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The nun agreed. A moment later two military police ran up and asked, "Sister, have you seen a soldier?"
The nun replied, "He went that way."
After the military police ran off, the soldier crawled out from under her skirt and said, "I can't thank you enough Sister. You see, I don't want to go to Ukraine." The nun said, "I understand completely." The soldier added, "I hope I'm not rude, but you have a great pair of legs!"
The nun replied,"If you had looked a little higher, you would've also seen a great pair of balls. I don't want to go to Ukraine either."
The betrayal over the Iranian bomb.
A recent comment tells us everything about the danger to the west from the Biden administration
By Melanie Phillips
Earlier this week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the breakout time for Iran to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon had now come down to “a matter of weeks”.
This is clearly deeply alarming news. But why did Blinken choose to announce this to the world? After all, it invites the question, “So what are you going to do about it?”
Blinken told the hearing that renewing the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which lifted sanctions in return for limitations on its nuclear programme, remained “the best way to address the nuclear challenge posed by Iran”.
But negotiations stalled several weeks ago, as the result of widespread outrage over leaks revealing that the American negotiators had accepted Iran’s demand that the United States lift the terrorist designation from the regime’s terrorist army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
So it’s possible that Blinken’s stark warning was intended to frighten people so much that opposition to the US concessions to Iran to seal the deal just melted away.
Although both American and Israeli sources have been briefing that a deal is now exceedingly unlikely, it would be unwise to conclude it won’t happen. For the Biden administration’s determination to seal it has been astounding.
Blinken and his foreign-policy team ignore the fact that it would funnel billions of dollars into a terrorist regime that has launched countless attacks against American and western interests and regularly declares its intention to wipe Israel off the map.
They seem oblivious to the fact that the inter-continental ballistic missiles they would be facilitating through this agreement would point not at Israel but at America and Europe.
They brush aside the fact that Iran recently plotted to murder the former National Security Advisor John Bolton and the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. At the Senate committee hearing, Blinken merely acknowledged “an ongoing threat against American officials both present and past” while reiterating his commitment to sign an agreement with its perpetrators.
Blinken and his team ignore the way the regime lies through its teeth. Its repeated claim that it had no intention of using its nuclear programme to build nuclear weapons was recently demolished by a former Iranian politician, Ali Motahhari.
“When we began our nuclear activity our goal was indeed to build a bomb,” Motahhari told an Iranian radio outlet. The idea of building a bomb as a form of regional “intimidation,” he said, was known to all officials in Tehran.
So the question is why the Biden administration is so fixated upon doing this deal. And the answer to that also answers the question of why it chose to announce that Iran was about to get the bomb.
It was former President Barack Obama — several of whose retreads are now Biden administration officials — whose determination to bring Iran in from the cold led to the 2015 deal. Obama reportedly wanted to “even up” the rival Shia and Sunni Islamic camps in the region, and thus create a balance of power.
In addition to this deeply questionable realpolitik, certain members of the Biden administration are also motivated by malice against Israel.
But the main reason for this fixation, embodied in Blinken’s own mindset, is surely the dominant western liberal dogma that war never solves anything, and that the appropriate response to aggression is always negotiation and compromise.
As Blinken’s team has reportedly said, a nuclear Iran is preferable to military confrontation.
That staggering statement tells us everything we need to know about the Biden administration and the danger it poses to the western world. For it means that it will refuse to stop a fanatical and genocidal aggressor if going to war is the only way to do so.
As a result, it lies to itself and to everyone else to minimise the extreme danger posed by that aggressor. When reminded about Iran’s intended extermination of Israel, the same officials replied: “The world would never let that happen”. Well, try telling that to Ukraine.
And as a result of promoting this fantasy, the Biden administration tells a demonstrable untruth about its proposed deal with Iran.
As Blinken told the Senate committee: “We continue to believe that getting back into compliance with the agreement would be the best way to address the nuclear challenge posed by Iran and to make sure that an Iran that is already acting with incredible aggression doesn’t have a nuclear weapon”.
But the reported terms of the deal actually guarantee that, after a relatively brief delay, Iran will legitimately get nuclear weapons — just as the 2015 deal guaranteed a legitimate Iranian nuclear arsenal after a somewhat longer delay.
The Biden administration cannot fail to have grasped this undeniable fact. It follows that, with or without a deal, it believes that Iran will get the bomb — because the United States won’t stop it.
The Biden team, therefore, wants the deal as a fig leaf to camouflage its appalling betrayal of the west. But if Iran won’t provide that fig leaf, the Biden administration has to deflect the blame.
That’s why it has said Iran is now on the verge of nuclear breakout — and that this is all the fault of former President Donald Trump for taking America out of the deal in May 2018.
That agreement, it says, helped set back the time it would take for Iran to procure a weapon. So it blames Trump’s withdrawal for Iran’s subsequent acceleration towards break-out capacity.
“Under the Iran nuclear deal, Iran’s nuclear program was tightly constrained and monitored by international inspectors,” said the White House spokesperson Jen Psaki. After the United States pulled out, Iran “rapidly accelerated its nuclear program and reduced cooperation with international inspectors in non-performance of Iran nuclear deal commitments”.
But this is highly tendentious revisionism. It was impossible to monitor what Iran was actually up to even when it was said to be “complying” with the 2015 deal because it never allowed the inspectors onto its most sensitive sites.
As a State Department report observed last week: “Serious concerns remained outstanding regarding possible undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran,” and noted that the Islamic Republic had “not fully cooperated with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which is trying to investigate possible secret nuclear activity at four sites around the country”.
Moreover, as Andrea Stricker and Anthony Ruggiero write for the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies: “The Biden administration has failed at each quarterly IAEA Board of Governors meeting to recommend that the body censure Iran for its restrictions on IAEA monitoring, non-cooperation with a separate IAEA investigation into Tehran’s undeclared nuclear activities, and flagrant nuclear escalations — the majority of which have occurred on the Biden administration’s watch”.
Now the Israelis are talking to the Biden team about a “Plan B” following the likely collapse of a deal. But the awful logic of the team’s approach is that the United States won’t move on from the 2015 agreement but will treat it as a kind of zombie deal—neither dead nor alive.
As Behnam Ben Taleblu of the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies told Benny Avni of The New York Sun, the more likely outcome is “a ‘plan C’: not announce that the talks have collapsed, but also not revert to pressure” on Iran.
The big lie about the Obama-Biden courtship of Iran is that this was intended to prevent it from getting the bomb. It wasn’t. It was to conceal what the United States had decided was inevitable — an Iranian nuclear weapon — because it intended to do nothing to stop it.
So does Israel have its own plan? We can only hope.
Jewish News Syndicate
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This from a dear conservative friend and fellow memo reader who sent with one word "distressing."
https://www.
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Does The NYT's reach into the sewers to find such employees and then claim it is not biased? The Ochs-Sulzberger Families must truly hate themselves. The worst Jews are the ones who hate Jews. They are sick and will go to any length to create problems.
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The anti-Israel past of NY Times Jerusalem bureau’s latest hire
New York Times' Jerusalem-based news assistant Hiba Yazbek. (Twitter)
By Alana Goodman, Washington Free Beacon
The latest hire in the New York Times‘ Jerusalem Bureau doesn’t exactly have a history of scrupulous objectivity when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hiba Yazbek, a former intern for Israeli-bashing Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), called herself a victim of Israel’s “mental occupation” and said Palestinians are a “minority in our own land” in a 2020 speech.
Yazbek, who joined the Times as a news assistant last week, deleted similar comments she had posted on Twitter, as well as posts in which she condemned Israel for killing terrorists, according to the media watchdog group Honest Reporting.
Although Yazbek deleted a number of her politically charged posts, she still has a photo of her sitting next to squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) as her Twitter background. Another photo posted on Twitter shows Yazbek posing with Tlaib. Yazbek interned in 2019 for Tlaib—one of the most vocal anti-Israel members of Congress who has accused the Jewish state of “apartheid.”
The hire is likely to fuel concerns about Times reporting on the Middle East conflict, which pro-Israel watchdog groups claim is deeply skewed against the Jewish state. In 2019, the Times was forced to apologize after publishing an anti-Semitic cartoon that depicted then-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog with a Star of David on his collar, leading a blind President Donald Trump who was drawn wearing a yarmulke.
The outlet also caught flak for publishing a glowing portrayal of Louis Farrakhan and a lengthy interview with Alice Walker that failed to mention their anti-Semitism in 2020. That same year, Times opinion editor Bari Weiss stepped down and said she had faced harassment from colleagues over her support for Israel.
Anti-Israel media bias hasn’t been confined to the Times. Last year, the Associated Press hired an anti-Israel activist who accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and helped organize protests against Jewish students traveling to Israel on the Birthright program, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The AP later cut ties with the reporter.
The Times did not respond to a request for comment.
In a speech posted by the Muslim American Leadership Alliance, Yazbek said her father’s family was “forced out of Nazareth due to the occupation” in 1948, the year Israel was founded, and moved to Amman, Jordan. She said her family later moved back to Nazareth and she has Israeli citizenship.
“We are a minority in our own land. We experience micro-aggressions every day,” she said in the speech in 2020. “Living in your own land but feeling like a second-class and third-class citizen your entire life, I would say is a mental occupation, in the very least.”
Yazbek added that her “first goal is to bring awareness” to this plight.
In another Twitter post that has since been deleted, Yazbek denounced Israeli soldiers who shot and killed a Palestinian man after he rammed his car into them at a checkpoint, a common type of Palestinian terror attack that is often followed by the driver getting out of the vehicle and stabbing the victims.
“I can’t stop thinking about Ahmad Erekat’s mother and sister, a bride on her wedding day, waiting for him to pick them up from the salon,” wrote Yazbek. “Could they have ever imagined that he was late because he was lying in the street bleeding to death after getting shot by Israeli soldiers?”
Yazbek also said she was “livid” after Saber Ibrahim Mahmoud Suleiman, a Hamas commander, was killed in an Israeli airstrike, claiming that Israel “murdered” him, according to a still-available Twitter post.
A serious observer, and especially a sober-minded journalist, would be expected to know the difference between ‘murder’ and a legitimate military casualty,” said CAMERA, a pro-Israel media watchdog group that flagged the post. “Yazbek’s comment, in other words, was far from serious, sober, or objective-minded.”
The hire could also raise questions about the paper’s social media policy. Earlier this month, the outlet encouraged its reporters to reduce the time they spend on Twitter, where its journalists are already prohibited from “tak[ing] sides on issues that the Times is seeking to cover objectively.”
The Times updated its social media policy in 2017, stating that its reporters “must not express partisan opinions, promote political views, endorse candidates, make offensive comments or do anything else that undercuts the Times‘s journalistic reputation.”
Executive editor Dean Baquet went further earlier this month, encouraging reporters to “meaningfully reduce how much time you’re spending on [Twitter], tweeting or scrolling” and warning that “our feeds [can] become echo chambers” in a memo.
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DOV and I agree:
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