Middle East and Other Musings: Obama-Forever Self-Serving and If He Cannot Overcome His Rage Then We Face Two More Bleak Years!

Gaza 'Corpses' Caught Moving When They Forget Cameras Are On Them:

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She's ready!!!! She's Ready for the 'TOP' Job
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https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=670841776267356

See A and B below.)
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Is it possible the pressures from Obama's failure to rescue our diplomats and security people in Libya nettled him so he was proactive in trying to rescue the recently beheaded journalist.? All to the good but the downside is why did Obama announce this mission?

By doing so he compromises future such efforts and puts at risk those who are called upon to engage in these dangerous undertakings.

Obama, ever the politician always interested in his own political welfare and disregarding the lives and safety of others.

The announcement of this has to be seen as self-serving by our elite forces and dangerous to their own welfare.

Obama has two more years to learn what most logical and less ideological people already know.

Here are a few things that would help Obama to realize his 'rage' has caused his presidency to collapse!

Islamist terrorism is a scourge and eliminating the word will not stop them from killing innocents and eventually attacking America.
Making tough speeches and then going off to play golf should put the fear of God in Americans but not terrorists. (See 1 and 1a below.)

Iran intends to go nuclear and appeasing them and allowing them to play the West like a violin will not deter them. Feeding and appeasing bullies only increases their appetite.

Government is generally incompetent and big government magnifies government incompetency.
Therefore, why supplant America's health care delivery with government controls?

America has many flaws but the world is better off when we are engaged. American withdrawal and unilateral demilitarization creates vacuums filled by those intent on evil.

Increased taxes, red tape regulations and entitlements make us less competitive, destroys initiatives,frequently results in fraud and sends the wrong message regarding personal responsibility.
Therefore, if raising the minimum wage works, which is always unaccompanied by any requirement for maximum effort, why stop at any given amount? (See 1b below.)

Americans are generous so why portray them as greedy?

Capitalism has produced more for more than any other economic system so why bash it?
Trust competition and the market place over government heavy handedness. (See 1c below.)

A nation incapable of protecting its borders will not long survive.

Multiculturalism is a worthy goal but when a nation does not insist upon and teach a common language it is flirting with disaster.

American youth must be challenged by a solid education, taught history, encouraged to be patriotic and be supported by a strong family unit if our Republic is to survive and prosper.(See 1d below.) and http://www.cnsnews.com/video/national/oreilly-americas-race-problem

Confidence and trust in government demands competent and unbiased leadership, supported by cost effective and efficiently delivered services if it is to gain the respect and the co-operation of its citizens.

And most important of all, pronouncing goals does not equate with achievement.

Obama's 'rage' is his and thus our problem. If no 'rage', none of the above would happen.(See 2 below.)
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Anti-Semitism existed long before Israel's founding. (See 3 and 3a below.)

As I wrote earlier: First the Jews then the Christians.

Anyone who believes you can have a rational conversation with animals is not only a damn fool but also has their head in sand! (See 3b below.)
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Dick
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A) WHAT DID YOU SEE???? Officers ordered the suspect to put the assault rifle down, and that is what he is doing, Right? it appears he is complying and then they shoot him!!!

OMG, he is shot! Is that what you saw? Do you want to know what it is like to work the streets as a cop, and what risks our Officers face daily? Watch the video again... Watch the suspect's right hand while he places the rifle down with his left hand. What you don't see by facing this Criminal face to face, but the Officer behind the suspect does see, is the suspect pulling a hidden handgun from his rear pants, with his right hand. {back-up yells "Gun" before firing}

Watch as the bad guy goes down..... the handgun is still in his right hand. This is a reminder... What you think you see is not always what is happening.

This photo was removed by Facebook today (it was Michael Brown’s Facebook page), at the insistence of his family’s attorneys!

This is a photo of Michael Brown posted on his Facebook page. Michael Brown was the “child” that was shot and killed by a

police officer in Ferguson, MO. last week after Brown aggressively resisted arrest and fractured that police officer’s eye socket..

Brown had just robbed a convenience store, on camera!

Please notice the Glock handgun pointed at the camera and a mouthful of cash! Other removed photos showed him in the colors

of the Bloods and giving the hand signs of the Bloods’ gang.

CNN reported that he was an “Innocent unarmed child headed off to college”! Maybe they meant JAIL!

Democrats want to keep people poor and beholden to them, for the money they are given to stay home and procreate more voters.

Democrats buy VOTES with OUR taxes!!

"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government." --Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 28, 1787

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1) So What Will You Do, Mr. President?

Denunciations won't stop the men who killed James Foley.

President Obama on Wednesday condemned the made-for-YouTube murder of American James Foley with as much passion as we've seen from the cool Commander in Chief.

He said that Foley's killers in the jihadist Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, "have rampaged across cities and villages, killing innocent, unarmed civilians in cowardly acts of violence. They abduct women and children, and subject them to torture and rape and slavery. They have murdered Muslims—both Sunni and Shia—by the thousands. They target Christians and religious minorities, driving them from their homes, murdering them when they can for no other reason than they practice a different religion."

All of this is horribly true. It was also true a year ago. The question now—what the world wants to know now, Mr. President—is what are you going to do about it?

If it serves any purpose, the butchery of James Foley will open more eyes about the threat ISIS poses to the Middle East and to America. Make no mistake, Foley was killed because he was American. The masked murderer in the video made that clear. Captured in Syria two years ago, the courageous journalist may have been kept alive precisely for this kind of public execution. The video also displayed another captured American freelance journalist, Steven Sotloff, whose fate it said would depend on Mr. Obama's "next decision" on bombing in Iraq.Six years into this Presidency, we know Barack Obama can do empathy. We know he can channel a family's grief for a murdered son and express a nation's outrage. What we don't know is if he can muster the will and fortitude to defeat an enemy that is growing in strength and danger on his watch. This is what America and the world need from a President when killers are on the march.

It is folly to think this brutality will be confined to unlucky journalists or the sands of western Iraq. ISIS knows which country's bombs have forced its retreat from the Mosul Dam this week, and it knows American power is the greatest threat to its dreams of a regional caliphate stretching from Lebanon to Kuwait. The jihadists know they are at war against America.

Yet it is not clear that Mr. Obama is willing to admit even now that America is at war against ISIS. American bombs are hitting ISIS Humvees in northern Iraq, but Mr. Obama continues to limit the military mission to preventing genocide against the Yazidi minority and protecting the U.S. consulate in Erbil. This is a defensive containment strategy. It is not a strategy for killing and defeating ISIS.

"One thing we can all agree on is that a group like ISIL has no place in the 21st century," Mr. Obama also said on Wednesday. But this is the 21st century and ISIS is expanding its "place."

"And people like [ISIS] ultimately fail," Mr. Obama added. "They fail, because the future is won by those who build and not destroy and the world is shaped by people like Jim Foley, and the overwhelming majority of humanity who are appalled by those who killed him."

But Foley is dead and his killers won't fail on their own. They will not fail because Barack Obama reached out his hand in peace on Inauguration Day. They will not fail because of a progressive vision that mankind has finally in the 21st century reached some higher level of being. Like every evil in human history, ISIS will stop only when it is forced to stop. This means only when enough of its fanatics have been killed.

Mr. Obama also said we will "act against ISIL, standing alongside others." This is his familiar point that America cannot act alone. And against ISIS he is surely right that the U.S. must mobilize a military and political coalition of the willing. The Iraqis themselves will have to fight to reclaim their lost territory and hold it, as the Kurds have shown this week they are willing to do.

But the lesson of the last century is that a coalition of the willing forms only when America leads. The main reason that ISIS has advanced so far has been the U.S. failure to act against it. Mr. Obama's refusal to intervene in Syria created a breeding ground for jihadists. And his total withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 created a vacuum for those jihadists to spill over and occupy Sunni Iraq.

Even if Mr. Obama absolves himself and still blames George W. Bush for his Middle Eastern troubles, that does him and the world no good now. Disorder is spreading while he is the world's ostensible leader. ISIS is marching while he is Commander in Chief.

Mr. Obama must get over his political fixation on ending Mr. Bush's wars and admit that his country must fight again in Iraq. America already is at war again fighting ISIS in Iraq. Mr. President, we share your disgust for James Foley's killers. What we need to know is whether you are willing to do what it takes to defeat these enemies of America and a civilized world.

1a) Author: defenseone.com
Source: Gen. John R. Allen, USMC (Ret.).

The brutal murder of the brave American journalist James Foley is meant to directly terrorize the world’s media, the international community, and the United States. If all the actions of the Islamic State, or IS, to date weren’t sufficiently reprehensible, this act and the potential for other similar acts will snap American attention with laser-like focus onto the real danger IS poses to the existence of Iraq, the order of the region and to the homelands of Europe and America.

Make no mistake, the abomination of IS is a clear and present danger to the U.S. The only question really is whether the U.S. and its allies and partners will act decisively now while they can still shape events to destroy IS, an act that seems increasingly self-obvious.

President Barack Obama, our commander-in-chief, was right to order airstrikes on IS elements in northern Iraq. He was also right to order humanitarian relief for the Yazidis and other desperate Iraqi minority elements fleeing the onslaught of IS elements, but until the grisly death of James Foley much of the American public was only beginning to awaken to what IS is and the enormity of the threat it represents.

The U.S. is now firmly in the game and remains the only nation on the planet capable of exerting the kind of strategic leadership, influence and strike capacity to deal with IS. It is also the only power capable of organizing a coalition’s reaction to this regional and international threat. As a general officer commanding at several levels in the region, I can say with certainty that what we’re facing in northern Iraq is only partly a crisis about Iraq. It is about the region and potentially the world as we know it.

Weeks ago I called for this group to be attacked in the manner only the U.S. can undertake – suddenly, swiftly, surgically – to deal it a setback and to begin the systematic dismantlement of this scourge. As we consider this threat there are some important points to consider that give urgency to the imperative to act:

The Islamic State is executing a well-thought-out campaign design intended to dismantle both Syria and Iraq and install in their place an Islamic Caliphate. Though we’re keyed into it now, we missed it initially.

IS is a well-organized entity, almost certainly supported by former Saddamist regime elements whose hand can be seen in the campaign design now unfolding. This group is not a flash in the pan that will go away of its own accord or if we don’t poke at it. It is not benign. IS is reinforced by Sunni tribal elements from Syria and Iraq, and most alarmingly, is aided by a witch’s brew of foreign fighters from Chechens to Uighurs to Pashtuns, but also including Europeans and Americans. The Caliphate’s Western recruits will be felt in the European and American homelands for years to come regardless of the fate IS and its cause.

IS is quite well heeled. It is flush with recently captured American and Iraqi ordnance and armored vehicles, and awash with dollars lifted from Iraqi banks along its route of advance. It is demonstrating an alarming ability to absorb heavier and more complex military capabilities and put them to work against their erstwhile opponents. IS is able to demonstrate substantial battlefield innovation and agility — two qualities none of us can afford as IS continues its forward movement and attempts to consolidate.

So how should we “see” IS and what is this terrorist group up to?

Within its means, IS is waging total war on the region and its “unbelieving and apostate” populations. Just ask the Christians, Yazidis, Kurds, Shi’a and some Sunni populations who’ve been unlucky enough to be along the IS axis of advance. Before our very eyes, it is transitioning from being a non-state actor into a state-like entity. The leadership of the so-called Caliphate has been clear that it will focus on Western and American targets if given the chance to consolidate its holdings into the so-called Caliphate. It’s worth remembering the Taliban provided the perfect platform from which al-Qaeda attacked the U.S., and the Taliban were and remain as cavemen in comparison to IS. As well, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, has attacked the U.S. at least twice, and they are a mere shadow of IS. Worse, the IS foot soldiers holding U.K., European, and American passports number in the hundreds. We need to prepare ourselves for what this will mean. Foley’s executioner spoke with a British accent.

So what now?

IS must be destroyed and we must move quickly to pressure its entire “nervous system,” break it up, and destroy its pieces. As I said, the president was absolutely right to strike IS, to send advisors to Iraq, to arm the Kurds, to relieve the suffering of the poor benighted people of the region, to seek to rebuild functional and non-sectarian Iraqi Security Forces and to call for profound change in the political equation and relationships in Baghdad.

The whole questionable debate on American war weariness aside, the U.S. military is not war weary and is fully capable of attacking and reducing IS throughout the depth of its holdings, and we should do it now, but supported substantially by our traditional allies and partners, especially by those in the region who have the most to give – and the most to lose – if the Islamic State’s march continues. It’s their fight as much as ours, for the effects of IS terror will certainly spread in the region with IS seeking soft spots for exploitation.

American and allied efforts must operate against IS from Mosul in the east across its entire depth to western Syria. In that regard, “sovereignty” in the context of its airspace and territory is not something we should grant President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Syria is a failed state neither capable of acting as a sovereign entity nor deserving the respect of one. We cannot leave IS a safe haven anywhere or a secure support platform from which to regroup or enjoy sanctuary across the now-irrelevant frontier between Syria and Iraq.

The tentative successes of the Kurds in rolling back IS from the Mosul Dam should offer a clear signal that this formula of employing indigenous forces coupled with American and allied firepower can be undertaken with effect. Accelerating the refurbishment of the Iraqi security force through a focused advise and assist program can open fronts against IS to the north along the Tigris and west into Anbar Province and along the Euphrates River. To that end, Iraq and Syria’s Sunni tribes and the Free Syrian Resistance can also play a central role in dismantling IS. Many of the tribes are fighting now and many others, ready to fight IS, are begging for U.S. and international support. Their advisory and military support should be a high priority. The Kurds, the Sunnis and the Free Syrian resistance elements of the region are the “boots on the ground” necessary to the success of this campaign, and the attack on IS must comprehensively orchestrate these diverse forces across the entire region. We’ve done this before, but we must view this crisis regionally and cannot fall victim to segmented thinking, approaches and policies that leave any potential allies out of the game or give IS any safe havens or maneuver space.

Bottom line: The president deserves great credit in attacking IS. It was the gravest of decisions for him. But a comprehensive American and international response now — NOW — is vital to the destruction of this threat. The execution of James Foley is an act we should not forgive nor should we forget, it embodies and brings home to us all what this group represents. The Islamic State is an entity beyond the pale of humanity and it must be eradicated. If we delay now, we will pay later.

Gen. John R. Allen, USMC (Ret.) led Marines in Anbar Province and was commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. He is a distinguished fellow of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

1b) Do Higher Minimum Wages Create More Jobs?

President Obama points to evidence that they do, but he must have missed New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Since the release of the May jobs report, President Obama and many in the media have been crowing about new evidence allegedly showing that minimum-wage hikes stimulate job growth. At a speech in Denver on July 9, Mr. Obama noted that "since I first asked Congress to raise the minimum wage, 13 states have gone ahead and raised theirs—and those states have seen higher job growth than the states that haven't raised their minimum wage."

Here's where this story got started. In June, the Center for Economic and Policy Researchreleased a report claiming that compared with the 37 states that did not raise their minimum wage in January, the 13 states that did had on average higher employment growth from January to May 2014. The data came from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

No one committed to evidence-based public policy would accept these skimpy facts as grounds for raising the minimum wage.

Why would firms hire more workers when government raises the cost of hiring workers? The progressive answer is that hiking the minimum wage raises the incomes of poor workers, causing them to spend more. This additional spending, in turn, is so great that firms hire even more workers. When you raise the minimum wage, as Mr. Obama said in Denver, "that money gets churned back into the economy. And the whole economy does better, including the businesses."

This theory is dubious for many reasons, not least because minimum-wage workers make up about 2% of the workforce, a percentage much too small to have such an effect. Yet if this theory were valid—and if these data reveal useful information—then job growth should be greater the higher the minimum-wage boost.

Not so. Of the 13 states that raised the minimum wage, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York were the three that raised it most, with increases ranging from 5% to 14%. These three states also experienced the worst job growth between January and May, an average of 0.03% compared with an average 1.28% for the other 10 states. Indeed, job growth was worse in each of these three states than it was, on average, in the 37 states that did not raise their minimum wage at all. Moreover, in New Jersey, the state that hiked minimum wage the most—to $8.25 an hour from $7.25—employment actually fell by about 0.56%.

Washington experienced the largest job growth at 2.1%, but the state only raised its hourly minimum wage by 13 cents. A full-time minimum-wage employee in Seattle now earns, before taxes, a whopping $23.80 more a month. That's barely enough to cover dinner for two at a chain restaurant. Consider also that between December and May the price of gasoline rose by more than 20 cents a gallon, according to Gasbuddy.com. Minimum-wage workers would need a big chunk of their higher pay to cover the increased cost of driving. There's no way there was enough left over to spark extra job growth.

We conducted a statistical analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' data called a two-sample "t" test for comparing two means. We found, for this time period, no difference in the job-growth trend in the states that raised their minimum wages from states that did not. In other words, the correlation cited as debunking the economic case against the minimum wage is not statistically significant.

President Barack Obama speaks at Cheesman Park in Denver. Associated Press

Minimum-wage supporters might say the data at least show that a higher minimum wage does not reduce job growth. That's also not what we found. When looking—over the time-span December 2013 through June 2014—at only the 13 states that raised their minimum wage in January, those that raised it the most had, on average, lower job growth than did those that raised it the least. This particular finding is not by itself evidence that raising the minimum wage slows job growth; these data remain too meager. But it does run counter to the White House narrative.

In short, there is no sound basis in this Labor Department report for rejecting the fundamental economic understanding that raising firms' cost of employing low-skilled workers makes firms less willing to employ such workers.

The data are simply no reason to reject this fundamental economic precept: When you raise the cost of hiring, companies will do less of it. Until there's a sound theory for why raising the price of low-skill labor doesn't lessen employers demand for it, and until that theory is confirmed by serious, empirical analysis based on adequate data, the only legitimate minimum-wage stance is that it shrinks the employment options for the very workers it ostensibly intends to help: the poorest of the low-skilled.

Ms. Palagashvili is a fellow of the Classical Liberal Institute at the NYU School of Law. Ms. Mace studies economics at George Mason University.

1c) Plouffe for Free Markets

Obama's strategist discovers the virtues of capitalism.

Everyone has to make a living, so far be it from us to complain that David Plouffe, President Obama's former chief political strategist, is joining a private business to fight government regulation. The uber-politico will join Uber, the four-year-old San Francisco company that uses smartphones to compete with taxi services to get passengers around big cities.

50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a Ferguson doesn't need to happen.

By Daniel Henninger

It has been 50 years since Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Across that half century, the condition of inner-city black life in America has consumed immeasurable amounts of the nation's public and private spending, litigation, academic study, cultural output and opinion. And yet everything about Ferguson is familiar.

A poor neighborhood has erupted over a police killing, protesters are in the streets, civil-rights leaders are everywhere, local businesses have been looted and cameramen are recording the most familiar image of all—young black men in a state of rage. Eventually Ferguson will subside as a daily news story, and then life in this small town in the middle of the country will return to being what it was.

We will leave it to others to plumb the riddles of whether racism and injustice create the Fergusons of America. A question more open to the possibility of an answer is: Why don't more young guys in places like Ferguson have a job to occupy their days?What we are seeing in Ferguson occurred on a larger scale in Detroit and Newark in 1967, in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965, and in a neighborhood called Hough on the east side of Cleveland in 1966. Some argue that Detroit and Newark never recovered.

The short answer is, they don't work because there is no work. And anyway, who would hire them? President Barack Obama explained all this in February when he announced the "My Brother's Keeper" Initiative.

"As a black student," Mr. Obama said, "you are far less likely than a white student to be able to read proficiently by the time you are in fourth grade. By the time you reach high school, you're far more likely to have been suspended or expelled." And the future? "Fewer young black and Latino men participate in the labor force compared to young white men. And all of this translates into higher unemployment rates and poverty rates as adults." All indisputable.

The goal of "My Brother's Keeper," Mr. Obama said, is to find out "what works," and then build on what works.

But we know what works. The build-out is simply waiting for a head contractor to get the job done.

When the president announced this initiative in February, the progressive website Think Progress produced an article that includes one eye-popping chart. Based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, it shows the unemployment rate for black youth from 2007-2012. In November 2009 it hit 49.1%. It has declined to about 35%, but remains twice the rate for young whites.

The article also noted the massive shortfall in educational preparedness: "Just 5% of African-American students meet the ACT's college readiness benchmark in all four subject areas: English, reading, math and science."

Connect the dots: What younger black men need is a decent job and the education necessary to get and hold that job. Absent that, normal life is impossible, for them or for their neighborhoods.

More dots: Last August, the Pew Research Center published a report, also documenting that the "black unemployment rate is consistently twice that of whites." Gaze, however, at Pew's chart of unemployment by race based on seasonally adjusted Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 1954 to 2013. It reveals what works.

Peak unemployment for all blacks hit 19.5% in 1983, after a deep recession. Then it plummeted, to about 11%. These were the boom years of the Reagan presidency, when economic growth hit 7% in 1984 and averaged 3.6%. Following a recession in the early 1990s, that strong-growth trend continued during Bill Clinton's presidency, and black unemployment fell further, below 10%.

The postrecession growth rate for the first five years of the Obama presidency was below 2%, and joblessness for young black men is unprecedented. Something, obviously, isn't working.

Good growth is half of what works. Without a functional education, holding a job, or improving on the one you've got, is nearly impossible. Ferguson's school system, the Washington Post's visiting reporters noted Tuesday, "is crumbling."

The decline of inner-city public schools is the greatest, most bitterly ironic social tragedy in the 50 years since passage of the liberating civil-rights acts. But what works here is no longer an unsolvable mystery. It is the alternatives that emerged to the defunct public system—charters schools and voucher-supported parochial schools. Over the past 20 years, these options, born in desperation, have forced their way into the schools mix. Freed of politicized, sludge-like central bureaucracies, they've proven they can teach kids and send them into the workforce.

Economic growth is nonpartisan. But inner-city public education is totally partisan. Democratic politicians made a Faustian bargain with the teachers unions, and the souls carried away have been the black children in those doomed schools.

What America's Fergusons need—from L.A. to Detroit to New York—is a president, and a party, obsessed with growth and messianic about giving a kid what he needs to hold the job that growth provides. Maybe by the 100th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.

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2) U.S. Tried To Rescue Slain Journalist

American journalist James Foley wears a helmet and body armor in a photo taken while he was covering the war in Aleppo, Syria, in November 2012. Associated Press

U.S. Special Operations forces mounted an unsuccessful mission inside Syria earlier this summer to try to rescue several Americans held by Islamic extremists, including thejournalist who was beheaded this week, senior Obama administration officials said.

President Barack Obama ordered the secret operation, the first of its kind by the U.S. inside Syrian territory since the start of the civil war, after the U.S. received intelligence the Americans were being held by the extremist group known as Islamic State at a specific facility in a sparsely populated area inside Syria. Among the group, intelligence agencies believed at the time, was James Foley, the U.S. journalist whose beheading was shown in a grisly video released Tuesday.

The officials declined to say precisely where and when the operation took place. But its disclosure was just the latest of several signs of a toughening American posture toward the extremist forces of Islamic State, a group that Mr. Obama Wednesday labeled a "cancer" on the Middle East.

James Foley's death highlights the danger for journalists working in repressive countries such as Syria and Iraq. WSJ's video editor Mark Scheffler and Reporters Without Borders U.S. director Delphine Halgand discuss James Foley and the dangers of war reporting on the News Hub with Sara Murray.

Officials said that several dozen Special Operations forces took part in the helicopter-borne operation as drones and fighter aircraft circled overhead. After landing nearby and approaching the facility by foot, the force came under small-arms fire, to which it responded, the officials said. Several fighters of the Islamic State were killed in the exchange of fire. One member of the special operations forces team was shot and slightly injured, the officials said.

But the U.S. forces didn't find any of the Americans in the facility and pulled out of the area. "When the opportunity presented itself, the president authorized the Department of Defense to move aggressively to recover our citizens," Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, said in a statement. "Unfortunately, that mission was ultimately not successful because the hostages were not present."

The U.S. rescue mission wasn't coordinated with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a senior U.S. official said.

As the details of the attempted rescue suggest, Mr. Foley wasn't the only Westerner being held by Islamic State operatives. Approximately 20 journalists are believed to be missing in Syria, with many held by the Islamic State, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Philip Balboni, the president and chief executive of GlobalPost, an online news site Mr. Foley worked for, said Mr. Foley's captors originally demanded a ransom sum from both the family and GlobalPost of €100 million ($132.5 million). He declined to discuss their reply to the demand. He said all communication was shared with appropriate government authorities.

The disclosure of the dramatic rescue operation came on a day of stern public responses from the Obama administration to the videotaped beheading of Mr. Foley, which Islamic State said was its first answer to recent American bombing runs in Iraq to drive the extremist group's forces away from a key dam in Mosul.

In a somber public statement, President Obama denounced the beheading of Mr. Foley as the work of "nihilistic" Islamic extremists and called Wednesday for a broadened international campaign to eradicate the group from the Middle East.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron cut short his vacation to describe the purported murder of American journalist James Foley as "shocking" and "depraved". Photo: Associated Press

He also vowed to continue the U.S. air war against them in Iraq, despite threats by the group, commonly known by the acronyms ISIL and ISIS, to behead more Americans if the strikes continue.

The U.S. would be relentless, he said, in pursuing those who killed Mr. Foley.

"One thing we can all agree on is a group like ISIL has no place in the 21st century," Mr. Obama said from his vacation in Martha's Vineyard. "From governments and people across the Middle East, there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer so that it does not spread. There has to be a clear rejection of these kind of nihilistic ideologies."

Propaganda videos by the militant group the Islamic State show people claiming to be Australian, British and even American. And now, the execution of James Foley by a man with a British accent has further heightened fears about the potential for terrorist activity by radicalized Western Muslims returning home.

The president urged allies and partners to join forces to defeat Islamic State fighters who have established a quasi-state that controls large swaths of Iraq and Syria.

Mr. Obama's comments followed release of the video showing an Islamic State militant killing Mr. Foley, who was captured in Syria nearly two years ago, and threatening to kill another U.S. reporter in the group's hands.

Mr. Obama's language was much sharper than comments he made in an interview in January, when he compared the group to a high-school basketball team that had neither the talent nor the wherewithal to pose a major global threat.

Islamic State militants released a video Tuesday purporting to show the beheading of American journalist James Foley in an act of retribution for U.S. airstrikes on the group in Iraq, raising new dangers for President Obama's Middle East policy. WSJ's Tamer El-Ghobashy has the latest on the News Hub with Simon Constable. Photo: Militant Video

While Mr. Foley's killing isn't expected to lead to an immediate shift in U.S. policy in the Middle East, it creates new pressure on Mr. Obama to authorize a wider military campaign to directly confront the Islamic State.

"Make no mistake: We will continue to confront ISIL wherever it tries to spread its despicable hatred," Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement. "The world must know that the United States of America will never back down in the face of such evil. ISIL and the wickedness it represents must be destroyed, and those responsible for this heinous, vicious atrocity will be held accountable."Administration officials said the U.S. wouldn't be deterred by the group's threats.

Soon after Mr. Obama spoke, the U.S. military announced a new series of airstrikes that hit Islamic State forces near Mosul Dam, Iraq's largest. On Monday, with critical help from American airstrikes, Kurdish and other Iraqi forces routed Islamic State fighters holding the dam.

On Wednesday, U.S. jet fighters and armed drones carried out 14 airstrikes that destroyed Islamic State armored vehicles, hidden bombs and other targets, the military said.

For now, the U.S. is hewing to a narrow set of objectives in Iraq: to protect American military and diplomatic personnel working in the country, and to offer selective help for vulnerable Iraqi communities.

A ribbon is seen on the front door of the family home of journalist James Foley Wednesday. Associated Press

Those elastic goals give the U.S. military considerable leeway to carry out airstrikes across the country. Military officials say the strikes so far have succeeded in blunting the group's attacks, demoralized the fighters and led some to leave the group. But they have done little to damage the group's overall danger to the region, military officials said.

That is leading to growing pressure—within the military and in Congress—for the president to authorize a broader fight against the Islamic State.

For weeks, the U.S. military's Central Command, which oversees Middle East operations, has advocated a more expansive, near-term air campaign targeting Islamic State commanders, equipment and military positions that U.S. intelligence has pinpointed in Iraq, defense officials said.

"Hunt while the hunting's good," one senior defense official said of Central Command's message to White House and Pentagon policy makers.

Other officials want to limit the strikes until a new Iraqi government is formed in the coming weeks. For now, that view appears to be winning the debate.

Advocates of a more immediately aggressive U.S. approach say targets of opportunity today may no longer be reachable by the time a new government in Baghdad is formed.

The U.S. currently has about 900 military personnel working in Iraq. They are providing security for the U.S. Embassy, helping the Iraqi and Kurdish forces plan their military operations against the Islamic State, and looking at other ways America can help Iraq combat the militant threats.

U.S. officials said on Wednesday that the State Department asked the Pentagon to dispatch 300 more military personnel to the Baghdad area to protect Americans working there, defense officials said.

Mr. Obama's current airstrike strategy is also geographically limited. The U.S. has no intentions of launching airstrikes in Syria, where the Islamic State controls large parts of the country and has established a de facto capital, U.S. officials say. For now, Syria provides a safe haven for Islamic State forces who are able to return from fighting in Iraq without fear of being hit by U.S. airstrikes. U.S. intelligence has detected some fighters flowing back into Syria after the recent U.S. air attacks.

The president has authorized a new $500 million program to arm and train pro-American Syrian forces that could confront the Islamic State, but that proposal has yet to be approved by Congress, and it isn't clear if or when lawmakers will back the proposal.

For part of his time in captivity, Mr. Foley was held along with at least two French journalists who were freed in April. One of them, Nicolas Hénin, told Europe 1 radio on Wednesday that Mr. Foley was singled out for particularly brutal treatment because he was American.

President Barack Obama approaches a podium in Edgartown, Mass., on Wednesday. Associated Press

As the Obama administration considers how to respond to the brutal murder of an American, the president must balance deep public reluctance to plunge back into Iraq against new calls to launch a broader offensive against extremists.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said Democrats support the president, but are concerned about backing military action with poorly defined objectives.

"It's going to require vigorous oversight by the Congress to make sure that the administration, despite its best efforts, doesn't get sucked into a level of commitment that the country isn't willing to support," he said.

Mr. Schiff said the military targeting in Iraq is "rapidly getting beyond the narrowly defined mission of protecting Americans and preventing genocide of the Yazidis," an ethnic group that came under attack this month.

Like Mr. Schiff, Sen. Angus King (I., Maine), said the president should consider asking Congress for specific authorization under the War Powers Act if he plans to expand military attacks in Iraq. Mr. King said the U.S. has to avoid being dragged into a costly confrontation in the Middle East.

"We have to be careful," he said. "We can't let it intimidate us and we can't let it provoke us."

— Colleen McCain Nelson and Jennifer Levitz contributed to this article.

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3) Israel Doesn’t Cause Anti-Semitism

By Jonathan S. Tobin

Is the rising tide of hatred that is being directed at Jews in Europe and elsewhere the fault of Israel? That’s what many anti-Zionists have been claiming, and now their argument is echoed by the Forward’s J.J. Goldbergwho writes in his column that the assumption that only Israelis face the consequences of their government’s policies is now being again proved false. He has a point in that, obviously, Jews everywhere are at risk of attack from those who hate Israel. But the fallacy here is that these anti-Semitic attacks are in any way Israel’s fault.

Goldberg’s main objective in this column is not so much to blame the Jewish state for what is happening to Jews elsewhere—though clearly he intends to wrongly lay some of the responsibility for these outbreaks on the Netanyahu government—as is it is to make a broader point that Israel needs to listen to the Diaspora rather than reject out of hand criticisms of its policies. He believes that Israelis must understand that as the nation state of the Jewish people, what Jerusalem does—whether in terms of war and peace issues or domestic ones that concern the rights of non-Orthodox denominations—has an impact on Jews elsewhere. I think he’s right about that and also right to advocate that Israel must think of its security in global terms that extends to the wellbeing of Jews everywhere.

The problem with this argument does not lie with the effort to wake up Israelis to the need to think more about the ties to Diaspora Jews. Rather, the flaw here is more fundamental. Goldberg’s attempt to draw a clear distinction between what he calls “old anti-Semitism” that was driven by “myths and fantasies disconnected from reality like drinking Christians’ blood or killing God” and what he calls the “new anti-Semitism” is misleading. So, too, is the assumption that anti-Semitism, whether we are talking about the hate directed at Jews during the medieval era, the Nazi-era assault, or today’s “new” variant, is the natural byproduct of Jewish actions rather than the psyches and the dark intentions of the anti-Semites. Goldberg writes about the current wave of hate:

The new anti-Semitism includes some of that, but it starts with something else: an anger at Jews over something that actually happened. Israel was created on land that Muslims, like it or not, considered part of their sacred waqf, the indivisible House of Islam. Many Muslims haven’t gotten over it. Hey, Osama bin Laden wanted Spain back.

While Goldberg acknowledges that it can be asserted that Israel’s existence or anger about its actions are a mere pretext that are used to legitimize expressions of hate that stem from the same beliefs that motivate “old anti-Semitism,” he thinks Hamas and others those who stoke hatred of Jews with traditional calumnies “would have a much smaller audience for their ravings if Israel could find a way to lower the flames of the conflict.”

Let’s draw some distinctions here. There is nothing anti-Semitic about criticizing Israel’s policies. It is a vibrant democracy and people there, like Americans and any other free people, criticize their government all the time. But those who believe that the Jews, unlike every other people on the planet, have no right to their own country and no right to defend themselves are subjecting them to discriminatory treatment. Anti-Zionism is, by definition, an act of prejudice against Jews. Moreover, those who campaign against Israel’s existence are drawing on the same anti-Semitic playbook that “traditional” Jew-haters have always used, including the same irrational myths that Goldberg cites.

Anyone taking a good look at the rhetoric and the signs that are present at anti-Israel demonstrations understands that what is on display is not the function of a political debate but a visceral hatred against Jews that is very much in tune with classic anti-Semitism. That is made abundantly clear by the manner with which these haters target not only Israelis but also everything connected with the Jews for boycott, including kosher food or Jewish ritual practices like circumcision.

Anti-Israel terrorists like Hezbollah and Hamas have, as Goldberg correctly notes, attacked Diaspora targets in the past and may well do so again. But to focus on such crimes as the 1994 bombing of the AMIA as purely the function of a tit-for-tat conflict between Israeli security forces and the terrorists and to see the recent outbreaks as being primarily a reaction to the fighting in Gaza is fundamentally mistaken.

Old style anti-Semitism wasn’t really pushback against the bad behavior of the Jews, though there were always some who thought it could be eradicated by every Jew being on their best behavior. Jews weren’t hated because they were capitalists or because they were socialists any more than because they were too rich or too poor. Their refusal to assimilate wasn’t the problem any more than fears about the willingness of many Jews to assimilate in the post-enlightenment era. Similarly, anti-Semitism, like anti-Zionism, is a function of the psychoses of the anti-Semites, not an understandable or rational response to Jewish or Israeli actions.

That’s still true today as anti-Semitic behavior is rationalized, if not excused, by false arguments about Israeli actions. The Israel-haters aren’t merely hypocrites since their outrage about the fighting in Gaza isn’t matched by a similar concern about far greater problems and casualties elsewhere. They are also dishonest because the “free Gaza” they support is actually an Islamist tyranny and those who claim to be resisting the “occupation” are not seeking to end the Jewish presence on the West Bank but rather trying to eradicate it inside the 1967 lines.

Jews have long labored under the delusion that they can reduce anti-Semitism by behaving differently and those who think Israel can lower the level of hatred by making concessions to the Palestinians or refraining from acts of self-defense are just as wrong as those who believed it could be accomplished by different types of behavior in the past.

Anti-Semitism is, as Ruth Wisse has wisely termed it, the most successful ideology of the 20th century in that it has outlived its various host organisms—including traditional religious believers, fascism, Nazism, and Communism. Its new partners—Islamism and anti-Zionism—are no different than the old ones.

What can be done about this? The Jews can defend themselves against anti-Semites and they can call attention to this ideology in an effort to rally decent people against the haters. But they can’t make it go away by being less aggressive in defending their rights any more than they can do so by other actions. Those who believe that Israel can reduce anti-Semitism by behaving differently are buying into the same myths that tormented previous generations. Both the Israeli government and Diaspora Jewry should ignore their suggestions.

Jonathan S. Tobin is senior online editor of COMMENTARY magazine and chief political blogger at www.commentarymagazine.com.

2a) Sherman in Gaza

His march through Georgia has been gravely misunderstood ― as has Israel’s strategy in Gaza.

By Victor Davis Hanson

William Tecumseh Sherman 150 years ago took Atlanta before heading out on his infamous March to the Sea to make Georgia “howl.” He remains one of the most controversial and misunderstood figures in American military history. Sherman was an attritionist, not an annihilationist — a strategist who believed in attacking the sources that fuel and field an army rather than butting heads against the army itself. To review his career is to shed light on why the Israeli Defense Forces were both effective in Gaza and hated even more for being so effective.

Much of the South has hated William Tecumseh Sherman for over a century and a half, but not because his huge army killed thousands of young Confederate soldiers (it did not). Grant did that well enough in the horrific summer of 1864 outside Richmond. Rather, Sherman humiliated the plantationist class by staging three long marches during the last twelve months of the Civil War — from Tennessee to Atlanta, from Atlanta to Savannah, and from Savannah up through the Carolinas. In each of these brilliantly conducted invasions, Sherman, with a few notable exceptions, sought to avoid direct fighting with Confederate forces, either outflanking opposing armies that popped up in his way, or entrenching and letting aggressors wear themselves out against his fortified lines. He did enormous material damage, as he boasted that his enemies could do nothing to impede his progress — humiliation being central to his mission.

Instead of fighting pitched battles, Sherman was interested in three larger strategic agendas. War in his mind was not a struggle between militaries so much as between the willpower of entire peoples, distant though they be from the battlefield. One chief aim was iconic. Sherman sought to capture cities or traverse holy ground that might offer his forces symbolic lessons that transcended even strategic considerations. He wanted to capture the important rail center of Atlanta before the November 1864 election and thereby ensure that the war would continue under a reelected Lincoln rather than be negotiated into a meaningless armistice by George McClellan. By taking the South’s second-most-important city, Sherman reminded the Union that the northern strategy was working and that Lincoln, as the architect of it, deserved support.

Marching through the heart of Georgia to Savannah also reminded the Confederacy that it could not stop a Union army from going pretty much where it pleased — even into the heretofore untouched southern heartlands. The much-hyped March to the Sea took on an almost messianic character in dissecting the Confederacy, as Sherman torched plantations and freed slaves. His so-called bummers praised their “Uncle Billy” and sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as they tramped through Georgia. Sherman was interested in such theatrics as part of a larger moral lesson that “War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.” He was particularly keen on reminding those who start wars that they must bear the consequences of their ideologies.

Accordingly, Sherman was most eager to go into the Carolinas, despite the forbidding terrain and the ordeal of winter, in part to pull up behind Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia, but also in part to humiliate the Confederacy by brazenly marching into the very birthplace of secession.

The Sherman way of war had another important symbolic aspect. Sherman often derided the mythography of the southern “Cavalier” class, by which he meant the notion that southern aristocratic manhood might offer such displays of martial prowess that the Confederacy’s disadvantages in matériel and manpower would be rendered irrelevant. As an antidote to the Rebel yell and the luster of a Wade Hampton or a Bobby Lee, Sherman formed the core of his forces not from high-born Yankees but from hardscrabble Midwestern farmboys. The latter enjoyed camping out and had the skills to live off the land far more than did southern cavalrymen. By entering the southern heartland with such rural regiments, Sherman was also signaling to the Confederacy that its pride in the martial supremacy of a rural South was a myth.

His point was to show them that farmboys from Illinois or Ohio were just as tough fighters as Tidewater horsemen or the impoverished rural folk of northern Georgia. Sherman felt that part of the appeal of the Confederacy had been the mythology about its landed gentry, and he felt it essential to expose this as hollow and superficial; after all, he was in Georgia, while Georgian units were not in Ohio: “My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

It is often alleged that Sherman was a terrorist, on the grounds that he favored collective punishment, or destroying the property of innocent civilians in order to make “war and individual ruin synonymous terms” both for those who had started the war and for those who supported it. Sherman certainly burned plantations, freed slaves, destroyed railways, tore down telegraph lines, and stripped the country bare of its post-harvest bounty. But the ruin he spread was not a Dresden or a Nagasaki. Instead, he made an effort to be selective, in that his two prime targets were Confederate government property — arsenals, public buildings, state factories — and the estates, businesses, and plantations of the very wealthy, who, as a tiny percentage of the southern population, owned the vast majority of its slaves. He was not so much a killer as an avatar of ruin and humiliation.

His brutal methods were aimed at instructing the civilian South that those who had precipitated the war surely deserved its harshest penalties. Only when the luminaries of the Confederacy saw that their bellicose rhetoric had brought them personal ruin would they be willing to curb their enthusiasm for secession: “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”

Sherman envisioned his wave of unapologetic ruin as dividing the populace and sowing dissension, and thus encouraging tax delinquency, desertion at the front, and loss of confidence among the elite. In all of these aims, he was largely successful.

The brutal Sherman way of war did not spare civilians from the general misery. Yet another purpose was to remind the southern populace that because they had largely followed their privileged leaders into a hopeless war against a far larger, more industrial, and wealthier Union, they too could not escape the collateral damage that followed from the targeting of plantations and Confederate property.

Sherman accepted southern hatred, but he assumed that after he left the Deep South, civilians would start to see a logic to his devastation: The homes and property of the middle classes and poor were largely spared, the infrastructure of the wealthy and of the state were not. That ruthless selectivity would spawn endless arguments among southerners over who was to blame for such destruction — well beyond Sherman himself. Certainly, for all the popular hatred, Georgians and Carolinians were far more likely to be alive after Sherman left than Virginians were after Grant was finished.

The Israeli army was eerily Shermanesque when it went into Gaza. The IDF targeted the homes of the wealthy Hamas elite, the private sanctuaries of the tunnels, and the rocketry and other infrastructure of the Hamas terrorist state. The homes of civilians who did not have rockets in the backyard or tunnels in the basement were usually not hit, and that sent a telling Shermanesque lesson. Long after the international media’s cameras have left, Gazans will argue over why one man’s house was leveled and another’s was not, leading to the conclusion more often than not that one was being used by Hamas, either with or without its owner’s consent, while the other was not. But all Gazans suffered amid the selective targeting — as did all Georgians and Carolinians for their allegiance to a plantationist class whose own interests were not always the same as those of the non-slave-owning white poor. Fairly or not, the IDF was reminding the people of Gaza that while it tried to focus exclusively on Hamas, such selectivity was often impossible when Gazans followed such reckless leaders who deliberately shielded themselves among civilians.

The IDF taught the supposedly fearsome Islamic warriors of Hamas, who adopted the loud bells and whistles of primordial killers and who supposedly love death more than life, that nondescript Israeli conscripts, through hard training and with the help of sophisticated technology, were in fact far deadlier than a man in a suicide vest or an RPG-wielding masked bandit. The IDF, then, like Sherman, sought to dispel the romantic notion that a uniformed conscript army cannot fight a warrior culture, or that it becomes so baffled by insurgencies and asymmetrical warfare as to be rendered helpless. The IDF went into the heart of Gaza City and came out largely intact after defeating all those it encountered.

Sherman was obsessed with separating bellicose enemy rhetoric from facts on the ground. He believed that unless humiliation was a part of defeat, a tribal society of ranked hierarchies would always concoct myths to explain away failure. southern newspapers boasted that Sherman was a Napoleon trapped deep in a Russia-like Georgia and about to be cut apart by Confederate Cossacks. Yet when his Army of the West sliced through the center of the state, Sherman smiled that some southerners had suggested that he go instead over to South Carolina and attack those who “started” the war.

Again, once the IDF is out of Gaza, civilians will ask their leaders what the tunnels and rockets, the child tunnel-diggers, the use of human shields, and all the braggadocio were supposed to achieve. What will Hamas tell its donors, when it requests money for more cement and rebar? That it wishes to build schools and hotels and not more instruments of collective suicide?

Sherman welcomed the hatred he earned from the South. He understood well the dictum of Machiavelli that men hate far more those who destroy their patrimonies than those who kill their fathers. He accepted that humiliating the South was a far graver sin than destroying its manhood, as Grant had done from May to September 1864 in northern Virginia. Lee at least could say that brave southerners had killed thousands of Grant’s troops in defense of their homeland; Sherman’s opponents, like Generals Hardee, Hood, and Johnson, could not brag that very few northerners died marching through Georgia or the Carolinas.

Sherman’s rhetoric was bellicose, indeed uncouth — even as he avoided killing as many southerners as he could. He left civilians as mad at their own leaders as at him. For all that and more, he remains a “terrorist,” while the bloodbaths at Cold Harbor and the Crater are not considered barbaric — and just as the world hates what the IDF did in Gaza far more than the abject butchery of the Islamic State, which at the same time was spreading savagery throughout Syria and Iraq, or than the Russians’ indiscriminate killing in Ukraine, or than what passes for an average day in the Congo.

Sherman got under our skin, and so does the IDF. Today we call not losing very many soldiers “disproportionate” warfare, and leaving an enemy’s territory a mess and yet without thousands of casualties “terrorism.” The lectures from the IDF about the cynical culpability of Hamas make the world as livid as did Sherman’s sermonizing about the cowardly pretensions of the plantationist class.

We tend to hate most deeply in war those who despoil us of our romance, especially when they humiliate rather than kill us — and teach us the lesson that the louder and more bellicose often prove the more craven and weak.

3b)Temple Univ. Jewish Student Punched In Face And Called ‘Kike’ In Anti-Semitic Attack

“Before this I just thought Students for Justice in Palestine was crazy but I didn’t know it would lead to violence.”

By Daniel Mael

A Jewish student on the campus of Temple University was assaulted on Wednesday afternoon and called “kike” and “baby killer” by members of the anti-Semitic student group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Daniel Vessal, a Camera on Campus fellow and a member of the Jewish fraternity AEPi, was punched in the face by a violent member of the anti-Israel organization SJP at “Templefest” which is organized for students on campus to gain new information about campus clubs a week before the start of classes. Vessal is a managing information systems major at the Fox School of Business at the university.

“I’m walking down Polett Walk, one of the main walkways through Temple University and I see the SJP table,” Vessal told TruthRevolt from a local area hospital. “I go up to them and I really just wanted to see what angle they were coming from. I went up to the table and started talking to them. I said, ‘listen, you shouldn’t be protesting Israel- if anything protest the terrorists.’”

“At that point I walked away and after a little back and forth,” Vessal explained. “I came back to the table after a little while and explained that the Palestinians have a right to a state just like anyone else but that SJP should come at the right people. I said, ‘when Hamas stops sending the rockets, that’s when there can be peace. That’s when we can start.'”

“This one girl sitting at the end of the table was just laughing and laughing at me,” he explained “As she was laughing at me, people at the table were calling me a ‘baby killer,’ I said when she stops then maybe we could have a genuinely peaceful conversation.”

“And then this kid just rocks me in the face as hard as he can. My glasses flew off. After a two-second blur I had no clue what had happened. I couldn’t believe the kid actually hit me,” said Vessal who added that he needs to obtain a new pair of glasses due to the extensive damage.

Vessal told Truth Revolt that the student who punched him was one of four or five individuals at the table.

“When the police came over and were filing the report the kids at the table were screaming ‘You Zionist pig, you racist, that’s what you get,’” Vessal explained. “If anything, I thought they would be apologetic for someone in their organization doing something like that.”

Vessal told TruthRevolt that the campus police took the assailant and sent him home but did not detain him, which confused the victim.

“I don’t understand why after physical assault he just got sent home. This was not anti-Israel at all, it was completely anti-Semitic.”

Vessal proceeded quickly to the head of student activities on campus who immediately stated that SJP’s table needed to be shut down. The campus police disagreed and said they wouldn’t shut down the table only because they already sent the kid home according to Vessal. He said, “They should have shut down the table, especially when they are laughing and calling me a Zionist pig.”

A short time later, after experiencing a headache and neck stiffness, Vessal sought medical attention at the Temple University Hospital. He spoke to TruthRevolt just prior to undergoing a medical evaluation.

A copy of the medical evaluation provided exclusively to Truth Revolt listed mandibular pain, cervical sprain, and closed head injury.

Josh Josephs and Alex Winokur witnessed the assault and confirm Vessal’s account and added that they heard members of Students for Justice in Palestine call Vessal a "kike" while he lay on the ground.

“Daniel went up to talk to them and have an educated conversation, and try to rationalize their opinions,“ explained Josephs. “Alex and I, being not as educated on this topic, stood to the side and let them converse. The ‘conversation’ shortly escalated to the Palestine group being very arrogant and irrational. The people behind the table started attacking Daniel calling him a "Zionist, racist, baby killer." Daniel asked the people behind if they could keep the name calling out of it, and just try to have a calm talk about their opinions.”

“Out of nowhere, a member of the group strikes Daniel, straight in the jaw with a closed fist. This led to

Daniel going straight to the ground, losing his glasses and in immediate pain.”

“While on the ground, the members in this group were just pointing at Daniel and were laughing at him,” Josephs told TruthRevolt. “In addition, names including kike, stupid Jew, and Zionist, were used by the members in reference to Daniel.”

“This was unacceptable, uncalled for, and a clear act of Anti-Semitism. The organization ‘Students for Justice in Palestin’ at Temple is a disgrace to this University, clearly shown by acts like this,” Josephs and Winokur told TruthRevolt in a joint statement. “Temple University should be embarrassed to allow this type of behavior to happen right on campus, especially at a big event like this.”

“The Simon Wiesenthal Center calls on the university President to condemn this violent anti-Semitic act,” Aron Hier Director of Campus Outreach for the Simon Wisenthal Center told TruthRevolt.. He also insisted that the university “launch a full investigation into the alleged SJP member and his parent organization.”

Aviva Slomich, Director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) Campus Department told TruthRevolt that “this type of physical harassment and intimidation coming from members of Students for Justice in Palestine is becoming more and more common across US campuses and it should not be tolerated.”

“Those who participate in such violent, criminal activity should be immediately held accountable for their actions. We expect Temple University to address this outrageous behavior and stand up for and protect the civil rights of their students," she concluded.

In the aftermath of the incident Vessal pulled the blinds on the Israeli flag in his window, no longer feeling safe. “I do not feel that it’s OK for someone to physically assault me on campus.”

Vessal is in the process of assembling a legal team to pursue legal action and has a meeting scheduled for Thursday with a campus detective. He said, “Before this I just thought Students for Justice in Palestine was crazy but I didn’t know it would lead to violence.”

In May of 2014, Temple University spokesman Brandon Lausch told the Washington Free Beacon that Temple University welcomed the controversial views on campus of Adjunct Temple University Professor Alessio Lerro, who, on a secret listserv, accused “Jewish scholars” of having “humungous influence” over the entirety of academia and stated, “It is time that Zionists are asked to finally account for their support to the illegal occupation of Palestine since 1967.”

Repeated phone calls to Temple University and an email to a campus spokesperson went unanswered.

UPDATE: Temple University told TruthRevolt that it now condemns Lerro's views:

It is Temple University’s position that the ample historical evidence, scholarship and research regarding the horrific impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish people is a strong counterpoint to Mr. Lerro’s statements. Mr. Lerro’s opinion is solely his own and not that of Temple University. Temple University condemns in the strongest possible terms the disparagement of any person or persons based on religion, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation or identity.

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Middle East and Other Musings

Thursday, August 21, 2014

Obama-Forever Self-Serving and If He Cannot Overcome His Rage Then We Face Two More Bleak Years!

Denunciations won't stop the men who killed James Foley.

President Obama points to evidence that they do, but he must have missed New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Obama's strategist discovers the virtues of capitalism.

Related Video

50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a Ferguson doesn't need to happen.

“Before this I just thought Students for Justice in Palestine was crazy but I didn’t know it would lead to violence.”

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