Arabs and Muslims are dying all over the Middle East — in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and almost everywhere else — but despite hundreds of thousands dead in Syria alone, it is the 1,000 or so in Gaza that grab the world’s heart, and its headlines.
Thank you for this opportunity to share my views on the subject of today’s hearing. I want to commend you, the Committee, and your staff for highlighting this issue in this public setting. In my view, it comes none too soon.
Among the handful of non-anti-Serb Balkans-observers in America, all eyebrows raised last month when the leftist ivory tower New Republic outdid its own famous fabulist StephenGlass with two new ones. A pair of Eastern Europeans named Vera Mironova and Maria Snegovaya, who penned an opinion article clunkily headlined “Putin is Behaving in Ukraine Like Milosevic Did in Serbia.”
It is hard to imagine two more unwelcome, uninvited visitors to Israel in the middle of a war against Palestinian terrorists than UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and US Secretary of State John Kerry. But even more unwelcome is that they are working together.
It amazes me that more than 5 years into Barack Obama’s presidency, otherwise-intelligent people are still wondering who he is, what he believes and why he’s doing what he’s doing. It’s not a mystery. It’s never been a mystery. Although he made a somewhat half-hearted attempt to dress up his leftist extremism when he first ran for president in 2008, his radicalism was apparent to anyone paying the slightest attention.
The 20th century job description of the United Nations was “to maintain international peace and security” based on “the sovereign equality of all its members,” and to do “nothing [to] impair the inherent right of self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the UN.”
The greatest thing about movies is their ability to conflate reality with illusion, not just regarding special effects but in convincing us that actors are the characters they portray on screen. Movies made us believe that John Wayne was a war hero though he never served a minute in combat; we believed that Vivien Leigh, a neurasthenic, fragile British beauty was a southern belle with enough pluck to get her hands dirty in Tara’s soil; we believed that Rock Hudson was the ultimate lady’s man who enjoyed the many love scenes that he played with the screen’s sexiest women.
Dean Peter Richards of London’s St. Mary’s Medical School was a world-renowned expert in teaching medical students to become doctors. One of his key counsels was, “All doctors must continue to learn, and not only about new advances but to appreciate the limitations of all knowledge.”
With sweltering summer heat and long lines, no one can be happy about the latest Transportation Security Administration edict on powering up cellphones (and other devices) before heading to the gate at some overseas airports.
A stranger named Dr. Alpert entered my dentist’s waiting room this morning and sat down. The answer to your obvious question of how I knew this stranger’s name is that as soon as she sat down, she pulled out her cell phone and listened to her voice mail messages on speaker. One was from a woman who sounded distraught and wanted Dr. Alpert to call back immediately; two others were less distinct. Dr. Alpert did not return the first call but she did call someone else- perhaps an adult child or a close friend - to chat cozily and loudly about how the play was coming along. As she did, the other woman in the waiting room and I faced each other with increasing discomfort, neither of us brave enough to say what we wanted: Lady, there’s a sign on the wall asking you to please turn off your phone - dammit, just do it!
Maybe there’s a “teachable moment” for the world in the back-to-back murders of Jewish and Palestinian teenagers and the reaction to them by each side, and the larger world community.
“With the help of some former inmates convicted of rape, sodomy, child sexual abuse and other crimes, Martin raised a gray-block chapel in a rural patch of central Alabama in 2010, and parked old campers and recreational vehicles behind it to house the men. More than 50 convicted sex offenders have lived there since,” it says.
For one thing, the horrible murder of the Palestinian teen, thought to possibly have been done in retribution for the murders of the three Jewish teens, prompted an immediate condemnation from the White House — something it took nearly three weeks to get in the first case.
Indeed, over the past decade and particularly since 2009 when President Obama sent his letter to Ayatollah Khamanei as a prelude to engagement with the Islamic Republic, voices in Washington and in Brussels have asserted that the Khomeinist regime is strong domestically and is the only option available to the West for stabilizing the region.
Before 91 veterans of World War II board a jet at Midway Airport early Wednesday, before the Southwest pilot powers up the engines and the tower clears the plane for takeoff to Washington, D.C., where they will be heaped with honor and visit a monument to themselves that most have never seen, Lindi Strobel has to answer their questions, calm their fears and coax them aboard that plane.
“….You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, Before you are six or seven or eight, To hate all the people your relatives hate, You’ve got to be carefully taught.” (rodgers and hammerstein, South Pacific)
