stages` whereby Israel is forced to commit national suicide through the diabolical euphemism called `land for peace.‘Obama embraces the darkness of the Arab world and chooses—not from ignorance but from hatred—to enact under his watch the eventual annihilation of the Jewish state.”
Is there any light in this bleak picture? According to Professor Barry Rubin, director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, “Israel is not going to allow a president with no credibility, who clearly doesn’t understand what’s at stake, fails to support his Arab allies, is soft on his Iranian and Syrian enemies, doesn’t learn from his past errors, is sacrificing U.S. interests in the region, and pays no attention to what’s happening in Egypt, to determine its future.”
But the last word (at least of this article) has to go to writer and Army veteran J.D. Longstreet, who cites Amos and Jeremiah and Ezekiel in “America’s Betrayal of Israel,” in which he states:
“Let me be very clear here: ISRAEL WILL NOT LOSE. Its enemies WILL lose…as a result of the Obama’s announced policy demanding that Israel return to the pre-1967 war borders.
What Obama, and Israel’s other enemies, fail to understand (or understand it and choose to ignore it) is this: That of all the dry land on this planet earth, there is only one tiny little piece of geography that God, Himself, has designated as belonging to a single people—ISRAEL.
What the evangelical Christian Americans rightly understand is this: When God brought the people of Israel, His people, home and gave them a “state,” a nation, in May of 1948, God had already made it as plain as possible that Israel would never be moved from that land again—forever.
Joan Swirsky
Joan Swirsky Most recent columns
Joan Swirsky is an award winning author and journalist. Her work can be found at joanswirsky.com
Joan can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
SEE NETANYAHU REACT TO PROTESTER INTERRUPTING HIS CONGRESSIONAL SPEECH
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/see-netanyahu-react-to-protester-interrupting-his-congressional-speech/
Earlier today in our our story about CODEPINK activists interrupting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s AIPAC speech yesterday, we noted that the group planned to be on hand for his speech to Congress today. It appears they followed through. But, rather than frazzle Netanyahu, it made him look like a strong leader, giving him the opportunity to praise “true” democracies such as the U.S. and bash tyrannical government.
The indecipherable* shout as well as Netanyahu’s off-the-cuff response is below:
Earlier today in our our story about CODEPINK activists interrupting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s AIPAC speech yesterday, we noted that the group planned to be on hand for his speech to Congress today. It appears they followed through. But, rather than frazzle Netanyahu, it made him look like a strong leader, giving him the opportunity to praise “true” democracies such as the U.S. and bash tyrannical government.
The indecipherable* shout as well as Netanyahu’s off-the-cuff response is below:
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