I have heard of the “snowflake generation,” but, on some level, thought the idea of grown men and women unable to tolerate anything outside their “comfort zone” without crumbling to dust, was a clever, media-derived sound-bite thing.
“The Jews/Israelis/Mossad/whatever were behind the attacks; the Jews knew the attacks were coming and stayed away from the Twin Towers that day; no Jews died on 9/11″ — and a lot of other nonsense.
In what appears to be an attempt to soften the terribly frightening developing enmity between the state of Israel and the United States over the latter’s insistence on going forward with the badly flawed “Iran deal,” a recent Associated Press article seriously downplays the danger posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran to the Jewish state and the rest of the world.
The real photos of Martin Luther King, Jr. during the march on Selma show rabbis at either elbow, but for some reason, these have been replaced by Catholics — a nun and a priest — in the recent film.
Why is that?
Rarely does it come up at Black History Month events or even in conversation that Jews figured prominently in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. For some reason, the media is airbrushing the Jews out of the history of the U.S. Civil Rights movement and I’d be surprised if this isn’t also true of the fight for farm worker’s rights lead by Cesar Chavez, which was also heavily populated with Jews.
Does it matter?
Yes, I think it does; especially now.
With the Middle East on fire and contending with an ever-expanding band of mass-murdering Islamo-Fascist thugs and Europe awash with Islamo-Fascist-inspired anti-Semitism and U.S. college campuses buzzing with anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism, the intentional manipulation of historical fact is making matters worse.
Though the makers of films like Selma caution that they are not documentaries, they are likely the only encounter many viewers have ever had with the issues depicted, and who will absorb what they see as fact.
It requires only a rudimentary glance back at human history and a comparison with what’s on the nightly news today, to come to the inescapable conclusion that mankind is either on the precipice or already over the edge of another worldwide anti-Semitic episode that is potentially so profound it could make the last one look like the Salem Witch Trials by comparison.
Of course, there are two major differences in play today that were absent the last time mankind lost its way and began murdering Jews.
One – It is not the governments of most of these countries trying to kill the Jews, and two – there is Israel, and therefore someplace for the Jews to go.
The importance of Israel’s continued existence in this light, cannot be overstated, but that’s another discussion.
By way of illustration, in case you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been going on, the other day the Associated Press published a story about a bunch of European rabbis gathering in Prague “for training in self-defense and first aid in response to a wave of attacks against Jews and a rise of anti-Semitism on the continent.”
This is being done in response to “the deadly terror attack against a kosher grocery in Paris in January and the murder of a Jewish security guard outside a synagogue in Copenhagen earlier this month,” AP reports. But these are only the latest in an increasing number of deadly attacks against Jews in Europe, including the 2006 torture and murder of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi in France, the shooting deaths of a 30-year-old rabbi, his two young sons and a little girl, also in France, in 2012.
“When we see the level of anti-Semitism in Europe, when we see the level of hate in Europe, when we see the lack of leadership of European governments to fight against anti-Semitism and terror, we’re not surprised, unfortunately (by the attacks),” Rabbi Menachem Margolin was quoted saying.
It is at the point in Europe that Jews and Jewish institutions need 24-hour protection, he said. What happens if these guards keep getting attacked by those trying to get to the Jews (which has already happened at least once)? Will the majority of the populace eventually decide it’s just too dangerous to have the Jews around? Will the idea spread that the Jews’ very existence is the reason for the violence?
Who knows?
On U.S. college campuses, it is no longer comfortable and often, not even safe, to be Jewish or to support the right of the world’s only Jewish country to exist. A recent study ranks San Francisco State University the seventh most anti-Semitic college in the country, with Columbia ranked first.
Many of the students in these colleges and universities are buying a skewed bill of goods about the history of the Middle East and the facts on the ground there now, mostly from Pro-Palestinian students and teachers, which is causing too many of them to misunderstand the situation and misidentify who the good guys and bad buys are over there. They have somehow concluded that a billion Arab Muslims are being bullied by about 6 million Jews (including women, children and old people). They are convinced that “the Jews” are “committing a genocide” against Palestinian Arabs. But, since the population of Palestinian Arabs (1.3 million in 1960 and more than 5 million in 2014) has only grown in the past 50 years, either the Jews are really, really bad at genocide, or THAT’S NOT WHAT’S HAPPENING.
With this Goebbels-like, through-the-looking glass world view as the backdrop, keeping from these students the truth about the part Jews played in the American Civil Rights movement can only make matters worse.
And, one day in the not too distant future, these students will be let loose on the worlds of business, economics, politics, parenthood and everything else, poisoned with this loathsome anti-Semiticly slanted world view.
To make matters even worse, the weird, childish, pissing match between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu is likely to result in the Obama Administration announcing to the country and the world that the U.S. has decided to sever ties with its best and most consistent ally in the Middle East — the only democracy in that insane and dangerous neck of the woods.
Such a development could easily result in the atmosphere in the U.S. and worldwide vis-à-vis the Jews, deteriorating to the point that Jews’ patriotism could be called into question.
If American Jews are forced to somehow choose sides, between the U.S. and Israel, what would you do?
Even in its nearly universally shared grief and outrage over the IS terror gang’s unspeakably barbaric murder of the downed Jordanian pilot, attempts by Arab leaders to frame the problem in other than Islamic robes has served mostly to highlight that faith’s seeming schizophrenia.
Associated Press reports that in the wake of the 26-year-old pilot’s intentional torching, before a cheering crowd of all ages, “a wave of grief and rage” was unleashed across the Middle East.
“Political and religious leaders united in outrage and condemnation, saying the slaying of the airman goes against Islam’s teachings,” the A.P. story said. “The gruesome militant video of the last moments in the (pilot’s) life, ‘crossed a line’ beyond the beheadings of Western hostages at the hands of Islamic State extremists.””
Okay, so, what I get from that statement is that beheading Western hostages is kind of acceptable in Islam, while burning Muslims alive goes a little too far. This is clearly the case, since the beheadings of a whole slew of innocent Westerners — drew no condemnation whatsoever from the Muslim world. It is not made clear if it’s the burning, per se, that’s the problem, or if it’s the fact that the victim was an Arab Muslim.
The story goes on to say that Imams from the highest levels of Sunni Islam say that burning that pilot to death “violated Islam’s prohibition on immolation or mutilation of bodies, even during wartime.”
That’s interesting.
Call me crazy, but lopping off a living person’s head strikes me as a fairly serious form of mutilation. Not to mention that nauseating Muslim practice affectionately known as female circumcision.
This Imam goes on to say that in punishment for their crossing that line, IS barbarians “deserve the Quranic punishment of death, Crucifixion or the chopping off of their arms,” because “Islam prohibits the taking of an innocent life.”
That line, my friends, the ‘innocent life’ line, is clearly where the barbarians find their loophole, since “innocent” is obviously in the eye of the beholder.
But, what a schizophrenic belief system it is that can say a criminal must be mutilated because he broke Islam’s ban on mutilation.
It is in keeping, however, with the oft-repeated Islamic threat, issued whenever anyone anywhere says, writes or draws something they find offensive, along the lines of, “how dare you call me violent — I’ll kill you!”
The A.P. reporter goes on to describe the various forms capital punishment tends to take in the Arab/Muslim world, underplaying the instances and reasons for mostly hangings, but also stonings (the reporter says for adultery, proved or suspected, but, I happen to know, also for homosexuality and other random offenses) in Iran and Pakistan, beheadings in Saudi Arabia “and Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers have on occasion publicly shot to death Palestinians suspected of spying for Israel.” They have also hanged and burned them publicly, dragged them through the streets behind cars, literally torn men limb from limb, murdered sleeping babies and a whole bunch of other stuff the reporter chose not to mention for whatever reason.
But in the “contemporary Middle East,” burning people to death as a punishment is frowned upon, the story says.
There was evidently some battling of the Imams around the Muslim world about whether some story or other may exist in the Quran to sanction burning people alive, but the consensus of opinion, the story says, is that “the killing showed total disregard for the rights of prisoners under Islam, as well as what (one Imam) called the moral standards for war.”
These condemnations came from all over the Muslim world, including counties like Turkey, which has been known to send heavily armed “peace demonstrators” to try to kill Israelis, and Iran, which continues to chant its determination to murder all the world’s Jews, starting with Israel’s.
The one possible bright spot in the IS savages’ increasingly horrific behavior, is that in their arrogance and blind barbarity, they have now managed to piss off some countries not usually involved in opposing Radical Islam — like Japan and most of the Arab world. With any luck, more of the world will be convinced of the urgent necessity to devise and carry out a plan to eradicate this menace — and by that I mean the IS monsters in particular and Radical Islam generally — entirely from the planet.
The Arab world especially, is crucial to this effort, since they spawned this menace, and have a better chance of discerning between the barbarian and the non-barbarian or at least, less barbaric.
Jordan reacted to this latest atrocity by executing a failed female Iraqi suicide bomber and another nameless terrorist thug it had in custody, and the king there says the barbarians haven’t seen the end of this episode.
One Jordanian politician, moved to tears by the sight of the captured pilot burned to death inside a cage, started yelling during a TV interview, the story says.
“Let’s use the same methods as them!” he shouted. “Let’s kill their children! Let’s kill their women!”
Hopeless.
It’s nice that the United Nations General Assembly held its first meeting recently on anti-Semitism, but while there were some important issues raised, the thing was rife with irony.
The meeting “sparked calls for global action to combat the rising hatred of Jews and a surprising denunciation from the world’s 57 Islamic nations of all words and acts that lead to hatred, anti-Semitism, Islamaphobia,” according to the Associated Press.
The denunciation by the Arab World — Saudi Arabia in particular — is indeed surprising, shocking, really, until you note that it threw “Islamophobia” in there, in a cynical effort to equate Israeli self defense and attempts to stop the Islamization of Europe, with murderous attacks against innocent, unarmed Jews in Israel and elsewhere.
U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power, said the statement delivered by the Saudi Arabian U.N. Ambassador on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation was “extremely significant,” especially since the United Nations has often been a venue to try to de-legitimize Israel, A.P. reported.
Clearly, Powers didn’t immediately catch on to the Saudi game, because she’s right — the U.N. has become a body focused almost entirely on bashing Israel, and I can’t believe the Arab world has suddenly seen the error of its ways.
Despite the incessant (and patently false) drum beat out of the Arab world that Israel is an Apartheid state, the real Apartheid is found in Saudi Arabia where Jews aren’t really allowed to be at all. By contrast, a large minority of Israel’s population is Arab — Muslims and Christians — and they have completely equal rights, serving in the Knesset and the military and as doctors and patients in Israeli hospitals and teachers and students in Israeli schools and universities.
Most sites on the issue of Jews in Saudi Arabia, however, suggest that if Jews deny being Jews, they might be allowed to visit the kingdom, but not if they have ever visited Israel. Israelis are verboten altogether, and no Jews have lived in Saudi Arabia since the creation of the kingdom.
This was not always so.
The so-called holy city of Medina was, in ancient times, first settled by Jewish tribes, according to historical references. Some scholars even suggest the roots of the virulent anti-Semitism in the Muslim world today, may be traced to the ancient Jews’ refusal to accept Muhammad as a prophet.
“One of the reasons for ‘this discrimination’ against the Jews is… because the Jews’ development of land and culture was a prime source of booty in the Arabian desert peninsula,” one source says. “Beginning at the time of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam — from the expulsions, depredations, extortion, forced conversions or murder of Jewish Arabians settled in Medina to the mass slaughter of Jews at Khaibar — the precedent was established among Arab-Muslims to expropriate that which belonged to the Jews.”
So, unless the Saudis have suddenly seen the light, they are merely trying to do it again — to expropriate the fight against anti-Semitism, and turn it around to suit their purposes.
But, let’s examine the meaning of the two words — anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
The one means the irrational hatred of Jews and the other means the irrational fear of Muslims. To my mind — and when held up to historic review and against today’s headlines — the one has no realistic basis and the other, kinda doesn’t seem necessarily irrational. The Jews have never deserved the periodic waves of attacks against them through the ages — the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust. But, one need not be Einstein to notice that Islamo-Fascists are wreaking havoc, slaughtering innocents, worldwide.
It is not irrational to fight to keep the irrational mindset that drives the Islamists from taking root in the West, because a world under the jackboot of Sharia Law would not be worth living in.
So, that Saudi/Arab announcement, seeking to equate Jew hatred with fear of Islamists, is going to be used against the Jews and the West in years, or maybe days, to come. I’m sure of it.
It seems to me the Palestinians must be feeling pretty confident that the world has completely ingested the revisionist Arab narrative to take what even the A.P. called the “risky” step of trying to bring war crimes charges against Israel at the International Criminal Court.
Though it is unclear as I write this if or how the Obama Administration is going to react to the rash of murder-by-car terrorist attacks in Jerusalem, but as much as it may want to downplay them as “traffic incidents” or the work of lone nut jobs, this is clearly the Jihadis’ new tactic.
A week or so ago, a terrorist ran down a bunch of people at a light train stop in Jerusalem, killing an American baby and a young woman from South America in an act of terror the U.S. Administration called a “traffic incident,” and which barely even made the news. This was the same week that a similar attack took place in Canada, followed by another terror attack there not involving a vehicle.
The fact that the U.S. Government and the intentional press chose not to see the terror-driver attack in Israel as terrorism may be keeping authorities worldwide from connecting the dots; understanding this new tactic and addressing it.
There can be no doubt with these three terror-by-vehicle attacks in Israel — two in one day — that this is the savages’ new thing. This might be made slightly more difficult if the U.S. and international press continue to insist that there is no such thing as terrorism if the victim is Jewish or Israeli, but at this point, even the stupidest, anti-Semitic ignoramus has to get the picture.
And this time, Hamas is “taking credit” for the most recent attack, unlike the last one, in which it only glorified the baby-killer as a “martyr.”
Hamas said this second attack, was meant to “protect the city’s most sensitive and sacred site” the compound known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount.”
The third terror-by-car attack was in the West Bank, later the same day, “when a Palestinian motorist drove into a group of soldiers, wounding three in a suspected attack,” according to the Associated Press.
Bear in mind that these attacks appear to be motivated by a call by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, for his minions to protect Judaism’s holiest site from Jews coming to pray there, because, somehow, the site is “defiled” by the presence of Jews.
There has been an attempted assassination and calls by Jordan for the Jews to be kept away from this Jewish holy sites so Muslims may pray there undesturbed by the presence of Jews.
If anyone uttered that same sentence with the roles reversed, the resulting worldwide righteous indignation would be epic.
But Antisemitism is cool these days.
It’s not just Jews under attack, however. There were the two attacks in Canada, the ax attack against some cops in New York and the beheading of a woman in Oklahoma — each of which has radical Islam in common. So, no matter what our government tries to say, these are not random, unrelated attacks.
So, now that we know the loony-toon Islamists have taken to using their cars as weapons, wouldn’t it make sense to deny them legal access to vehicles?
I know I’m going to be called names for making this suggestion, but under any other circumstances, it would be clear that this group should be made to turn in their drivers licences and all motor vehicles registered to them should be confiscated. And I don’t just mean in Israel and the Palestinian-Arab occupied territories — I mean everywhere there are radical Islamists — which is, basically, everywhere.
Israeli police said they plan to set up barricades near train stops to prevent the attacks, but we could be more effective by removing the temptation to drive into people by removing the vehicles from the terrorists.
Hamas, the A.P story says, praised the violence as a “glorious operation” and called for more, because attacking a bunch of unarmed, unsuspecting people waiting for a bus really makes you a man. Murdering infants is terribly taxing. Right.
All this murder and mayhem by the Arabs, which has drawn no international condemnation whatsoever, is taking place while the U.S. and the European Union are bent all out of shape over Israel’s announced plans to build housing in East Jerusalem.
In this world, construction brings condemnation, cold-blooded murder does not. Apartments “seriously call into question Israel’s commitment to peace,” A.P. reports — as opposed to the Palestinian’s slightly more violent approach. That’s just fine, I guess.
Nothing shows commitment to peace like mowing down pedestrians with a minivan.
I can’t seem to shake the feeling that we’re all down the rabbit hole.
Once again, The Jews have sparked international outrage — this time by buying homes in Arab neighborhoods.
I am continuously baffled by the reaction of so many, including the current U.S. President, to the idea of Jews living in areas “the Palestinians claim for an independent state,” but who are not the least bit troubled by Arabs living in Israel proper.
In fact, were someone to even suggest an Arab-free Israel, the international hysterical gnashing of teeth would be loud enough to wake the dead Jewish Patriarchs buried all over that area.
Yet everyone seems entirely comfortable with a Jew-free “Palestine,” as if this is the only rational way for this to go. I don’t get it.
So today, Associated Press reported that some Jewish men “moved under the cover of darkness, slipping into apartments” in the Silwan area of east Jerusalem, “œin the middle of the night and changing the locks.”
In the morning, “Arab residents of Silwan found” these young Jewish men “hunkered down inside 25 apartment units,” in what the reporter described as “the biggest settler takeover since Jews began buying up properties in the volatile area two decades ago.”
So, these Jewish people bought a building in an Arab neighborhood and they felt the need to sneak in in the middle of the night, arm themselves and “hunker down” to defend their lives from their new neighbors. Yet the reporting suggests the Jews are in the wrong for legally buying housing and moving in.
This attitude only seems to make sense in the Jim Crow south, or Nazi-occupied Europe. I can think of nowhere else where some people are outspokenly and violently unwelcome in certain neighborhoods because of their religion or ethnicity.
Actually, that’s not strictly true. That kind of in-you-face Antisemitism is the status quo in most Muslim countries and is becoming increasingly common all over Europe — at least wherever there are large Muslim communities. And it seems like Muslim communities only come in the large-and-growing variety.
And somehow, these Jews buying apartments in a neighborhood hostile to their presence because they’re Jews “has sparked yet another spat between Israel and the U.S.,” AP reports.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest condemned the occupation of the properties “by individuals who are associated with an organization whose agenda, by definition, stokes tensions between Israelis and Palestinians,” the story says.
So, to recap, Jews buying and moving into apartments in certain areas is considered “occupation,” while Arabs buying and moving into apartments in Israel, is considered perfectly natural.
According to the story, the problem everyone is having this time, is that the apartments were bought by an organization that has “settled hundreds of Jews amid an Arab population estimated at about 30,000 in an area it calls the City of David, where Jewish tradition holds King David established Jerusalem as Judaism’s central holy city.”
So, I guess, it’s the fact that these Jews are reminders of the actual, ancient Jewish history of the area that bothers everybody. It’s not as though these Jews are threatening to blow anyone up, as is the wont of some of their neighbors.
It’s because, the AP reporter says, “the Palestinians claim east Jerusalem, home to the city’s most sensitive holy sites, as the capital of a future independent state.”
That’s worth noting.
East Jerusalem is home to the sensitive holy sites for Jews and Christians, who have both been allowed, along with Muslims, access to them under Israeli rule. This was not the case when the Muslims had control before Israel wrested their traditional Holy City from them in 1967, in a war they did not start, but did finish, decisively, in just six days.
Despite the fact that Jerusalem has been cared for and open to all since its liberation, “the international community, including the U.S., does not recognize Israel’s annexation of east Jerusalem,” the way they recognize Jordan’s annexation of most of what the U.N. meant to be the Palestinian Arab portion of the original two-state solution several decades ago, and which no one ever suggests be carved into at least part of a Palestinian state.
Forced to admit that “Jerusalem’s Arabs,” are “free to live wherever they want,” the reporter hastens to add that they “say they often encounter resistance or discrimination when trying to buy or rent properties in Jewish areas.”
This, I guess, is the closest the reporter could come to some sort of parity: The Arabs often encounter resistance in Jewish neighborhoods, while the Jews encounter international condemnation and armed resistance in Arab neighborhoods.
The story notes that real estate transactions involving Jews buying properties from Arabs often must be cloaked in secrecy, much like sales of homes to Jews and Blacks in “white” U.S. neighborhoods once were. If you’ve never seen the film Gentlemen’s Agreement, go rent it, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Even this reporter notes that most of the reason for the cloak-and-dagger way these transactions are done is necessary to keep not just the buyers, but also the sellers from suffering some sort of violence at the hands of Arabs who don’t what “that type” moving into their neighborhoods.
About 500 Jews live in the area, and the newly purchased homes will allow for 200 more, according to the story.
“Until residents move in, the properties are occupied by police officers, private security guards, and young volunteers packing pistols,” AP reports. “An ad on a Facebook page for religious Jewish army veterans offered 500 shekels ($140) a day to anyone willing to sit in the properties.”
The reporter describes how Israeli police officers “disappeared down a narrow concrete alleyway, bringing a box of supplies deep into the Arab neighborhood to a second-floor apartment,” and how the “Israelis peered out from windows they enveloped in wire mesh, and would not open the door to visitors.”
The reporter also describes the reaction of a young woman whose family had owned the building, when “accused” by neighbors of selling to the wrong kind of people.
“Are you crazy?” she reportedly retorted. “How would my father sell to Jews?”
Am I the only one who sees a problem here?
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.
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.
Viewing today’s news through the prism of Jewish history, things aren’t looking so good.
For instance, what is likely the biggest thing going on in Israel right now — the fact that someone (presumably Hamas) has kidnapped three kids and the army is out in force searching for them in the Palestinian-occupied areas — did not make it onto the agenda for a conversation Wednesday between President Barack Obama and outgoing Israeli President Shimon Peres.
Despite the U.S. President and first lady each having weighed in on the unconscionable abduction of some 200 school girls, some weeks ago by some other Islamist thugs in Nigeria, the silence on the missing Jewish boys, one of whom is American, is conspicuous by in absence.
So, the whole state of Israel and Jews worldwide are praying for these boys’ safe return even as the Boko Haram barbarians reportedly kidnapped some 90 more Nigerian children, some as young as 3. This is what the world is dealing with — a mindset in which kidnapping children is a cause for celebration.
An Associated Press story notes that Obama and Peres discussed Iraq, Iran and Mideast peace, but not a word about the missing teens.
Meanwhile, even as Jews are reportedly fleeing France in droves, that country’s true colors came shining through on Wednesday with an A.P. report that government officials are “warning companies trading with Israeli settlers in the West Bank of the legal risks stemming from doing business in the settlements that it says are ‘illegal under international law.’”
A boycott no less odious than the ones with which the Nazis began their reign of anti-Semitic terror or the one the Presbyterian Church recently adopted hoping, obviously, to spark a similar episode. Why else would they follow the Nazi path?
A statement posted on the French foreign ministry website this week also urges anyone considering doing business in the settlements — areas that would be described as neighborhoods anywhere else — to “obtain appropriate legal advice before proceeding,” according to the story.
And, even as Francestan makes clear its position vis-a-vis Israel and the Jews, and the country careens toward Judenfree-ness, the Arab/Muslim world toward which it’s tilting also made its position clear, also on Wednesday, when A.P. reported an attack near Iran’s western border with Iraq killed three Iranian border guards. Also Wednesday, four near-simultaneous explosions went off in subway stations and outside a court building in Cairo, wounding three people and an explosion blamed on Islamic extremists rocked a shopping mall in Nigeria’s capital, killing at least 21, A.P. reported.
At the same time, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned Mideast nations against “taking new military action in Iraq that might heighten sectarian divisions, after Syria launched airstrikes across the border and Iran flew surveillance drones over the neighboring country,” A.P. reported.
A senior Iraqi military official confirmed that Syrian warplanes bombed militants’ positions and that Iraq’s other neighbors — “Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey — were all bolstering flights just inside their airspace to monitor the situation.”
This comes just days after fire from Syria killed an Israeli Arab teenager inside Israel and Israel responded with tank shells and airstrikes.
American officials said the more resent strikes appeared to be the work of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government, A.P. reports, saying the target is believed to be this uber-nuts Islamist group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is trying to “carve out a purist Islamic enclave across both sides of the Syria-Iraq border,” which is clearly what the world needs now (like a hole in the head).
Meanwhile, “Afghan security forces fought back against a fierce Taliban onslaught by about 800 militants in a key southern province Wednesday as clashes that have killed dozens of people, including at least 35 civilians, stretched into a fourth day,” and “a suicide bomber blew himself up in his room at a Beirut hotel Wednesday as Lebanese security forces raided the premises,…” A.P. reported.
Does anyone else detect a pattern, here?
The blood-thirsty insanity is not limited to the Arab world and the parts of Europe in transition into Muslim countries.
A.P. also reports that the wife of Greece’s far-right leader was placed under house arrest pending trial for allegedly running a criminal organization.
This Greek lawmaker and her husband are part of a scary shift to the Nazi-like right that country appears to be taking.
Their “Nazi-inspired Golden Dawn party” — once marginal — is “now Greece’s third most popular.”
The story doesn’t say this, but my guess this is another example of humanity’s age-old progression from terrible financial crises to searching for someone to blame, to finding a convenient scapegoat in “the Jews,” even if no actual Jewish people are living anywhere near by.
By my count that’s a lot of extra weight on the Nazi/Islamo-Fascist side of the international ledger.
My passport is current; is yours?
I almost feel sorry for the actor Gary Oldman, who came out in a Playboy interview in defense of Mel Gibson and Alex Baldwin for making remarks that offended millions of people.
As Israeli soldiers desperately search Hebron for the three Jewish teenage boys assumed kidnapped by terrorists, Palestinians protested after weekly Muslim prayers, using the popular new three-finger gesture — one for each missing teen — “in a sign of their support for the abduction,” according to the Associated Press.
So, some time between 1035 and 1627 C.E. (or A.D. if you prefer), the name of a Spanish town changed from Jews Hill to Kill Jews, and there’s an effort under way to change it back, according to the Associated Press.
A Bay Area high school’s officials were right in banning students from wearing American flags on their shirts on Cinco de Mayo, the Ninth District Court of Appeals ruled this week.
If signs went up saying “Jews only,” or “Whites only,” or “Christians only” anyplace on the planet, but particularly in Israel, there would be a righteously indignant outcry around the world, as there should be.
Israel is being criticized, for a change, for sending dozens of the tens of thousands of the African migrants that have flooded the country in recent years, to Uganda.
As though more proof were needed that the Islamist world is heavily populated by fruits and nuts, we have today’s Associated Press article about Hezbollah accusing an Israeli bird of being a spy.
They can’t let their populations know they’re doing it, but the leaders of several Gulf States are in high-level discussions with Israel over the overarching threat posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.