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A 'fatwa' cannot be issued by a thin Muslim!
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We were sufficiently exposed to Obama during the 2008 campaign but most gave little weight to his ideas because the majority of voters were turned off by GW and were enamored with Obama's golden tongue.
Matters are not so golden now but most continue to ignore reality because Obama remains the darling of the media and news folks and they are unwilling to bash him as they did GW and most anyone with an R at the end of their name.
The R message is preferable to the D one. It has proven to be so time and again but many of the R's do not adhere to their espoused principles whereas the D's are more than willing to adhere to their's because it means spend and spend and spend and requires little if any discipline. People love the prospect of a free lunch.
Also the R's got involved in digging their own grave by espousing their extreme social views and the D's hammered them but escaped being hammered themselves for their own extreme views.
D's spend and far too many R's do as well all the while calling the D's to task for their acts of irresponsibility. The public is not stupid and/or blind. They see the hypocrisy in what the R's do but, being on the take, they overlook the danger of the D's policies.
Being a super wealthy nation, it takes time for the walls to fall but they inevitably will if we continue along our current profligate path.
It is axiomatic - you cannot continue to spend beyond your ability to repay and/or finance. You cannot dumb down your society and you cannot destroy the family unit and act as if morality is beyond comprehension. All of these trends take time to burrow their way in a societies' psyche but they eventually cannot be ignored because they have a cumulative and pernicious effect.
We are fast approaching that period as evidenced by our high rate of unemployment, increasing dependency upon food stamps, our historically slow recovery, our mounting debt and our decline as a world power.
The causal effect has been building for decades and cannot all be laid at Obama's feet. However, his lunatic policies and failed management has hastened their appearance.
This is a fact and it will become increasingly evident as we move through his second term and experience the consequences of his presidency. In some ways one might argue Obama is learning but even if he shows he is it does not take but a nano second before he reverts to his radical ways and thinking.
The leopard just cannot change his spots! (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Israeli gas begins to flow. (See 2 below.)
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A lesson about the dangers of freedom. (See 3 below.)
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Efraim Inbar believes Israel's apology to Turkey was a mistake. Time will tell whether he is right but I believe he has over stated the case for concern.(See 4 below.)
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Fund on Carson's banning. (See 5 below)
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Truly getting bugged! (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1)Dangerous Times: America will Survive Obama
By James Lewis
Can America survive the age of O? Many conservatives are worried sick.
Some friends invited me to their Passover seder the other night, and for the first time I really paid attention to the meaning of the words. As you know, the seder celebrates the liberation of the Hebrew people -- the Jews -- from oppression and slavery in Egypt around the first millennium BCE. There has long been debate about the accuracy of that history, but skip that for now.
Ask yourself why liberation from slavery has dominated Jewish and later Christian thought for three thousand years? Jesus' Last Supper was a seder ceremony. Black churches used the Egyptian slavery of the children of Israel as a model for their own experiences of slavery and liberation. So have other liberation movements, including the Abolitionists and the American founders.
The Jewish flight from Egyptian slavery was a model of human liberation in the West, until Karl Marx twisted liberty into tyranny. But the struggle between freedom and control freaks is universal. It can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in the family hell created by kids during teenage rebellion. Freedom is a basic yearning of the human spirit, and so is control freakery.
Now we have a president who confuses slavery and liberty, most obviously in the case of the Islamist Spring, which is certainly not an Arab Spring, since in Syria alone nearly 100,000 Arabs have killed each other by now. Some Spring!
To make the results clear beyond question, the Morsi regime in Egypt has just imposed a Sharia constitution that drops the provision against slavery. The reason for that is Islamic law: the Quran describes Mohammed raiding caravans and small towns to steal slaves, including his child bride. The Islamist world still applies slavery to wives and daughters. Thomas Jefferson tried to stop Libyan slave raiding of American merchant ships off the shores of Tripoli, but they never quite got the point.
In Islam it is not freedom but complete submission that is emphasized. Islam is radically different from Judaism and Christianity. It is a desert nomad religion. It reflects that culture.
Domestically, Obama is trying to create a Eurosocialist centralized economy. But in the liberal paradise of Europe the socialist model is failing right in front of our eyes today. Millions of people in Italy and Greece have had their incomes slashed in half and their taxes increased. The Euro is failing in all the weaker economies of Europe. The standard demagogic propaganda of Eurosocialism -- calling one's opponents racists and planetary poisoners -- is failing. In a few years the Arab-Iranian oil monopoly will crumble, when shale gas takes over its market share. Countries around the world are frantically searching for shale now that it can be converted into clean hydrocarbons. That will eliminate Islamist OPEC control of oil and allow freedom to emerge again.
Everywhere the Arab Spring has sprung, Islamist tyranny has replaced relative freedom -- for women most of all. Turkey used to be a modern country until the Islamofascists took over. Egypt used to be relatively tolerant, and kept the 30-year peace treaty with Israel, until Obama told Mubarak to resign. Wherever the Muslim world was poised between modernism and tradition, now the reactionary patriarchs are in control of hundreds of millions of people. Behind a solid wall of media censorship, women are being abused, intimidated, and beaten, with the official approval of imams and mullahs. Read the books of Ayaan Hirsi Ali if you have any doubts about that. Our feminists are playing deaf, but they know, they know. Under Obama the feminist movement has colluded in the enslavement of Muslim women in the "Arab Spring." (Just consider Naomi Wolf's new job with Al Jazeera.)
Pre-Obama, there were genuine movements towards modernity in the Muslim world, beginning with Turkey in 1922. Post-Obama, half a billion women are likely to be openly abused if they venture outside of the house without a male escort, much more vulnerable to blame for being sexually abused by the "justice" of Shariah law, and much more oppressed by the last nasty patriarchy in the world. Thank you, Liberator Obama.
Thomas Jefferson and Abe Lincoln would never, ever have gone along with the renewed fascist control of the Muslim world.
At the UN, 57 Muslim member regimes routinely smear and slander Israel and America, with European and American acquiescence. Brain-locked liberals around the world think this is all fine, and Obama the Messiah is beyond criticism.
Obama is all in favor of the Islamist Spring, because, whether he is Muslim or not, he is an Islamist sympathizer. There is no reasonable doubt anymore.
This is the worst news about an American president since the rise of Stalin, who also penetrated the U.S. with his agents.
My question is whether it will spell an end to the America we have known.
I think America will survive and ultimately win.
The reason is that control freaks are always self-deluded. Freedom is a yearning of the human spirit in America, but it is not limited to America.
No control freak in the world can really run a giant national economy, much less the world as a whole. People have tried to do such things for thousands of years. In general, centralized control fails, just as the Soviet command economy failed.
What about ObamaCare? Nationalized medicine will elect a lot of Democrats. Ordinary people will learn to get around the inevitable medical rationing, the way they do in Europe. We will all become Italians. Medical vacations abroad will offer an increasingly attractive alternative to American socialized medicine. Private medical care is always being tried in Europe, and some of it works very well. Now it will become global, with private medicine competing with nationalized bureaucracy. Mexico is already becoming a medical travel destination, with international approval for some of its medical centers.
Even in the face of Obamanism, the high-tech revolution is increasingly hard to control. Lenin placed all his technological control bets on electrification of the Soviet Union. When a new industrial revolution commenced with the appearance of cheap computers, the Soviets could never keep up.
When shale technology (invented in America) begins to work in Poland, the Eastern Med, China, and Ireland, the Greens will suddenly decide that natural gas is good for us. Their favorite control whip won't work anymore.
The biotech revolution is exploding, along with space travel, web talk, and a hundred other new and hard-to-control inventions.
The biotech revolution is exploding, along with space travel, web talk, and a hundred other new and hard-to-control inventions.
Even today the stock market is rising, a leading indicator of growth. The market is already discounting the expected effects of ObamaCare.
Will it work? Not forever. But it will continue the long, long struggle between control freaks and regular people. Just think Soda Jerk Bloomberg in New York, who has now decided to control restaurant portion sizes in the city. Will that work? Of course not.
So -- will American freedom survive Obama?
I think so, yes. But the country will look very different when the uproar dies down.
Conservatives should think globally, and mobilize the forces of freedom around the world. They exist. Every time an impoverished African buys a cellphone the global free market expands. We must find freedom-loving peoples, make strong alliances, and resist the control freaks, who also exist around the world.
The Cold War was won by a Western alliance that finally won the sympathies of regular people in the Soviet Empire. The Evil Empire crumbled from within. All it took was a unified front by the West combined with its own internal protest movement.
The Long Jihad war can be won the same way. With instant globalization there is no other way. This is an ideological war, and free peoples have won such struggles before.
As for American conservatives, we should heed Winston Churchill, who saw very bad times indeed:
"Never give in -- never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
As Obamacare begins to roll out, its champions are beginning to have to confront reality. But because they’re getting a lot of leeway and protection from the political press, the results of this confrontation with the consequences of the law’s poor design and misguided economic assumptions often take the form of little nuggets of truth buried in mountains of frantic, wishful obfuscation. Such was the little nugget buried in the middle of a story that was itself buried in the back of the A section of last Friday’s New York Times.
The story was about the enormous challenges of implementing the law, and while it was careful to inform us (in the mouths of unnamed “supporters of the law”) that a lot of these problems are surely functions of the fact that “President Obama has done little to trumpet its benefits, educate the public or answer the critics,” it also notes the following curious fact:
Mr. Obama scored his biggest legislative achievement exactly three years ago when he signed the Affordable Care Act. But this week the administration cautioned officials to be careful about suggesting that the law would drive down costs.
After extensive research, the administration said it was unwise to tell consumers that they could get “health insurance that fits your budget.” That message, it said, is “seen as highly motivational, but not as believable.
This makes it sound like the “extensive research” in question was research into public opinion, which it may well have been. But of course, the more fundamental reason “to be careful about suggesting that the law would drive down costs” is that no one really expects it to do so — not even the administration.
Administration officials and many others on the left who talk about slowing health costs in the coming years never really attribute that expectation in any concrete way to the new law. Rather, they point to the fact that the growth of health costs has slowed a bit during the recession and the painfully slow recovery of the past few years, and they simply expect that slow rate to continue even as they simultaneously expect the economy to recover much more robustly in the coming years.
It’s very important to understand just how much the Left now hangs on this very implausible expectation about health costs. It is at the core of the Democrats’ fiscal arguments, and at the core of their optimistic assumptions about how Obamacare will work out.
That expectation is, to begin with, what allows Paul Krugman and others (including administration officials) to suggest that we just don’t have to worry about the deficit and debt at this point because they will be pretty stable for about a decade before beginning a catastrophic rise that would crush the economy. That’s what amounts to fiscal optimism these days, and it’s the essence of the Democrats’ resistance to entitlement reform. It is embodied, for instance, in this chart that you’d find if you trudged through the president’s 2013 budget proposal all the way to the 510-page “analytical perspectives” volume that was released with the budget:
This projection, which predicts an epic disaster for the American economy if we remain on our current fiscal course in the long run, is, to repeat, a very rosy view, since it suggests we have about ten years of relative stability (if at a high level of debt) in which to change course before the steep upward trajectory of debt resumes — although the people who use this figure somehow use it to argue against changing course. But in any case, even this sorry excuse for optimism is only made possible by the notion that the growth of health costs won’t soon return to even its postwar norm, let alone to its norm of the last two decades. It assumes, for instance, that Medicare spending will only be 3.3 percent of GDP in 2020, while the Congressional Budget Office assumes it will be 4.2 percent of GDP — a huge difference. And it’s a difference that has a massive effect on medium and long-term expectations. The CBO uses somewhat less rosy assumptions (but still assumes health-cost growth will take a while to resume), and so expects federal debt to reach 200 percent of GDP not in 2080 but in 2037 — again, a huge difference, which means the CBO sees a far steeper rise in deficits and debt in the near and medium term.
But the optimistic assumptions about health-care costs have much more immediate consequences too. The relative stability projected in that chart for the next decade is simply assumed, it is not asserted to be a function of any particular reform in Obamacare. In fact, it is assumed in the administration’s expectations of how the Obamacare rollout itself will work out, and therefore allows them to skirt over two huge problems with the law’s design.
The first is that, unless health costs grow very slowly and keep the growth of Medicare costs very low, Obamacare’s additional price controls (in the form of the IPAB) would have to kick in, and, because they are only allowed to take the form of across-the-board rate cuts for providers, they would result in drastically reduced access to health care for seniors. The actuaries of the Medicare program (who work for Barack Obama) have projected that this would require payment rates for doctors in Medicare to dip well below Medicaid rates and keep falling. Here’s how they see it:
We know that Medicaid’s low payment rates cause many doctors to refuse Medicaid patients, and therefore make it difficult for many poor Americans to find health care. Taking Medicare rates below that level should have similar, but even more drastic, effects. It’s not even worth trying to think through the details of what that would look like because it would simply never happen — we’ve seen that far smaller cuts than that are undone each year through the “doc fix” and there is no way doctors or seniors would put up with such blunt across-the-board cuts and such a loss of access to care. The only way to really avoid that mess is if health costs just magically remain very low, and that’s basically what the administration (and to some extent the CBO) now project when assessing the law. The CBO assumes, for instance, that the IPAB wouldn’t even have to start doing anything at all until after 2022.
But that’s not all. The second large design problem that the rosy health-costs scenario allows the administration to ignore reaches even closer to the heart of Obamacare. After the law’s designers got their first real CBO score in 2009, they realized they had to find some way to cut the projected costs of the law’s exchange subsidies if they were to have any chance of pretending the law would cost less than a trillion dollars over a decade. So they inserted a provision that kicks in in 2018 and requires that, if the cost of the exchange subsidies exceeds 0.5 percent of GDP in any given year, the level of subsidy would be cut in a means-tested way. The provision didn’t draw much attention even from health wonks at first, but in 2011 the CBO produced an analysis of it showing that it would cause very significant declines not just in the growth of subsidies but in their nominal value year-over-year for many middle-class families. These families’ out-of-pocket costs would quickly grow larger than the penalty (or tax, for John Roberts fans) they would have to pay for not having coverage, and many could well opt to go uninsured until they needed care. (Jed Graham of Investors Business Daily has done some great reporting on this provision, especially here and here.)
Until this year, the CBO has always assumed that these families just wouldn’t drop their coverage, but in its latest score of Obamacare, the agency for the first time projects that the number of people in the exchanges will actually begin to drop after 2018, declining by almost a tenth over the subsequent five years even as the population grows. And since the people who remained in the exchanges would tend to be poorer and sicker, the costs of providing them subsidies would grow very quickly (by almost 6 percent annually), since the exchange pool would become more risky. (And this projection, remember, is still based on rosy expectations about overall health-cost growth.) This nightmare scenario, too, is pretty unlikely to happen, since the people involved would be middle-class families. They’re not going to accept the enormous downside of Obamacare without even the modest upside of exchange subsidies, and they’re not going to like being forced to go uninsured. The politics of this just wouldn’t hold.
In both cases, it is only possible to imagine that Obamacare might be sustained if we assume very low growth in health costs. That assumption is absolutely critical to liberal fiscal and health policy today. But of course, Obamacare doesn’t really offer any serious mechanism to achieve such low costs — in fact, it’s actively hostile to the kind of consumer incentives and competitive pressures it would take to achieve it.
These are just a few of the many increasingly evident reasons why Obamacare in its current form has no future. For now, you’ve got to dig pretty deep in your newspaper to see it. But it’s going to become clearer and clearer to real voters as implementation proceeds.
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2)
| PM Netanyahu Comments on Start of Flow of Natural Gas from the Tamar Field |
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this evening (Saturday, 30 March 2013), commented on the start of the flow of natural gas from the Tamar field: "This is an important day for the Israeli economy. On the Festival of Freedom we are taking an important step toward energy independence. We have advanced the natural gas sector in Israel over the last decade, which will be good for the Israeli economy and for all Israelis." ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3)The Danger of Freedom
By Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo
One of the greatest lessons that Judaism has taught the world
Freedom can be a very dangerous commodity.
When reading the story of the Exodus from Egypt, we are confronted with a strange phenomenon: the mashchis (destroyer). After the Jews were told to mark their doorposts with the blood of the korban pesach (paschal lamb), they were informed that G0D would pass over their doors "and He will not allow the destroyer (ha-mashchit) to enter your homes and attack you" (1). Later, at midnight, Moses would call them to leave their homes after they had had a family meal, and they would subsequently leave Egypt. Commentators struggle with the term "the destroyer." Who or what was this? G0D? A plague? Some other power?
One of the most remarkable explanations is that the destroyer was freedom itself. Often in history, national liberations were followed by long periods of chaos and violence. Many bloody and ruthless insurrections erupted by slaves eager to settle a score with their cruel masters. The brutish drive for vengeance, for gratification of the satanic impulses within man, was often irresistible. At the time of the French revolution, many of those who were liberated initiated mass killings. The same is true of the upheavals after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Victims of harsh slavery tend to throw off the shackles of moral behavior and become criminals themselves, taking their revenge on innocent bystanders. The turmoil that often follows the experience of sudden freedom is too much for people to handle.
When we look at the story of the Exodus, we are struck by the fact that an upheaval of revenge was completely absent. No Egyptian babies were snatched from the embrace of their mothers and thrown into the Nile, as had been done to the Jewish male babies just a short time before. Not one Jew beat up his taskmaster who mercilessly tortured him only a few days earlier. There was not one Egyptian hurt; nor was there an Egyptian house destroyed or vandalized.
At that crucial hour, when the Jews had the motivation, opportunity and ability to take revenge for 210 years of exceedingly cruel treatment, they chose to be restrained and quiet. Instead of rioting in the streets of Goshen, they remained in their homes, ate a festive meal—which included the korban pesach—sang praises to G0D, and waited until they were told to leave. Would anyone have blamed them for beating up a few taskmasters who had thrown their babies in the Nile? Yet, not one Jew raised a hand against his enemy. Once it was certain that they would be free at any moment, and that there was no longer a need to defend themselves, revenge would be meaningless.
This is one of the greatest lessons that Judaism has taught the world. Freedom should be experienced in a prudent manner, far removed from chaos, bloodshed and revenge.
Freedom can be very dangerous if one does not think it through, control it, and apply it carefully. It is therefore quite understandable that Pesach—which celebrates freedom, powerfully symbolized through the Seder rituals—has a large number of restrictions, to the extent that even a crumb of bread is forbidden. In our chaotic world, this is a most important lesson.
Today, when so much freedom has been given to man, most people do not know what they are free from. We have confused the free with the free and easy. "He only earns his freedom and existence," says Goethe, "who daily conquers them anew" (2).
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4)Israel's apology to Turkey was a mistake
by Efraim Inbar
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Israel's apology to Turkey for "operational errors" in the Mavi Marmara incident is a diplomatic mistake both in terms of substance and timing. It's hard to understand or justify Israel's weekend apology to Turkey. While the use of Israeli force in the Mavi Marmara "flotilla" incident was not very elegant, it was perfectly legitimate – as the UN-appointed "Palmer Commission" unequivocally determined. Moreover, the incident was a Turkish provocation that warrants a Turkish apology, not an Israeli one.
Worse still, the hopes in Jerusalem for a new era in Israeli-Turkish relations in exchange for the apology are simply illusory.
The Israeli apology will hardly stop Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's regular Israel-bashing rhetoric. Nor has it secured a clear Turkish commitment for the resumption of full diplomatic relations.
Moreover, Erdogan already has conveyed his intention to visit Hamas-ruled Gaza. Such a visit is a slap in the face to both Jerusalem and Washington.
Turkey, under the AKP, an Islamist party, has gradually adopted a new foreign policy, fueled by neo-Ottoman and Islamist impulses, whose goal is to gain a leadership role in the Middle East and the Islamic world.
Attaining this objective requires harsh criticism of Israel, which has generated great popularity for Erdogan and Turkey. Unfortunately, vicious attacks on Israel come easily for Erdogan, who is plainly and simply an anti-Semite.
Israel has failed to fully grasp Turkey's new Islamist direction. For several years already, we no longer have a pro-Western Turkey with which Israel can cooperate in the turbulent Middle East. Ankara and Jerusalem have very different views on a variety of issues. While Turkey is truly an important and powerful player in regional politics, its behavior over the past decade actually harms Israeli interests. It does not follow the US policy on Iran and helps circumvent the international sanctions imposed on Tehran. As a matter of fact, Turkey helps Iran, a country with genocidal intentions toward Israel, to progress in its nuclear program.
Turkey also sides with Hamas, an Islamist terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state, and helps it entrench its rule in Gaza and gain international support and recognition.
Turkey is also actively helping radical Islamic Sunni elements take over Syria. It also supports the idea of violent opposition against Israel's presence in the Golan Heights. As such, the hope that Israel and Turkey can cooperate together with the US in limiting the damage from a disintegrating Syria has little validity.
Furthermore, Turkey, still a NATO member, is obstructing the efforts of Israel in developing its ties with this organization. The Turkish position in NATO also hinders the Western alliance's ability to deal more effectively with the Iranian nuclear challenge.
Turkey's policy in the Mediterranean similarly clashes with Israeli vital interests. Its bullying of Cyprus interferes with Israel's plans to export via this island its newly found gas riches to an energy- thirsty Europe. Turkey, that sees itself as an energy bridge to Europe, does not want the Israeli competition. It may even use military force to maintain its role in the energy market.
What is also important is how the Israeli apology will be perceived in a region whose prism on international relations is power politics. Inevitably, Israel under Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will be seen as weak, bowing to American pressure. Public regrets about use of force erode deterrence and project weakness.
Perceived weakness usually invites aggression in our tough neighborhood.
This is also what Ankara thinks, which is very problematic for Israel. Moreover, Tehran and Cairo, both ruled by radical Islamists, cherish the Turkish victory over the Zionist entity.
The Israeli-initiated apology is an American diplomatic success, but reflects a dangerous American misperception of Turkey as representing "moderate Islam," which is incredible naïve. Turkey is distancing itself from the West and its values.
Nowadays, more journalists are in jail in Turkey than in China.
Israel's friends in Turkey, part of the democratic opposition, must be bewildered as Israel hands Erdogan a diplomatic achievement, buttressing the grip of the Islamist AKP on Turkish politics.
The timing is particularly troubling.
Turkish foreign policy is in crisis because its much-heralded approach to the Middle East ("zero problems with its neighbors") is in shambles. Turkey needed a diplomatic success here more than Israel did. Israel could have negotiated a better formula to end the impasse in bilateral relations.
Only very recently, we heard Erdogan call Zionism a crime against humanity. He did not apologize, as he should have, but told a Danish newspaper that he was misunderstood.
This was part of a concerted effort on part of Turkey to prevent additional international criticism on this issue. Nevertheless, the pressure was on Ankara, not Jerusalem.
Furthermore, an apology to a Hamas supporter, just a day after Hamas again launched rockets against Israel, communicates terrible weakness. Sanctioning an Erdogan victory trip to Gaza at this particular moment is terribly foolish, too, particularly when Israel is seeking to bolster the standing of the rival Palestinian Authority.
It is highly unlikely that we will see a reversal or a turnaround in Turkey's anti-Western and anti- Israeli policies. The apology from Jerusalem only enhances Turkish ambitions and weakens Israel's deterrence.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Efraim Inbar is a professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University, the director of the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
5) Dr. Carson Banned from a Commencement Speech?
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