Magician Halbart Performs At The Savannah Classical Academy, April 27 at 6:15 PM. Spreading Illiberalness On American Campus Life!

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Rudy Halbart, a good friend and fellow memo reader, is also a magician and has agreed to perform for the kids at The Savannah Classical Academy, at 6:15 PM, April 27.
Out of the generosity of his big heart, Rudy. is doing this because I asked him.

I took some of my friends to visit SCA last Friday and if you have never been I urge you to go and watch Rudy perform and mingle with the kids.  You will not regret it and I am sure you will come away enthused that SCA is setting the bar for Chatham County education.

The school is located at 705 East Anderson Street.
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When GW was president he was vilified by all for :

a) causing the war in Iraq based on false information regarding WMD.

b) then he was vilified for causing the sectarian civil war among Sunnis, Shia and Kurds.

c) then he was vilified for destroying Iraq , the cost of the war and mounting casualties and deaths of U.S. forces.

I do not hear our biased lame press and media doing any math pertaining to the number of refugees when Obama became president and the number now.  The entire region is in flames and no one connects Obama's feckless policies to what is happening. Why is he given a pass?

Now Obama has a fleet of eight ship traversing  the seas near Yemen tracking an Iranian fleet supposedly carrying weapons but no one has decided what our navy is supposed to do by way of intervention, boarding etc. Is another disastrous message of American impotence about to be sent because this president does not know what he is doing and/or is afraid to act? (See 1 below.)


Meanwhile, we have an aged Democrat aspirant ducking  questions about her collecting money from renegade nations so she and Bill can maintain their, high on the hog, lifestyle while running around the nation telling the middle class how they are going to protect them and how they are supportive of  gays and women's rights.  What hypocrisy we will be watching and hearing for another 18 months  and what fools we are for tolerating our chains being jerked by these Arkansas yahoos.

What has happened to our nation is sickening and you can lay it at the feet of Democrats led by Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Hillary and all sheltered and protected by the liberal press and media who have lost total respect of their readership and viewers.

As for Grandma, we already had one Stonewall as president, do we really want another?

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My oldest daughter, Debra, graduated from Kenyon and her political science professor, John Agresto,  later became president of St John's College and he subsequently asked me to join St John's board of Advisors. (St John's is America's third oldest college and is The Great Books College.)

While at Kenyon, John defended a fellow political science professor who sought tenure and was denied it because he was too politically conservative.

John resigned and subsequently was honored by Kenyon for his courageous stance.

I mention this because Kenyon is one of those small Mid-West liberal arts colleges that has  always enjoyed  a fine reputation along with Oberlin, etc.

Kenyon Professor and noted poet,. John Crowe Ransom began the The Kenyon Literary magazine, which, at the time, was considered one of the finest in the nation.  Debra, had an article published in one of the journals.  That said, there was always a festering undercurrent of illiberalism  on  the Kenyon campus which now manifests itself in an Anti-Israel virus so typical of the growing type on most of America's college campuses where Palestinian students have resorted to rabble rousing and  school administrations tolerate such behaviour choking that dying Bill of Rights calling for free speech.

Liberals are. all too often.  intolerant when it comes to ideas that challenge their own thinking.  They shut down free speech and interrupt speakers who disagree with them, Their union friends smash people's skulls and break store front windows, take over Capital buildings  their lackeys in the press and media bias their reporting and now we see Palestinians and their misguided sympathizers making trumped up charges on college campuses aimed at silencing those who defend Israel or happen to be Jewish.

This is how radicals burrow into a nation and eventually destroy any vestige of freedom and exchange of ideas.. The elite  and the intellectuals start with education.  They use PC'ism to alter text books, rewrite history, brainwash the young and then move upward along the education cycle and food chain.

By the time innocent first graders graduate from colleges their thinking has been shaped, warped and their allegiance to liberal thought and intolerance of others has been established and ingrained.  This is what is happening in America and on  the campuses of its institutions of, so called, higher learning. It begins innocently under the umbrella of some cause, attacking the alleged abuse perpetrated by Israel on Palestinians which is simply a vehicle, a Trojan Horse, if you will, for a higher goal - our Republic's destruction.

California campuses and those of the Ivy League Universities have already been infected and now the sickness is filling in America's  middle geography. (See 2 below.)
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Khamenei's nephew publishes an open letter to Obama. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)

Shadow Plays in Yemen

Obama tries to back Saudi Arabia—but not enough to rile Iran.

ENLARGE

A Saudi soldier stands alert, on the border with Yemen, at a military point in Najran, Saudi Arabia. PHOTO: HASAN JAMALI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Shortly after the Iranian revolution in 1979, Jimmy Carter dispatched two squadrons of F-15s to Saudi Arabia to reassure the Kingdom that America had its back. Only when the fighters were in mid-flight did the President announce they were unarmed. Mr. Carter wanted to send a signal of resolve—but not too much resolve.

Here’s guessing the Saudis are experiencing déjá vu all over again after President Obamaordered the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt to the coast of Yemen, perhaps to interdict a flotilla of Iranian ships thought to be carrying supplies to the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in that country. We say “perhaps” because the Administration won’t say whether the U.S. would, in fact, stop the Iranian ships from making for the Yemeni coast. “I’m not telegraphing anything,” said a Pentagon spokesman about what the U.S. might be prepared to do.

But Riyadh won’t forbear for long if the Iranians can resupply by sea what the Saudis are destroying by air. The Saudis are also looking for evidence that the U.S. is still prepared to back them as Iran continues to arm the Kingdom’s enemies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Mr. Obama has insisted that the nuclear negotiations with Iran will not affect broader U.S. Mideast policy or reshape U.S. regional alliances. Stopping the Iranian ships would be a good way to prove the President means it.That won’t reassure the Saudis, who on Tuesday pressed the pause button on their military campaign against the Houthis after destroying a huge Houthi arms cache near San’a. The Saudi move follows pressure from Washington to ease up on the bombing, which has caused civilian casualties, along with rumored back channel talks between Riyadh and Tehran.

All the more so given Mr. Obama’s track record of trying not to offend Tehran. In Syria the U.S. has gone out of its way not to hit regime targets or make good on its promises to arm the Free Syrian Army because it feared upsetting Bashar Assad’s patrons in Tehran.

The Administration also reached out to the Houthis as recently as January. “The Obama administration has sought to describe the Houthis as a potential partner of Washington’s ever since the militia gained control of San’a in January,” the Journal reported late that month. “One Houthi commander said the U.S. provided logistical aid to the militants and exchanged intelligence” on al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In February the U.S. was forced to evacuate its embassy in San’a, then as now under Houthi control. So much for the outreach.

Mr. Obama seems to believe that his nuclear concessions will mollify Tehran and moderate its behavior in the region. But what we’ve seen so far is that nuclear diplomacy has instead convinced Iran that it can extend its writ throughout the Middle East.

Would Mr. Obama risk his nuclear deal over a naval incident, all for the sake of standing with the Saudis over Yemen? The Iranians surely doubt it, which is why they are now testing the U.S. at sea.

A U.S. carrier battle group is a formidable display of power, especially when wielded by a President with credibility. The reason so much of the Middle East is in flames is because no one believes Mr. Obama would use this military power.

2) Israel's Security Fence and the SJP Protesters

By Fred Baumann

Introduction by Richard Baehr:

Kenyon College, a small liberal arts college in Gambier, Ohio, is the undergraduate alma mater of both Thomas Lifson, American Thinker’s publisher and me. Professor Fred Baumann has taught political science at the college for over 30 years, and is one of its most distinguished professors in a department that has had many fine teachers through the years.

In the last two years, Kenyon has been infected with the arrival and formation of the anti-Israel hate group, Students for Justice in Palestine. Last year, SJP erected an “apartheid wall” to “celebrate” the beginning of Passover in the College’s main dining hall.  SJP is a big fan of in-your-face activism, and at some colleges (e.g. Temple University), this has meant slugging pro-Israel students in the face.  This year, the group  set up their wall at Kenyon right after Holocaust Remembrance Day (coincidental I am sure). 

I spoke at Kenyon about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in February, and one SJP member, who did not attend my talk, nevertheless wrote a defamatory piece for the college newspaper, claiming I was an Islamophobe, prejudiced, and a fool, and calling for greater campus-wide action against me, whatever that means. All of this condemnation was based on hearsay about a talk he did not attend (likely from another unbiased SJP member of course), and a few articles in American Thinker that I did not write. Anyone who wants evidence of the meaning of guilt by association, would have found this article of interest.

Needless to say, the student never withdrew his article, nor apologized, though a few subsequent letters to the college paper revealed how off base, ignorant and malicious he was.

In response to the second annual presentation of the "apartheid wall" at Kenyon, Professor Baumann has written an open letter to the Kenyon community on why a wall was constructed by Israel after the second intifada.  Of course the wall is not a wall, but a low fence for almost all of its length, and a wall only in areas where there was a lot of sniper fire aimed at Israeli villages from elevated Palestinian communities during the second intifada. Baumann lays out the truth: Palestinians hate the wall, because it has made it much harder to kill Jews in Israel. 

Dear members of the Kenyon community:

Kenyon Students for Justice in Palestine have erected their "Wall" for the second year in a row.  It is meant to arouse your sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian Arabs who live behind it and whose entry into Israel is impeded by it.  It is meant, correspondingly, to arouse your indignation at Israel, which so apparently heartlessly erected it.  In their explanatory message they repeat the lie that Israel engages in apartheid.  Ask Israel's deputy ambassador to Norway about that one; he is an Arab. Or listen to him on YouTube.

Oh, and by the way, how are Jews and for that matter Christians treated in Arab countries? Let's not talk about that, right?

So, in the spirit of the promotion of rational debate, I want to let the Kenyon community know why that fence (it's only a wall in a few places where it discourages sniping) was put up in the first place.

During the so-called Second Intifada (not a spontaneous uprising at all, but ordered by Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian chief), the more or less open access Palestinians had to Israel resulted in a series of horrific massacres.  Checkpoints on the West Bank were widely, and rightly, seen as both harassing the innocent and ineffective against the guilty.  I would urge all of you to Google the following on the Internet to see what those massacres accomplished.  If your need to understand requires gruesome pictures of dead bodies, they are right there at the top of the list of links.  If you would be satisfied by head shots of the victims, they are available too.  If you just want to read about what happened, there is plenty of information on that as well.  Specifically, I would urge you to Google "Sbarro's pizzeria bombing," "Dolphinarium bombing," and "Netanya Passover Seder bombing."

In the wake of these catastrophes, public opinion in Israel gradually moved in the direction of calling for a fence of separation. Interestingly, the pressure came primarily from the Israeli Left; the Right was afraid that building such a fence would amount to giving up claims to the West Bank.  Eventually, the fence was built and the number of terrorist events declined rapidly.  That meant it again was possible for a bunch of teen age Russian immigrant girls to go to a disco without the likelihood of being slaughtered, as had happened at the Dolphinarium.  (Here's the barebones Wikipedia description of what happened there, by the way:

"Suicide bomber Saeed Hotari was standing in line on a night in front of the Dolphinarium, when the area was packed with youngsters (most of them Russian new arrivals) waiting for admission. Survivors of the attack later described how the young Palestinian bomber appeared to taunt his victims before the explosion, wandering among them dressed in clothes that led some to mistake him for an orthodox Jew from Asia, and banging a drum packed with explosives and ball bearings, while repeating the words in Hebrew: "Something's going to happen". At 23:27, he detonated his explosive device. It was the second attack in five months on the same target. Witnesses claimed that body parts lay all over the area, and that bodies were piled one above another on the sidewalk before being collected. Many civilians in the vicinity of the bombing rushed to assist emergency services."

True, terrorism continues.  Thus see yesterday's Jerusalem Post for the story of a plan to bomb a shopping mall that was detected by the police.  Still, when it comes to the fence of separation, few things have been done in the history of human conflict that have produced more good for one people at such a low cost to the other.  A fence is the single most passive form of self-defense there is.  It keeps the killers away without retaliation, preemption or anything else.

As for the grievous harm SJP and all the other haters of Israel claim it does the Palestinians, I would strongly urge each of you to go to YouTube and watch the reflections of a Palestinian woman whose house is in fact overshadowed by the wall at its highest, in Bethlehem.  She is a Christian and you will perhaps not be surprised, after you have watched it and heard her story, that she got death threats for having told the truth.

So far I have tried to convey information for the purpose of taking the debate past gestures and political theater.  But here is a question I would like to ask KSJP.  I know it is a harsh one, but still I believe it necessary to ask it:  what is it KSJP and all the other SJPs and BDSers in this country and the world, really want in protesting the fence?  Are they most concerned with the difficulties Palestinians suffer in living their lives?   If so, why aren't they vociferously protesting the recent massacre of Palestinians in Yarmouk

by ISIS?   Or are they really just concerned that the fence makes it so hard for terrorists to murder Jews?  When KSJP invited Steven Salaita to speak at Kenyon, a man who rejoices in the murder of Jewish children, they gave us every reason to think that their anger is really directed at the fence's frustration of new Sbarro's Pizza, new Dophinarium, new Passover Seder massacres.  

Perhaps this suspicion is incorrect.  But if so, one wonders why SJP, which claims to speak out of humanitarian compassion, doesn't  feel responsible for explaining how, if the fence comes down, they will assure that the mass murder of Jews doesn't start again.

Sincerely,

Fred Baumann

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3)Extraordinary Open Letter from Ayatollah Khamenei’s Nephew to Obama: Stop Nuclear Deal
By Roger L. Simon

An open letter to President Obama was posted on an Iranian website (khodnevis.org) today from Dr. Mahmoud Moradkhani — the nephew of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.  This letter is explosive and tells Obama, in essence, that the ayatollah, his uncle, is lying in negotiations, practicing the Shia doctrine of taqiyya in which it is permissible for Muslims to lie to the infidel for the advancement of Islam.   He advises the president not to pursue his nuclear deal with Iran and to focus on the atrocious human rights record of that country.  But allow the doctor to speak for himself:

Dear Mr. President

I am presenting this open letter as one of the serious opponents of the Islamic republic of Iran on behalf of the like-minded opposition groups and myself. Because of my knowledge of this regime, especially of Ali Khamenei who is my uncle (my mother’s brother), I see it as my duty to inform you about this regime and the issue of nuclear negotiations with the Islamic regime of Iran.

Let me at first inform you that the regime that falsely calls itself a republic came to power in 1979 by deceiving Iranian people and the world through provoking Iranian people against the regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and gaining the support of the world community.

The tragedy of Cinema Rex*, believing in Khomeini’s words and then establishing a backward regime that is violent, medieval and against all international laws are all results of Iranian people and the world community being deceived. We are witnessing that not only a rich and cultured country like Iran has become a victim of this regime but also the Middle East and the whole free world. The intervention of Ali Khamenei’s regime (following Khomeini’s footsteps who had no other intention other that domination of Iraq) in Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria is more than obvious. As if these were not enough, he has now added the Arabian Peninsula to that list.

In any case, this regime has done great damage to Iranians and to the international community.

We can find a historical example of this kind of deception prior to the Second World War. Hitler manipulated and deceived German people and European countries and the hesitation in addressing the problem with Hitler led to a great disaster.

Due to the changes in time, the domain of the disaster might become limited now but breach of human rights is the same, regardless of the number of people who become victimized in the process.

Ali Khamenei and his collaborators know very well that they will never become a nuclear power. They certainly do not have the national interest of Iranian in their mind; they just use the nuclear issue to bully the countries in the region and export their revolution and middle-aged culture to other countries. Obviously, you and European countries do not give the Islamic regime any concession unless you are certain that they comply with the agreement. The Islamic regime of Iran will certainly prolong the verification period the same way that they have delayed and prolonged the nuclear talks. It is in this period that the wounded regime will retaliate with its destructive policies.

The countless breaches of human rights violations, spreading of Islamic fundamentalism, intervention and creating crisis in the Middle East are all unacceptable and contrary to democratic and humane beliefs of yours and ours.

While we can, with some measure of decisiveness and courage, uproot the wicked tree of the Islamic regime of Iran, just settling for cutting its branches is nothing more than avoiding responsibility.

It is clear that the eradication of the Islamic regime of Iran is the responsibility and mission of Iranian people and specially the opposition abroad; however, by putting obstacles in front of Iranian people and the Iranian opposition abroad one prevents them from doing their task.

The Islamic regime of Iran, based on their deceptive nature have sent their mercenaries abroad and even managed to recruit and manipulate some American-Iranians. Individuals who out of self-interest are lobbying for the Islamic regime of Iran and hiding its true nature and giving a false picture of its intentions; in the same manner that while Khomeini was in France, the so-called Iranian intellectuals did not let people of Iran and the world, realize the true meaning “the Islamic republic”. Those so-called intellectuals polished the remarks of Khomeini and converted them to positive, popular, strong and victorious ones.

We see that unfortunately in your country and your state media (the Persian section of Voice of America) and especially in UK (the Persian section of BBC) the remarks of the opposition of Islamic regime of Iran are being censored and instead the indecent habit of analyzing and relaying statements of the Islamic regime of Iran have become a norm.

I have a deep understanding and insight of the habits, morals and true indentions of this regime and I find it necessary to let you and the world know that the true evil of the Islamic regime of Iran is far more damaging and dangerous to be resolved by just signing an agreement.

People who have always lied, deceived and believe in Taqiya**, people whose main goal is supremacy and domination over others can never be trusted.

Instead they should be confronted with the very basic principles that have led to their criminality

and

• To put an end on breaching of human rights violations; in other words, an end to Qisas***, random executions, discrimination, suppression of dissent, media repression, religious and ideological hegemony.
• Devolving power to the people and the abolition of restrictive laws, such as mandatory supervision in elections.
• Giving freedom to religious minorities and repealing laws limiting the choice of thought and religion.
• Non-interfere policy toward governments of countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
• Cancelling the assassination orders of dissidents in the world that have resulted in the killing of journalists, writers and even cartoonists.

I believe that any agreement or concession that is not associated with these basic conditions in reality will only be assisting this regime in achieving its indecent goals.

The possible disaster following this kind of hesitation will be similar to the historical mistake made prior to the Second World War.

Ali Khamenei will not be satisfied with the little that he has today and surely, and in all secrecy, at the first possible moment will attempt to bully and dominate.

Removing the crippling sanctions without fundamental changes in this regime will not be in Iran’s interest and will only facilitates the Islamic regime of Iran in reaching its objectives.

United States of America and Europe should not jeopardize their long-term interests due to short-term ones.

There are powerful and pro-active forces in the Iranian opposition and if the censorship of the media that are supporting the Islamic regime of Iran were to be removed, the opposition can easily organize and assist the powerful civil disobedience of Iranian people.

Iranian people want peace and freedom; without this regime not only can they ensure the resurrection of a civilized country but also a peaceful region.

Yours respectfully

Dr.Mahmoud Moradkhani