The glee with which the Obama administration jumped on the Jewish state for a misplaced timing of an announcement is palpable. I write administration because Obama himself is silent. He knows Jews will have tough enough time voting for him as is, he does not need to give his 2012 Republican opponent additional ammunition. Instead, he sends Hillary Wynette, the woman Bill Clinton passed on to him (by convincing her to take a career killing job she did not want) to do his dirty work. After all, this is the woman who praised Suha Arafat after Suha accused Israel with infecting Palestinians with the HIV virus. Hillary is famous for standing by her man. She can have no qualms attacking Israel for actions she has praised mere months ago as Barry Rubin notes:

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We are in the world George Orwell and Ayn Rand saw coming. It is a world where words no longer have meaning and A is not A. Consider the following two examples:

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This may be a fluke or a new trend. Time will tell. If the former, Europe may yet escape both Dhimitude and xenophobe rule. When the Danish cartoonists and their paper were threatened by Islamists for their Muhammad cartoons, the danish media did not unite behind them. But when axe wielding Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks is similarly threatened, the Swedish media pushed back. This time Islamists failed to divide and conquer:

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A recent survey is sending shock waves through the power elite. A new poll reveals that Americans believe that Barack obama failed to deliver on his campaign promise to restore America’s good name in the world:

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“Sophisticated” foreign policy analysts agree with Ahmadinejad that a nuclear Iran is a fait accompli and containment is the only viable response to it. It would mean bringing the Middle East, including Israel, under the American nuclear umbrella. Former Secretary of state James Baker advocated just such a policy on Fareed Zakaria GPS a couple of weeks ago.

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It has been a long while since I have read such a pointed retort to the facetious a-historical accusations carelessly and callously hurled at Israel by self righteous ignoramuses as the one written by the eminent historian Andrew Roberts and published in the usually less than objective  Financial Times under the heading Israel is no more rogue than America . Indeed, if Benjamin Netanyahu did order al-Mabhouh’s assassination, his order would not differ from those issued by Winston Churchill or Barack Obama and are currently carried out by NATO.

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Dubai is getting nervous. The royal family worries that their goal of becoming ( even replacing) Switzerland is being undermined by Iran’s enemies. Switzerland helped the Nazi regime survive and flourish economically and got handsomely paid for her “efforts.” For many decades it even avoided censure for so doing.

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President Obama’s various legislative initiatives have so unsettled the business world that it went Galt (on strike). Big business is making money by cutting expenses and investing elsewhere. Small businesses merely hoping to survive. Citizens who are not rushing to pay up debts, worry that what remains of their savings is about to be taxed away. Atlas Shrugged and the Road to Serfdom are best sellers and Democratic politicians are preparing to become unemployed.

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On Thursday, Ben Bernanke followed in the footsteps of Barack Obama. The president announced that he is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan in order to withdraw in a year. The Fed announced a raise in interest rates insisting that it should not be interpreted as a change in monetary policy. One contradictory announcement is as believable as the other. Just as Obama delayed sending troops as long as he could so did Bernanke. Taliban progress forced Obama’s hand; A bad bond sale forced Bernanke’s hand. Why else would he raise rates when we are teetering on the edge of deflation and the price of dollar is rising in relation to the Euro? Last month Core Consumer Prices Fell for First Time Since 1982 as “prices fell for hotel rooms, home ownership costs, new cars, airfares and clothing” and given the current slack in the economy, are expected to continue to do so.

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Another day, another Jihadist terror attack. 10 died and 45 were wounded when a bomb blast ripped through Pune’s popular German Bakery located near Chabbad House and the OSHO Ashram. This time it seems that it was the Indian intelligence service which failed to connect the dots. The services should have known that initiating talks with Pakistan means that Jihadist opposed to the talk, more specifically, Lashkar El Taibe, will make an effort to scuttle with a terror attack. Hamas used the same strategy to scuttle Israeli/Palestinian talks for decades. Moreover, both the US (Defense Secretary Robert Gates did so personally) and the UK have recently warned India of an imminent terror attack. Part of the reasons for the warning may be found in a series of emails exchanged between a Lashkar El Taibe operative and the recently arrested Pakistani/American businessman David Headley, ne Daood Sayed Gilani. Headley visited Pune twice and stayed in the area of the bakery. Indian intelligence wonders whether the attack was Headley’ brain child and hopes to be given permission to interrogate him.

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“We knew they wanted to hurt us but we did not believe they are capable of so doing,” US intelligence members explained when asked to justify their failure to stop the Christmas bomber. They were referring, of course, to Al Qaeda Yemen. The sentiment, however, is reflecting current intelligence assessment of the Iranian Mullahcracy. Yes, it is true that Iran wishes harm to the West (and not only to Israel). It is true that Ayatollah Khamenei, whom President Obama hoped to charm by insisting on his honorific “Supreme Leader,” has just promised to celebrate the 31st anniversary of the Iranian revolution with a stunning anti-Western “punch.” It is also true that the “selected, not elected” Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has just ordered his nuclear scientists to enrich uranium to 20% purity. It must be acknowledged that such enrichment would enable Iran to produce weapons-grade uranium in a relatively short time and that the Iranians have been repeatedly able to hide their nuclear progress from the West.

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We all blinked furiously when we read the government’s claim that the number of unemployed rose in January by 20,000 but the unemployment rate fell from 10% to 9.7%. Somebody has obviously been cooking the numbers in a most ingenious manner. On Meet the press, Alan Greenspan explains the absurdity thus:

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For the past year we were ruled by a single party, the Democratic one. We have a Democratic president with a veto proof Democratic Congress. The result? Massive economic harm. Blaming Republicans is absurd but clearly Tom Friedman believes in the BIG LIE and so did many pundits this past Sunday. He writes:

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We knew it will come to this. Barack Obama is criticized by the left for not being tough enough on Israel, so his special envoy to the Middle East George Mitchel threatens Israel with cutting aid if it fails to “to advance peace talks with the Palestinians and a two-state solution.”

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Obama’s elections and the promise of an American retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan is in part responsible for the marked rise in Al Qaeda efforts to attack the American homeland. Why? because it removed the single negative consequence of 9/11 as far as Jihadists are concerned, the insertion of infidel armies into two additional Muslim territories. The rest of the consequences of 9/11 are considered positive. America and the West incurred significant economic losses while the visibility and marked deference to Islam has increased geometrically.

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The Obama administration is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country’s problems. Many Americans do not have faith in that sort of centralized expertise or in the political class generally.

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Remember the 2008 attack on Mumbai? Yesterday, there was a repeat performance in Srinagar, Kashmir. The perpetrators were members of the Pakistani Islamist group, Lashkar el Taiba. The attack focused on a midtown hotel, guests were turned to hostages and the city center was paralyzed.

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Yes, another case of Deja vu. The publication of a new volume of Einstein includes previously unpublished materials about his 1921 visit to America to raise money for his pet project, the establishment of my alma mater, Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Jewish public adored him but the Jewish (Harvard) elite did not. So writes Walter Issacson in the Dec. issue of the Atlantic. It includes these wonderful Einstein quotations:

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Candidate Barack Obama challenged Americans to be audacious enough to hope that being perceived as racist bullies was at the root of all their security and economic woes, therefore, the best way forward was to elect as president a first term multiracial senator who would change the “unfair” free enterprise system. To worldwide cheers, the majority of American voters accepted the challenge. The greatest achievement of the Obama presidency has now been to prove candidate Obama’s security premise wrong, and to admit so in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

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GEN. HAYDEN: There are honest differences. Clearly, this past summer with regard to some CIA activity, interrogation memos from the office of legal counsel, the CIIG report, the question of a special prosecutor, I actually think that’s harmed our overall effort, all right? But that’s a personal view. That’s the decision the president has to make. We should not overly politicize things that are essentially security in nature. But we do need political guidance that will be the product of our political process.

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Barack Obama is right. The ability of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board a plane to Detroit represents a “catastrophic” failure. But he is also wrong. The system did not fail. He did. He sent signals which led the people working in the system to fail. These people no longer worked for an anti terrorist warrier called George W. Bush but a cool, imperturbable Barack Obama whose primary enemy was “over reaction.” This is the conclusion I reached reading that the warning received in Nigeria was not buried in Nigeria. The opposite is true. It triggered a multi-agency meeting, the kind of meeting designed to insure that the dots are connected. WSJ reports:

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On my last flight to Israel and from Israel on an American carrier we were told that Israeli regulations demand that passenger remain in their seats during the last hour of the flight. Had the US instituted similar precautions, those on the flight would not have owed their lives to pure luck and passenger courage.

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I do not know what irked me more, the truth about U.S. diplomat John Service’s betrayal or China expert reporter Jonathan Mirsky’s cover up. Together they serve to continue to propagate the myth that those accusing American diplomats of dubious loyalty are mendacious paranoids. You can find the charge seamlessly inserted in a popular movie such as Julie & Julia and you can read it in the oral interview conducted with Service by CNN in the late 90s.

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