Obama Is Not Only Sucking Us Dry He Is Making Suckers Out of Us!

LTE I recently sent to the local paper before I left town: "By now it should be evident, even to Netanyahu, if Obama says he has Israel's back they are in deep trouble.

Sec. Hagel made it imminently clear recently, Israel has no unilateral freedom to defend itself if it is relying upon America.

 They must cool their heels and wait while Obama does what he does best - dither and duck.

 All Bibi has to do is look to the persistent slaughter of the Syrians, and now their apparent gassing, to know Obama's red line does not exist and if it ever did it was a meek pink. Certainly, N Korea and Iran are watching with utter contempt.

 Having eliminated all reference to terrorists dictates to those agencies sworn to protect us, it is little wonder the recent two 'Coor's Lite Jihadists' who caused a disruption in a social gathering of the Boston Marathon ( FT Hood was characterized as work place violence) were able to do what they did and the FBI and CIA, even after being alerted by Russia, proved feckless. After all theses agencies were forbidden to look for terrorists even after being served them on a Russian platter surrounded by caviar. 

We are stuck with a president who is America's equivalent of Chamberlain and we have become the laughing stock of the world. Obama beamed over getting bin Laden and informed us the threat from Jihad was over. Then came Benghazi and the relatives of those killed are allegedly being told to clam up. 

This president is incapable of coping with reality because when it comes to the high jacking of Islam by a host of radicals he continues to blather syrupy and evasive comments. He can't even stand before grade school kids and be cohesive. Amazing that he  can even blather at all with his head constantly in the sand.

How pathetic but then Obama never was qualified for the job so we can only blame ourselves for electing and re-electing him and the press and media for keeping their hands off attitude because he remains their anointed lap dog."
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Welcome to the new American way sucker! (See 1 below.)
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It is a sad indictment of American reasoning ability, or lack thereof and objectivity to realize GW, with all his faults and mistakes, was a much better president. I have written, time and again, history would treat him far more kindly than the media and press who led the parade in getting the average citizen to virtually hate him. It is a shame that it took the current narcissistic president to jog us back to reality.

Granted, GW was fortunate to be born into the Bush family and that gave him latitude to sow some oats further than, perhaps, was warranted. But he was and is true American in both his heart and mind and America will come to miss him more and more for his basic decency and reverence for the office he occupied.(See 2 below.)
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Kagan may or may not be right but if things do not change, and rapidly, he will be for sure correct.

This recession and Obama's policies ares decimating the middle class, driving the lower socio-economic class further and further into the arms of government and making them increasingly dependent (return and reread 1 below.)

 Our institutions are failing us, the increased cost of everything is widening the gap between the rich and poor and taxing the former is not going to help the latter. Obama is incapable of telling and/or seeing the truth because everything about him is seen through a political prism.

 He lives to flay the opposition and in the process is destroying our nation. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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Dick
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1)Received this today from a friend…..and haven’t verified its credibility….but don’t doubt the system is being abused….

 Recently, our friend Michael ( Realtor) shared his experience with an "Obama supporter" he encountered while showing homes to a low income, working family in Pontiac, MI.. We asked him to please write it down so we could share it. Michael says: "As a Realtor for the past 28 years I thought I'd seen or heard it all. Until now. I was showing homes in Pontiac, MI.

One afternoon recently showed up at a home at the 4:00 pm appointment. I woke up the Homeowner, who let us in and then proceeded to tell my Buyers and I that she has already entered into a Contract to sell the home on a 'short-sale'. (A short-sale is a sale where the Banks accepts less money than is owed on the Home).

After some chit-chat, the Seller proceeded to tell us that she and her Sister (who also lived in the area) were buying each other's homes via the short-sale process. I mentioned to her that I thought Relatives could not be involved in those Transactions. She smiled and said "We have two different last names so no one knows the difference". She went on to tell us that each of them owed over 100K on their Homes and were in the process of buying each other's Homes for about 10-15K cash.

 To top it off, they were each receiving $3,000.00 in Government provided 'relocation assistance' at the closing. My Buyers and I were amazed that she was outright admitting to fraud and yet, she continued. She began to tell us that the best part of her scheme was that because they currently were not working that they (both) are now receiving Section 8 Vouchers.

 I said I thought those were for Renters and she said "That's the best part; me and my Sister are going to be renting each other's Homes so we don't even have to move, and Obama is going to give us each $800.00 a month to pay the rent!"

She then picked up a Picture she had framed of Obama and did a little happy dance around her living room and while she kissed the Picture she was singing "Thank you Obama.... thank you Obama." "So here is the bottom line.

Both of these Scammers got at least $80,000.00 in debt forgiven, $3,000.00 in cash for relocation (when in fact they did not relocate) and to boot, you and I will now be paying (through our Taxes) $1,600.00 in rent for each them each and every month.... perhaps forever!

And I also would not be at all surprised if they are receiving food stamps and whatever other Programs are available for anyone who is willing to lie to get assistance.

These women went from working and paying about $900.00 each in mortgage payments to staying home and getting paid $800.00 each per month to live in the same home they had been living in and all they had to do was lie on a few papers."

 This craziness has to stop! I'm sure this kind of fraud is going on each and every day all across the Country and no one wants to touch the subject of entitlements because they might OFFEND someone or lose a vote or two.

 "By the way... this Seller had an almost new SUV in the driveway, three flat screen TV's and a very nice computer set up in her living room which was furnished entirely with nice leather furniture." THE NEW 'AMERICAN WAY'.....
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 2)The Presidential Wheel Turns Disaffection for Bush gave us Obama. That explains the new affection for Bush.
By Peggy Noonan

 Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 because he was not George W. Bush. In fact, he was elected because he was the furthest thing possible from Mr. Bush.

On some level he knew this, which is why every time he got in trouble he'd say Bush's name. It's all his fault, you have no idea the mess I inherited.

As long as Mr. Bush's memory was hovering like Boo Radley in the shadows, Mr. Obama would be OK.

This week something changed. George W. Bush is back, for the unveiling of his presidential library. His numbers are dramatically up. You know why? Because he's the furthest thing from Barack Obama. Obama fatigue has opened the way to Bush affection. ***

In all his recent interviews Mr. Bush has been modest, humorous, proud but unassuming, and essentially philosophical: History will decide. No finger-pointing or scoring points. If he feels rancor or resentment he didn't show it. He didn't attempt to manipulate. His sheer normality seemed like a relief, an echo of an older age. And all this felt like an antidote to Obama—to the imperious I, to the inability to execute, to the endless interviews and the imperturbable drone, to the sense that he is trying to teach us, like an Ivy League instructor taken aback by the backwardness of his students.

And there's the unconscious superiority. One thing Mr. Bush didn't think he was was superior. He thought he was luckily born, quick but not deep, and he famously trusted his gut but also his heart. He always seemed moved and grateful to be in the White House. Someone who met with Mr. Obama during his first year in office, an old hand who'd worked with many presidents, came away worried and confounded. Mr. Obama, he said, was the only one who didn't seem awed by his surroundings, or by the presidency itself. Mr. Bush could be prickly and irritable and near the end showed arrogance, but he wasn't vain or conceited, and he still isn't. When people said recently that they were surprised he could paint, he laughed: "Some people are surprised I can even read."

 Coverage of the opening of his presidential library Thursday was wall to wall on cable, and a feeling of affection for him was encouraged, or at least enabled, by the Washington press corps, which doesn't much like Mr. Obama because he's not all that likable, and remembers Mr. Bush with a kind of reluctant fondness because he was.

 But to the point. Mr. Obama was elected because he wasn't Bush. Mr. Bush is popular now because he's not Obama. The wheel turns, doesn't it? Here's a hunch: The day of the opening of the Bush library was the day Obama fatigue became apparent as a fact of America's political life. When Bush left office, his approval rating was down in the 20s to low 30s. Now it's at 47%, which is what Obama's is. That is amazing, and not sufficiently appreciated.

Yes, we are a 50-50 nation, but Mr. Bush left office in foreign-policy and economic failure, even cataclysm. Yet he is essentially equal in the polls to the supposedly popular president. Which suggests Republicans in general have some latent, unseen potential of which they're unaware. Right now they're busy being depressed. Maybe they should be thinking, "If Bush could come back . . ." Actually, forget I said that. Every time Republican political professionals start to think that way, with optimism, they get crude and dumb and think if they press certain levers the mice will run in certain directions. ***

The headline of the Bush Library remarks is that everyone was older and nicer. Jimmy Carter, in shades, with wispy white hair, was gracious and humorous. Anyone can soften with age, but he seemed to have sweetened. That don't come easy. Good for him. George H.W. Bush was tender. He feels the tugs and tides of history. "God bless America, and thank you very much." He rose from his wheelchair to acknowledge the crowd. That crowd, and the people watching on TV—the person they loved and honored most was him.

Bill Clinton does this kind of thing so well—being generous to others, especially former opponents. "We are here to celebrate a country we all love," he said. He was funny on how he wanted Mr. Bush to paint him and then saw Mr. Bush's self-portrait in the bath and thought no, I'll keep my suit on. He got a laugh when he called himself the black sheep of the Bush family. I said everyone was older and nicer. It's occurred to me that the Clintons and both Bushes were president when baby boomer journalists were in their 30s and 40s and eager to rise. Everyone was meaner, both the pols and the press, because they were all young. Now they're in their 60s. When they went through the 9/11 section of the library, the day before the opening, some had tears in their eyes. They understood now what that day was.

Young journalists: You're going to become more tolerant with time, and not only because you have more to tolerate in yourself. Because life will batter you and you'll have a surer sense of what's important and has meaning and is good.

 President Obama was more formal than the other speakers and less confident than usual, as if he knew he was surrounded by people who have something he doesn't. "No matter how much you think you're ready to assume the office of the president, it's impossible to understand the nature of the job until it's yours." This is a way of seeming to laud others when you're lauding yourself. He veered into current policy disputes, using Mr. Bush's failed comprehensive immigration reform to buttress his own effort. That was manipulative, graceless and typical.

 George W. Bush was emotional: "In the end, leaders are defined by the convictions they hold. . . . My deepest conviction . . . is that the United States of America must strive to expand the reach of freedom. I believe that freedom is a gift from God and the hope of every human heart." He then announced that on Saturday he would personally invade Syria. Ha, kidding. It was standard Bush rhetoric and, in its way, a defiant pushing back against critics of his invasions and attempts to nation-build.

Who isn't for more freedom? But that bright, shining impulse, that very American impulse, must be followed by steely-eyed calculation. At the end Mr. Bush wept, and not only because the Bush men are weepers but because he means every word of what he says, and because he loves his country, and was moved.

John Boehner weeps too when he speaks about what America means to him. You know why they do that? Because their hearts are engaged. And really, that's not the worst thing. Back to the point. What was nice was that all of them—the Bush family, the Carters and Clintons—seemed like the old days. "The way we were." They were full of endurance, stamina, effort. Also flaws, frailty, mess. But they weren't . . . creepy.

 Anyway, onward to Obama fatigue, and the Democratic Party wrestling with what comes next. It's not only the Republicans in a deep pit. 
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3)'Democracy May Have Had Its Day' Donald Kagan, Yale's great classicist gives his final lecture, fighting as ever for Western civilization.
By MATTHEW KAMINSKI

 Donald Kagan is engaging in one last argument. For his "farewell lecture" here at Yale on Thursday afternoon, the 80-year-old scholar of ancient Greece—whose four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War inspired comparisons to Edward Gibbon's Roman history—uncorked a biting critique of American higher education.

 Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values."

He counseled schools to adopt "a common core of studies" in the history, literature and philosophy "of our culture." By "our" he means Western. This might once have been called incitement. In 1990, as dean of Yale College, Mr. Kagan argued for the centrality of the study of Western civilization in an "infamous" (his phrase) address to incoming freshmen. A storm followed. He was called a racist—or as the campus daily more politely editorialized, a peddler of "European cultural arrogance."

 Not so now. Mr. Kagan received a long standing ovation from students and alumni in the packed auditorium. Heading into retirement, he has been feted as a beloved and popular teacher and Yale icon. The PC wars of the 1990s feel dated. Maybe, as one undergrad told me after the lecture, "the pendulum has started to swing back" toward traditional values in education. Mr. Kagan offers another explanation. "You can't have a fight," he says one recent day at his office, "because you don't have two sides. The other side won." He means across academia, but that is also true in his case.

Mr. Kagan resigned the deanship in April 1992, lobbing a parting bomb at the faculty that bucked his administration. His plans to create a special Western Civilization course at Yale—funded with a $20 million gift from philanthropist and Yale alum Lee Bass, who was inspired by the 1990 lecture—blew up three years later amid a political backlash. "I still cry when I think about it," says Mr. Kagan. As he looks at his Yale colleagues today, he says, "you can't find members of the faculty who have different opinions." I point at him. "Not anymore!" he says and laughs. The allure of "freedom" and "irresponsibility" were too strong to resist, he says. His sharp tongue and easy sense of humor hearken to the Brooklyn of his youth.

 Born in 1932 in a Lithuanian shtetl, Mr. Kagan was raised in Brownsville, which was then a working-class Jewish neighborhood. He rooted for the Yankees on Brooklyn Dodgers turf—"everything you need to know about him," as his son Robert, the neoconservative writer, once said. He was a high school fullback. Mr. Kagan is personally warm, always tough and occasionally smart alecky. Imagine Robert DeNiro as an eminent conservative scholar of ancient Athens. He has no patience for "nonsense" or "wrong ideas." He's a guy who'll tell you what's what and that's that.

Generations of faculty and students came away bruised from Kagan encounters. The tussles over course offerings and campus speech of course speak to something larger. Democracy, wrote Mr. Kagan in "Pericles of Athens" (1991), is "one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience." It relies on "free, autonomous and self-reliant" citizens and "extraordinary leadership" to flourish, even survive. These kinds of citizens aren't born—they need to be educated. "The essence of liberty, which is at the root of a liberal education, is that meaningful freedom means that you have choices to make," Mr. Kagan says. "At the university, there must be intellectual variety.

If you don't have [that], it's not only that you are deprived of knowing some of the things you might know. It's that you are deprived of testing the things that you do know or do think you know or believe in, so that your knowledge is superficial."

 As dean, Mr. Kagan championed hard sciences, rigorous hiring standards for faculty, and the protection of free speech. Those who see liberal education in crisis return to those ideas. "Crisis suggests it might recover," Mr. Kagan shoots back. "Maybe it's had its day. Democracy may have had its day. Concerns about the decline of liberty in our whole polity is what threatens all of the aspects of it, including democracy."

 Taking a grim view of the Periclean era in Athens, Plato and Aristotle believed that democracy inevitably led to tyranny. The Founding Fathers took on their criticism and strove to balance liberty with equality under the law. Mr. Kagan, who grew up a Truman Democrat, says that when he was young the U.S. needed to redress an imbalance by emphasizing equality. The elite universities after the war opened to minorities and women, not to mention Brooklyn College grads like himself—then "it was all about merit," he says.

 The 1960s brought a shift and marked his own political awakening. Teaching at Cornell, Mr. Kagan watched armed black students occupy a university building in 1969. The administration caved to their demands without asking them to give up their rifles and bandoliers. He joined Allan Bloom and other colleagues in protest. In the fall of that year, he moved to Yale. Bloom ended up at the University of Chicago and in 1987 published "The Closing of the American Mind," his best-selling attack on the shortcomings of higher education. In the decades since, faculties have gained "extraordinary authority" over universities, Mr. Kagan says. The changes in the universities were mirrored in the society at large. "The tendency in this century and in the previous century at least has been toward equality of result and every other kind of equality that could be claimed without much regard for liberty," he says. "Right now the menace is certainly to liberty." Over lunch at the private Mory's club last week, we marvel over the first-ever NCAA championship for Yale's hockey team, the oldest program in the country. "Unbelievable!" says Mr. Kagan with the gleam of a sports obsessive.

In 1987, he stepped in for a year to direct Yale's athletic department—probably the only classics professor ever to hold the post anywhere. His first initiative was to call to disband the NCAA or take Yale out of it. "I wish I had," he says. "It's so disgusting, it's so hypocritical, it's so wicked. The NCAA is just a trade organization meant to increase profits." Whether athletics, democracy or war are the topics of discussion, Mr. Kagan can offer examples from the ancients. His lifelong passion is Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War—the epic clash between those former allies, militaristic Sparta and democratic Athens, that closed out the fifth century B.C. As Thucydides wrote, people go to war out of "honor, fear and interest." War, he also said, "is a violent teacher." Another enduring lesson from him, says Mr. Kagan, is "that you can expect people, whatever they may be, to seek to maximize their power"—then a slight pause—"unless they're Europeans and have checked their brains at the door, so mortified are they, understandably, by what happened to them in the 20th century. They can't be taken seriously." These days the burden of seriousness among free states falls on America, a fickle and unusual power. The Romans had no qualms about quashing their enemies, big or small. While the U.S. won two global conflicts and imposed and protected the current global order, the recent record shows failed or inconclusive engagements in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Some would argue that free societies are too soft to fight brutal wars too long. Mr. Kagan offers culture and political leadership as an explanation. "We're a certain kind of culture which makes it hard for us to behave rationally when the rational thing is to be tough," he says. "We can do it when we're scared to death and there seem to be no alternatives.

When it's time to nail down something, we very often sneak away." The protection and distance offered by two oceans gives America the idea—or delusion—of being able to stay out of the world's problems. Mr. Kagan also wonders about possible "geocultural" shifts at play. A hundred years ago, most people worked the land for themselves. Today they work for a paycheck, usually in an office. "Fundamentally we are dependent on people who pay our salaries," says Mr. Kagan. "In the liberal era, in our lifetime, we have come more to expect it is the job of the government to provide for the needs that we can't provide.

Everything is negotiable. Everything is subject to talk." Maybe that has weakened the American will. Also don't forget, says Mr. Kagan, "unsubtle Christianity" and its strong strain of pacifism. "Who else has a religion filled with the notion 'turn the other cheek'?" he asks. "Who ever heard of such a thing?! If you're gonna turn the other cheek, go home. Give up the ball." In 2000, Mr. Kagan and his younger son, Frederick, a military historian and analyst, published "While America Sleeps." The book argued for the reversal of the Clinton Cold War peace dividend to meet unforeseen but inevitable threats to come. The timing was uncanny. A year later, 9/11 forced the Pentagon to rearm. With the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the U.S. is slashing defense again. "We do it every time," Mr. Kagan says. "Failing to understand the most elementary childish fact, which is: If you don't want trouble with somebody else, be sure he has something to be afraid of." Brownsville, not Thucydides, taught him that. "Any kid who grows up in a relatively tough neighborhood gets quick early lessons in what the realities are," he says.

His 1995 book, "On the Origins of War," made a moral and strategic case to exert as much effort and money to safeguard peace as to win a war. Thucydides identified man's potential for folly and greatness. Mr. Kagan these days tends toward the darker view. He sees threats coming from Iran and in Asia, yet no leadership serious about taking them up. The public is too ignorant or irresponsible to care. "When you allow yourself to think of it, you don't know whether you are going to laugh or cry," he says.

 The Kagan thesis is bleak but not fatalistic. The fight to shape free citizens in schools, through the media and in the public square goes on. "There is no hope for anything if you don't have a population that buys into" a strong and free society, he says. "That can only be taught. It doesn't come in nature."

 3a List of Islamic Terror Attacks For the Past 30 Days

Date Country City Killed Injured Description

2013.04.19 USA Boston, MA 1 1 Jihadists gun down a university police officer sitting in his car.

2013.04.19 Iraq Khales 9 29 Mujahideen attacks on rival mosques leave nine dead.

2013.04.18 Iraq Baghdad 32 65 Children are among nearly three dozen people at a coffee shop obliterated by a Shahid suicide bomber.

2013.04.18 Kenya Garissa 8 5 al-Shabaab gunmen burst into a hotel and mow down eight patrons.

2013.04.18 Pakistan Hyderabad 1 0 A secular politician is assassinated by religious radicals.

2013.04.17 India Bangalore 0 16 The Indian Mujahideen detonate a bomb outside a Hindu party office.

2013.04.17 Afghanistan Shindad 7 4 Seven women and children are dismantled by a Mujahid shrapnel bomb.

 2013.04.16 Afghanistan Mali Zai 8 0 Religion of Peace bombers take down eight members of the same family.

2013.04.16 Pakistan Peshawar 16 35 Two children are among sixteen innocents torn to shreds by a Holy Warrior suicide bomber.

2013.04.15 Afghanistan Mali Zai 7 4 Seven civilians are pulled into pieces by Taliban bombers.

2013.04.15 USA Boston, MA 3 170 Foreign-born Muslims describing themselves as 'very religious' detonate two bombs packed with ball bearings at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and causing several more to lose limbs.

2013.04.15 Iraq Fallujah 2 14 A Fedayeen suicide bomber takes out two innocents along a city street.

2013.04.15 Iraq Kirkuk 9 79 Six car bombs leave at least nine Iraqis dead.

2013.04.15 Iraq Habibiya 10 12 At least ten Iraqis at an auto mall are taken out by Mujahid car bombers.

2013.04.15 Iraq Kamaliya 4 13 An al-Qaeda bombing near an elementary school leaves four dead.

2013.04.14 Pakistan Manglawar 1 0 Taliban bombers take out a peace committee member.

2013.04.14 Jordan Amman 1 0 A pregnant woman's throat is slit in an honor killing, after which her body is burned.

2013.04.14 Somalia Mogadishu 5 0 Aid workers are among those killed by Islamists bombers.

2013.04.14 Afghanistan Darzab 2 6 Two Afghan policemen are shot to death by Taliban fundamentalists.

2013.04.14 Somalia Mogadishu 29 58 Twenty-nine civilians are sent to Allah when six suicide bombers storm a courthouse.

2013.04.14 Iraq Shura 6 14 Five policemen are killed when Islamic militants booby-trap the body of another murdered policeman.

2013.04.14 Iraq Diyala 4 0 A moderate and three family members are blown to bits by radical Sunnis.

2013.04.14 Iraq Baji 1 0 A secular politician is assassinated by suspected Islamists.

2013.04.14 Pakistan Gulshan-i-Iqbal 2 0 Sectarian Jihadis murder a father and son at a mobile phone shop.

 2013.04.13 Pakistan Matani 9 19 Women are among nine killed when Mujahideen bomb a passenger bus.

2013.04.13 Nigeria Monguno 3 0 Sharia advocates ambush students from a local university, tie them up and slit their throats.

2013.04.13 Yemen Hadramout 1 0 Two al-Qaeda gunmen assassinate a government official.

2013.04.13 Pakistan Karachi 1 0 A secular political activist is found tortured to death following Taliban threats.

2013.04.12 Iraq Kanaan 12 30 Mujahideen detonate two bombs at a Sunni mosque, leaving a dozen worshippers dead.

2013.04.12 Thailand Pattani 1 0 Muslim militants machine-gun a 46-year man on his way home.

2013.04.12 Afghanistan Shiberghan 1 0 A man beheads his wife over 'moral crime'.

2013.04.12 Iraq Mosul 3 0 Three security personnel are kidnapped and executed by al-Qaeda.

2013.04.12 Dagestan Buinaksk 1 3 One person is killed when Islamists set off a bomb near a school.

2013.04.12 Pakistan Karachi 1 0 A Shia religious scholar is murdered by Sunni rivals from the Ahl-e-Sunnat wal Jamaat terror group.

2013.04.12 Afghanistan Nari 13 0 More than 100 Sunni fundamentalists pump rockets and grenades into a remote outpost, killing thirteen Afghan defenders.

2013.04.12 Mali Kidal 3 0 At least three people are killed by a suicide bomber.

2013.04.12 Pakistan Mach 1 0 Sipah-e-Sahaba gunmen take out a Shia civilian.

2013.04.11 Afghanistan Marjah 1 2 One civilian is killed by Sunni bombers.

2013.04.11 Afghanistan Chora 3 0 Taliban militants murder three local cops.

 2013.04.11 Nigeria Babangida 4 2 Islamic extremists enter a police station and gun down four officers in cold blood.

2013.04.11 Bangladesh Kazirhat 3 100 Jamaat-e-Islami radicals bludgeon three people with sticks and knives.

2013.04.11 Egypt Khusus 1 0 A 26-year-old Christian is doused with gasoline and set ablaze.

 2013.04.11 Pakistan Sindh 1 0 The Tehreek-e-Taliban assassinate a secular politician.

2013.04.11 Syria Homs 20 0 Six children, including a baby, are among twenty people executed by Hezbollah.

2013.04.11 Iraq Fallujah 2 0 Mujahid snipers pick off two civilians, including a young boy.

2013.04.10 Nigeria Bama 4 0 Two teachers and the wife and 12-year-old child one are slaughtered and burned by Sharia advocates.

2013.04.10 Pakistan Mardan 1 1 A guard for a polio vaccination team is shot to death on the job by fundamentalists.

2013.04.10 Thailand Pattani 2 6 Muslim 'insurgents' bomb a community center, killing two people.

2013.04.10 Nigeria Dikwa 4 0 Islamists brutally murder three education officials and their driver, including one in charge of a program to feed poor students.

2013.04.10 India Srinigar 0 9 Two children and five women are among nine Christians attacked in their home by a mob whipped into a frenzy by an imam.

2013.04.10 Pakistan Shahkas 1 0 Terrorists gun down a 28-year-old man at a cricket match.

2013.04.09 Nigeria Gwoza 3 0 Islamists shoot three people in the head while they are playing cards, including a pastor's son.

2013.04.09 Afghanistan Paron 2 0 A Taliban attack leaves two local cops dead.

2013.04.09 Philippines Ungkaya Pukan 1 0 A local soldier is murdered by Abu Sayyaf.

2013.04.09 Afghanistan Char Borjak 4 2 Sunni extremists kill four local cops with a roadside bomb.

2013.04.09 Pakistan Hayatabad 0 23 Two dozen people are injured when Islamic militants send mortars into a residential neighborhood.

2013.04.09 Afghanistan Marjah 5 4 A bomb planted by Sunni extremists leaves five dead civilians along a city street.

2013.04.09 India Pulwama 1 0 Islamic militants gun down a 45-year-old man in his own home.

2013.04.08 Somalia Hiran 1 0 A 22-year-old woman is executed by Islamic militia.

2013.04.08 Syria Damascus 15 53 A Fedayeen suicide car bomb rips through a crowded street, leaving at least fifteen dead.

2013.04.08 Iraq Abu Ghraib 4 4 Two bombings kill four local cops.

2013.04.08 Afghanistan Wardak 9 22 Religion of Peace hardliners detonate a bomb under a bus, killing nine passengers.

2013.04.08 Bangladesh Chittagong 0 20 Twenty people are hurt when Hifazat-e-Islam riot over a decision not to impose a blasphemy law.

2013.04.08 Nigeria Borno 1 0 A guard at a market is killed during a Boko Haram attack.

2013.04.07 Pakistan Taunsa 1 0 A 15-year-old boy is gunned down in a mosque by Sipah-e-Sahaba because he is Shia.

2013.04.07 Pakistan Jaffar Tayyar 1 0 Lashkar-e-Jhagvi gunmen murder a Shiite near a cricket field.

2013.04.07 Thailand Narathiwat 2 0 Two local soldiers are knocked off their motorcycle by Muslim militants, who proceed to execute them at point-blank range.

2013.04.07 Pakistan Mathra 1 0 The body of a man kidnapped and tortured to death by the Taliban is found along a roadside.

2013.04.07 Egypt Cairo 2 89 Muslim radicals attack a group of mourners leaving a church, killing one on the spot and another in subsequent clashes.

2013.04.07 Pakistan Peshawar 1 1 Sunnis fire on a Shia mosque, killing the custodian.

2013.04.07 Iraq Mosul 4 7 al-Qaeda bombers take out four Iraqis.

2013.04.07 Thailand Yala 1 0 Muslim militants behead a plantation worker.

2013.04.06 Afghanistan Qalat 6 3 American civilians and a doctor are among six killed by a Shahid suicide bomber as they are delivering books to a school.

2013.04.06 Iraq Samarrah 3 5 A teenage boy is among the casualties of a Mujahideen bombing.

2013.04.06 Pakistan Karachi 1 0 A Shia schoolteacher loses his life to sectarian Jihadis.

2013.04.06 Pakistan Orangi 1 0 Militants associated with a Sunni seminary gun down a Shiite.

2013.04.06 Nigeria Midlu 11 5 Muslim radicals shoot, hack and slit the throats of eleven people.

2013.04.06 Egypt Khusus 7 17 Angry Muslims torch a church and kill seven Christians over alleged desecration.

2013.04.06 Iraq Baqubah 22 60 A Fedayeen suicide bomber sends two dozen souls to Allah.

2013.04.06 Afghanistan Asadabad 2 0 Two children are obliterated by a Taliban rocket.

2013.04.05 Thailand Yala 2 1 Muslim bombers kill two people and put another into a coma.

2013.04.05 Pakistan Hayatabad 1 5 A young boy is killed when Islamic terrorists shell a town.

2013.04.05 Indonesia Medan 8 6 Eight Buddhists are beaten to death by Muslims in an attack at a detention center.

2013.04.05 Afghanistan Alingar 1 3 Terrorists kill a cop with a bomb attached to a donkey.

2013.04.05 Iraq Hillah 5 15 Mujahideen murder five people in a series of attacks, including a bombing at vegetable market.

2013.04.05 Bangladesh Dhaka 1 0 Hifazat-e-Islam murder a fruit vendor.

2013.04.05 Pakistan Syedabad 1 0 A Shia schoolteacher is murdered in a suspected sectarian attack.

2013.04.04 Kenya Garissa 3 24 al-Shabaab Islamists toss a hand grenade into a packed restaurant, killing three patrons.

2013.04.04 Afghanistan Batikot 3 2 Three schoolchildren are dismantled by a Taliban roadside bomb.

2013.04.04 Somalia Marka 1 0 An elderly man is gunned down by suspected al-Shabaab.

2013.04.04 Pakistan Manga Mandi 1 0 A 20-year-old Christian is shot in the head by Muslims calling their religion 'supreme'.

2013.04.03 Iraq Baghdad 3 0 al-Qaeda gunmen enter a home and shoot a woman and her two sons to death.

2013.04.03 Tanzania Tunduma 2 3 Two Christians are murdered by Muslim extremists for selling non-halal meat.

2013.04.03 Pakistan Karachi 4 5 Four security personnel die when Islamic militants throw a grenade at their vehicle.

2013.04.03 Afghanistan Farah 53 91 Over fifty people are slaughtered when nine religious radicals storm a court and self-detonate.

2013.04.03 Pakistan Gujranwala 0 18 Eighteen Christians are injured by a Muslim mob whipped into a frenzy by a cleric.

2013.04.03 Thailand Yala 1 19 Muslim bombers take out a bus passenger.

2013.04.02 Iraq Baghdad 2 5
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If Obama Has Your Back You are In Danger!

What follows was sent to me by a friend, his own commentary ( in blue) precedes and introduces the article:

" I truly believe  today’s World Muslim Community is more dangerous to Jews and Christians than the Nazis in WWII.

The number of Muslims  who write, speak and plan to destroy Israel and the Jewish People is greater by many multiples than the Nazis.

The use of the Internet has allowed Muslims and many others to preach hatred and death of Jews without abatement. Where is the NY Times and other world publications when it comes to exposing this danger to the Jewish People.

Yes, I know many of you will accuse me of ignoring those peace loving , moderate Muslims ho represent the majority of Muslims  However, I won’t excuse those moderates for their lack of proper behavior. You see, saying nothing or trying to justify extreme behavior by terrorists or those who speak of “Death to the Infidels” under the guise of “They really don’t mean what they say” or “You are taking their statements out of context”  is the same as condoning their actions and statements.

Europe is under siege from the Right and Left on many issues. However, both sides seem to agree on their respective hatred for the Jewish People and the Jewish State. This unholy alliance poses the greatest danger to the Jewish World since the Dark era of the Nazis.

So now we face the confluence of Hateful Muslims ,Right Wing anti- Semites and Leftists who view Israel as a killer State all mixed into a boiling pot of one common diatribe against Jews, Israel and Capitalism/The West.

Nonie Darwish’s article below provides you with an insight into the Muslims cause and effect on the Hatred of Jews, the rest is up to you! E.K."

 ARTICLE FOLLOWS:

Why Muslims Must Hate Jews

By Nonie Darwish

Recently, a Pakistani religious leader, Pirzada Muhammad Raza Saqib Mustafai, said: "When the Jews are wiped out ... the sun of peace [will] begin to rise on the entire world." The same preaching is routinely done not only by clerics, but by politicians -- in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. This is not just Ahmedinijad; it is at the heart of Islamic theology that world peace will be established only when all the Jews are wiped from the earth. But few people in Western media are alarmed by this kind of rhetoric or care to expose this dreadful dark side of Islam's obsession with Jew-hatred.

I do not believe that one has to be an authority on human behavior or group thinking to find out the obvious pathology in Islamic Jew-hatred. It is time for all of us to uncover and expose this atrocity against the Jewish people. We owe that to humanity and the truth.

No true Muslim can see that such hatred is unbecoming and unholy for a world religion to focus on and that the credibility of Islam is tarnished by such hatred. No Muslim is allowed to go far enough to self-analyze or ask why such hatred. Muslims defend Jew-hatred by claiming that Jews betrayed Muhammad and thus deserve of this kind of treatment. Even when I was a Muslim, I believed that the one-sided story against Jews by Islam was enough to justify all the killing, terror, lies, and propaganda by Islamic leaders against Jews. To the average Muslim, routinely cursing Jews in mosques feels normal and even holy!

After a lot of thinking, analysis, research, and writing, I discovered that Jew -hatred in Islam is an essential foundation to the Islamic belief system that Muslims cannot seem to be able to rid themselves of. Jew-hatred masks an existential problem in Islam. Islam is terrified of the Jews, and the number-one enemy of Islam is the truth, which must be constantly covered at any cost. It does not matter how many Muslim men, women, and children die in the process of saving Islam's reputation. The number-one duty of Muslims is to protect the reputation of Islam and Mohammad. But why would a religion burden its followers like that? This is why:

When Mohammed embarked on his mission to spread Islam, his objective was to create a uniquely Arabian religion, one created by an Arab prophet, which reflected the Arabian values and culture. Yet to obtain legitimacy, he had to link it to the two previous Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity. He expected the Jewish tribes who lived in Arabia to declare him their Messiah and thereby bring him more legitimacy with Arabs, especially with his own tribe in Mecca, the Quraish. Because his own tribe had rejected and ridiculed him, Mohammed needed the approval of the Jews, whom he called the people of the book. But the conversion of Jews to Islam was part of the scenario that Mohammed had to accomplish in order to prove to Meccans that they had made a mistake by rejecting him.

That was one of the reasons Mohammed chose to migrate to Medina, a town that had predominantly been settled by Jewish tribes and a few impoverished Arabs who lived around the Jews. The Jews allowed Mohammed to move in. At the beginning, the Koran of Mecca was full of appeals to the Jews, who were then described as "guidance and light" (5:44) and a "righteous" people (6:153-154), who "excelled the nations" (45:16). But when the Jews rejected the appeasement and refused to convert to Islam, Mohammed simply and completely flipped. The Quran changed from love to threats and then pure hatred, cursing, and commandments to kill Jews. Rejection by the Jews became an intolerable obsession with Mohammed.

Not only did the Jews reject him, but their prosperity made Mohammed extremely envious. The Jewish Arabian tribes earned their living from legitimate and successful business, but Mohammed earned his living and wealth through warfare -- by attacking Arab tribes, some of whom were from his own tribe -- and trade caravans, seizing their wealth and property. That did not look good for a man who claimed to be a prophet of God. The mere existence of the Jews made Mohammed look bad, which led Mohammed to unspeakable slaughter, beheading of 600 to 900 Jewish men of one tribe, and taking their women and children as slaves. Mohammed had the first pick of the prettiest woman as his sex slave. All of this senseless slaughter of the Jews was elaborately documented in Islamic books on the life of Mohammed -- not as something to be ashamed of, but as justified behavior against evil people.

One does not have to be psychiatrist to see the obvious: that Mohammad was a tormented man after the massacre he orchestrated and forced his fighters to undertake to empower and to enrich himself and his religion. To reduce his torment, he needed everyone around him, as well as future generations, to participate in the genocide against the Jews, the only people whom he could not control. An enormous number of verses in the Koran encouraged Mohammed's fighters to fight, kill, and curse Muslim fighters who wanted to escape fighting and killing Jews. The Quran is full of promises of all kinds of pleasure in heaven to those who followed Mohammed's killing spree and curses and condemnation to those who chose to escape from fighting. Muslims were encouraged to feel no hesitation or guilt for the genocide because it was not they who did it, but rather "Allah's hand."

Mohammed never got over his anger, humiliation, and rejection by "the people of the book" and went to his grave tormented and obsessed that some Jews were still alive. On his deathbed, Mohammed entrusted Muslims to kill Jews wherever they found them, which made this a "holy commandment" that no Muslim can reject. Muslims who wrote sharia understood how Mohammed was extremely sensitive to criticism, and that is why criticizing Mohammed became the highest crime in Islam that will never be forgiven even if the offender repents. Mohammed's message on his deathbed was not for his followers to strive for holiness, peace, goodness, and to treat their neighbors as themselves, but rather a commandment for Muslims to continue the killing and the genocide against the Jews.Killing thus became a holy act of obedience to Mohammed and Allah himself.

Mohammed portrayed himself as a victim of Jews, and Muslims must avenge him until judgment day. With all Arab power, money, and influence around the world today, they still thrive at portraying themselves as victims. Sharia also codified into law the duty of every Muslim to defend Mohammed's honor and Islam with his own blood, and allowed the violation of many commandments if it is for the benefit of defending Islam and Mohammed. Thus, Muslims are carrying a huge burden, a holy burden, to defend Mohammed with their blood, and in doing so they are allowed to kill, lie, cheat, slander, and mislead.

Mohammed must have felt deep and extreme shame after what he had done to the Jews, and thus a very good reason had to be found to explain away his genocide. By commanding Muslims to continue the genocide for him, even after his death, Mohammad expanded the shame to cover all Muslims and Islam itself. All Muslims were commanded to follow Mohammed's example and chase the Jews wherever they went. One hundred years after Mohammed's death, Arabs occupied Jerusalem and built Al Aqsa mosque right on top of the Jewish Temple ruins, the holiest spot of the Jews. Muslims thought they had erased all memory of Jewish existence.

Mohammed's genocide of the Jews of Arabia became an unholy dark mark of shame in Islamic history, and that shame, envy, and anger continues to get the best of Muslims today. In the eyes of Mohammed and Muslims, the mere existence of the Jewish people, let alone an entire Jewish state, delegitimizes Islam and makes Mohammed look more like a mass murderer than like a prophet. For Muslims to make peace with Jews and acknowledge that Jews are humans who deserve the same rights as everyone else would have a devastating effect on how Muslims view their religion, their history, and the actions of their prophet.

Islam has a major existential problem. By no will of their own, the Jews found themselves in the middle of this Islamic dilemma. Islam must justify the genocide that Mohammad waged against the Jews. Mohammad and Muslims had two choices: either the Jews are evil sub-humans, apes, pigs, and enemies of Allah, a common description of Jews still heard regularly in Middle Eastern mosques today, or Mohammad was a genocidal warlord not fit to be a prophet of God -- a choice that would mean the end of Islam.

Then and now, Mohammad and Muslims clearly chose the first worldview and decreed that any hint of the second must be severely punished. Jews must remain eternally evil enemies of Islam if Islam is to remain legitimate. There is no third solution to save the core of Islam from collapsing; either Mohammed was evil, or the Jews were evil. Any attempt to forgive, humanize, or live peacefully with Jews is considered treason against Islam. How can Muslims forgive the Jews and then go back to their mosques, only to read their prophet's words, telling them they must kill Jews wherever they find them? It does not add up, if someone wants to remain Muslim.

That is why the number-one enemy of Islam is, and must remain, the truth. If the truth exposes Islam's unjustified Jew-hatred, Muslims will be left with an empty shell of a religion, a religion whose prophet was a murderer, a thief, and a warlord. Without Jew-hatred, Islam would self-destruct.

Nonie Darwish author is the author of The Devil We Don't Know.

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Sowell - part two on his thoughts regarding immigration and art of the impossible  (See 1 and 1a  below.)
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I have repeatedly written my friend Khaled Toameh is not only a fine journalist but also one of the most courageous.  Again to prove it I am posting an article he wrote taking after his own .  Khaled writes for The Jerusalem Post and I met him in Israel over five years ago. (See 2 below)
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Bret Stephens says what anyone with clear vision has known for months . You never want Obama to have your back because it means nothing but posturing and empty words.

Israel and Netanyahu are fools to believe Obama.  (See 3 below.)
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Off to Birimingham, tomorrow.
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Dick

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1)Immigration Gambles: Part II

Thomas Sowell

Whose interests are immigration laws supposed to serve -- and whose interests do current immigration reform proposals actually serve?

In order to have any immigration policy serve any purpose, the border must first be secured. Otherwise American immigration policy exists only on paper, and is mocked by what happens on the ground, as masses of people cross the border illegally, in disregard of whatever policies are embodied in our laws.

Moreover, all the people who cross the border from Mexico are not Mexican. They can easily include Middle East terrorists. The fact that this obvious threat has been blithely ignored for years, in order to get political leverage for "comprehensive" immigration reform, suggests that importing more potential voters for the Democrats has a higher priority in some quarters than safeguarding the country.

"Comprehensive" immigration reform -- as distinguished from securing the border before doing anything else -- serves the interests of politicians of both parties.

A "comprehensive" immigration bill means that they can vote for something that mollifies those Americans who are concerned about the uncontrolled influx of foreigners, while winning support from those who want more foreigners admitted and made citizens. Starting the amnesty track immediately, while promising border security in the future, means that an irreversible benefit is conferred up front, while only time will tell whether the promise of border security will be kept -- as it has not been thus far.

Ask yourself why people who have been living illegally in this country for years cannot wait a couple of more years until the border is secured before the question of their legal status can be studied and debated in Congress and among the public at large.

Ask yourself why the American people must continue to be played for suckers by such games as letting foreign pregnant women drop in to have their babies here, who automatically become American citizens, opening the door for other members of their families to come in later. These are called "anchor babies."

Crossing the border from Mexico is by no means the only way such women unilaterally confer American citizenship on their children. There are profitable organized programs to bring in affluent pregnant women from overseas to live in little communities set up for them before and after the birth of their anchor babies. The principle that anyone born on American soil was automatically an American citizen made sense in centuries past, when getting here across an ocean in ships was very different from booking a round trip flight from Shanghai or Manila, much less walking across the border from Tijuana.

If nothing else, putting a legal end to the "anchor baby" racket might suggest to the American public that they were regarded in Congress as something more than expendable suckers who can be mollified with rhetoric.

Waiting until the border has already been secured before an immigration policy is decided upon would also allow time to discuss the pros and cons of various ways of enforcing whatever that policy might turn out to be. But many politicians much prefer to rush complex legislation through Congress before the public knows what is in it or what is at stake. "We the people" are to be by-passed.

Time to deliberate would also be time to raise questions as to why local government officials in "sanctuary" cities who openly thwart or defy federal immigration laws should be allowed to get away with such illegal acts, while private employers are forced to become enforcers of such laws, under heavy penalties for not investigating the legal status of those they hire.

Government officials at all levels take an oath to uphold the laws, but somebody who owns a restaurant or hardware store has not applied for the job of border enforcement -- and the 13th Amendment forbids involuntary servitude. Or are we already too far along on the road to serfdom for that to matter any more?

"Comprehensive" immigration reform serves the interests of politicians who like to be on both sides of a controversial issue, and it serves the interests of those foreigners who want to game the system in the United States, at the expense of the American people. But it does not serve the interests of American society.

1a)The Art of the Impossible

By Thomas Sowell |

Someone called politics "the art of the possible." But, in the era of the modern welfare state, politics is largely the art of the impossible.

Those people morbid enough to keep track of politicians' promises may remember how Barack Obama said that ObamaCare would lower medical costs -- and lots of people bought it.

But if you stop and think, however old-fashioned that may seem these days, do you seriously believe that millions more people can be given medical care and vast new bureaucracies created to administer payment for it, with no additional costs?

Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free red tape. Bureaucrats have to eat, just like everyone else, and they need a place to live and some other amenities. How do you suppose the price of medical care can go down when the costs of new government bureaucracies are added to the costs of the medical treatment itself?

By the way, where are the extra doctors going to come from, to treat the millions of additional patients? Training more people to become doctors is not free. Politicians may ignore costs but ignoring those costs will not make them go away.

With bureaucratically controlled medical care, you are going to need more doctors, just to treat a given number of patients, because time that is spent filling out government forms is time that is not spent treating patients. And doctors have the same 24 hours in the day as everybody else.

When you add more patients to more paperwork per patient, you are talking about still more costs. How can that lower medical costs? But although that may be impossible, politics is the art of the impossible. All it takes is rhetoric and a public that does not think beyond the rhetoric they hear.

You can just call "medical care for all" a "right" and you are home free with a major part of the public. Those who are more skeptical can be dismissed as people who just are not as compassionate. That puts you on the side of the angels against the forces of evil -- and that is a proven winning strategy in politics.

Back during World War II, military construction battalions had the motto, "The difficult done immediately; the impossible takes a little longer." Today, the impossible may not even take longer. Indeed, the impossible has become routine in political rhetoric.

Whether in medical issues or other issues, politicians don't even have to prove that what they advocate is possible, much less probable. For example, those who advocate tighter gun control laws are almost never asked for evidence that such laws have in fact reduced gun violence. And almost never do they even attempt to present such evidence.

But the only way that it is possible that such laws will save lives is if they do in fact reduce killings with guns. But who cares what is possible these days? If the intention is good and the means sound plausible, who wants to get bogged down in specifics? Certainly not politicians or most of the media. All you really need is rhetoric that puts you on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.

On the international stage, the ever-popular policy of "disarmament" is in essence domestic gun control writ large. Nuclear disarmament is especially popular. No doubt many people wish that scientists had never discovered how to make such devastating weapons.

But, once the principles on which nuclear bombs operate have been discovered, it is impossible to undiscover them.

Even if you destroyed every nuclear bomb in the world, the knowledge of how to make them cannot be destroyed. If you killed every scientist who has this knowledge, such a bloodbath would be futile, because new scientists can discover what the old scientists discovered.

With international disarmament agreements, as with domestic gun control, nothing is easier than disarming peaceful people -- thereby leaving them more vulnerable to people who are not peaceful, who can simply ignore the restrictions that others obey.

But if verifiable, lasting and universal nuclear disarmament is impossible, who cares, so long as it sounds good? Politics is the art of the impossible.

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2)Palestinian Journalists Declare War On Israeli Colleagues

by Khaled Abu Toameh
April 26, 2013

How can anyone talk about resuming the peace process when Palestinians are being told by their leaders, on a daily basis, how bad and evil Israel is? If Israel is so bad and evil, then how can any leader go to his people and say he is negotiating with them?

Palestinian journalists have declared an intifada against their Israeli colleagues.

In recent weeks, Israeli journalists who cover Palestinian affairs have been facing increased threats from Palestinian reporters.

On a number of occasions, the threats included acts of violence against the Israeli journalists, particularly in Ramallah.

Human rights organizations and groups claiming to defend freedom of media have failed to condemn the campaign of intimidation waged by Palestinian journalists against their Israeli fellow-journaists.

It is one thing when governments and dictators go after journalists, but a completely different thing when journalists start targeting their counterparts.

An Israeli journalist had his microphone damaged during an assault, while another was thrown out of a press conference. Behind the two incidents were Palestinian journalists, angered by the presence of Israelis in Ramallah and other Palestinian cities.

The threats and harassment came as more than 200 Palestinian journalists signed a petition, for the first time ever, calling on the Palestinian Authority to ban Israeli correspondents from operating in its territories "without permission."

The Palestinian Authority, for its part, has complied, issuing instructions requiring Israeli journalists to obtain permission from its Ministry of Information before entering Palestinian cities.

Palestinian Authority officials and journalists later explained that the ban does not apply to some journalists working for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz and who report on "Palestinian suffering."

The Palestinian journalists campaigning against their Israeli colleagues have justified their action by saying that Israeli authorities do not allow them to work freely inside Israel. They also accuse the Israeli authorities of refusing to issue them with [Israeli] government press cards.

If anything, these claims represent a hypocritical approach.

In recent years, Palestinian journalists have strongly opposed to "normalization" with Israelis, including meetings with Israeli colleagues. Some Palestinian journalists who violated the ban and met with Israeli counterparts were denounced as traitors and expelled from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.

So while Palestinian journalists are opposed to "normalization" with Israel, they are at the same time demanding that Israeli authorities grant them permission to work inside Israel.

Even more, the Palestinian journalists are demanding that Israel provide them with press cards issued by none other than the Israeli government.

Won't the Palestinian journalists be violating their own rules and ideology once they accept press cards issued by the Israeli government? And if they enter Israel and meet with Israelis, won't they also be acting against their own boycott campaign?

What is disturbing is that foreign journalists based in Israel have not come out against the campaign of intimidation against their Israeli colleagues. Could it be because these foreign journalists have also been facing threats and want to stay on good terms with Palestinian reporters, and will also agree to report only on "Palestinian suffering"?

Gone are the days when Israeli and

Palestinian journalists used to work together and exchange information on a daily basis, in the days before the peace process started.

Today, there is a new generation of Palestinian journalists who have evidently been radicalized to a point where any meeting with an Israeli is being viewed as a "crime." This is the result of anti-Israel incitement by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, especially over the past two decades.

Aware of the growing radicalism of Palestinian journalists, the Palestinian Authority, together with the American security detail, banned a large number of Palestinian journalists from covering the visit of US President Barack Obama to Ramallah last month.

The biggest fear was that a Palestinian journalist would either throw a shoe at Obama or engage in a rhetorical attack against him and US policies.

If Palestinian journalists have been so radicalized that some are even willing to resort to threats and violence against colleagues, what must one say about the rest of the Palestinians who, for the past two decades, have also been exposed to messages of hate by their leaders?

How can anyone talk about resuming the peace process when Palestinians are being told by their leaders, on a daily basis, how bad and evil Israel is? If Israel is so bad and evil, then how can any leader go to his people and say that he is negotiating with them?

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3)The Other Bluffer

Barack Obama isn't the only world leader issuing threats that he won't execute.

By Bret Stephens

Until not long ago, Israelis remained prudently coy about whether they would strike Iran's nuclear facilities. More recently, prominent Israelis have voiced doubts about whether Israel can strike those facilities, at least in any way that would make a lasting difference to Tehran's bid to acquire nuclear weapons.

Essentially, they're saying it's all a bluff.

The transition marks another decline in the quality of the Jewish state's deterrence. This would be bad news in better circumstances. Considering the way the Obama administration is acting with respect to Syria, it's much worse than that.

That's because President Obama has now made it clear that, when it comes to rogue regimes and weapons of mass destruction, he's exactly the bluffer he promised he wasn't. He warned repeatedly that the use by Bashar Assad's regime of chemical weapons against the Syrian people was a red line, a game changer, a thing "we will not tolerate." And he responded to the regime's use of chemical weapons by doing nothing. This is supposed to be the guy who has Israel's back and will never allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon?

What's Fuhgeddaboudit in Yiddish?

That's a lesson that needs to sink in fast with Israeli decision makers. Israel has justified reservations about taking anything except covert or surgical action against Iran and Syria. Among those reservations: the limits of its military capability; its vulnerability to counterstrikes; its diplomatic isolation; the displeasure of the Obama administration.

Above all, Israelis have shied away from action on the theory that Mr. Obama's red lines were real, even if he drew them further down field than Israel would like. What's the point of rushing to do something yourself at great immediate risk, when you can wait for someone else to do it, at much less risk to them or to you, a little later?

Sound logic, one flaw: There is no someone else. Israelis are now watching how the administration reacts when a rogue regime crosses the president's red lines. It calls for a U.N. investigation to corroborate the findings of Western intelligence agencies. It justifies the exercise in the name of international consensus. It emphasizes the need to avoid the mistakes of the Iraq war.

That's the path the administration is traveling in the Syrian chemical-weapons case, and things will only get worse. As the Assad regime realizes it can use these weapons without international penalty, it will unleash them again. Sooner or later it will figure out that the more widely it uses them, the quicker it can kill enemies at home and deter enemies abroad. A twofer. The administration will go from arguing that it's too soon to intervene in Syria, to arguing that it's too late.

What Israel gets from this is a chemical-weapons free-fire zone on its Syrian border, along with the growing likelihood that the weapons will reach Hezbollah's hands along its Lebanese border. On the plus side, Israel also gets an arms deal from the administration. But the deal consists of selling Israel stuff it already has or doesn't particularly need, like aerial tankers and V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft, while withholding stuff it doesn't have and dearly needs, like large bunker-busters and the means of delivering them.

Meanwhile, Israel faces an Iran that, according to former military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin, has already crossed the nuclear red line Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew at the U.N.'s General Assembly last September. Did Mr. Netanyahu draw that line as a means of warning Iran, or of goading the U.S. to act?

If it was the latter, it was a bad bet. Mr. Obama will treat evidence of Iran's impending nuclearization the way he has looked at Syria's use of chemical weapons, demanding a standard of proof that will be impossible to meet until it is too late to do much about it. And as in Syria, the longer he searches for proof, the tougher the military options will become.

If it was the former, however, then Israel had better be prepared to act. Soon. A threat that cannot be executed should never be issued. It invites contempt from friend and foe alike. If Mr. Netanyahu really has been bluffing all along, he'll go down as the man who made Ehud Olmert look good.

Israel's military planners have now had more than a decade to plan an attack on Iran. Let's assume their capabilities are better than advertised. (Can a country that can come up with Iron Dome be incapable of producing the required bunker busters?) Let's assume also there's a known-unknown in this plan, an element of surprise that will take even the most hardened war-gamers by surprise.

It had better work. Because Israel cannot live with a nuclear Iran. Because Israel should know by now that this American administration will not be coming to its rescue. Because the purpose of a Jewish state is never having to rely for survival on the kindness of others, even ones so charming and solicitous as Barack Obama.