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What I have been saying about PC behaviour masking the destruction of opposing beliefs etc. What self-inflicted nonsense. (See 1 below.)
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Will Netanyahu draw a line and stick to what he draws? (See 2 below.)
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More on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The meaning of NABKA and the impact/failure of UNRWA.(See 3 below.)
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Time for getting serious regarding what to do about Islamic Terrorism is past, way past.
The first thing we must wipe out is the Obama concept of denial and all those he planted in our government . Then we need to bring the world together on focusing on making the climate horrible for terrorists. That is the cklmate change that needs to occur. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) The Most Absurd, Needless Cultural Suicide in History
With a family member seriously ill and confined to different hospitals recently, I’ve sought out hospital chapels to be alone and say prayers. Or I should say I sought out the areas formerly known as “chapels.” Now they are known as Interfaith Centers or Spiritual Care Areas or Meditation Rooms. There is no Christian cross hanging in any of them lest someone be offended. There are, however, Muslim prayer rugs and signs pointing toward Mecca.
In some of these spiritual areas you can write down a prayer for your loved one and put it in a prayer wheel: a cylindrical container that has instructions to “spin it” after you put in the tiny paper containing your prayer. Though the wheels are of Tibetan Buddhist tradition, there is no telltale Sanskrit on the outside, or anything else indicating it’s anything other than a fun way to spin your prayer from your fingertips up to God, or some Creator, or whatever force you think will have some impact on your life.
There are tiny prayer rocks you can put in your pocket; pamphlets with inspiring verses from the Psalms, the Quran, the Talmud, a little Buddhist dharma thrown in and some Native American quotes about the Great Spirit to round out your peaceful ecumenical experience. I suppose some people might lament that there is nothing for the atheists and Satan worshipers. In at least one spiritual area, there were pamphlets with inspirational thoughts for pagans.
As I kneeled to pray, I didn’t know which way to face. The front of the room held a table and vase filled with artificial flowers. That wouldn’t do – I felt as though I were praying to Keats’ Grecian urn. I turned the other direction, but Mecca didn’t seem an appropriate way to face either. Two choices left – one direction faced an abstract painting that looked as though it had spilled out of someone’s troubled mind just before they’d purposely leapt from a window; the other direction faced some stacked chairs.
Finding a Post-It note and a pencil, I drew a cross and stuck it to a panel behind the fake flowers in the front of the room. I got down on my knees and faced it. That’s when I saw the CCTV camera. For a brief moment I panicked realizing I had just broken the rules and put a cross on public display. I said my prayers and left, but noticed the tiny drawing was gone first thing the next morning.
I wandered into the back halls of the spiritual room in this great, large hospital in upstate New York. They had dozens of Christian Bibles piled next to dozens of Qurans – all ready to be given to whoever was in spiritual need. Two new unopened boxes of Qurans had just come in and were waiting to be stacked on the shelf. There was one book labeled as a guide to Jewish prayer.
I take my Bible everywhere, so I never really need a room or a special place to talk to God. But I do remember those places used to exist in hospitals -- places where a Christian cross adorned the front of the room and a Bible lay open on a lectern for anyone to read. When you walked in, a quiet reverence came over you because you believed that room to be blessed as a designated dwelling place for the presence of God. There you could commune with a power that could bring about divine intervention. I remember kneeling in some of those rooms, begging God to spare the life of a loved one; asking for mercy, forgiveness, or letting my tears fall onto a carpet where so many other’s had shed tears with similar pleadings.
But in these new touchy-feely, one-religion, one-world, global-peace-inspired rooms I feel…nothing. It’s as though your mind, and even history itself, has been wiped clean of any memory of that God your parents talked about. Then you angrily wonder what the hell happened while you were busy taking the kids to soccer practice. If you have any sense of the gravity of what’s really happened, you feel like Charleton Heston riding up the beach and finding the Statue of Liberty broken and beleaguered in the sand: “You maniacs! You blew it up!...God damn you all to hell!”
The worst part was nobody seemed to care about little things like hospital chapels. Our Christian chapels were replaced with generic meditation rooms containing not-so-generic Muslim prayer rugs, qiblah compasses and Buddhist prayer wheels and nobody dared peep in protest. In fact, in many places, the moves were likely heralded as “interfaith solidarity.”
Such was the case with the sign I passed on my way home from the hospital. With a Lutheran billboard as a backdrop proclaiming “Hallelujah Jesus Lives!” a sign below it proclaimed, “To our Muslim neighbors, Blessed Ramadan.” I pulled into the parking lot to take a closer look. The sign was a product of the New York State Council of Churches. Apparently I didn’t notice them last year when they began popping up “in front of churches and synagogues, and on urban and suburban lawns across the Capital Region.”
An article in the Albany Times-Union last year waxed progressively poetic when it said the signs “were meant as a kind of metaphor, these small candles of interfaith solidarity lighted against the darkness of religious intolerance and racism.” The article went on to say that, “They were a rebuke to anti-Islam rhetoric spouted by the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, who called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States.” Apparently, it didn’t start out as a New York thing; the NYS Council of Churches got the idea from a Michigan counterpart, and it also comes up under other states Council of Churches’ organizations. On the Minnesota website, you can “request a #BlessedRamadan sign” and also memorize what to say, verbatim, when you call to “tell Congress that you oppose Trump’s rewritten order to discriminate against refugees…”
I cannot follow the logic that leads to embracing diversity by ripping down crosses in hospital chapels, while Christians simultaneously stampede to the curb in order to be the first ones to wave “Blessed Ramadan” to their passing Muslim neighbors.
Maybe it’s time for everyone to come clean about their true intentions: To discard all individual religions in the name of peace and form that one universal religion that the United Nations has been clamoring for. The idiocy is the Vatican thinks it’s going to be able to hold a rosary in one hand and a Quran in the other; and the Lutherans think all they have to do is take pork out of their church suppers and the Muslims will be their BFFs. Meanwhile, Muslims have no intention of capitulating, and the West mistakenly thinks it can integrate Islam into everyday life the same way it successfully absorbed Yoga, Reiki and Feng shui.
We are watching the most absurd, needless and naïve cultural suicide in history.
Susan D. Harris can be reached at www.susandharris.com.
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2)
| Will Israel be undermined by "Best Case Scenario" Allen Security Plan? |
| By Dr. Aaron Lerner When Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu opted to placate President Obama and buy time by facilitating the development of a security plan by U.S. Marine Corps General John Allen in consultation with Israeli security people there were those who warned that the move would inevitably lead to the formulation of a best case scenario plan endorsed by Israeli brass. After all - Israeli brass have a long record of being on the wrong side of history in their evaluations Almost the entire general staff was pushing us to retreat from the Golan Heights in exchange for a signing ceremony and some gizmos. They also thought it was a fantastic idea to make every withdrawal we ever carried out or considered carrying out. So much so that the Council for Peace and Security of ex-brass could also be known as the the Council for Withdrawal as in their entire history they have NEVER concluded that a concession to the Arabs or a withdrawal did not serve Israel's security. Best case scenario? Just read the details below and you will appreciate that these ideas were clearly never tested in a simulation in which the "red team" wanted to undermine the system. Are the Palestinian idiots? Is it truly reasonable to assume that they are so profoundly inept that they won't come up with a way to pick this apart? And. Oops. Once they are a sovereign state they can simply drop the fantastic arrangement on paper and they will still be a sovereign state. At most it’s a question of coming up with an excuse that they can get enough allies to accept. Don't be surprised that the arguments are so convincing that they earn the support of major political elements even in the United States. Question: Will our Prime Minister draw a line in the sand and put an end to this folly? +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 3) Nakba: The Source of Arab-Israeli Conflict
by Asaf Romirowsky
Since Israel's inception in 1948, the Arab-Palestinians mark Nakba Day. Nakba, the Arabic term for catastrophe, represents much more than just the physical creation of the modern State of Israel in 1948, which Palestinians decree as the cataclysmic disaster. It is also the Palestinian process of refusing to accept the fact that a sovereign Jewish state could even be allowed to come into being.
Over the years, one of the greatest ironies is that Arab members of Knesset have repeatedly proposed establishing an official Nakba Day. Although the Knesset's Ministerial Committee on Legislative Affairs eventually banned these proposals, they indicate how ingrained 1948 is in the Arab psyche. To the Knesset's credit, there was an understanding that marking the Nakba is harmful and propagates the notion that Israel's birth was illegitimate.
But what is the Nakba all about? On the one hand, the very idea that an Arab-Israeli MK could propose Nakba be celebrated as a national holiday highlights the extent and openness of Israeli society; even ludicrous idea can be raised in its parliament. On the other, such a proposal would require Israeli society to forget what Zionism is all about.
Moreover, the Nakba's vitality is embedded in the existence of Arab-Palestinian refugees who serve as a permanent reminder of the original sin of 1948. Nakba is also what has allowed Arab countries to treat their own brethren as bargaining chips rather than human beings whose suffering and deprivation they could have alleviated.
Let's take Lebanon. Arab-Palestinians amount to approximately 450,000 refugees registered in 12 camps run by UNRWA, where Lebanese authorities have no jurisdiction. The Palestinians have been caught in a perfect storm, where they can rationalize and blame their condition on Lebanon and Israel in tandem, yet Israel is guiltier given its sole responsibility for the Nakba. While Palestinians are prohibited from working in most professions and from owning property, it is never seen as an outgrowth of Lebanese policy or Arab politics at large.
Claudio Cordone, UNRWA's country director, of course claims that Palestinians in Lebanon feel trapped in a political limbo and see an "almost total lack of meaningful political prospects of a solution" to their perceived displacement from "Palestine."
Sheikh Mohammad Muwad, a Palestinian imam in Sidon, was recently quoted as saying, "[T]hey starve us, so we go back to Palestine. They deprive us, so that we go back to Palestine. Well, go ahead, send us back to Palestine! Let us go to the border, and we will march back into Palestine, no matter how many martyrs we must give."
It's a statement that is analogous to the ones heard for decades, for example in 1949 when UN's Economic Survey Mission reported on a visit to Gaza in 1949: "In one of the camps, the refugees staged quite a demonstration. A large sign had been printed in English on which were the following, numbered as indicated: 1. Send us back home. 2. Compensate us. 3. Maintain us until we are refreshed. Just what they had in mind by 'refreshed' I leave to your imagination."
Syrian-Palestinians who fled that civil war have protested outside UNRWA's offices in Lebanon, asking for help. But the double standard is critical to Palestinian identity; the Nakba narrative mandates the creation of a Palestinian state only in Israel, while everything beyond those borders should be a constant reminder that there is no option for resolution outside of "Palestine."
UNRWA's success has been in transforming itself into the guardian of the refugees' isolation, preserving the uniqueness of the Palestinian refugees' identity as an entity that cannot be assimilated into any Arab country, but only into what is perceived as Palestine. This dependency prevents the refugees from directly getting involved in local politics, leaving UNRWA as their only voice in the "Arab wilderness."UNRWA's success has been in
In 2007, shortly after the Hamas takeover of Gaza, Ahmed Jammal, a father of five from Gaza, exclaimed inside an aid center in Gaza City that "we now have only God and then UNRWA." This perceived theological bond has enshrined the fact the no Palestinian leader will ever get the mandate to give up the "right" of return or UNRWA's role, and this is the Nakba at its core.
Since 2017 is the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War—a war for Israel's survival—there has been significant growth in commemorations reminding the world of Palestinian statelessness and refugeeness. It is a reminder that anniversaries should celebrate growth and not paralysis.
Asaf Romirowsky is the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 4) Time for a Terrorism Accord, Not a Climate Accord 
Islam, like cancer, needs a cure. And we all have to participate in the search for one before it's too late.
Yes, this is about Islam, not "radical" Islam or some other off-shoot, real or imagined, because the tenets that have inspired the non-stop spate of terrorism across the world in recent years are spelled out clearly in sections of the Koran and the Hadith and other holy works of Islam. They provide justification for ISIS and a hundred other groups that may or may not replace them, now and in the future. This cannot continue -- unless we really do want to destroy ourselves.
To be clear, this is not about bad people (many Muslims are fine human beings), but about a malignant ideology from the seventh century that must be expunged for the survival of all.
But the majority of Western leaders don't want to know that. In fact, I'd wager that most have not even bothered to educate themselves in any serious way about Islam nearly sixteen years after 9/11 and with all the constant carnage that has gone on since and has been increasing significantly, not just in London and Manchester but virtually everywhere.
These Westerners are not only willfully blind, they are suicidal. But we cannot let them commit suicide for the rest of us. They have to go.
Similarly, the recent Paris climate accord is not only based on bad or "cooked" Climategate science, it is a deliberate conscious/unconscious deflection from the genuine "present danger" in front of us. It is no more than obfuscation allowing moral narcissists to feel good about themselves, virtue signaling about an environmental armageddon that hasn't happened and may never happen while, in real life, people are actually murdered on London bridges and in Cairo churches.
What we need now is an international terrorism accord -- and, unlike the climate accord, a binding one -- that would commit the world, including the Muslim nations themselves, to the complete reformation of Islam that is the necessary basis for an end to this terrorism.
President Trump made a good start in Riyadh in his address to the Sunni leaders, but we must go much further. It is correct that the Islamic world should be the ones to change their religion, but the rest of us on the planet are too affected by the results to stand by and wait. From the horrifying (London this weekend) to the daily (the constant of indignity of being scanned at airports, concerts, museums, etc.), we are all victims of Islamic ideology. We have a right, indeed an obligation, to participate in and demand its change. Otherwise, it will only get worse.
Since Trump had the courage to open the discussion in Saudi Arabia, he should attempt to expand the dialogue and create this global accord. Egypt's el-Sisi would be a good partner because he already had the guts to criticize his own religion. All should be invited, even those who would never come (like the mullahs). All must confront the question of why Islam, unique among the world's religions today, has so much violence committed in its name. What is it about Islam that attracts this? What therefore has to be changed, both in behavior and ideology?
The event should be public, with Islam ultimately made to pledge itself to human rights as accepted by the West -- equal rights for women and homosexuals, separation of church (mosque) and state, no discrimination based on race or religion (why no churches allowed in Saudi Arabia?), etc. -- not the absurd Orwellian version of human rights promulgated the UN Human Rights Council.
This demand should be made to all quarters of the Islamic world with economic punishment applied if necessary. The time for diplomatic politesse is long over. Islam must be forced to join modernity. Reactionary multiculturalists among us must be ignored, along with their hypocritical (and nonsensical) belief that all religions are equal. To do otherwise would be to treat Muslim people like children. And that is what the West has been doing for some time -- with atrocious results for all.
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