<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; state</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/state/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 07:56:08 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>Palestinians Attempt to Co-Opt Jewish History</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/palestinians-attempt-to-co-opt-jewish-history/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=palestinians-attempt-to-co-opt-jewish-history</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/palestinians-attempt-to-co-opt-jewish-history/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Dec 2014 05:08:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israeli]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jewish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248061</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The desperate antics of an invented people. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_248203" style="width: 346px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/tel.jpg"><img class="wp-image-248203" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/tel-450x337.jpg" alt="tel" width="336" height="252" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">The Tel Dan Stele</p></div>
<p>In December 2011, former House Speaker and presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich made the <a href="http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2011/12/13/yes_palestinians_are_an_invented_people_99796.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">following observation</span></a> regarding the Palestinians;</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we&#8217;ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community…</i></p></blockquote>
<p>That comment set off a firestorm of debate and criticism but is in actuality, grounded in historical fact. As noted historian Benny Morris pointed out in his acclaimed book, <i>1948: The First Arab-Israeli War</i>, at the turn of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, most Arabs residing in the Land of Israel or “Palestine” considered themselves to be subjects of the Ottoman Empire. There were some Palestinian Arabs with vague nationalistic tendencies but even this minority considered itself to be part of Greater Syria. There simply was no reference to an independent Palestine for a distinct group of people calling themselves “Palestinians.”</p>
<p>Morris also perceptively notes that the residents of Palestinian villages routinely failed to come to the assistance of nearby villages that were under attack by Jewish forces thus reinforcing the view that Arab villagers felt little loyalty to all but clan and village. The notion of a “Palestinian people” was an alien concept to the common Palestinian villager who was not bound by any sense of duty to assist a neighboring village.</p>
<p>Occasionally, Palestinians themselves will acknowledge this fact. In a revealing 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, PLO executive committee member <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zuheir_Mohsen"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Zahir Muhsein</span></a> stated,</p>
<blockquote><p><i>The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct &#8216;Palestinian people&#8217; to oppose Zionism.</i></p>
<p><i>For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>It was a rare but astonishing moment of candor. A senior PLO member was openly acknowledging what few would readily admit. But his was not an isolated admission. In a March 2012 televised address, Hamas Minister of the Interior and of National Security <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAfENxzv2mc"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Fathi Hammad</span></a> essentially validated Gingrich’s assessment of the Palestinians. While pleading for Egyptian fuel, Hammad let loose with a series of embarrassing admissions that were certainly not intended for Western audiences.</p>
<p>“Every Palestinian…throughout Palestine can prove his Arab roots, whether from Saudi Arabia or Yemen or anywhere.” He went on to say that “personally, half my family is Egyptian, we are all like that.” And further buries himself deeper by stating, “Brothers, half the Palestinians are Egyptian and the other half are Saudis…Who are the Palestinians?” he asks rhetorically. “We have families called al-Masri whose roots are Egyptian, Egyptian! We are Egyptian! We are Arab! We are Muslim!” He concludes his rant with the obligatory Muslim battle cry, “Allahuakbar!” Curiously absent from his long diatribe is any recognition of an independent Palestinian identity and that’s precisely because there simply isn’t any.</p>
<p>Lacking their own independent history, culture and identity, Palestinians have adopted a strategy of <a href="http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1468"><span style="color: #0433ff;">denying Jewish history</span></a>. Arafat, for example, flat out denied the fact that great Jewish Temples, built first by king Solomon and then by Herod, once stood where the Al-Aqsa Mosque currently stands. So ridiculous were his comments that they earned a swift rebuke from President Clinton. Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas taking cue from his boss also adopted this odious position. It should therefore come as no surprise that Abbas is also a <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/exposing-abbas-5335"><span style="color: #0433ff;">confirmed Holocaust denier</span></a>, despite his transparent efforts to <a href="http://tabletmag.com/scroll/170686/mahmoud-abbas-still-a-holocaust-denier"><span style="color: #0433ff;">rehabilitate his image</span></a> for his gullible Western audience.</p>
<p>Palestinian Arabs have also attempted to recruit Western “experts” and academics to their cause. In his insightful book <i>The Fight for Jerusalem:</i> <i>Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City,</i> veteran Israeli diplomat Dore Gold chronicles the length to which Arab-Muslims and their Western lackeys will go to deny the Jewish nexus to the Land of Israel. They argued that much of ancient Jewish history was nothing but mythology including the Kingdoms of David and Solomon.</p>
<p>From the Arab perspective, the tactic was a sound one. Sever the ancient historical Jewish nexus with Israel and you severely undermine claims of indigenousness. But archeology does not lie and those very Western academics (at least the intellectually honest ones) were forced to retract their findings and conclusions after the dramatic 1993 discovery of a 9<sup>th</sup> century stele at Tel Dan in northern Israel that clearly referenced the “<a href="http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/artifacts-and-the-bible/the-tel-dan-inscription-the-first-historical-evidence-of-the-king-david-bible-story/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">House of David</span></a>.” Additional discoveries since then, including finds in <a href="http://www.aish.com/h/9av/ht/48961251.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Jerusalem</span></a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/international/middleeast/09alphabet.html?_r=0"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Tel Zayit</span></a> and at the <a href="http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/insideisrael/2013/June/Did-David-Solomon-Exist-Dig-Refutes-Naysayers/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Fortress of Elah</span></a> have further eroded claims by skeptics and naysayers.</p>
<p>Not content with denying Jewish history, Palestinian Arabs have actually attempted to co-opt it by absurdly claiming that Moses as well as King Saul were Palestinian Muslims who conquered and claimed “Palestine” for the benefit of Palestinians. These risible comments were spewed forth by “Dr.” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqjwLKdg9ro"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Omar Ja’ara</span></a>, a lecturer at Al-Najah University in Nablus and broadcast on Palestinian Authority TV. He notes further that the actions of Moses and Saul represented “the first Palestinian liberation through armed struggle to liberate Palestine&#8230; this is our logic and this is our culture.”</p>
<p>Incidentally, Al-Najah University boasts on its <a href="http://www.najah.edu/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">website</span></a> that it is “the first Palestinian University to obtain the EFQM European Certificate of Excellence.” Something to bear in mind next time any parent contemplates sending their child off to Europe for higher education.</p>
<p>Of course it doesn’t matter that Saul lived approximately 1,700 years before Muhammad was zygote. Facts play absolutely no role in Palestinian academia. Empirical data and evidence is ignored. Precedence is given to upholding a false, pernicious and viscerally anti-Semitic narrative that either denies historical fact or co-opts it.</p>
<p>As PLO bigwig Zahir Muhsein candidly noted, the claim of a Palestinian identity is a myth whose aim is not designed to achieve liberation or advancement for any particular people but rather to subjugate and destroy another people. For those of you, who still remain unconvinced; consider the <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/al-aqsa-speaker-the-slaughter-of-the-jews-is-near/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">recent comments</span></a> made by a prominent sheikh during a religious sermon at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. During his tirade, which included the usual dose of anti-Semitic vitriol, the sheikh never once uttered a desire or longing for Palestinian statehood. Instead he expresses the desire to join with ISIS in its quest for an Islamic caliphate and asks the large crowd of acolytes surrounding him to, “pledge allegiance to the Muslim Caliph,” and they in turn respond with chants of “amen!”</p>
<p>Few in the West have faced up to this malevolent reality. They continue to adhere to the harmful, dogmatic formula of a two-state solution. What they willfully fail to realize is that such a solution poses an existential threat to the Mideast’s only democracy and will most certainly have grave negative consequences for the region at large.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/palestinians-attempt-to-co-opt-jewish-history/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>68</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Rick Perry: Restore the 10th Amendment, Restore Freedom</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/rick-perry-restore-the-10th-amendment-restore-freedom/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rick-perry-restore-the-10th-amendment-restore-freedom</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/rick-perry-restore-the-10th-amendment-restore-freedom/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2014 05:54:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[California]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Midterm]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rick Perry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Texas]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247758</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Former governor of the Lone Star State sheds light on the path to liberty at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to Gov. Rick Perry’s keynote speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event took place Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/114532350" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>David, as we gather here for this 20th anniversary celebration of the Freedom Center, it was similar circumstances that this country found itself in when you had the first Restoration weekend in 1994. Two decades ago Republicans had swept into power in both of the Houses, a revolution that changed the balance of power for the first time, Cleta, in 40 years. Twenty years later, Republicans again have won historic victories in the midterm elections and once again we are controlling both houses of Congress. In addition to picking up eight seats in the U.S. Senate, we picked up at least a dozen House seats, three governorships, several state legislative chambers. Today, Republicans control 68 of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers. That is the most in the history of our party. And we stunned the pollsters. It was a beautiful thing. We stunned the pollsters even more than we stunned President Barack Obama, who apparently doesn&#8217;t realize that November 4 even happened. He&#8217;s too busy representing those who didn&#8217;t vote to listen to those who did vote. But even if he didn&#8217;t hear the message, the American people delivered one. They said enough of the slow growth tax policies, enough of the smothering debt, they said enough to this colossal bureaucracy that we&#8217;ve seen, and these agencies of government that all too often are unaccountable to the people. They rebelled against government-run healthcare schemes, against a President who refuses to secure the border, and against bureaucracies that are broken, arrogant and abusive of power. That&#8217;s what the American people said Tuesday. The American people made it clear. They want a clean break from the economic policies that have slowed our recovery at home, and the foreign policies that Jim did an incredible job of laying out that have weakened our standing abroad.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m here to say that a congressional majority is a terrible thing to waste. The power that has been newly granted by the people must be used wisely to serve the people, that it&#8217;s not good enough to state what we are against. We must articulate what we are for. The election results leave us with a truly once in a generation opportunity to usher in an era of renewal and reform. You are here tonight through your commitment to the Freedom Center, and you&#8217;re going to be on the front lines of this battle. One of the ideas that has returned to the fore of the conversation, to the forefront of people&#8217;s minds, if you will, is the proper place of states within our constitutional system. Indeed, we have spent the last six years challenging edicts out of Washington that amount to federal control of our classrooms, our healthcare, and our environment and our economy. Washington&#8217;s assault on state sovereignty and individual freedom is a well-documented assault on the Constitution and, in particular, the Tenth Amendment. Some have ridiculed the binding power of the Tenth Amendment, but, of course, Jay, without that amendment, the Bill of Rights would have been incomplete, and the Constitution would never have been ratified. The question is whether Republicans in Washington, now in control, will pursue Washington-centric solutions to the problems that plague us, or will they look to and empower the states.</p>
<p>It was the liberal Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who called the states laboratories of democracy which &#8220;tried novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.&#8221; Yet Brandeis&#8217;s political descendants have forgotten that lesson. In fact, they flipped it around trying these grand experiments in federal power, ostensibly for the common good. I like that Tocqueville observed that in the American system the actions of the federal government would be rare, but the reality is the federal government is involved in all kinds of things the Constitution doesn&#8217;t empower it to do, while ignoring basic responsibilities like securing our border. And it&#8217;s the states that are pushing back against federal overreach and the courts are starting to take notice.</p>
<p>In the infamous Obamacare case of 2012, Chief Justice Roberts upheld the law, but the Supreme Court also struck down the mandatory Medicaid expansion as a violation of the Tenth Amendment. Now a new Obamacare case is about to be heard. It uses the letter of the law to challenge the federal government&#8217;s use of subsidies on many of these healthcare insurance exchanges. Now we know that the federal government overstepped its powers. We know that, partly because we know there is now a new smoking gun: One Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare. In less than a week&#8217;s period of time the Washington sin of prevarication has come to be known as &#8220;Gruber-ing.&#8221; He said repeatedly, I think, what is there now, six videos that we have, that the federal government had to lie to the voters because we are too stupid to know what&#8217;s good for us. That shows exactly why the states are so important to defending individual freedom; because the states have stood up to the abuses of federal power in Obamacare. The law, as a matter of fact, it may collapse upon its own weight.</p>
<p>So if the states are these laboratories of democracy, I would suggest to you that Texas has found the formula for success. You know, it&#8217;s interesting, some people call it the Texas miracle, and I tell them, I said it&#8217;s not a miracle. I can&#8217;t explain a miracle. This I can explain. This is really pretty simple. This is not rocket science. You don&#8217;t spend all the money. Keep the taxes low, a regulatory climate that is fair and predictable, a legal system that doesn&#8217;t allow for over-suing, and accountable public schools so you&#8217;ve got a skilled workforce. This will work. It&#8217;ll work anywhere. Jay, it&#8217;ll even work in California, I swear to God, I&#8217;m telling you it will. And the results have been rather stunning. When you look at job creation, one-third, one-third of all the jobs created in the United States in the last 13 plus years have been in the Lone Star State. Over the last ten years, we have created four times more jobs than the state of New York, we have created nine times more jobs than the state of California. And some would say well it&#8217;s because you have all of that energy, and I will suggest to you we are glad we have that energy. America is glad we have that energy. But it&#8217;s not singularly the energy boom, that&#8217;s only part of the reason for our success. We&#8217;ve added jobs across the spectrum – 228,000 workers in education and healthcare, 156,000 in professional services, 162,000 in hospitality services, 130,000 in trade and transportation, according to the Texas Public Policy Foundation. I am particularly proud of the fact that as of January of this year, Texas became the number one high-tech exporting state in the nation, passing up California and the famed Silicon Valley. And we&#8217;ve been continuing to reach out to give California companies the opportunity to relocate to the great state of Texas, companies like Toyota, who moved their North American headquarters to Plano this last year, companies like Space-X, and we&#8217;re going to keep doing it.</p>
<p>And my point is, I want the Golden State to succeed. We need California to be a powerful, successful country. That was a Freudian slip. We would really like to bring them into the United States and be a part of this country. You know, for ten consecutive years now, Chief Executive Officer magazine has chosen Texas as the number one state to do business, and, thanks to the governor of this state, Rick Scott, they are doing a good job to push us. Rick Scott is an extraordinary governor, and Floridians were really wise to put this man back into office again because he really understands what the future of our nation, the future of this state is all about, and the focus on creating that environment, where the citizens of this state will be free.</p>
<p>Freedom is what this is all about. It is in the pursuit of freedom, and, on average, there is a thousand people every day moving to the state of Texas because they are in pursuit of freedom. Freedom from over-taxation, freedom from over-litigation, freedom from over-regulation. That is what needs to be the powerful Republican message as we go forward inside the boundaries of this country. And here are some of the results of those policies. Our crime rate is now the lowest that it&#8217;s been since 1968. We&#8217;re shutting prisons down in the state of Texas, not building them.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s the result of good, thoughtful public policy? There are those that would stand up and say you cannot have a growing economy and take care of your environment. That is an absolute false lie. Nitrogen oxide levels are down 63 percent in the state of Texas in the last decade, ozone levels are down by 23 percent during that same period of time, our carbon footprint which, by the way, is not a pollutant, but is down by 11 percent during that period of time because we understand that, even if it is, we want to make sure that we&#8217;re doing everything that we can to make that environment as pleasing as it can be for the future generations, and that&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve done in the state of Texas. Part of that&#8217;s been because of policies that we&#8217;ve put into place to move old polluting types of engines, diesel engines, out of the fleets. Part of it&#8217;s been moving to that natural gas. That&#8217;s what can happen all across this country. This isn&#8217;t a miracle. It&#8217;s a model and it&#8217;s a model that will work anywhere. We are an increasingly diverse state. We got a little of something for everybody. We have Austin, Texas. As I told you, we are a diverse state. I refer to it as the blueberry in the tomato soup. And, David, I encourage you to visit from time to time. You can talk philosophy and tenure to the professors at the University of Texas. They would love to have you.</p>
<p>But, in all seriousness, can we do more? Yes. Should we try to do more? Absolutely. But what Texas shows is that with a rapidly growing economy all else becomes possible. Clearly Texas is a model that works, but we&#8217;re not alone. America has just experienced a great test of governing principles. In the days leading up to the 2014 mid-term elections, we were told that Republican governors were in trouble. You read it everywhere. You saw it on multiple outlets. Scott Walker&#8217;s public union reforms in Wisconsin, Sam Brownback&#8217;s tax-cutting in Kansas, Rick Scott&#8217;s pro-growth policies in Florida, all were going to be punished by the voters. For example, the campaign for America&#8217;s future said that seven Republican governors were now &#8220;being judged harshly by voters now that their right-wing policies had failed to deliver.&#8221; It went on to say that these states were laboratories for the kind of small government trickle-down economics that Senate candidates hoped to bring to Washington, impose on the nation, and there is a real danger that the failed experiments in these seven states will be brought to Washington by a Senate Republican majority. But the experiment wasn&#8217;t quite over, and the voters decided in a very powerful conclusion on November 4. Not only did six of those seven governors win re-election, but Republicans picked up governorships in solid states for Democrats like Massachusetts, Illinois, and even Maryland. And there were a lot of people, a lot of people that were responsible for those Republican victories including a number of you, if not all of you, in this audience tonight. Yet in the end it was the people who decided. They told fellow Americans that the experiment and conservative governance is a resounding success and they want more of it.</p>
<p>There were a few places that bucked the trend though. Jay, your California being one of them. See, I tell people, I say California, for example, is as liberal as Texas is conservative. But that is not an argument against federalism. In fact, California is an example of how the state&#8217;s Tenth Amendment powers work for liberals too. You think about this. California has some policies that no other state in the union have tried, and in most other states, don&#8217;t want to try. Take cap and trade, for instance. I mean, not even Barack Obama, in those heady early days of his first administration, could pass cap and trade, but California has it. And it&#8217;s making new companies like Tesla a lot of money, even as it is at the same time forcing a lot of companies out of that state.</p>
<p>Nearly 20 years ago, California also became the first state in the nation to legalize medical marijuana. In 2012, Washington and Colorado legalized marijuana entirely. This year Alaska, Oregon, and the District of Columbia followed suit. The governor of Colorado said that he regrets it. Most conservatives oppose it. The federal government&#8217;s still fighting it, and the United Nations said this week that legalizing marijuana violates international law. But that is the beauty of the Tenth Amendment. I&#8217;m telling you, that is the beauty of federalism. If states can make their own decisions on matters of general policy, then we can have the kind of political diversity among the states that gives meaning to the pursuit of happiness. People can vote with their feet, they can vote with their pocketbooks, they can invest their dollars where they want, and that gives states an incentive to attract them, and to innovate. The reason welfare reform became so popular nationwide was because it succeeded in Wisconsin. The reason state provided healthcare is unpopular nationwide is they proved that it was costly in Massachusetts.</p>
<p>Some states want to cling to policies for various reasons. California is addicted to spending. Therefore, it&#8217;s addicted to debt and taxes. So, there&#8217;s a result. It&#8217;s losing people, and entrepreneurs, and homeowners, and that is another benefit of federalism. You can do what you want in your state. But you are forced at some point to pay the costs.</p>
<p>So, how do we ensure that the states protect and, I might say, regain their Tenth Amendment rights? One way is by continuing to fight the encroachments of the federal government. Whether bad laws like Obamacare, bad spending like the stimulus of 2009, or bad faith in immigration policy, but beyond that we can take political action. We can show the American people concrete results, how states work better, how states compete against each other, and, I might add, better than the federal government could do. And that&#8217;s exactly how Governor-elect Larry Hogan over in Maryland, that was the point that he made. He laid out the data. He showed people in that state how many people had left the state, how many billions of dollars it was costing the state because of the bad policies. If we show people the difference between conservative policies and liberal policies, I happen to think they&#8217;re going to demand conservative policies almost every time just as they did last Tuesday. And when people understand, when people understand that they have the power to choose these policies, they&#8217;ll resist. They&#8217;ll resist any attempt by the federal government to take that power away. There is a reason that people and states are included together in that Tenth Amendment. Individual liberty has shone brightest when it&#8217;s been protected from big government. Only successful states are strong enough to protect our freedom from those in Washington who think they know better. States are the essence of our national motto e pluribus unum, from many one. That is the common creed of the David Horowitz Freedom Center that defends it every day. They defend it now and I will suggest to you they will defend it 20 years from now. And that is what each of us must fight for every day.</p>
<p>God bless you, and thank you all for coming and being a part of this.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/rick-perry-restore-the-10th-amendment-restore-freedom/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>12</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Leftist and Islamic War on the Family</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-leftist-and-islamic-war-on-the-family/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-leftist-and-islamic-war-on-the-family</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-leftist-and-islamic-war-on-the-family/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2014 05:35:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[family]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244397</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The greatest threat to the totalitarian state is the family.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/war.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-244400" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/war.jpg" alt="war" width="220" height="183" /></a>The greatest threat to the totalitarian state is the family. In Nazi Germany, in the Soviet Union and in the Islamic State, children were split apart from their families, subjected to ruthless indoctrination and taught to turn on their parents at the slightest hint of dissent.</p>
<p>In our more enlightened liberal society where the family is being displaced by the state, children are merely taught to view their parents as ignorant, racist, sexist, homophobic and outdated. The classroom and popular cultural inflate the self-esteem of the next generation by assuring them of their moral superiority to their parents and offering them independence from the authority and values of their parents in exchange for accepting the values and authority of the benevolent liberal state.</p>
<p>It’s a system that is less overtly cruel, but equally determined to replace the family unit with detached citizens cut off from being able to maintain and pass on a set of values opposed to those of the state.</p>
<p>The War on the Family ends with children, but begins by disrupting the relationships between men and women.</p>
<p>While liberalism’s War on Women meme and the sexism of Islamic law may seem like two opposites, they are actually mirror images of each other. Muslims teach men to hate and fear women. Liberals teach women to hate and fear men. Liberalism promotes paranoia about the intentions of men while Islam teaches men to be paranoid about the intentions of women.</p>
<p>Liberalism treats masculinity as a pathology. Islam treats femininity as the root of all evil. Both ideologies insist that one gender and everything related to it is inherently tainted and that the only way to maintain a good society is to purge that gender and everything it represents from the public square.</p>
<p>Liberalism and Islam both seek to create conditions of divisiveness that make trust between the sexes impossible. Even when men and women do connect, both ideologies work to create power imbalances, social, religious and legal, that make family life inherently unstable. Their goal is to prevent the family from becoming the center of human life. Instead the family is transformed into an alien condition that can and does end at any moment by preying on the fears and weaknesses of its participants.</p>
<p>Islam drives women out of public spaces by encouraging predatory male behavior. Liberalism encourages predatory male behavior by disrupting the moral values that keep it in check and then profits from the chaos that it has caused by promoting paranoia about predatory male behavior.</p>
<p>The unspoken truth of the War on Women is that the breakup of the family has made life more dangerous for women and men. It’s a statistical fact that crime rates increase for children from single parent households. Sixty percent of rapists <a href="http://www.rightwingnews.com/top-news/ann-coulter-on-single-mothers-the-statistics-from-guilty/">grew up in single parent</a> households. The real War on Women began with the War on the Family. That is also where it ends.</p>
<p>Unlike liberalism, Islam does not seek to eliminate the family, but to maintain its functionality at the purely mechanical level without allowing for healthy relationships. The members of the Islamic family are alienated from each other. The women learn to fear their husbands, fathers and brothers. The men know to distrust their mothers, sisters and daughters. A misstep can easily end in an honor killing.</p>
<p>Both genders view each other as dangerously unpredictable and predatory. Normal human relationships collapse under the weight of mutual distrust. The Muslim family is outwardly intact, but inwardly broken. Its members are united only by an even deeper suspicion and hostility toward the outside world. Muslim men know that women on the outside are even more immoral and untrustworthy than their female relations and Muslim women expect men outside the family to be even more dangerous.</p>
<p>The sex grooming scandals in the UK are an interaction between two networks of broken families. On one side are Muslim men who have been taught that women are barely human. On the other side are the young casualties of a nanny state that killed the family and replaced it with apathetic social workers and callous cops. The same phenomenon is taking place in Western cities across the world.</p>
<p>Islam destroys the family to create men with nothing to live for. The Muslim terrorist does not die for his family. The idea of dying to protect his wife and children has no emotional resonance for him. He can use women and children as human shields because they matter less than he does. It is his own honor that moves him far more than the lives of his family. Kill his children and he may forget. Humiliate him and he will never forgive. Promise him paradise and he will willingly die for a better world than this one.</p>
<p>The Muslim Jihadist does not submit to Allah. He submits to his own ego and kills in its name.</p>
<p>Liberalism however destroys the family to create helpless individuals looking for the next handout. The protégé of the nanny state is a coward. He is eager to join mobs, but does nothing as an individual. He creates nothing, and therefore has nothing to lose except his material possessions which he uses as gateways to the ‘fun’ that consumes his life. He is capable of violence, but only when he has numbers on his side. Family is a means of sharing resources, but not responsibilities. Like his children, it is disposable.</p>
<p>When families die, human beings begin reverting to a feral state. The inability to sustain family leads to the collapse of civilization. Liberalism and Islam both feed off the social failures that they manufacture.</p>
<p>The violent gangs of Jihadists that can pop up anywhere are symptoms of a society with large numbers of feral men. The rapists and killers of ISIS are animated by a profoundly different ideology, but behave similarly to gangs in Latin America and the United States. Islam and liberalism both produce large numbers of feral young men with no meaningful human relationships who derive their sense of identity from gang membership.</p>
<p>It is why Islam spreads so effectively in prison. The penal system is the ideal Islamic environment. It is a world without family and without choice where the only attribute is honor. It is also the inevitable consequence of liberalism. Liberalism kills the family producing young men destined for prison. Islam sweeps in to pick up the pieces and gives them purpose and meaning by turning them into killers.</p>
<p>Islam is a religion of the clan, not of the family. Liberalism organizes people along the lines of the group. Islam militarizes the clan into an expansionist force through conflict with other clans. Liberalism militarizes group identity into a struggle with every other group. Both promote conflict and isolation, uniting combatants through paranoia and hate, while dividing them so that they cannot make peace.</p>
<p>Liberalism and Islam both perpetuate the crises that keep them going through dysfunction. They can only thrive by maintaining a constant supply of unhappy people who have lost the ability to live fulfilling and meaningful lives. The biggest threat to their empires and caliphates of dysfunction is a strong family.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-leftist-and-islamic-war-on-the-family/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>43</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Bill Whittle: The Struggle for Stupidity</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-the-struggle-for-stupidity/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-the-struggle-for-stupidity</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-the-struggle-for-stupidity/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Aug 2014 04:26:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Common Core]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[standards]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238828</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/KFrYEV07p4I" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Sci-Fi Author Jerry Pournelle recently re-published a sixth grade reader from 1914. In his latest FIREWALL, Bill Whittle explains how full comprehension of a single paragraph from that hundred-year-old elementary school textbook eludes virtually all of today&#8217;s college graduates; shows why it is such a sin, and reveals the Progressive Struggle for Stupidity in all of its undeniable venality.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<blockquote style="font-style: italic;"><p>AMERICAN EDUCATION AND THE STRUGGLE FOR STUPIDITY</p>
<p>Hi everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p>Science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle has republished, with his additional commentary, a completely forgotten – but far from forgettable – book called Literature Reader, Sixth Year, by Leroy E. Armstrong.</p>
<p>Literature Reader, Sixth Year, by Leroy E. Armstrong is not a novel or a scientific treatise or a book or Mr. Armstrong’s poetry. It’s a textbook – a California textbook: a collection of written tales and their analyses, the basics of literature, story structure and all the rest: that’s it and that’s all.</p>
<p>On a whim, I looked it up on Amazon, and on another whim, I clicked on a random link, and scanned the first paragraph I laid eyes on, which read:</p>
<p>Then Jason lighted the pile, and burnt the carcass of the bull; and they went to their ship and sailed eastward, like men who have a work to do. Three thousand years and more they sailed away, into the unknown Eastern seas; and great nations have come and gone since then, and many a storm has swept the earth; and many a mighty armament, to which Argo would be but one small boat; English and French, Turkish and Russian, have sailed those waters since; yet the fame of that small Argo lives forever, and her name is a proverb among men.</p>
<p>This is what sixth graders were reading one hundred years ago, in 1914, but if a college kid today graduated with a full and complete understanding of that one single paragraph they would be better educated than they are after a quarter-million dollars or so of student debt.</p>
<p>Reduced to a movie – which would be the only way to get a 6th grader to meet Jason and the Argonauts today – It would be:</p>
<p>EXT. WIDE SHOT – THE BEACH</p>
<p>Jason lights fire to the bull. After a moment, his men turn and walk to the ship. Casting off the lines, they set sail out into the harbor.</p>
<p>CLOSE UP – JASON</p>
<p>He looks out to sea, a look of determination on his face.</p>
<p>CUT TO…</p>
<p>And that would be it. But that’s just the surface of the paragraph, and that’s all 6th graders in 2016 get – the only the surface of everything. A hundred years ago, these same-aged children would have imagined – they would have seen in their minds – the great ship setting sail for the eastern sea, and then be shocked that the Greek author did not talk abut sailing for three hundred miles bur rather for three thousand years. They saw the mighty fleets of the English and French and Turks and Russians – sailing ships, battleships – come and go and only the small Argo remain on these waters of eternity. Only this small band of men, in a little boat, sailing across the ocean of history and legend human history, like men who have a work to do.</p>
<p>For a random paragraph from an obscure textbook, that is a profound insight. No doubt it is why Leroy E. Armstrong decided to include it in his reader.</p>
<p>The Progressives have had to fight against that 1895 or 1914 level of education, and it hasn’t been easy for them. It took them at least half a century to win this struggle for stupidity: elimination of standards, grading on the curve, the self-esteem movement, new math, gender studies, speech codes and all the rest – the det-ritus of the battle against educated citizens, in harness to the socialist paradise that is so obviously doomed to failure – well…obvious to people who know math, history, and economics, anyway.</p>
<p>And now, with Common Core, soon it will be against the law for your child to hit the jackpot, against all odds, and end up with a Leroy E. Armstrong. No, the final battle in the Struggle for Stupidity will be to make it illegal to be taught anything other than Standard State Stupid. They have succeeded in taking a generation that go to the moon with slide rules, doing the math in their head, to a generation that is amazed to discover that the movie Titanic is based on a true story.</p>
<p>And through it all – through the rise and fall of England and France and Turkey and Russia and now us, the United States of America – the Argo sails on alone, unread, undiscovered, waiting for a time when people begin to search for her once again.</p></blockquote>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-the-struggle-for-stupidity/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>10</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>What States Are Doing on the Border Crisis</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ian-smith/what-states-are-doing-on-the-border-crisis/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-states-are-doing-on-the-border-crisis</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ian-smith/what-states-are-doing-on-the-border-crisis/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 05 Aug 2014 04:34:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ian Smith]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[border]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crisis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[DACA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deferred action]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[house]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237829</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Taking matters into their own hands. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/illegal-aliens-3.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237842" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/illegal-aliens-3-450x339.jpg" alt="APTOPIX Mexico Migrants" width="285" height="215" /></a>Before Friday night&#8217;s DACA-gutting immigration bill was passed in the House, rookie Majority Whip, Steve Scalise (R-La.) had been getting <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/steve-scalise-day-one-109612.html"><span style="color: #0463c1;">pounced</span></a> on by the liberal media for his “inability” to push wavering House Republicans into getting something out the door before the recess-break. Ever since the Gang of Eight’s amnesty bill was introduced last year, the media has <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/03/19/the-gop-dilemma-on-immigration/"><span style="color: #0463c1;">claimed</span></a> that it&#8217;s Republican intransigence that is obstructing immigration and border security “reform.”</p>
<p>Whether true or not, it’s important to point out that this has never been the case for our conservative representatives at the state and local-level. In 2007 alone they <a href="http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/hazleton-and-beyond-why-communities-try-restrict-immigration"><span style="color: #0463c1;">introduced</span></a> over <i>1,500</i> immigration bills in state assemblies across the nation with 240 being enacted into law. They’ve been just as busy since, probably because they’ve had to. The problems from decades of open-borders faced by state and local governments are getting ever closer to crisis-proportions. Given that Friday’s much improved bill will surely not survive the Senate’s or Obama’s chopping block, it may be time to reassess what our representatives at the state-level can and have been doing to deliver true patriotic immigration reform.</p>
<p>In a newly published book of academic essays about state-level immigration regulation, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Neighbors-Immigration-Citizenship-Migration/dp/0814737803/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1407008550&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=strange+neighbors+immigration"><span style="color: #0463c1;"><i>Strange Neighbors</i></span></a>, immigration law guru Kris Kobach declares that “every state is a border state now.” Indeed, immigration-induced problems are the “new normal” for most state governments which will be compounded by a perennially underperforming national economy and budget-busting pension and welfare obligations. Drawing on Milton Friedman’s statement that “you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state,” Kobach reminds us that “[a] massive influx of individuals who either pay very little in income taxes or evade income taxes entirely, but consume public services at a relatively high rate, is costly for any receiving state.” This is clearly seen in the predominately Democrat-run “<span style="color: #0463c1;"><a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/sanctuary_cities_and_states_will_bear_the_lions_share_of_amnesty_cost.html">sanctuary cities</a>,</span>” which have some of the most unstable governments in the nation.</p>
<p>Despite the flurry of state and local bills over the past few years, states have been restrained from regulating immigration where it really hurts: education costs. It’s now <a href="http://www.thesocialcontract.com/articles/plyler-v-doe.html"><span style="color: #0463c1;">estimated</span></a> that around 50 percent of the increase in the national school-age population going forward will come from illegal aliens. But in the landmark 1982 decision of <i>Plyer v. Doe</i>, statutes denying free education for illegal alien children were deemed unconstitutional by a bare majority of the Supreme Court. In a display of ignorance startling even for liberals, then-Chief Justice William Brennan wrote for the court that “few if any illegal immigrants come to this country… in order to avail themselves of a free education.” On the contrary, says John Eastman, constitutional lawyer and fellow contributor to <i>Strange Neighbors</i>, a free top-notch education is “one of the three great magnets” for illegal aliens to come across our border – the others being employment and birthright citizenship.</p>
<p>According to Brennan in the <i>Plyer </i>decision, the statute in question (which originated from Texas) was struck down because “the record in no way supports the claim that exclusion of undocumented children is likely to improve the overall quality of education in the State.” Although there may not have been a lot of data available to counsel for Texas then, that was over 30 years ago and we now have a ton of statistics on education costs from illegal immigration. According to a 2010 report from the <a href="http://www.fairus.org/site/DocServer/USCostStudy_2010.pdf?docID=4921"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Federation for American Immigration Reform</span></a>, the <i>largest</i> cost of illegal immigration to states today is, in fact, education. Just in Arizona that year alone, it cost taxpayers close to $1.5 billion. It now looks likely that what was missing for Brennan can now be met.</p>
<p>In 2011, Alabama attempted to build such a challenge to <i>Plyer</i>. It enacted a <a href="http://www.fairus.org/publications/hb56-helping-to-move-alabama-s-economy-forward"><span style="color: #0463c1;">law</span></a> that sought to gather information on education costs of illegal aliens and how it affected state-wide education in general. Although it sought to merely gather data, the statute was immediately challenged by treasonous lawfare groups, like the SPLC and ACLU, and implementation of the law has been delayed. But for states hoping to turn off the education magnet, Alabama’s efforts are instructive.</p>
<p>Since <i>Plyer</i>, Eastman reminds us, the Supreme Court has made some positive shifts towards states’ rights, as seen in such cases as <i>US v. Lopez</i>, <i>US v. Morrison</i> and <i>Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting</i>. It is hoped patriotic state legislators and attorneys general across the nation will follow Alabama and take up similar legislative initiatives. Considering our congress is compromised and our president wants the borders erased, it may be our only hope.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ian-smith/what-states-are-doing-on-the-border-crisis/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>9</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Revolt Against the Testing Tyrants</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/michellemalkin/revolt-against-the-testing-tyrants/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=revolt-against-the-testing-tyrants</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/michellemalkin/revolt-against-the-testing-tyrants/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Mar 2014 04:15:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Common Core]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[experimental]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[students]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[testing]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221370</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Who's really benefiting from school testing madness? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/6a00d8341c630a53ef0133f387e0cb970b.jpg"><img class="wp-image-221373 alignleft" alt="6a00d8341c630a53ef0133f387e0cb970b" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/6a00d8341c630a53ef0133f387e0cb970b-450x332.jpg" width="315" height="232" /></a>Have you had enough of the testing tyranny? Join the club. To be clear: I&#8217;m not against all standardized academic tests. My kids excel on tests. The problem is that there are too damned many of these top-down assessments, measuring who knows what, using our children as guinea pigs and cash cows.</p>
<p>College-bound students in Orange County, Fla., for example, now take a total of 234 standardized diagnostic, benchmark and achievement tests from kindergarten through 12th grade. Reading instructor Brian Trutschel calculated that a typical 10th-grade English class will be disrupted 65 out of 180 school days this year alone for mandatory tests required by the state and district. &#8220;It&#8217;s a huge detriment to instruction,&#8221; he told the Orlando Sentinel last month. The library at one Florida middle school is closed for a full three months out of the 10-month school year for computerized assessments.</p>
<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s horrible, because all we do is test,&#8221; Nancy Pace, the school&#8217;s testing coordinator, told the newspaper. &#8220;There&#8217;s something every month.&#8221; My Colorado 8th-grader has been tied up all week on her TCAPs (Transitional Colorado Assessment Program), which used to be called CSAPs (Colorado Student Assessment Program), which will soon be replaced by something else.</p>
<p>Now, pile on the latest avalanche of federal pilot testing schemes tied to the Common Core racket. When they&#8217;re not preoccupied with getting ready for Iowa basic skills tests, NAEPs, ACTs, PSATs, revamped SATs, CLEPs, FCATs, TCAPs and scores of other state exams, American kids will be busy testing new tests. Because the Common Core testing scheme mandates computerized administration and because the tests incorporate bandwidth-hogging videos and graphics, school districts across the country must spend gobs of time and money on test preparation.</p>
<p>The San Francisco Unified School District shelled out more than $800,000 this year for new computers, keyboards and headsets for testing, and will buy 5,300 Apple computers next year to start standardizing the district on a single operating system, according to the EdSource.org website. Rural students will be yanked out of the classroom and herded on buses over the course of several days to get to tech-connected districts, where they will spend several hours each day (on top of hours of travel) taking experimental Common Core-aligned field tests that won&#8217;t count until next year.</p>
<p>The federally funded testing consortium called PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), which raked in $186 million through Race to the Top to develop nationalized tests tied to the top-down Common Core program, will dragoon more than one million students into field testing this spring.</p>
<p>The other federally funded testing consortium, the $180-million tax-subsidized Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, was supposed to start field tests this week for three million students in 23 states. But last-minute &#8220;glitches&#8221; have delayed the untested tests by at least a week, disrupting district instructional plans and calendars in 20,000 schools — and in some cases, interfering with other test schedules for high-stakes Advanced Placement and SAT exams that <i>do </i>count.</p>
<p>Parents, teachers and administrators are fed up with Fed Ed. There&#8217;s a growing grassroots movement — left, right and center — to opt out of this latest battery of assessments. Last week, the Worcester, Mass., school board voted to allow parents to opt out of PARCC field tests and keep their kids in regular classroom instruction. The Norfolk, Mass., school board did the same in January. Colorado State Board of Education Chairman Paul Lundeen has called on the state legislature to repeal the PARCC testing requirement.</p>
<p>The testing tyrants, of course, are doing everything they can to stop parents from protecting their children: deceive, bully, intimidate and obfuscate. The state of Connecticut recently sent out a misleading letter to parents warning them that &#8220;all children enrolled in public schools&#8221; are legally required to &#8220;take yearly assessments.&#8221; But as parent Wendy Lecker points out, the bureaucrats failed to disclose that the mandate applies to &#8220;statewide mastery tests,&#8221; not to experimental field tests such as the PARCC and SBAC pilots, which &#8220;fail to satisfy the basic elements the law clearly sets forth of the required statewide test.&#8221;</p>
<p>Dr. Sandra Stotsky, former senior associate commissioner in the Massachusetts Department of Education and Massachusetts State Board of Education member, spells out the grounds for revolt: &#8220;(L)ocal school districts can legally refuse to give state tests because they don&#8217;t address the legally adopted standards and curriculum at the local level. &#8230; (U)nless state law explicitly forbids parents from opting their kids out of SBAC or PARCC field tests, then parents can do so, and should. They can petition their school boards to pass a policy allowing all parents to opt their kids out of all field tests for any Common Core-aligned test. And they can add that there are to be NO penalties for parents exercising that right. State (Departments of Education) cannot make policy, by law. They are threatening local districts and parents illegally.&#8221;</p>
<p>Bottom line: No child in America is legally required to be a part of the latest Common Core lab-rat testing experiments. You are your kids&#8217; primary educational provider and decider. You have the power to flunk the latest Fed Ed testing boondoggles. Use it.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/michellemalkin/revolt-against-the-testing-tyrants/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>8</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>&#8216;Labor Negotiations&#8217;: Goodyear Union Kidnaps Bosses</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/labor-negotiations-goodyear-union-kidnaps-bosses/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=labor-negotiations-goodyear-union-kidnaps-bosses</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/labor-negotiations-goodyear-union-kidnaps-bosses/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 08 Jan 2014 05:35:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boss]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[France]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Goodyear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[kidnap]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214858</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Welcome to compassionate, socialist France. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ALeqM5hwyLOxB8KUtip3H0xzodoj4Yr56Q.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214859" alt="ALeqM5hwyLOxB8KUtip3H0xzodoj4Yr56Q" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ALeqM5hwyLOxB8KUtip3H0xzodoj4Yr56Q-450x305.jpg" width="315" height="214" /></a>This weekend, when management-labor negotiations broke down at a tire factory, employees kidnapped their bosses. Where, you ask, did this happen? In the Central African Republic? Somalia? Burkina Faso? No – in Amiens, France. Turns out it&#8217;s become something of a Gallic custom.</p>
<p>It started this way: Goodyear decided last year that it wanted to wash its hands of the plant; when the French government tried to get another U.S. firm, Titan, to take it over, the company head, Maurice Taylor, Jr., checked it out, found the union confrontational and the workers unproductive loafers, and asked: “How stupid do you think we are?” Unable to find a buyer, Goodyear decided to shutter the operation – but in exchange for letting it do so, workers demanded “severance packages of 80,000 euros, or about $110,000, plus €2,500 for each year worked.” When Goodyear balked, the kidnapping commenced.</p>
<p>Welcome to <i>la belle République</i>, A.D. 2014.</p>
<p>But first a flashback to 2007. About an hour and twenty minutes into <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hHnSlZsVRI"><i>Sicko</i></a><i>, </i>his paean to socialized medicine that was released that year, Michael Moore sits at a table at what looks like a swank Paris bistro with a group of expatriate Americans – young, upscale professional types – who sing the praises of the French health-care system. As they regale him with stories about all the services they get for nothing, or next to nothing, he feigns astonishment. It&#8217;s not just the free first-class medical care. The day care, they tell him, is also terrific – and also virtually free. One of the Americans gushes that because she lives in France she can count on her kids receiving “a certain level of care, a certain education. College, I don&#8217;t have to worry about” because “you get a college education for free.” The French freebies seem well-nigh unlimited: for heaven&#8217;s sake, when you have a baby, the government will even send somebody over to cook and do your laundry for you.</p>
<p>What a country. Everything&#8217;s free! Nobody pays! There&#8217;s a thirty-five-hour work week, five weeks minimum paid vacation, and employment laws that provide almost total job security for everybody, competent or not. What could go wrong? If any of Moore&#8217;s worldly, well-heeled, presumably well educated interlocutors sees any potential problem with this system, there&#8217;s certainly no hint of it in the movie. Yes, one of them does hint that the government would cut back on the largesse if it could get away with it. But it <i>can&#8217;t </i>get away with it: as she explains, “one of the things that keep everything running here” – one of the things, she means, that keep the gravy flowing – “is that the government is afraid of the people, afraid of protests&#8230;.In France, that&#8217;s what people do.” And why, pray tell, would the government want to rein all this in? That question goes unanswered – indeed, unasked.</p>
<p>Seven years after Moore&#8217;s film, the <i>poulets</i> have<i> </i>come home to roost. Indeed, during the last year or so, even publications that one might have expected to join Moore in celebrating the French welfare state&#8217;s munificence have run stunningly frank accounts of its dire consequences. In November 2012, <i>The Economist </i>served up a <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2012/11/fran%C3%A7ois-hollande">piece</a> entitled “Battling French Decline.” Last January, under the headline “France is in free fall,” CNN <a href="http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/09/france-economy-crisis/">reported</a> on the country&#8217;s “shocking deterioration in competitiveness,” noting that its workforce boasts “the lowest number of working hours in the developed world” and the highest social expenditures (“42 euros for every 100 euros in total expenses go to social charges, versus 34 euros in Germany, 26 in the UK, and 20 in the US”). Last June, in a piece <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/economic-decline-in-france-the-failed-leadership-of-hollande-a-903732-druck.html">headlined</a> “Bonjour Tristesse: The Economic and Political Decline of France,” <i>Der Spiegel </i>described the Hexagon as being “in the grip of a crisis”: “The mood hanging over the country is depressed&#8230;.It feels as if the French model had reached an end stage.” In August, the <i>New York Times </i>asked: “can the Socialist government&#8230;pull France out of its slow decline and prevent it from slipping permanently into Europe’s second tier?” And in July, predictably enough, the <i>Times</i>&#8216;s house numbskull, Roger Cohen, put an idiotically positive spin on all the bad news under the headline “France’s Glorious Malaise.” Cohen&#8217;s argument, if you can call it that, was that “French malaise, moroseness and melancholy” is “a perennial state” – “a fierce form of realism,” “a bitter wisdom,” a “badge of honor.”  Yes, he admitted, France is saddled with an unaffordable welfare state, but, hey, it&#8217;s also got “superb medicine, good education, immense beauty, the only wine worth drinking,” and so on. “Better,” he concluded, “to be miserable than a hypocrite, nauseated than naive — and far better to be morose than a fool.” Well, if he knows about anything, it&#8217;s about being a fool.</p>
<p>Then came the November-December issue of the <i>National Interest. </i>In a long essay entitled “The Decline and Fall of France,” economist Milton Ezrati stated flatly that “France&#8217;s economy&#8230;is in profound decline,” and provided the data: “More than one thousand factories have closed in France since 2009….Government in France now constitutes some 57 percent of the entire economy&#8230;.France’s share of global exports has fallen from 7 percent in 1999 to only 3 percent today&#8230;.employers in France pay the government the equivalent of almost 64 percent of their payrolls&#8230;.some 54 percent of the working-age population holds themselves outside the workforce, compared with 42 percent in Germany and 32 percent in the United States.” France, concluded Ezrati, “is beginning to resemble a less developed economy.” (Of course, a major factor in this decline – but one that hardly any of these accounts so much as mentions – is the presence within the French borders of some five to ten million Muslims, a high percentage of whom are social clients.)</p>
<p>Even after all these tales of gloom and doom, however, a <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/fall-france-225368">piece</a> published last week in the just-relaunched <i>Newsweek </i>counted as a head-turner. Under the headline “The Fall of France,” Janine di Giovanni recalled Louis XIV&#8217;s persecution of the Huguenots, “the worker bees of France,” hundreds of thousands of whom fled the realm for safer climes. Today&#8217;s France, like the Sun King&#8217;s, is suffering a “brain drain”: now that productive Frenchmen – those who actually earn a decent living by the sweat of their brow – are taxed at rates upward of 70 percent, “there has been a frantic bolt for the border by the very people who create economic growth – business leaders, innovators, creative thinkers, and top executives. They are all leaving France to develop their talents elsewhere.” Two years ago, part-time <i>Parisienne</i> Claire Berlinski <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_1_diarist-france.html">observed</a> in <i>City Journal </i>that while “France can no longer pay for its comfortable way of life,” Paris still felt “like a city whose troubles are far away.” No more, says di Giovanni: “the past two years have seen a steady, noticeable decline in France. There is a grayness that the heavy hand of socialism casts.” Di Giovanni, herself a British expat living in the City of Light, has been at the receiving end of a lot of the government goody bags that were acclaimed by Michael Moore&#8217;s American-expat pals, but she, unlike them, recognizes some of those perks as “pure waste”: for example, after she gave birth, the government – without even asking her if she wanted it – sprung for twice-a-week physical-therapy sessions so she could lose her baby fat. Di Giovanni summed up the whole sad situation by quoting a corporate lawyer: “France is dying a slow death. Socialism is killing it.”</p>
<p>Last fall, a cousin of mine who lives in Paris drew my attention to a story that perfectly demonstrates just how France is doing itself in. Monoprix, a big supermarket chain, wanted to extend its opening hours and do business on Sunday as well. It would&#8217;ve been good for the economy – and for the chain&#8217;s employees, who backed the idea. But France&#8217;s largest union, the extremely powerful General Confederation of Labor (CGT), threatened Monoprix with an 80,000-euro fine for every worker affected. So that was the end of that.</p>
<p>So it goes in France these days. While protecting even the most unproductive employees by making it almost impossible to fire anyone, the government punishes entrepreneurs brutally. “You&#8217;d have to be crazy to start a business here now,” my cousin lamented recently. The self-employed are drained dry: “you almost pay more to the state than what you can gross in a year,” he told me. In order to be able to declare and pay taxes on his hard-earned freelance income, he was obliged to cough up a hefty fee – around seven thousand euros the first year, ten thousand the second – for the right to identify himself as a “microenterprise.”</p>
<p>“No one in France,” wrote Berlinski two years ago, “seems to have grasped the connection between the country’s army of ceaselessly striking civil servants and the prospect of economic doom.” Well, some of them plainly grasp it now. But all too many, it appears, are – like those American expats in <i>Sicko </i>– still in heavy denial, enjoying their free ride while clinging to the illusion that it&#8217;ll go on forever. Moore, with his socialist magical thinking, was doubtless sure when he made that stupid film that if only Americans kicked up more of a fuss, as the French do, they could live like kings – getting not only free health care, but free <i>everything –</i> while not necessarily doing much of anything to pay their way. Now, however, as Ezrati notes, France, far from being able to cure everyone&#8217;s ills without cost, is itself increasingly being described as the “sick man of Europe” (which, Ezrati adds, is “quite a distinction at a moment when Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy share the hospital ward”). As it turns out, Moore was absolutely right to single out France as a splendid example for Americans. He just didn&#8217;t realize it was a <i>cautionary </i>example.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/labor-negotiations-goodyear-union-kidnaps-bosses/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>5</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Ari Shavit’s &#8216;Doomed&#8217; Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/ari-shavits-doomed-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ari-shavits-doomed-israel</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/ari-shavits-doomed-israel/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 23 Dec 2013 05:15:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[P. David Hornik]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ari Shavit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[future]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[my promised land]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213692</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Another left-winger’s warped vision of the Jewish state.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/0319-obama-mideast-trip-israel-public_full_600.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213693" alt="0319-obama-mideast-trip-israel-public_full_600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/0319-obama-mideast-trip-israel-public_full_600-439x350.jpg" width="307" height="245" /></a>I haven’t read <a title="" href="http://www.amazon.com/My-Promised-Land-Triumph-Tragedy/dp/0385521707/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1387722962&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=ari+shavit" target="_blank">My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel</a>, the new New York Times bestseller by Israeli left-of-center journalist Ari Shavit. In my book-reviewing days I read more than my fill of “Israel is losing its soul” books. I have a lot of resistance to subjecting myself to another, along with other priorities.</p>
<p>Shavit, of course, is not just another Israel-basher. Among left-wing Israeli commentators he’s distinguished by having <a title="" href="http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/soul-searching-on-syria-1.456951" target="_blank">admitted he was wrong about “peace” with Syria</a>, relating to Binyamin Netanyahu as a human being instead of a demon, and being intensely concerned about the Iranian threat—that is, capable of acknowledging that Israel still faces threats that it did not create itself.</p>
<p>Some commentators I respect clearly like My Promised Land. However, a <a title="" href="http://mosaicmagazine.com/supplemental/2013/12/their-tragic-land/" target="_blank">review</a> by another of my esteemed authors and commentators, Ruth Wisse, makes me all the more leery of putting any time into the book.</p>
<p>“[E]verywhere in My Promised Land,” Wisse writes, “the techniques of literary foreshadowing are deployed to telegraph impending doom.” And yet, “according to Shavit himself, his fears arise less from what Arab and Muslim leaders intend to do to Israel than from what Israel has done to them.”</p>
<p>Israel, in other words, as a doomed country—as comeuppance for its own sins. Sounds all too familiar.</p>
<p>Perhaps, if I read the book myself, I would get a different impression of its import. It seems unlikely, though, in light of some quotations Wisse offers.</p>
<p>Such as some sentences of Shavit’s about a concert by the great violinist Jascha Heifetz at Kibbutz Ein Harod in 1926—that is, in prestate, pioneering Israel, twenty-two years before statehood. As Shavit imagines this event:</p>
<blockquote><p>I think of that great fire in the belly, a fire without which the valley could not have been cultivated, the land could not have been conquered, the state of the Jews could not have been founded. But I know the fire will blaze out of control. It will burn the valley’s Palestinians and it will consume itself, too. Its smoldering remains will eventually turn Ein Harod’s exclamation point into a question mark.</p></blockquote>
<p>“…burn the valley’s Palestinians,” no less. Here you can see a <a title="" href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/aboutisrael/maps/pages/1947%20un%20partition%20plan.aspx" target="_blank">map</a> of the 1947 UN Partition Plan. The blue part was supposed to be Israel, the orange part Palestine (Jerusalem belongs to neither, an internationally administered city). Everything from Beersheba southward is desert; the Jews, whose connection to the land goes back over three thousand years and who have been assiduously building it up since the 1880s, get the Negev Desert, a strip along the coast, and eastern Galilee. The Palestinians get the rest.</p>
<p>As Ari Shavit knows, the Jews accepted this plan; the Palestinian and Arab side rejected it out of hand and instead launched a war to annihilate Israel. Shavit also knows that in 1994 Israel created the Palestinian Authority; that in 2000-01 it turned the historical clock back by offering the Palestinians a state that they—again—rejected; ditto for 2008; that meanwhile in 2005 Israel withdrew totally from Gaza; and that in 2009 Netanyahu, with his right-of-center background, pronounced himself in favor of a two-state solution.</p>
<p>Apparently, though, for Shavit, none of this is enough to expiate the primal sin he feels hovering over himself, over his country.</p>
<p>And then there’s this statement of Shavit’s, as <a title="" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/opinion/brooks-the-tragic-situation.html?_r=0" target="_blank">quoted by David Brooks</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>If Israel does not retreat from the West Bank, it will be politically and morally doomed, but if it does retreat, it might face an Iranian-backed and Islamic Brotherhood-inspired West Bank regime whose missiles could endanger Israel’s security. The need to end occupation is greater than ever, but so are the risks.</p></blockquote>
<p>“Doom” again. Many reasons can be given for why, if the current, John Kerry-impelled Israeli-Palestinian talks do not—as most people expect—lead to an agreement, Israel will not be doomed as a result.</p>
<p>There is the fact that, since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank in 1967, it has experienced remarkable demographic and economic growth. And on the moral side of the ledger, since 1967 Israel has become a much more vibrant, genuinely pluralist democracy compared to the previous one-party Mapai rule with its attendant nepotism and cronyism.</p>
<p>There is the fact that, as journalist David Rosenberg <a title="" href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/david-s-harp/.premium-1.564168" target="_blank">observed</a> last week in Shavit’s paper Haaretz, the anti-Israeli boycott movement—despite a few symbolic successes—has basically been losing:</p>
<blockquote><p>[Last] week four major port operators, including three European companies, bid to operate marine terminals in Israel. Israel was admitted to the European nuclear research consortium CERN as its first non-European full member. The Irish company Covidien offered to buy the Israeli medical device company Given Imaging. Apple bought PrimeSense, an Israeli high-tech startup. Carefusion, a San Diego company, bought 40% of Caesarea Medical Electronics.</p>
<p>Foreign direct investment in Israel stood at $9.4 billion in the first 10 months of the year, matching the total for all of 2012, and is likely to exceed 2011’s $10.8 billion.</p></blockquote>
<p>Yes, West Bank “occupation” and all. Doesn’t sound like a “doomed” country.</p>
<p>And there is the fact that, amid the horrific bloodletting in Syria and Iraq, the strife and brutality in Egypt, Lebanon, and Yemen, the savage persecution of Christians throughout the region, the poverty and corruption, one can fairly ask whether Israel—or anyone—has a moral obligation to create another Arab state; one, as Shavit acknowledges, capable of “endangering Israel’s security” to put it mildly.</p>
<p>These points seem so obvious that one surmises there is something other than “occupation of the West Bank” that is souring Shavit and other Israeli left-wingers on the Israeli endeavor. Perhaps a more primordial guilt over the reassertion of Jewish nationhood. Perhaps—one might say ironically—an aversion to enhanced Israeli democracy with its greater role for religious, Mizrahi, and Russian-immigrant Jews. Perhaps an inability to cope with Western elites’ disapproval of Israel, no matter how unwarranted and ill-informed.</p>
<p>In any case, that even a more thoughtful, nuanced left-winger like Shavit feels compelled to write about his country in terms of “tragedy” and “doom,” and that so many people are now getting this warped message, is really something to lament.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/ari-shavits-doomed-israel/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>70</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Inside the Turkish Protests</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/michael-van-der-galien/inside-the-turkish-protests/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=inside-the-turkish-protests</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/michael-van-der-galien/inside-the-turkish-protests/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Jun 2013 04:45:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael van der Galien]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mosque]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protests]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[turkey]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=193856</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Freedom fighters dare to battle for the separation of mosque and state.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/alsancak.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-193874" alt="alsancak" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/alsancak-450x337.jpg" width="252" height="189" /></a>The battle taking place in Turkey touches the very core of the Turkish Republic and its future. The country’s secularists who were in power for decades, but who have for the last ten years taken a backseat, have taken to the streets demanding the separation of mosque and state, while the Islamists led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan aim to Islamize the country faster and more thoroughly than ever before, while cracking down on all possible dissent.</p>
<p>I was able to speak to protesters in two different cities (Izmir and Istanbul) about their aims and the reasons for their sudden protests. At first, international media reported that the protests had started purely because inhabitants of Istanbul wanted to save a park (Gezi Parki). Although that certainly played a role, it was made clear to me from the get-go that the park was simply the last straw: their anger with Erdogan had increased year after year, and lately month after month. Finally, they said, they were fed up. They drew a line in the sand and said, &#8220;No more&#8221; to Erdogan’s authoritarianism and Islamism.<a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/karsiyaka-22.jpg"><img class="alignright  wp-image-193875" alt="karsiyaka 22" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/karsiyaka-22-262x350.jpg" width="168" height="224" /></a></p>
<p>Some of the protesters I spoke to had voted for Erdogan’s AK Parti in 2003. At that moment the country was hit hard by an economic crisis (which eerily reminds me of some other authoritarians who came to power in such difficult times, and who gradually increased their hold on their populace). He pretended to be a liberal democrat, a man who could unite the Turkish people, both conservative Muslims and secularists, and who would take the desperately needed measures the economy required to spring back to life. With him, he said &#8212; and voters believed &#8212; that a new era of universal freedom and economic prosperity was to arrive.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Sadly, things turned out slightly different than these voters had expected, they said. In the last ten years, they told me, Erdogan first strenghtened his hold on the government and all its institutions (including the judicial power and the military), after which he &#8211; at first slowly, later much faster &#8211; started to Islamize the country. In the last few months especially that Islamization had speeded up, with the prime minister saying women should have three children, a ban on the sale of alcohol between 10PM and 6AM, and an attempt to greatly reduce the right of abortion. When the opposition voiced their criticism they were at best ignored and at worst imprisoned (as has happened to hundreds of journalists).</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/women.png"><img class="aligncenter  wp-image-193876" alt="women" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/women.png" width="342" height="197" /></a></p>
<p>“Erdogan is a fascist, it’s that simple,” one of the protesters in Izmir told me. “He has to step down!” Another passionate youth said that “Erdogan has gone too far. Did you know that there’s no image of [Mustafa Kemal Atatürk - the founder of the modern and secular Turkish Republic] in schoolbooks anymore? He wants to remove all traces of Atatürk, who represents Turkish secularism. He wants to replace our laws with the Sharia!”</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/alsancak-2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-193877" alt="alsancak 2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/alsancak-2-262x350.jpg" width="183" height="245" /></a>One of the reasons that I understood the significance and true meaning of these protests early on is that many of the protesters are women. One of them told me that they all fear for their future role in a Turkey governed by the AK Parti. “Do I have to stay at home and raise three children or more? Will he decide that for me? Will I not be able to decide what I want to do and how I want to live my life? Do I need a headscarf eventually?”</p>
<p>Erdogan’s response to these questions and concerns has been brutal. Lawyers, doctors, protesters, Twitter users, Facebook users, journalists (both foreign and domestic) have been arrested this month. By behaving in that manner, the prime minister has, protesters justifiably say, confirmed their suspicions: he is out to Islamize the country and he will not stop until he has achieved that overarching goal.</p>
<p>Much has been written the last few years about a so-called &#8220;Arab Spring.&#8221; Arab peoples were ridding themselves of their dictators to finally embrace democracy. Yes, it was the start of a new Middle Eastern Golden Age. Sadly, that scenario was, as we now know, not to be. The secular dictators of the region have not been replaced by democrats, but by Islamofascists. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya are all lost to the West. They have been taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic radicals who not only wish to destroy Israel, but also to enslave and oppress their own people.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/girl-beaten.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-193879" alt="girl beaten" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/girl-beaten.jpg" width="350" height="232" /></a></p>
<p>In Turkey, however, there <i>is</i> a real Spring taking place. The protesters who have taken to the streets for weeks now, and who are attacked, tear gassed and arrested by the police are freedom-loving secularists, who defend their right to live as they see fit, and who demand answers from a prime minister who is increasingly showing his true &#8211; authoritarian and Islamist &#8211; colors.</p>
<p><strong>More photos of the protest in Turkey:</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/protesten-izmir-1.png"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-193880" alt="protesten izmir 1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/protesten-izmir-1-450x184.png" width="450" height="184" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/karsiyaka.png"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-193881" alt="karsiyaka" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/karsiyaka-450x184.png" width="450" height="184" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/akp-office-izmir.png"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-193883" alt="akp office izmir" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/akp-office-izmir-450x184.png" width="450" height="184" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/arrest-lawyer.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-193882" alt="arrest lawyer" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/arrest-lawyer-262x350.jpg" width="262" height="350" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/office.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-193884" alt="office" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/office-450x337.jpg" width="450" height="337" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/izmir.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-193885" alt="izmir" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/izmir-450x337.jpg" width="450" height="337" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/michael-van-der-galien/inside-the-turkish-protests/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>23</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>UN Pressures Germany to Bow to &#8216;Hate Speech&#8217; Hysteria</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod-and-sam-nunberg/un-pressures-germany-to-bow-to-hate-speech-hysteria/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=un-pressures-germany-to-bow-to-hate-speech-hysteria</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod-and-sam-nunberg/un-pressures-germany-to-bow-to-hate-speech-hysteria/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 May 2013 04:10:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Harrod &#38; Sam Nunberg]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CERD]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamopobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Turks]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=189649</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An ominous indication of the United Nations' growing Islamist sympathies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/United-Nations-sign.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-189667" alt="United Nations sign" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/United-Nations-sign.jpg" width="292" height="202" /></a>A recent <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD-C-82-D-48-2010-English.pdf">decision</a> by the United Nation’s (UN) <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/">Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination</a> (CERD) foreshadows an ominous future for free societies should Muslim entities like the <a href="http://www.oic-oci.org/home.asp">Organization of Islamic Cooperation</a> (OIC) achieve their goal of having “Islamophobia” defined internationally as a form of prejudice.</span></b></p>
<p>Former German central bank board member <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thilo_Sarrazin">Thilo Sarrazin</a> has got himself in trouble with the UN, as the <a href="http://tbb-berlin.de/?id_presse=225">Turkish Union in Berlin-Brandenburg</a> (<i>Türkischer Bund in Berlin-Brandenburg</i> or TBB) stated with satisfaction in an April 18, 2013, German-language <a href="http://tbb-berlin.de/?id_presse=225">press release</a>.  The spokesman of this German-Turkish interest group, Hilmi Kaya Turan, praised a February 26, 2013, “historic decision” by the CERD condemning Germany for not having prosecuted Sarrazin’s criticism of Arab and Turkish immigrants.</p>
<p>Sarrazin, a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (<a href="http://www.spd.de/"><i>Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands</i></a> or SPD), produced a <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-man-who-divided-germany-why-sarrazin-s-integration-demagoguery-has-many-followers-a-715876.html">storm of controversy</a> with his August 2010 book <a href="http://www.amazon.de/Deutschland-schafft-sich-unser-setzen/dp/3421044309"><i>Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab: Wie Wir Unser Land aufs Spiel Setzen</i></a> (“<i>Germany Abolishes Itself:  How We Are Risking Our Country</i>”).  In the context of this controversy, CERD’s detailed 19-page <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD-C-82-D-48-2010-English.pdf">decision</a> extensively excerpted in English translation a fall 2009 <a href="http://www.pi-news.net/wp/uploads/2009/10/sarrazin_interview1.pdf">interview</a> with Sarrazin.  In the interview, the Berlin magazine <a href="http://www.lettre.de/content/frank-berberich_klasse-statt-masse"><i>Lettre International</i></a> discussed some of the upcoming book’s themes.</p>
<p>CERD <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD-C-82-D-48-2010-English.pdf">complained</a> that “[i]n this interview, Mr. Sarrazin expressed himself in a derogatory and discriminatory way about social ‘lower classes’, which are not productive’ and would have to ‘disappear over time’ in order to create a city of the ‘elite’.”  Sarrazin specified that about 20% of Berlin’s population depended on welfare payments, which he wanted to cut, “above all to the lower class.”</p>
<p>Berlin’s indigent included within the immigrant population a “<a href="http://www.lettre.de/content/frank-berberich_klasse-statt-masse">large</a> number of Arabs and Turks in this city, whose numbers have grown through erroneous policies, have no productive function, except for the fruit and vegetable trade.” Compounding the problem for Sarrazin was a birthrate among Arabs and Turks about three times their percentage of the population.  Sarrazin thereby saw “Turks…conquering Germany just like the Kosovars conquered Kosovo: through a higher birth rate.”  Sarrazin “wouldn’t mind if” these immigrants “were East European Jews with about a 15% higher IQ than the one of Germans.”  Central to Sarrazin’s <a href="http://www.lettre.de/content/frank-berberich_klasse-statt-masse">thesis</a> was the assumption that “human ability is to some extent socially contingent and to some extent hereditary.” Sarrazin’s “solution to this problem” was “to generally prohibit influx, except for highly qualified individuals and not provide social welfare for immigrants anymore.”</p>
<p>As noted by <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD-C-82-D-48-2010-English.pdf">CERD</a>, Sarrazin’s interview comments prompted on October 23, 2009, a criminal complaint by the TBB under the <a href="http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html">German Criminal Code’s Article 130</a> against “Incitement to Hatred” (<a href="http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__130.html"><i>Volksverhetzung</i></a>).  Yet upon review, German prosecutors suspended their investigations on November 23, 2009, deciding that Sarrazin’s views fell under the protection of free speech contained within Article 5 of Germany’s <a href="https://www.btg-bestellservice.de/index.php?navi=1&amp;subnavi=68&amp;anr=80201000">Basic Law</a> (<a href="http://www.bundestag.de/bundestag/aufgaben/rechtsgrundlagen/grundgesetz/index.html"><i>Grundgesetz</i></a>).  Prosecutors quoted by CERD had judged Sarrazin’s statements as a “contribution to the intellectual debate in a question…very significant for the public.”</p>
<p>Following this domestic defeat, the TBB turned in 2010 to Article 14 of CERD’s governing convention (Article 14), the <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CERD.aspx">International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination</a>.  Article 14 provides that the CERD may “consider communications from individuals or groups of individuals within” a consenting State Party’s “jurisdiction claiming to be victims of a violation by that State Party of any of the rights set forth in this Convention.”  In response, CERD agreed with TBB that Sarrazin had made discriminatory comments and that the German “State party failed to provide protection against such discrimination.”  CERD thus wanted the “State party” to “review its policy and procedures…to give wide publicity to the Committee’s Opinion,” and to deliver “within 90 days, information from the State party about the measures taken.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD-C-82-D-48-2010-English.pdf">CERD’s</a> decision did not involve Islam directly, for Sarrazin had referenced the ethnicity of Arabs and Turks, not their majority-Muslim faith.  Yet <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD-C-82-D-48-2010-English.pdf">CERD’s</a> decision noted various party submissions according to which in Germany the “labels ‘Turks’ or ‘Arabs’ are applied as synonyms for Muslims.”  Citing various evidence examples, CERD agreed with one submission that “Mr. Sarrazin’s statements led to public vilification and debasement of Turks and Muslims in general.”</p>
<p>Any such foreign judgment of a country raises sensitive questions of national sovereignty, particularly when involving limitations of free speech.  Sarrazin’s case was no exception, especially in light of CERD members mocked by the German conservative website <a href="http://www.pi-news.net/2013/04/uno-kritisiert-deutschland-wegen-sarrazin/#more-318358"><i>Politically Incorrect</i></a> as “torches of democracy and human rights.” Analyzing this <a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/members.htm">roster</a>, Germans might well wonder what they could learn in equality under the law from members hailing from Algeria, Burkina Faso, China, Niger, Pakistan, Russia, Togo, and Turkey, among other countries.</p>
<p>The Sarrazin case exemplifies how international law and its institutional developments can impact domestic matters.  Observers of the <a href="http://www.oic-oci.org/home.asp">OIC</a>, an international organization of 57 majority-Muslim nation-states (including “Palestine”), would be well advised to keep Sarrazin in mind when considering the OIC’s longstanding <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/deborah-weiss/oic-ramps-up-islamophobia-campaign/">campaign</a> against “<a href="http://www.oic-oci.org/page_detail.asp?p_id=182">Islamophobia</a>.” This campaign would only too willingly extrapolate from Sarrazin’s comments about Arab and Turk immigrants, however controversial, to a condemnation of criticizing Islamic ideas as well.</p>
<p>Defenders of free speech should beware.  The transnationalist, multiculturalists and OIC have a new mechanism to override domestic legal hate speech decisions.  Precedent is slowly but surely being set.</p>
<p><em>This article was sponsored by the Legal Project, an activity of the Middle East Forum.</em></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod-and-sam-nunberg/un-pressures-germany-to-bow-to-hate-speech-hysteria/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>30</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Former Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad: A Moderate?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dbedein/palestinian-prime-minister-fayad-was-hardly-a-moderate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=palestinian-prime-minister-fayad-was-hardly-a-moderate</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dbedein/palestinian-prime-minister-fayad-was-hardly-a-moderate/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Apr 2013 04:15:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Bedein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[refugees]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[resign]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salman Fayad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sharia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=186934</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Good riddance to another general in the war to wipe the Jewish State off the map.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/1572385327.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-187047" alt="1572385327" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/1572385327-450x309.jpg" width="270" height="185" /></a>Former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayad, who recently resigned, is being eulogized as the last great hope of moderation for the Palestinian Authority.</p>
<p>The time has come to question such a characterization of Fayyad.</p>
<p>A case in point: In May 2009, our agency, the Center for Near East Policy Research, facilitated an informal briefing for staffers of the Middle East Subcommittee of the US Foreign Relations Committee of the US House of Representatives on the subject of the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA education. Journalist and scholar Dr. Arnon Groiss, who regularly translates new PA textbooks used in Palestinian Authority and UNRWA education, was featured at this briefing.</p>
<p>These translations can be easily perused on the net <a href="http://israelbehindthenews.com/library/pdfs/RightofReturninUNRWASchools.pdf">here</a> and <a href="http://israelbehindthenews.com/library/pdfs/PA-schoolbooks.pdf">here</a>.</p>
<p>Dr. Groiss updated Congress on the content of the new PA texts, which:</p>
<ul>
<li>Deny the historical and religious presence of Jews in Palestine;</li>
<li>Fail to recognize the State of Israel;</li>
<li>Demonize Jews and Israel;</li>
<li>Assign blame for the conflict exclusively on Israel, totally absolving Palestinians; and</li>
<li>Stress the idea of a violent struggle of liberation rather than a peaceful settlement.</li>
</ul>
<p>In August 2009, a delegation of fifty members from both sides of the aisle of the US House of Representatives met with Salam Fayyad when he was appointed prime minister of the Palestinian Authority.</p>
<p>Several members of Congress raised the issue of the Palestinian Authority schoolbooks with Fayyad, who assured the delegation that the school books would be changed for the new school year, which was just about to begin.</p>
<p>Hearing the report from the congressional delegation, our agency immediately dispatched a reporter to Ramallah to meet with Palestinian Authority Education Minister Lamis Al Alami to ask her about the PA curriculum for the new semester.</p>
<p>We asked her about changes in the curriculum. Al Alami answered that she was under strict orders from Fayyad not to change anything in the curriculum.</p>
<p>Yet you would not be surprised by Fayyad&#8217;s real educational policy if you were to read Fayyad&#8217;s position paper for a future Palestinian state, available on the net <a href="http://www.geneva-accord.org/images/Offical%20Paper%20-%20Program%20of%20the%20Thirteenth%20Government,%20August%202009.pdf">here</a>.</p>
<p>In that position paper, Fayyad spelled out his platform, in clear terms and in English.</p>
<p>Every embassy, consulate, and news outlet in the Middle East received a copy of Fayyad&#8217;s platform, entitled “Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State: Program of the Thirteenth Government.”</p>
<p>In his platform, Fayyad asserted that “Jerusalem” will be the Palestinian capital of the Palestinian state – with no mention of “East Jerusalem.”</p>
<p>In case anyone was wondering if Fayyad had made a typographical error by not mentioning “east” Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, Fayyad repeated &#8212; ten times &#8212; that he meant Jerusalem &#8212;  all of Jerusalem.</p>
<p>Fayyad left nothing to the imagination, and wrote that the Palestinian state will “Protect Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Palestinian state,” because Fayyad asserted that:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Jerusalem is our people’s religious, cultural, economic and political center. It is the Flower of Cities and Capital of Capitals. It cannot be anything but the eternal capital of the future Palestinian state. Jerusalem.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Fayyad went on to claim that Jerusalem “is under threat” and that:</p>
<blockquote><p>“the occupying authority is implementing a systematic plan to alter the city’s landmarks and its geographical and demographic character in order to forcibly create facts on the ground, ultimately separating it from its Palestinian surroundings and eradicating its Arab Palestinian heritage.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Fayyad further claimed that:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Palestinian life in Jerusalem is under daily attack through systematic violations perpetrated by the occupation regime” and that “It is the right and the duty of all Palestinians to protect their land, reject the occupation and defy its measures,” adding that the Palestinian state “bears special responsibility for nurturing our people’s ability to persevere and protect their homeland.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Fayyad added that the Palestinian government will maintain its:</p>
<blockquote><p>“unreserved commitment to defending the Arab character and status of Jerusalem&#8230;. The Government will continue to do all that is possible to achieve this goal. The Government will work with all organizations to preserve the landmarks of Jerusalem and its Arab Palestinian heritage, develop the city, and secure its contiguity with its Palestinian surroundings.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Fayyad framed Jerusalem as an illegal settlement, postulating that:</p>
<blockquote><p>“the occupying authority is pursuing its intensive settlement policy in and around Jerusalem&#8230;The occupation regime has shut down our national institutions, neglected the development of Palestinian life, continued to demolish and evacuate Palestinian homes, and restricted access to sacred Christian and Islamic sites.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Fayyad went on to present a practical plan to Arabize Jerusalem, by “Maintaining Jerusalem as a top priority on the Government’s agenda&#8221; and highlighting “its predicament in the media.”</p>
<p>Fayyad reassured his readers that a future Palestinian state would not be satisfied with Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza as the national home for Palestinians, and says that the Palestinian government will continue to advocate for “Palestinian refugees in accordance with relevant international resolutions, and UN General Assembly Resolution 194 in particular,” which mandates that Palestinian refugees and their descendants have a right to return to the homes and villages that Palestinians left during the 1948 war and its aftermath.</p>
<p>Fayyad reminded Palestinians that:</p>
<blockquote><p>“the refugee issue will remain under the jurisdiction of the PLO, through its Department of Refugees’ Affairs&#8230;in a manner that does not exempt the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from its responsibilities.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In Fayyad&#8217;s view, UNRWA will therefore continue to confine Palestinian refugees and their descendants to the indignity of refugee camps, under the premise and promise of the “right of return.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Fayyad expressed full support for Palestinians who have been convicted of murder and attempted murder, saying that “the state also has an enduring obligation to care and provide for the martyrs, prisoners, orphans and all those harmed in the Palestinian struggle for independence.”</p>
<p>Fayyad expressed a point of view indicating he could not understand why Palestinians convicted of capital crimes should be jailed.</p>
<p>Fayyad proclaimed that “the continued detention of thousands of Palestinian detainees and prisoners in Israeli prisons and detention camps in violation of international law and basic human rights, is of great concern to all Palestinians” and declared that “Securing the freedom of all these heroic prisoners is an utmost Palestinian priority and it is a fundamental duty all Palestinians feel to honor their great sacrifices and end their suffering.”</p>
<p>Fayyad also asserted that the PLO has signed “all provisions of agreements &#8230; with Israel,” yet forgot to mention that the PLO never ratified the signed agreements with Israel. On October 6, 1993, the now defunct Mapam newspaper Al HaMishmar’s correspondent in Tunis revealed that the late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat could not get a quorum for the PLO executive to ratify the Oslo Accords that Arafat had signed with Rabin on the White House lawn.</p>
<p>Fayyad’s view of justice was clearly presented in his position paper when he stated that “All Palestinians are equal before the law.” Simply put, anyone who is not a Palestinian is therefore not equal.</p>
<p>Fayyad also proclaimed that a future Palestinian State will be an Islamic state and that it will:</p>
<blockquote><p>“promote awareness and understanding of the Islamic religion and culture and disseminate the concept of tolerance in the religion through developing and implementing programs of Shari’a education as derived from the science of the Holy Qur’an and Prophet’s heritage.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In sum, Fayyad concluded with a demand for a Palestinian state in the next two years, along the parameters that he has outlined, with an Palestinian state that will have all of Jerusalem as its capital, in an Islamic Sharia state that will campaign for all convicts to be freed and for all refugees to return to the homes and villages that they left in 1948.</p>
<p>Was Fayyad a voice of reform and moderation?</p>
<p>Think again.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dbedein/palestinian-prime-minister-fayad-was-hardly-a-moderate/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Who Needs the Family?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/who-needs-the-family/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=who-needs-the-family</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/who-needs-the-family/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Feb 2013 04:55:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[birthrate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[breakdown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[family]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[marriage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=178314</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[By killing the building block of society, the Left is killing its own future -- and ours.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/who-needs-the-family/tumblr_lwgcnlj6or1qact7no1_400/" rel="attachment wp-att-178319"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-178319" title="tumblr_lwgcnlJ6or1qact7no1_400" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/tumblr_lwgcnlJ6or1qact7no1_400.jpg" alt="" width="252" height="189" /></a>For most of human history the family was the basic social unit of the species. It was a retirement plan that you paid into by keeping your children alive long enough for them to grow up and support you. It allowed the individual to pass on his ideas to people who would care about them because they were part of their heritage. Family was a collective endeavor, small enough to reflect the individual. It was a practical and philosophical aim that made life beautiful and meaningful.</p>
<p>But who really needs it anymore?</p>
<p>Governments have come to serve as undying guardians of human society, ushering new life into the world and ushering old life out of it. New parents are as likely to turn to the government for help as they are to their extended family. When their child is old enough to look around for a career, it is the government that they expect to provide the education and the jobs. And when they grow old, the child can keep on working at his government job and paying off his student loans knowing that the government will be there to make all the difficult and expensive decisions about their care.</p>
<p>With all that taken care of, who needs parents or children anyway?</p>
<p>People once had children to pass on wealth, genes and beliefs. But wealth is now thought to be the collective property of society, which is taxed to death or often just given away on some quixotic quest to stamp out disease in Africa or illiteracy in Antarctica. The thought of passing on genes carries with it a tinge of racism for the European and European-descended populations whose birth rates are dropping, but raises no such concerns for minority groups with high birth rates. That only leaves beliefs, which are also thought to be the collective property of the society and the state. Public education, mandatory in some countries, means that the best way to reproduce your beliefs is not to have children, but to get a job as a teacher.</p>
<p>The family has been displaced and replaced. In some places it is even repressed. Like an old station wagon, it idles by the side of the road, while its former owners drive away in their new sleek electric government compact car built for two or a micro-car built for one into a wonderful childless future of unfunded pensions, social collapse and death panels.</p>
<p>Marriage rates have dropped sharply. Not only is divorce more commonplace, but many couples aren&#8217;t even bothering to marry at all. And many of those who do marry don&#8217;t bother having children. Childfree is the new Zero Population Growth, not on behalf of the planet, but on behalf of the self. Modern society has made the price of children extremely expensive and many couples have found it easier to end the family with their own deaths.</p>
<p>The future of the West has been aborted or never conceived. It has been broken up, divorced and never married.</p>
<p>The state gave its citizens the impression that it could fulfill all the functions of a family far better than the real thing. Its appeal was the power of bigness, the stability of a system too big to fail and rooms full of experts working night and day to improve on the fallible family. Unfortunately not only can’t the state do any of these things better than the family, but it can&#8217;t do them at all without the family. And the family has collapsed, falling apart into disassociated lonely individuals, looking for their father and mother, their children and their future, in the great soulless body of the state.</p>
<p>&#8220;The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else,&#8221; Fredrick Bastiat wrote. At its most basic the state is a pyramid scheme into which everyone pays into and from which everyone expects to extract more than their fair share. At the very least they expect the state to function like a wise investment fund, taking their taxes and investing them in ways that will maximize their social return.</p>
<p>Unfortunately the state is more like an actual pyramid scheme whose schemers squander as much of the money as they can while pressuring the suckers to throw in more and more, promising big returns and parading around the model investors who made a fortune as their success stories.</p>
<p>Invest more in education, the schemers of the state urge, presenting as an example a few individual students from the diminishing percentage of college graduates who are actually able to find a full-time job based on their degree. Invest more in healthcare they cry, trotting out the elderly and the children who depend on social services, even while those same schemers are robbing those services blind. Invest in foreign aid, in the war on poverty, in infrastructure and the environment and a thousand other social funds, they cry, even as all the trillions of their former investments have gone up in smoke.</p>
<p>Money however is replaceable. Children are not. And nowhere has the pyramid scheme of the social state schemer proven more disastrous than in the collapse of the family. The state has usurped the family, but it depends on the family to crank out industrious little taxpayers, small men and women who will work the shops and factories, toiling night and day, paying their fines and fees dutifully while raising the next generation of taxpayers. Without the family, the pyramid scheme of the state faces a demographic collapse.</p>
<p>In 1848, Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto fearsomely declaring, &#8220;A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.&#8221; At that time the birth rate in Germany was five children. Today it isn&#8217;t even two. The spectre of Communism is no longer haunting Europe. It has come and gone. Under Socialism, it is the spectre of demographics that haunts Europe. It is the dead children, no longer killed in factories or protests, but in clinics and for convenience&#8217;s sake, that float aimlessly through the streets of Munich, London and Paris. Europe is no longer haunted by its dead, but by those who were never born.</p>
<p>The state replaced the family. It told men and women that they no longer needed to make permanent commitments to each or to their parents and children. So long as they paid their taxes, the state would bear the burden of their commitments. And so men and women gave up on each other, parents gave up on their children and children gave up on their parents, the family fell apart and now the state that took its place is also falling apart.</p>
<p>When a civilization destroys its families, then it destroys itself. A society cannot destroy its own capacity for life and regeneration, and continue on blithely occupying itself with the wars on obesity, poverty, racism, cough syrup and gendered pronouns. The state may seem impressive, but it is only a scheme by which people pay officials to make life better for them. When the number of people begins to decline while the number of officials increases; then the state dies.</p>
<p>American cities and states have built up a vast social infrastructure of schools and hospitals that there will not be enough children to use. From Detroit to California, the future is four teachers to an empty classroom and eight nurses to an empty hospital. The state that is too big to fail has grown bigger than its people. Like Saturn, the progressive revolution has devoured its own children leaving behind only the empty hallways and empty treasuries of the state.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/who-needs-the-family/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>60</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Egypt: Free People Not Going Quietly Into the Sharia Night</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/egypt-free-people-not-going-quietly-into-the-sharia-night/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=egypt-free-people-not-going-quietly-into-the-sharia-night</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/egypt-free-people-not-going-quietly-into-the-sharia-night/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Feb 2013 04:50:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[collapse]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[egypt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Morsi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim brotherhood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sharia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=175634</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The demonstrations continue; where is Obama?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/egypt-free-people-not-going-quietly-into-the-sharia-night/4490204-3x2-700x467-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-175638"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-175638" title="4490204-3x2-700x467" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/4490204-3x2-700x4671.jpg" alt="" width="252" height="168" /></a>Survey after survey, as well as the election results that put the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi in the presidential palace, show that most Egyptians want Islamic law. But those who do not are not submitting quietly to Sharia tyranny.</p>
<p>Morsi has <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/middle-east-in-turmoil/violence-grips-egypt-as-protesters-defy-morsis-decree/story-fn7ycml4-1226563964144">declared a state of emergency and given the military the power to arrest civilian protesters</a>, yet still the anti-Morsi demonstrations continue. And while he quickly endorsed the demonstrations against Hosni Mubarak that ultimately led to the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascent to power, Barack Obama has been reticent about supporting these demonstrations, as he was in 2009 when thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest against the mullahcracy.</p>
<p>But aren’t these “pro-democracy” protesters? After all, Morsi has been notably inhospitable to dissent, arresting his critics and overseeing the adoption of a constitution that Egyptian Christians fear will be used to deny them basic rights, in accord with Sharia provisions institutionalizing discrimination against non-Muslims. Videos have come to light in which he lashed out against Jews with venomous hatred, referring to Qur’anic curses of them as “apes and pigs” and declaring that there could be no negotiations with Israel.</p>
<p>Those who are protesting against his regime, on the other hand, are in favor of genuine democratic rule, without Sharia restrictions on the freedom of speech and its denial of equality of rights to large segments of the popular.</p>
<p>Yet Obama is silent. The only two mass popular uprisings in Muslim countries that he has not supported have one thing in common: both have been against pro-Sharia Islamic supremacist regimes. All the popular uprisings he has supported, meanwhile, have resulted in the installation of pro-Sharia Islamic supremacist regimes.</p>
<p>One might be pardoned for thinking that Obama is in favor of pro-Sharia Islamic supremacist regimes. In any case, so are most Egyptians: a <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=%22groups%20who%20want%20to%20modernize%20the%20country%22%20pew&amp;source=web&amp;cd=3&amp;ved=0CFMQFjAC&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pewglobal.org%2Ffiles%2F2010%2F12%2FPew-Global-Attitudes-Muslim-Report-FINAL-December-2-2010.pdf&amp;ei=iGbaT9HkEojM9QSmtcX9Aw&amp;usg=AFQjCNEZHgIuhXZMRa_7jSQkJjf1M-2GfA&amp;cad=rja">Pew Research Center survey conducted in Spring 2010</a>, before the chimerical “Arab Spring” and the toppling of Mubarak, found that no fewer than eighty-five percent of Egyptians thought that Islam was a positive influence in politics. Fifty-nine percent said they identified with “Islamic fundamentalists” in their struggle against “groups who want to modernize the country,” who had the support of only twenty-seven percent of Egyptians. Only twenty percent were “very concerned” about “Islamic extremism” within Egypt.</p>
<p><a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/egyptians-want-ditch-peace-treaty-israel-poll-shows">Another survey in May 2012</a> found little difference. 61 percent of Egyptians stated that they wanted to see Egypt abandon its peace treaty with Israel, and the same number identified the hardline Islamic kingdom of Saudi Arabia as the country that should serve as Egypt’s model for the role Islam should play in government. 60 percent said that Egypt’s laws should hew closely to the directives of the Qur’an.</p>
<p>Yet these surveys show that a substantial minority in Egypt does not want Sharia, and the demonstrations this week demonstrate that they’re determined to make a stand. They oppose the new Egyptian constitution that, as the <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ML_EGYPT_CONSTITUTION_GLANCE?SITE=AP&amp;SECTION=HOME&amp;TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&amp;CTIME=2012-11-29-20-23-22">Associated Press</a> reported, “largely reflects the conservative vision of the Islamists, with articles that rights activists, liberals and Christians fear will lead to restrictions on the rights of women and minorities and civil liberties in general.” They have every reason to be concerned, for the constitution reflects in numerous particulars Sharia restrictions on their rights. AP noted that the constitution’s wording “could give Islamists the tool for insisting on stricter implementation of rulings of Shariah.”</p>
<p>Also, “the draft contains no article specifically establishing equality between men and women because of disputes over the phrasing. However, it maintains that a woman must balance her duties toward family and outside work, suggesting that she can be held accountable if her public role conflicts with her family duties. No such article is mentioned for men.”</p>
<p>The implications for women’s rights are as obvious as they are unsurprising in light of Sharia’s reduction of women to the status of little more than commodities, slaves of the men who own them.</p>
<p>Then there are numerous articles heralding the introduction of Sharia restrictions on the freedom of speech. Islamic law forbids criticism of Islam, Muhammad and the Qur’an, and the constitution duly contains an article that “bans insulting or defaming the prophet and messengers.” And it doesn’t stop there. Another article bans “insulting humans,” suggesting authoritarian restrictions on criticism of political leaders, and yet another “underlines that the state will protect ‘the true nature of the Egyptian family &#8230; and promote its morals and values,’” about which AP notes: “phrasing that is vague and suggests state control over the contents of such arts forms as books and films.”</p>
<p>Darkness is descending upon Egypt, with willing aid from the putative leader of the free world, who has resisted cancellation of a deal that would send F-16s, tanks, and $1.5 billion to Egypt. The protesters whom Barack Obama should be supporting are on the streets of Cairo now. Instead, the outgoing Secretary of State <a href="http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013/01/29/hillary-clinton-on-egypt-we-must-make-sure-the-revolution-isnt-hijacked-by-extremists/">insists</a> that Morsi has “a lot of the right intentions” and that opposing him would be unwise: “We must make sure the revolution isn&#8217;t hijacked by extremists.”</p>
<p>In reality, the “extremists” are already in power. That America is not standing with those who oppose them is just the latest disgrace in the long line of disgraces that is Obama’s foreign policy.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/egypt-free-people-not-going-quietly-into-the-sharia-night/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>65</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>State TV in Norway: Paying to Be Propagandized</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/state-tv-in-norway-paying-to-be-propagandized/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=state-tv-in-norway-paying-to-be-propagandized</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/state-tv-in-norway-paying-to-be-propagandized/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 23 Jan 2013 04:23:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[labor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[NRK]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Propaganda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[public]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[TV]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=174534</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The shameless lies of Norwegian public broadcasting.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/state-tv-in-norway-paying-to-be-propagandized/nrk2_1165312657-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-174541"><img class="wp-image-174541 alignleft" title="NRK2_1165312657" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/NRK2_11653126571.jpg" alt="" width="287" height="196" /></a>Well, it&#8217;s done. I just made the first of my two compulsory yearly payments to NRK – short for <em>Norsk rikskringkasting. </em>In English it calls itself the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, but believe me, there&#8217;s nothing remotely corporation-like about it. It&#8217;s a fully government-owned and government-operated outfit, and its fealty to the Labor Party worldview is reflected in the nickname by which some of its disgruntled viewers refer to it: ARK, or <em>Arbeiderpartiets rikskringkasting –</em> Labor Party Broadcasting.</p>
<p>As of 2013, the semiannual NRK license fee – which, I should perhaps underscore, is something you pay <em>in</em> <em>addition</em> <em>to</em> whatever you might happen to shell out for your cable and/or satellite service – went up to $240.33, for a total of $480.66 per year. (Out of the kindness of their hearts, they divide the amount in two, apparently realizing that for a lot of people this is no small expense.) It&#8217;s a tax, of course, but it&#8217;s not treated as a tax – which is reflected in the fact that the fee actually <em>includes </em>an eight percent value-added tax. In other words, not only do they charge you a tax on top of your regular income tax to pay for a product that you may never even use – they also tax the tax.</p>
<p>With NRK, as with the BBC, it&#8217;s the license fees that pay the bills and keep the enterprise going. And as I&#8217;ve complained before (and will complain again), what you&#8217;re doing when you cough up this sum is paying to be propagandized. Essentially, that&#8217;s what NRK is: a propaganda operation, designed to ensure that when the Norwegian people get their news about the world, it&#8217;ll be served up to them with just the right spin, in hopes that it&#8217;ll keep them from straying too far from the socialist line they were fed in school. To be sure, ever since 1992, when NRK was finally forced to surrender its TV and radio monopoly, there have been other broadcast news sources in Norway; but old habits are hard to break, and besides, Norwegians have been told all their lives that NRK is the only <em>really </em>serious and <em>truly </em>reliable news source, since, unlike commercial TV channels, which always must look over their shoulders at their advertisers, NRK is undefiled by poisonous capitalistic influences, and is thus able to present them with the pure and unadulterated truth. An amazing number of people actually buy this bull. <em>Dagsrevyen, </em>the national news program that is broadcast every evening at seven, regularly draws around a million viewers in this country of five million.</p>
<p>Still, every once in a while NRK tries to pull something so flagrant in its dishonesty that it actually erupts into something of a scandal. Case in point: the <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa02011213/12-01-2013">January 12 edition</a> of <em>Dagsrevyen </em>featured an eight-minute story about Mirela Mustata, a Romanian gypsy, or Romani, woman who was in a Norwegian prison after having been convicted of “aggravated human trafficking” in a case involving four children. The clear objective of NRK&#8217;s report was to paint Mustata as a victim of cultural prejudice, punished simply for trying to keep her children from starving. To this end, NRK implied that Mustata had done nothing more than put her kids to work selling costume jewelry on the street – which, viewers were instructed, is a harmless, generations-old gypsy tradition. “I did everything I could to take care of my children,” a weeping Mustata said on camera.</p>
<p>What NRK tidily omitted from its report was the actual nature of the offense for which Mustata was convicted: namely, she had taken ten thousand euros in exchange for allowing her eleven-year-old daughter to be pinned down by several men and raped. Mustata exploited the same daughter again in the same fashion when the girl was twelve, and again when she was thirteen. The girl in question, and another daughter whose similar victimization Mustata also arranged for, are now living in foster homes at secret addresses, while two other siblings have been shipped back to Romania to be cared for by the child-protection authorities. None of this was mentioned in the <em>Dagsrevyen </em>report. NRK, in its determination to spin any and every event involving members of certain minorities in such a way as to make them look like virtuous victims, left out everything that mattered.</p>
<p>It says something about the media environment in Norway that the news outlet that called NRK on this outrageously irresponsible piece of reportage was not any one of the big newspapers – pretty much all of which share NRK&#8217;s basic political orientation, and many of which receive government subsidies. No, the <a href="http://www.document.no/2013/01/nrk-de-svakestes-forsvarer/">piece</a> that brought NRK&#8217;s mendacities to light was written by Nina Hjerpset-Østlie of the privately owned news and opinion website <a href="http://document.no/">document.no</a> (which, after the July 2011 Oslo massacre, won a degree of worldwide fame because it was a target of media and political elites eager to silence criticism of Islam). Asked by Hjerpset-Østlie to comment on her piece, NRK refused.</p>
<p>But that wasn&#8217;t the end of it. Hjerpset-Østlie&#8217;s story was picked up by Jon Hustad, who on January 18 wrote about <em>Dagsrevyen</em>&#8216;s twisted reportage in <em>Dag og Tid, </em>one of Norway&#8217;s smaller national newspapers – and one that&#8217;s known for challenging the leftist media consensus. Hustad&#8217;s article, in turn, apparently caught the attention of author and businesswoman Elin Ørjasæter, who on January 19 put in her two cents on her <a href="http://blogg.orjas.no/dagsrevyens-forsvar-av-romfolk/">blog</a> – noting, apropos of NRK&#8217;s benign and exculpatory view of certain “cultures,” that, after all, it&#8217;s also a part of Romani “culture” to keep kids out of school so that they grow up illiterate and end up traveling around with their parents committing organized crimes.</p>
<p>At this point, <a href="http://journalisten.no/">journalisten.no</a>, Norway&#8217;s leading website for journalists, <a href="http://www.journalisten.no/node/39036%20">took notice</a>, and actually managed to get the editor-in-chief of NRK&#8217;s news division, Ole Eivind Henden to step up to the plate and admit that, yes, <em>Dagsrevyen</em>&#8216;s report on Mustata should have mentioned her involvement in a conspiracy to rape her own children. Still, Henden insisted there had been no intention to mislead: the reason NRK had done the report on Mustata, he explained, was that it wanted to highlight the fact “that Romani people are being convicted of human trafficking because their children sell jewelry, among other things.” The little detail that the “other things” in Mustata&#8217;s case included rape just didn&#8217;t fit into NRK&#8217;s story – see? That its news chief could serve up such an excuse with a straight face only proves that skewing the facts in order to sell a specific message – in what is being passed off as an objective news story – is standard NRK practice. (Also interesting is that, as I write this, the <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa02011213/12-01-2013">January 12</a> episode of <em>Dagsrevyen </em>is not available at NRK&#8217;s website – instead, there&#8217;s a message claiming that the “sound or video content is so far not ready.” Curiously enough, the <em>Dagsrevyen </em>broadcasts <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa19010713/07-01-2013">from</a> <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa19010813/08-01-2013">the</a> <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa19010913/09-01-2013">several</a> <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa19011013/10-01-2013">days</a> <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa19011113/11-01-2013">before</a> and <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa03011313/13-01-2013">for</a> <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa19011413/14-01-2013">every</a> <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa19011513/15-01-2013">single</a> <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa19011613/16-01-2013">day</a> <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa19011713/17-01-2013">since</a> <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa19011813/18-01-2013">January</a> <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa02011913/19-01-2013">12</a> <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa03012013/20-01-2013">can </a><a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa19012113/21-01-2013">be</a> <a href="http://tv.nrk.no/serie/dagsrevyen/nnfa19012213/22-01-2013">viewed</a> without any trouble. NRK, one suspects, can&#8217;t even be honest about why it&#8217;s pulled a video off its site.)</p>
<p>The coverage by <a href="http://journalisten.no/">journalisten.no</a> finally forced at least some major media to acknowledge <em>Dagsrevyen</em>&#8216;s “mistake.” As a result, the daughter whose rape was at the heart of the human-trafficking case got wind of NRK&#8217;s mendacities and announced plans to file a complaint with the Norwegian Press Complaints Commission – which, in any event, isn&#8217;t empowered to do much more than give NRK a slap on the wrist. The prosecutor isn&#8217;t happy either, and has asked whether NRK, after pulling such a stunt, thinks it can get away with a semi-apology published at the relatively obscure <a href="http://journalist.no/">journalist.no</a>, as opposed to a full, public <em>mea culpa </em>on <em>Dagsrevyen </em>itself. It will be interesting to see what happens. Alas, I don&#8217;t expect there&#8217;s a chance in hell that this case, or any number of cases like it, will finally bring about that glorious day of which more than few of us in Norway dream: the day when the NRK license fee is revoked once and for all and these shameless propagandists are forced to stop selling their own version of costume jewelry and earn an honest living.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/state-tv-in-norway-paying-to-be-propagandized/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>12</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Arab Supremacist Islamist &#8216;State&#8217; of &#8216;Palestine&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/the-arab-supremacist-islamist-state-of-palestine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-arab-supremacist-islamist-state-of-palestine</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/the-arab-supremacist-islamist-state-of-palestine/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Dec 2012 04:50:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Two-State solution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vote]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=167730</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Israel signals it has had enough of the Palestinians' gaming of the UN.   ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/the-arab-supremacist-islamist-state-of-palestine/un-palestinians-status-jpeg-0f8de/" rel="attachment wp-att-167731"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-167731" title="UN Palestinians Status.JPEG-0f8de" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/UN-Palestinians-Status.JPEG-0f8de-450x345.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="241" /></a>Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas came to New York for the second time in four months to present the Palestinian case for statehood in person to the United Nations General Assembly. He basked in the glory of thunderous standing ovations, which both preceded and followed his speech.  Thousands of miles from Gaza and Ramallah, Abbas was enjoying his own version of a Turtle Bay &#8220;New York State of Mind.&#8221;</p>
<p>On November 29, 2012, the 65th anniversary of the General Assembly&#8217;s 1947 resolution recommending partition of what remained of the British Palestinian Mandate after the Palestinian-majority state of Jordan had already been carved out, Abbas called upon the General Assembly to complete the two state solution envisioned in 1947. He was petitioning the 193 UN member states for a new resolution that issues &#8220;a birth certificate of the reality of the State of Palestine.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Sixty-five years later and on the same day, which your esteemed body has designated as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,&#8221; Abbas said, &#8220;the General Assembly stands before a moral duty, which it must not hesitate to undertake, and stands before a historic duty, which cannot endure further delay, and before a practical duty to salvage the chances for peace, which is urgent and cannot be postponed.&#8221;</p>
<p>Abbas got his wish. With 138 UN member states in favor to 9 against and 41 abstentions, the General Assembly adopted the legally non-binding resolution to elevate the Palestinians&#8217; status from observer entity to observer non-member state.  The very next day Palestinians were proudly displaying their new <a href="http://www.eyeontheun.org/assets/attachments/documents/10771_Image2_11-29.jpg">nameplate &#8211; the &#8220;State of Palestine</a>&#8221; &#8211; on the table beside their seat in the morally bankrupt Hall of Mirrors that the UN General Assembly has become.</p>
<p>It is fitting that the racist Arab Muslim regime of Sudan, charged by the International Criminal Court (ICC) with genocide and other crimes against humanity, submitted the resolution and vouched for the bona fides of the Palestinian claim to recognition as a legitimate state.  Sudan is returning a favor. Abbas, after all, has in the past praised the ICC-indicted genocider, Sudan&#8217;s President Omar al-Bashir.</p>
<p>&#8220;We are with Sudan,&#8221; said Abbas when asked during his 2009 visit with Bashir in Khartoum about the Palestinian position on the ICC&#8217;s warrant for arrest issued against al-Bashir for war crimes in Darfur. Abbas added, &#8220;We are with the president. We support Sudanese unity and entirely agree with Sudan&#8217;s position.&#8221;</p>
<p>After Abbas concluded his speech last Thursday and took congratulations from many members of  his rapt UN audience, Daff-Alla Elhag Ali Osman, Sudan&#8217;s UN Ambassador, formally submitted the resolution, titled &#8220;Status of Palestine in the United Nations” (document A/67/L.28) for a vote.</p>
<p>In remarks to the press after the voting was concluded and the resolution passed, Sudan&#8217;s UN Ambassador said it was &#8220;bizarre&#8221; for supporters of the International Criminal Court to oppose the Palestinians using the vote as leverage to bring their allegations of war crimes against Israel in the ICC.  This is the same Ambassador Ali Osman who had accused the International Criminal Court prosecutor of &#8220;terrorist&#8221; tactics in investigating the Sudanese Arab regime&#8217;s ethnic cleansing, concentration camps for non-Arabs the ICC prosecutor likened to &#8220;a gigantic Auschwitz&#8221; and murders of non-Arab people living in Darfur that reportedly cost the lives of more than 300,000 people since 2003.</p>
<p>Abbas decided to end-run negotiations with Israel and raise false hopes among the Palestinian people, in order to use the General Assembly&#8217;s recognition of its statehood as leverage for lawfare purposes in bringing war crime charges against Israel at the ICC.</p>
<p>The General Assembly became an accomplice to Abbas&#8217;s sleight of hand.  Beginning in 1977, as Abbas alluded to in his speech, the United Nations has sponsored the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on November 29th, the date in 1947 when the UN General Assembly approved its partition Resolution 181 (II).  Abbas invoked the partition resolution, which the Palestinians and neighboring Arab countries once so vehemently rejected, in his speech last Thursday. However, he never once acknowledged Israel&#8217;s right to exist within <em>any </em>borders in the region as a Jewish state, even though Resolution 181 (II) used the expression “Jewish State” twenty-three times, when it advocated the creation of “two states in Palestine, a Jewish one and an Arab one.” By going along with Abbas&#8217;s cherry picking of the partition resolution,  the General Assembly ratified the Palestinian victimhood narrative in which they have only rights but no responsibilities.</p>
<p>Abbas claimed in his speech that he came to the General Assembly &#8220;to protect the possibilities and the foundations of a just peace that is deeply hoped for in our region.&#8221; But he laid down unconditional demands that he knows Israel cannot ever accept for its own security, particularly after the terrorist attacks it has experienced following its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 to give peace a chance.</p>
<p>Far from opening doors to genuine negotiations, Abbas&#8217;s speech was replete with the usual Palestinian blood libel, accusing Israel of &#8220;racism,&#8221; &#8220;apartheid,&#8221; &#8220;brute force&#8221; and &#8220;war crimes.&#8221; Abbas falsely characterized Israel&#8217;s very measured response to the Islamist jihadists&#8217; unprovoked rocket attacks against Israeli civilians launched from Gaza as &#8220;aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip.&#8221;</p>
<p>Finally, Abbas lied to the General Assembly and to his own people about what kind of society an independent Palestinian state is likely to be.  He said that &#8220;we reaffirm that Palestine will always adhere to and respect the Charter and resolutions of the United Nations and international humanitarian law, uphold equality, guarantee civil liberties, uphold the rule of law, promote democracy and pluralism, and uphold and protect the rights of women.&#8221;</p>
<p>Abbas&#8217;s Palestinian Authority does not control the lawless, Islamic fundamentalist Gaza Strip, a fatal flaw in the logic for a Palestinian state at this time but which also relieves him of responsibility for what is presently going on there under Hamas&#8217;s control. However, the West Bank territory under Palestinian Authority control does not come close to Abbas&#8217;s representation of a pluralistic democracy that protects the rights of women.</p>
<p>According to the Social Institutions and Gender Index launched by the OECD Development Centre,  laws in the West Bank &#8220;contain discriminatory provisions in the areas of marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance. Women cannot marry without permission from their closest male relative on the paternal side. Polygamy is legally accepted in the Palestinian Authority, in accordance with Islamic law.&#8221;</p>
<p>As for a pluralistic society upholding equality and guaranteeing civil liberties, the draft constitution of the Palestinian state contains some of the right words that Abbas mentioned in his speech, but also evidences the notion of Arab Islamist supremacy that Abbas conveniently omitted to mention. For example,</p>
<p>• Article 1: &#8220;This constitution is based on the will of the Arab Palestinian people. It shall be approved democratically.&#8221;</p>
<p>• Article 3:  &#8220;The Palestinian people are a part of the Arab and Islamic nations.&#8221;</p>
<p>• Article 6:  &#8220;Islam shall be the official religion of the state.&#8221;</p>
<p>• Article 10: &#8220;Sovereignty belongs to the Palestinian Arab people.&#8221;</p>
<p>The draft Palestinian constitution also implies that the Palestinians&#8217; claim of &#8220;right of return&#8221; to their homes in pre-1967 Israel is not negotiable.  Article 32 states: &#8220;The right of the Palestinian refugee to return to his home and the original home of his ancestors is a natural right which cannot expire. Its exercise may not be delegated nor surrendered.&#8221;</p>
<p>Abbas&#8217;s UN maneuver was intended to gain the endorsement of the international community for the Palestinian demand that Israel retreat to the pre-1967 borders and turn over Old Jerusalem (which they call East Jerusalem and claim as their capital) to Palestinian sovereignty.  They also continue to insist on the so-called right of return that would, if implemented, destroy the Jewish state without the necessity of Hamas&#8217;s missiles.</p>
<p>In response, Israel decided last Friday that it had enough of the Palestinians&#8217; gaming of a UN system stacked against Israel.  It announced that it was proceeding with zoning and planning preparation for a 4.6 square mile area near Jerusalem known as E-1, which can serve to buffer Jerusalem from incursions from the West Bank should the Palestinians get the state they are seeking.</p>
<p>UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned the E1 announcement.  &#8220;Should the E-1 settlement be constructed,&#8221; he said, &#8220;it would represent an almost fatal blow to remaining chances of securing a two-state solution.&#8221;</p>
<p>Instead of acting on cue with a Pavlovian criticism of Israel, the Secretary General should tell the Palestinians to stop playing games and get serious by resuming negotiations with Israel without conditions. The Israelis have not committed to the actual construction of E-1. However, if the Palestinians do not give up their play-acting at statehood via the UN and their unreasonable, non-negotiable claims, such as to Jerusalem, that have no historical or moral foundation, Israel will have to play whatever cards it has available.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/the-arab-supremacist-islamist-state-of-palestine/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>21</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Palestinian Statehood: An Ominous Vote at the U.N.</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/palestinian-statehood-an-ominous-vote-at-the-u-n/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=palestinian-statehood-an-ominous-vote-at-the-u-n</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/palestinian-statehood-an-ominous-vote-at-the-u-n/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 28 Nov 2012 04:50:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=167073</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Vote to be held Thursday expected to pass. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/palestinian-statehood-an-ominous-vote-at-the-u-n/aptopix-un-mideast/" rel="attachment wp-att-167080"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-167080" title="APTOPIX UN Mideast" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/mahmoud-abbas-united-nations-436x350.jpg" alt="" width="262" height="210" /></a>Permanent United Nations Observer of Palestine, Riyad H. Mansour, heralded the upcoming vote by the United Nations General Assembly on November 29th to upgrade the Palestinians&#8217; status to an observer &#8220;state&#8221; as an &#8220;historic event.&#8221;  He boasted that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas&#8217;s maneuver, in which Abbas will personally appear at the General Assembly and present the resolution for a vote, was a form of resistance to Israeli occupation that Mansour labeled &#8220;diplomatic resistance.&#8221;</p>
<p>Speaking to reporters at United Nations headquarters in New York two days prior to the vote, Mansour asserted that the General Assembly will be &#8220;legislating&#8221; international recognition of the Palestinians&#8217; claim to statehood, with &#8220;borders based on June 4, 1967&#8243; and East Jerusalem as its capital. He said that every nation, whether voting for or against, should respect the result because &#8220;what we are doing is legal, honorable&#8221; and following the &#8220;democratic way,&#8221; the &#8220;multilateral way.&#8221;</p>
<p>Mansour characterized the General Assembly vote on the 65th anniversary of the original General Assembly partition Resolution 181 in 1947 as completing the UN&#8217;s &#8220;legislating&#8221; of a two-state solution. Responding to a question as to whether the Palestinians were willing to admit that it was a mistake on the part of their leaders and neighboring Arab countries to reject the partition resolution, he dismissed the premise of the question as futile &#8220;score keeping.&#8221; The Palestinians like to cherry-pick the parts they now like in the partition resolution they once rejected.  Most importantly, Resolution 181 referred several times to the &#8220;Arab and Jewish States&#8221; resulting from the partition.  To this day, Abbas refuses to acknowledge Israel&#8217;s right to exist as a Jewish state as part of a two-state solution.</p>
<p>With the UN General Assembly&#8217;s recognition of Palestinian statehood in its pocket, Mansour said that the Palestinians then would be ready to negotiate with the Israelis as one state to another on the terms of Israel&#8217;s end to its &#8220;occupation&#8221; of the Palestinian &#8220;state.&#8221;  He invited Israel to join in the negotiations in good faith, but did not rule out the possibility that the Palestinians would go as a &#8220;state&#8221; to the International Criminal Court to seek legal action against Israel, if Israel did not play ball.</p>
<p>Mansour said that the Palestinian observer state resolution has nearly sixty co-sponsors, and he expects many more to join in co-sponsorship once they have had an opportunity to review the Palestinians&#8217; <a href="http://www.innercitypress.com/palrev1icpga112612.pdf">revised draft</a>.  He expects the final vote to be overwhelmingly in favor, and made a special appeal for European support.</p>
<p>France, which voted for the Palestinians&#8217; full membership in UNESCO, has publicly announced its support of the Palestinians&#8217; upgrade of status to observer state. Mansour lavished praise on France for its decision. He also said that Spain appears to be on board.  Other European countries have been more circumspect in announcing their intentions, but the ambassador from a non-permanent member of the Security Council estimated that anywhere between 11 and 15 European countries are likely to vote Yes.</p>
<p>The United Kingdom&#8217;s UN ambassador indicated to reporters that his country had not yet made a decision which way to vote, but was working with the Palestinians on possible wording changes to their latest revised draft of the resolution.  However, when Mansour was asked whether the Palestinians would entertain any further changes or amendments to their text, he flatly said no.</p>
<p>With all of Mansour&#8217;s talk about the upcoming international embrace of the Palestinian state, he tried to put the best face possible on the underlying split of territorial control between Hamas and Fatah. Mansour referred several times to Gaza as &#8220;the southern portion of our homeland.&#8221;  He also claimed that Hamas, like Fatah, supported a two-state solution. The problem, however, is that neither Fatah, the Palestinian Authority nor Abbas himself speak for Hamas, which remains committed to Israel&#8217;s destruction.</p>
<p>The pre-requisite to achieving statehood under international law is government control of all the territory said to be encompassed within the state. Consequently, I asked Mansour why President Abbas did not visit Gaza during the recent hostilities between Hamas and Israel as the Arab League had suggested, and whether Abbas&#8217;s decision not to visit Gaza indicated that the Palestinian Authority has no control as a practical matter over the Gaza territory.</p>
<p>Mansour conceded what he said was an obvious fact &#8211; &#8220;division&#8221; between the &#8220;two wings of our homeland.&#8221; The solution, he said, was either full implementation of the reconciliation plan worked out in Cairo and Doha or prompt elections to choose a new leader. Hamas has stalled on reconciliation, anticipating a ringing electoral victory in the West Bank and Gaza. Abbas&#8217;s &#8220;diplomatic resistance&#8221; at the United Nations this week appears to be a Hail Mary pass to stay relevant.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/palestinian-statehood-an-ominous-vote-at-the-u-n/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>70</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Left&#8217;s Only Enemy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/caroline-glick/the-lefts-only-enemy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-only-enemy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/caroline-glick/the-lefts-only-enemy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Oct 2012 04:46:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ehud barak]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[terrorism s]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[west bank]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=147241</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When enemies are at our doorstep, leftists take up arms against the Right. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012427102023901734_20.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-147320" title="2012427102023901734_20" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012427102023901734_20.gif" alt="" width="375" height="244" /></a><em>Originally <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=285733">published</a> in The Jerusalem Post. </em></p>
<p>Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas&#8217;s legal term in office expired nearly four years ago. But his supporters don&#8217;t care. In Israel, Washington and throughout the world, Abbas&#8217;s supporters extol the authoritarian leader as a great moderate. In 2002, desperately searching for a face for the Palestinians that wasn&#8217;t Yasser Arafat&#8217;s face, the Left pushed Abbas out from behind Arafat&#8217;s shadow. Abbas, who served as Arafat&#8217;s deputy for 39 years, was upheld as a great moderate and placed in the invented position of Palestinian prime minister.</p>
<p>The fact that Abbas was an inveterate Jew-hater who spent four decades in the senior leadership of a terrorist organization and whose doctoral dissertation was a long denial of the Holocaust, was brushed aside.</p>
<p>His leftist supporters don&#8217;t care that he says Israel has no right to exist. They are untroubled by his 2008 rejection of then-prime minister Ehud Olmert&#8217;s unprecedentedly generous offer of peace and Palestinian statehood. They don&#8217;t mind that Abbas has refused to negotiate peace with Israel for the past four years. They don&#8217;t care that he has signed two unity government deals with Hamas or that he seeks to gain sovereignty for a Palestinian state through the UN and so establish a Palestinian state in a formal state of war with Israel.</p>
<p>They don&#8217;t care. But most Israelis do. Due to their recognition of his hatred for Israel and due to the terrorism Abbas has condoned and financed for decades, the vast majority of Israelis do not consider him a potential partner for peace. They do not believe that either Abbas or the Palestinians as a whole are remotely interested in being appeased by Israel.</p>
<p>As a consequence, most Israelis greeted Abbas&#8217;s speech at the UN General Assembly last week with indifference. In that speech, Abbas made clear &#8211; yet again &#8211; that he remains Arafat&#8217;s loyal deputy. The majority of Abbas&#8217;s speech involved a litany of libels against Israel, which he accused of everything from terrorism to apartheid, colonialism, racism, murder, theft, etc., etc., etc.</p>
<p>Then he moved on to his demands. In addition to reinstating his demand that Israel agree to every Palestinian demand as a precondition for negotiations, Abbas demanded that Israel release all Palestinian terrorists from its prisons.</p>
<p>No, none of Abbas&#8217;s attacks had an iota of truth to them.</p>
<p>But who cares? Abbas certainly doesn&#8217;t. And neither do his supporters. Their support for Abbas has nothing to do with what he says or does. It has to do with who they are and what they want. Abbas is their prop, not their partner.</p>
<p>Abbas&#8217;s Israeli supporters are the core of far-leftists who brought us the phony peace process with the PLO. Two thousand dead Israelis later, and with no peace in sight, their camp is much smaller today than it was in 1993. But it is still dedicated. And it is overpopulated by members of the media.</p>
<p>TIPPING HIS hat to this group, this week Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced in a media interview that he thinks that Israel should unilaterally withdraw from much of Judea and Samaria.</p>
<p>For most Israelis, Barak&#8217;s plan is self-evidently insane.</p>
<p>We left Gaza and see the consequences of that unilateral withdrawal every day as southern Israel is bombarded with missiles and rockets. We left and Gaza was transformed into a hub for global jihad, increasingly indistinguishable from Sinai. The very notion that our defense chief could suggest adopting an identical strategy for Judea and Samaria is both obscene and frightening.</p>
<p>What can he be thinking? Barak is thinking about elections, which are apparently about to be called. Barak thinks his best bet politically is to try to win the support of Abbas&#8217;s ever shrinking support base.</p>
<p>Barak lost his political base when he left the Labor Party and formed his own Independence faction with other breakaway Labor politicians at the beginning of 2011. He needs Abbas&#8217;s Israeli supporters to vote for him if he is to get elected to the next Knesset. Even more crucially, Barak needs Abbas&#8217;s supporters in the Israeli media. So to win their support, he opted to run on a platform of expelling Jews from their homes.</p>
<p>Barak&#8217;s move doesn&#8217;t tell us anything we don&#8217;t already know about him. He remains the political opportunist he has always been. His move is interesting because of what it reveals about the nature of Israel&#8217;s Left.</p>
<p>There is no rational way to argue that Israel can gain any advantage by surrendering Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians. If Israel departs, either Abbas will gobble up the territory and demand more, or he will swallow the concession and get swallowed by Hamas, which will demand more &#8211; as happened in Gaza.</p>
<p>Either way, Israel loses.</p>
<p>But that doesn&#8217;t matter for the Left. The Left continues to support Israeli withdrawals because its members know that the biggest loser of such an action won&#8217;t be Israel as a whole. It will be the Israeli Right. And that is all the Left cares about.</p>
<p>The only enemy they are interested in fighting, the only adversary they wish to defeat, is their fellow Israelis. And in a bid to win their support at the ballot box &#8211; and on the evening news &#8211; Barak has decided to embrace their cause. He will fight their fight against their Israeli enemies for them.</p>
<p>The Israeli Left is not alone in its belief that its number one priority is to destroy its domestic political opposition. Throughout the Western world, the political Left is increasingly rallying around positions that are in fundamental conflict with their nation&#8217;s interests as well as with the specific ideological commitments of the Left, for the sole purpose of gaining and maintaining power.</p>
<p>In recent weeks, the Left in the US has exposed its motivations and purpose in profoundly troubling ways. If Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel is the core of the Zionist revolution, freedom of speech is the foundation of America. Without Jewish settlement, there is no Israel. Without freedom of speech, there is no America.</p>
<p>IN RECENT weeks, US President Barack Obama and all of his senior aides and supporters have launched an assault on freedom of speech. They have attacked previously unknown figures because they dared to exercise their freedom of speech to produce an anti-Islamic film and broadcast it on YouTube. The White House pressured Google (which owns YouTube) to take the movie down. Obama&#8217;s media supporters have gone along with this shocking assault on bedrock American principles.</p>
<p>The Left&#8217;s support for Obama&#8217;s bid to repress freedom of speech in relation to the movie was not an isolated incident. Today the enlightened leftists of New York and Washington are apoplectic because a federal judge required New York&#8217;s Metropolitan Transportation Authority to post paid advertisements by the Stop the Islamization of America human rights group calling for Americans to support Israel against jihad.</p>
<p>The content of the ads is self-evidently reasonable. They read, &#8220;In any war between the savage and the civilized man, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.&#8221;</p>
<p>SIOA&#8217;s founder Pamela Geller submitted the ads to the MTA last year in response to a rash of anti- Israel ads calling for the US to end its support for the Jewish state. Those ads were published on New York buses and subways and on public transportation around the US.</p>
<p>The MTA rejected SIOA&#8217;s ad but the group sued. Citing the US Constitution, the court required the MTA to post them. When after a year&#8217;s delay the ads were finally posted last week, the US Left in the media and beyond had a collective fit.</p>
<p>From The New York Times to radical rabbis to pro- Islamic Christian pastors to The Washington Post, everyone is wringing their hands. In a televised debate with Geller, the anti-Israel evangelical pastor Rev. Jim Wallis condemned the ads, told Geller she was going to get Christians killed, (by what or whom, he never said), and demanded that Geller silence herself. As he put it, &#8220;Stop talking.&#8221;</p>
<p>It is important to be clear. The American Left doesn&#8217;t have a problem with free speech, per se. And they aren&#8217;t concerned &#8211; as Wallis would have you believe &#8211; that calling jihad savagery is going to get people killed, (by not-at-all savage jihadists).</p>
<p>The problem with messages like Geller&#8217;s is that talk about jihad distracts people from what the Left wants them to be thinking about.</p>
<p>Like the Israeli Left, the American Left doesn&#8217;t want Americans to think about the actual threats to the US emanating from the Islamic world. They want the public to think about what for them is the only real threat to their values and their ability to win and wield power.</p>
<p>That threat doesn&#8217;t emanate from the Islamic world where women are treated worse than farm animals, homosexuals are hanged in public squares, Christians are forcibly converted and assaulted, churches are burned to the ground, the annihilation of the Jewish people throughout the world is an ardent desire, and &#8220;Death to America&#8221; is a political program.</p>
<p>For the American Left, the primary threat to their way of life comes from people who oppose abortions and gay marriage and gun control. It comes from people who oppose unionization of government workers and nationalization of healthcare.</p>
<p>And it comes from people like Geller who state the obvious about jihad.</p>
<p>The reason that Islam is supposed to be immune from criticism is that for American leftists as for Israeli leftists, the only important battle is the one against domestic foes. And just as the abysmal results of leftist policies have left the Israeli Left with no choice but to shoot the messengers, so too the American Left must deal with policy failure by silencing the opposition.</p>
<p>In Israel, leftist appeasement of Palestinian terrorists has led to a horrific death toll and the obvious absence of peace. So the Left must silence those who have the temerity to oppose that failed policy. The Right&#8217;s most visible members are the religious Zionists, who are disproportionately situated beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and so the Left must destroy them through expulsions, no matter what the cost to Israel.</p>
<p>In America, the Left&#8217;s most conspicuous failure is its claim to promote women&#8217;s rights, equality and civil liberties in the culture war, even as it defends the Islamic world&#8217;s addiction to female genital mutilation, forced marriages, honor killings and executions of homosexuals for the &#8220;crime&#8221; of being gay. So the Left must silence critics of jihad and Islamism, and hope no one will notice its hypocrisy.</p>
<p>The upshot of all of this is that the Left must be denied its ability to dominate national discourses. Because Abbas and the pathologically Jew-hating society he leads is a threat to the Jewish state, while religious Zionists are not. And the assaults on American embassies throughout the Islamic world are not due to Internet movies, but to the savagery inherent in jihadist Islam.</p>
<p>In these perilous times we cannot permit ourselves to be led astray by those who insist we are our worst enemies.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/caroline-glick/the-lefts-only-enemy/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>76</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>What Obama Really Thinks</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/what-obama-really-thinks/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-obama-really-thinks</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/what-obama-really-thinks/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Jul 2012 04:40:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[someone else built that]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=137823</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Time and again the president's unscripted remarks strike a deeply offensive tone with the American people. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/ObamaBusiness2_20120717_024824.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-137833" title="ObamaBusiness2_20120717_024824" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/ObamaBusiness2_20120717_024824.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a>“Did we not bring you into existence?” Socrates imagined the state saying to him should he have attempted to evade its death sentence. “Your father married your mother by our aid and begat you,” officials might have continued. Athens provided for the “education of children, in which you were also trained.” The message? You owe even your life to your government.</p>
<p>Philosophers still debate whether Plato wished readers of the <em>Crito</em> to embrace or reject this total conception of state power. No such ambiguity surrounds Barack Obama’s remarks crediting the success of individuals to the state.</p>
<p>“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help,” the president told an audience in Roanoke, Virginia last Friday. “There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”</p>
<p>For the businessmen who made all those “roads and bridges” happen through generous tax payments, Obama’s assertion was especially insulting. Isn’t it enough that tax-funded construction projects bear the stamp of the Obama administration rather than the taxpayer funders that the president vilifies? The head of state also credits the state for the spontaneous accomplishments of private citizens.</p>
<p>As the website of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) website notes, “On March 3, 2009 President Obama made the commitment that all projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) will bear a recovery emblem to make it easier for Americans to see which projects are funded by the ARRA. To meet this commitment, FHWA strongly encourages agencies to use the economic recovery signs on all projects funded by the ARRA.” Governments have spent tens of millions of dollars on signs giving the administration credit. But businessmen now must not even take credit for their own businesses.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/what-obama-really-thinks/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>45</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Why the Palestinians Must Pay a Price</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/alan-m-dershowitz/why-the-palestinians-must-pay-a-price/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-the-palestinians-must-pay-a-price</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/alan-m-dershowitz/why-the-palestinians-must-pay-a-price/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Oct 2011 04:04:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alan M. Dershowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[armistice lines]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barak]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ehud barak]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mass casualties]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[offer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[resolution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[second intifada]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[security council resolution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=107084</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Rewarding violence will only produce more violence.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/pal-children1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-107145" title="pal-children" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/pal-children1.jpg" alt="" width="378" height="284" /></a></p>
<p>The Palestinians are in the process of seeking sovereignty from the United Nations, but in doing so, they are asking for more than what was offered them in any prior negotiation with Israel—including during the talks involving President Clinton and Ehud Barak in 2000 and 2001. Rather than more, it is imperative that the Palestinians get less.</p>
<p>It is imperative to world peace that the Palestinians pay a price—even if it’s only a symbolic price—for rejecting the generous Clinton/Barak offer and responding to it with a second intifada in which 4,000 people were killed. It is also important that Israel not return to the precise armistice lines that existed prior to the 1967 war. If the Palestinians were to achieve a return to the status quo prior to Jordan’s attack on Israel in June of 1967, then military aggression will not have been punished, it will have been rewarded. That’s why Security Council Resolution 242—which was essentially the peace treaty that resulted from the end of the Six Day War—intended for Israel to retain territory necessary to give it secure boundaries (Indeed, in the formal application submitted by Abbas, he sought membership based on UN General Assembly Resolution 1810-11 of November 29, 1947, which would put the borders where they were before the Arab armies invaded the new Jewish state in 1948. This would reward multiple aggressions.)</p>
<p>Yet, however important it is that aggressive and unjustified violence not be rewarded, the international community seems bent on doing just that. If the end result of Jordan’s 1967 attack on Israel—an attack supported by the Palestinian leadership and participated in by Palestinian soldiers—is that the Palestinians get back everything Jordan lost, there will be no disincentive to comparable military attacks around the world. If the Palestinians get more than, or even as much as, they rejected in 2000 and 2001 (and did not accept in 2007), then further intifadas with mass casualties will be encouraged. A price must be paid for violence. That’s how the laws of war are supposed to work and there is no reason to make an exception in the case of the Palestinians.</p>
<p>I support a two-state solution based on negotiation and mutual compromise. But the negotiations must not begin where previous offers, which were not accepted, left off. They must take into account how we got to the present situation: The Arab rejection of the UN partition plan and the attack on the new Jewish state that resulted in the death of one percent of Israel’s population; the attack by Jordan and its Palestinian soldiers against Israel in 1967, which resulted in Israel’s capture of the West Bank; Israel’s offer to trade captured land for peace that was rejected at Khartoum with the three infamous &#8220;no’s&#8221;—no peace, no recognition, no negotiation; Israel’s generous offer of statehood in 2000-2001 that was answered by violence; and Olmert’s subsequent, even more generous, offer that was not accepted by President Abbas.</p>
<p>Efforts to achieve peace must look forward but they must not forget the past. A balance must be struck between not rewarding past violence and not creating unreasonable barriers to a future peace. But the Palestinians made it clear last week that they reject such balance.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/alan-m-dershowitz/why-the-palestinians-must-pay-a-price/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>21</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Economic Meddling Disasters</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/thomas-sowell/economic-meddling-disasters/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=economic-meddling-disasters</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/thomas-sowell/economic-meddling-disasters/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 29 Sep 2011 04:35:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Afternoon Edition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[american banks]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deposit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Depression]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economic decisions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[home]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Housing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oil explorations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[political decisions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[time horizon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=107074</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why politics and economics should not mix.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/large_20080912-home-foreclosure-auction-sign.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-107078" title="large_20080912-home-foreclosure-auction-sign" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/large_20080912-home-foreclosure-auction-sign.gif" alt="" width="375" height="253" /></a></p>
<p>They say &#8220;all politics is local.&#8221; But economic decisions impact the whole economy and reverberate internationally. That is why politicians&#8217; meddling with the economy creates so many disasters.</p>
<p>The time horizon of politics seldom reaches beyond the next election. But, in economics, when an oil company invests in oil explorations today, the oil they eventually find and process may not make its way to market and earn a profit until it is sold as gasoline a decade from now.</p>
<p>In short, the focus of politicians is extremely limited in both space and time — and all the repercussions that lie beyond those limits carry little, if any, weight in political decisions.</p>
<p>At one time, many state banking laws forbad a bank from having multiple branches. The goal was limited and local — namely, to prevent big, nationally known banks from setting up branches that many locally owned banks could not successfully compete against.</p>
<p>But, limited and local as such state banking laws were, their impact was both national and catastrophic, when thousands of American banks failed during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The vast majority of the banks that failed were in states that had laws against branch banking.</p>
<p>Why? Because, when there is a single bank in a single place, the fate of both its depositors and its borrowers depends on what happens there. If it is a wheat-growing region, a drop in the price of wheat means people deposit less money in the bank at the same time when more borrowers are unable to repay their loans.</p>
<p>Banks caught in that kind of crossfire went under on a scale that shrank the total amount of credit in the country and helped plunge the national economy into depression. In Canada, where banks were free to have branches all across the country, not one bank failed during the same years when thousands of American banks failed — and Canada did not yet have deposit insurance until 1967.</p>
<p>A Canadian bank with branches in all sorts of places across the country — with all sorts of different industry, commerce and agriculture — had their risks spread, instead of being concentrated, as in the United States.</p>
<p>Problems in a place where one branch was located would not collapse the whole bank.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/thomas-sowell/economic-meddling-disasters/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>9</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 1537/1708 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 03:27:02 by W3 Total Cache -->