Over Israeli and U.S. objections, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to visit Iran next week for a summit of non-aligned developing nations • Israel: Unfortunate that U.N. chief gives legitimacy to Iranian leaders who call for Israel's destruction.
Egypt asks Israel to delay talks on tank withdrawal from Sinai'
Egyptian security official says Cairo asked to delay discussion due to "the sensitive situation" in Sinai as troops act against terrorism, Ma'an reports • Israeli political sources say talks have intensified and become more frequent in recent days.
FP: But of course. This is exactly how it’s done. And it works.
A trip to the U.S. by Egypt's President Mohammed Morsi may solidify relations between the two countries • The U.S. visit will be Morsi's first since taking office on June 30.
FP: The illusion of an US-Cairo-Ankara alliance. Only one partner believes in it. Guess which. Morsi will play Obama like a violin.
With nearly half its population dependent on subsidies for necessities, an effective unemployment rate of 40%, and a 45% effective illiteracy rate, Egypt is one of the least-prepared nations of the world for parliamentary democracy. The state rationing system now in preparation will make the local Muslim Brotherhood office the arbiter of whether families eat or starve. There is no more powerful form of social control. It is not necessarily the case that the Morsi government will follow the guidelines of the Brotherhood's sage Sayyid Qutb, whose tract Social Justice in Islam argues for an Islamist-tinged sort of socialism, but the logic of circumstances are pushing them towards this kind of model.
The irony here is that the Muslim Brotherhood may construct a totalitarian state with the help of the International Monetary Fund, including American money. Al-Ahram reports,
International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde will visit Egypt on 22 August, according to an IMF statement on Wednesday. Lagarde's visit will focus on the $3.2 billion loan that Egypt has been asking for since March 2011. No deal has been reached and Egypt's funding problems have steadily worsened during subsequent 18 months of political turmoil. Reuters reported on Wednesday that Egypt would discuss the possibility of a bigger-than-expected $4.8 billion loan from the Washington-based body.
How much financial aid Egypt will receive remains unclear. What is crystal clear is that the Muslim Brotherhood is using economic misery to entrench its power.
On Friday, the New York Timesreported on yet another key Islamist military appointment in the Brotherhood’s new Egypt: General Sedky Sobhi, who was just named army chief of staff.
Sobhi, it turns out, is the author of an academic paper that sharply rebukes American foreign policy as both insufficiently deferential to sharia (Islamic law) and too one-sided in favor of Israel. He’s on record calling for “the permanent withdrawal of United States military forces from the Middle East and the Gulf.”
…
As we’ve illustrated here time and time again, it is delusional to assume the Egyptian military is pro-American and thus a reliable bulwark against the advance of Islamic supremacism. Cairo’s armed forces reflect the broader society, whose able-bodied men are required to serve — and, as even the Times now concedes, the Egyptian mainstream is Islamist. Plus, the Egyptian army has always had Islamists (including violent jihadists) in its ranks. Its historical tendency, moreover, has not been to lead; it has been to follow the shifting political programs of whatever dictator happened to be running the show.
Nonetheless, you’ve spent nearly two years being told not to worry: Bet the farm on these generals we’ve been training and funding. Yet, now we see that not only is our government well aware of the Egyptian army’s Islamist streak (or shall we say swath?); Egyptian officers, who often study in the U.S., actually submit sharia-driven “get out of Dar al-Islam” term papers to their American military professors. And I’m betting Sobhi got an “A.”
The sustained anti-Israel de-legitimization campaign is a corollary of the millenarian obsession with the Jews in the Christian and the Muslim worlds. Since Israel is the world's only Jewish state, and since Zionism is the Jewish people's national liberation movement, anti-Zionism—as opposed to criticism of specific Israeli policies or actions—means denial of the Jewish right to national self-determination. Such a discriminatory denial of this basic right to only one nation (and one of the few that can trace their corporate identity and territorial attachment to antiquity) while allowing it to all other groups and communities, however new and tenuous their claim to nationhood, is pure and unadulterated anti-Jewish racism, or anti-Semitism as it is commonly known.
But as is clear from the US's denial of the significance of Morsy's rapid completion of Egypt's Islamic transformation; its blindness to the dangers of Syrian chemical and biological weapons; and its complacency toward Iran's nuclear weapons program, by the time the US foreign policy establishment realizes it lost Egypt, the question it will be asking is not who lost Egypt. It will be asking who lost the Middle East.
FP: They should be asking it now already. And the answer is clear.
Anyone who takes the deployment of Egyptian tanks and helicopters in Sinai too lightly, regarding it as merely necessary at this point in time, may soon get slapped in the face by reality. If you think that Egypt's deployment in Sinai is intended merely to take care of Israel's Sinai terror problem, you may have to think again. Egypt is deploying (permanently, it seems) armed forces in Sinai at such an extent that not only is it a violation of the peace treaty with Israel, but it could pose a serious challenge for Israel should the relations between the two countries deteriorate. This deterioration will not just be a product of global jihad terror, it will first and foremost be sparked by any renewed confrontation between Israel and Hamas. Hamas, as we all know, was created in the Brotherhood's image. It was Morsi who urged Hamas to relocate its politburo to Cairo.
Fareed Zakaria, the Time columnist and host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, who was exposed plagiarizing his column and suspended on August 10, has suffered long enough, apparently.
Exactly one week after news broke of the plagiarism, Time announced that they will be revoking their previously publicized one-month suspension of Zakaria, and that his column will be printed in the upcoming September 7 issue:
We have completed a thorough review of each of Fareed Zakaria’s columns for Time and we are entirely satisfied that the language in question in his recent column was an unintentional error and an isolated incident for which he has apologized. We look forward to having Fareed’s thoughtful and important voice back in the magazine with his next column in the issue that comes out on Sept 7.
CNN has completed its internal review of Fareed Zakaria’s work for CNN, including a look back at his Sunday programs, documentaries, and CNN.com blogs. The process was rigorous. We found nothing that merited continuing the suspension.
Zakaria has apologized for a journalistic lapse. CNN and Zakaria will work together to strengthen further the procedures for his show and blog.
Fareed Zakaria’s quality journalism, insightful mind and thoughtful voice meaningfully contribute to the dialogue on global and political issues. His public affairs program GPS will return on Sunday, August 26 at 10am ET on CNN/US and 8am ET on CNN/International.
Fareed Zakaria’s “mistake” of lifting content from New Yorker writer Jill Lepore has thus established a precedent of less than a month suspension for plagiarism in the mainstream media.
FP: As if the mainstream media has had no problems of blatant bias, ignorance, shalowness and even anti-Semitism, now plagiarism is getting condoned. And you thought there is a bottom, right? Imagine in how much trouble Time and CNN must be if they cannot afford to lose Zakaria for plagiarism, whom they present as insightful, thoughtful and important. I guess they were referring to Lepore.
I have no illusions about the Washington Post. It's a liberal paper, and can sometimes be infuriating. But its editorial page is the best liberal editorial page in the country, and often defies the trendies and conformists.
The Post has run a troubling editorial on a new report about our educational system, and its treatment of quality teachers. Well worth reading:
A COMPREHENSIVE study three years ago by the New Teacher Project showed how U.S. schools generally fail to recognize teacher quality, instead treating all teachers the same. Now comes an even more devastating finding from the group: Even when schools know the difference between good and bad teachers, they make no special effort to retain the good ones. Just as the previous report spurred improvements in teacher evaluation systems, this study should prompt changes in how teachers are treated.
The aptly named report, “The Irreplaceables,” concludes that the real teacher retention crisis in urban schools is not about the number of teachers who are leaving but the loss of really good ones. The two-year study identified the top 20 percent of teachers whose students consistently make the most progress on state exams. Not only do these teachers on average help students learn two to three additional months’ worth of math and reading compared to the average teacher (and five to six months more compared to low-performing teachers), but they also get high marks from students.
Yet the researchers found little effort by districts to hold on to these top performers. Only 47 percent of these high-performing teachers said they ever got praised for their work, and only 26 percent were encouraged to take leadership roles. Particularly shocking was the finding that two-thirds of the best teachers were never asked to stay when they told principals of their plans to depart. “Our findings suggest that Irreplaceables usually leave for reasons that their school could have controlled,” the report says.
COMMENT: I'm not shocked. Too many schools, especially in the politely termed "inner cities," are patronage mills and political headquarters, rather than educational institutions. Too many are part of what could correctly be called the education industry, one of the nation's largest businesses.
In the mid-sixties, New York City had an ugly, raw debate over demands by black leaders for "community control of schools," insisting that only if blacks controlled their schools would education improve. Anyone with minimal intelligence (and integrity) could see through the demands. They were really demands by local pols for control of budgets and jobs. But the trendies got their way, and community control of schools was adopted. Forty years later it was judged a complete, total, absolute failure. There had been no progress. The schools had replaced competent teachers with hacks, and became nothing more than power centers for local interests.
We know how to educate students. Good schools do it routinely. The question is whether the political class wants good schools, or just schools that help their political careers.
FP: Nothing that you have not heard here from me. In fact I have been deploring this for years at my technical site dbdebunk.com.
Leader Of Anti-Semitic Party In Hungary Discovers He's Jewish
Not only that, but Szegedi's grandmother survived Auschwitz and his grandfather survived labor camps. The AP adds:
"Under pressure, Szegedi resigned last month from all party positions and gave up his Jobbik membership. That wasn't good enough for the party: Last week it asked him to give up his seat in the European Parliament as well. Jobbik says its issue is the suspected bribery, not his Jewish roots.
"Szegedi came to prominence in 2007 as a founding member of the Hungarian Guard, a group whose black uniforms and striped flags recalled the Arrow Cross, a pro-Nazi party which briefly governed Hungary at the end of World War II and killed thousands of Jews. In all, 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed during the Holocaust, most of them after being sent in trains to death camps like Auschwitz. The Hungarian Guard was banned by the courts in 2009.
"By then, Szegedi had already joined the Jobbik Party, which was launched in 2003 to become the country's biggest far-right political force. He soon became one of its most vocal and visible members, and a pillar of the party leadership. Since 2009, he has served in the European Parliament in Brussels as one of the party's three EU lawmakers, a position he says he wants to keep."
Szegedi told him that following the Holocaust, his grandparents had an Orthodox Jewish wedding, but they decided to keep that and their religion a secret from their children and grandchildren.
The JTA reports that after talking to Koves, Szegedi decided to plan a trip to Auschwitz. Koves said he apologized "for any comments he had made against the Jewish community" and would like to make the trip to "pay his respects to the Holocaust martyrs."
FP: You can’t make this stuff up. There are hardly better examples of the ignorance and stupidity that go into bigotry in general and anti-Semitism in particular.
A nuclear-powered Russian missile submarine cruised undetected for several weeks in the Gulf of Mexico, and its presence was confirmed only after it left the area, according to the Washington Free Beacon. The paper further states: "The stealth underwater incursion in the Gulf took place at the same time Russian strategic bombers made incursions into restricted U.S. airspace near Alaska and California in June and July, and highlights a growing military assertiveness by Moscow." I guess Obama's "reset" with Russia just hasn't panned out. But remember, the Russians are just misunderstood, and still angry at Reagan.
The good burghers of Gouda, Holland—famous for its cheese—have a solution. It seems that there is a problem with some of the immigrants there, especially those from Morocco, being involved in violence. How can these tendencies be channeled in a more productive direction?
The Toulouse massacre did not bring French anti-Semitism to a halt. It actually increased. “Any time young people approach me in order to get married, I ask them various questions about their future. Eighty percent of them say they do not envision any future in France.” This is what one rabbi in Paris told me last week. I heard similar statements from other French rabbis and lay Jewish leaders: “We have a feeling the words are on the wall now,” one leader in the Lyons area confided to me. “It is not just our situation in this country deteriorating; it is also that the process is much quicker than expected.”
FP: Does not look like there is a future for Jews anywhere, does it?
And yet the Shalit deal was reasonable compared to the Peace Process. While Israel has given up a great many lives and a great deal of land, it has yet to receive peace. But in the Shalit deal, it actually did get Gilad Shalit back. If a "life-loving" country cannot afford to keep exchanging one soldier for 1,000 terrorists, then how can it afford to keep exchanging land and lives for the false promise of peace?
Terrorists are a renewable resource. Arrest them, plant them in jail, let them study for advanced degrees and post status updates to Facebook while collecting salaries from the Palestinian Authority, funded by the United States and Europe, then trade them for a soldier. Then when they've gone back to their old habits, arrest them and trade them again. But doing that with territory is much harder. Let Israel try offering Ramallah a second time in exchange for peace and see what kind of howls rise out of the State Department in Washington D.C. and the Foreign Office in London.
…
Instead, Israel keeps putting new lands on the table, which Washington and London proclaim to be insufficient because something is too low a price to pay for nothing. Peace is a priceless commodity. while half of Israel's capital is a negotiable commodity. But after two decades of negotiations, Israel is running out of things to negotiate with.
The old joke about the Six-Day-War was that the Egyptians had followed the Soviet battle plan from World War II: pull back and wait for winter. The joke has now turned around. Since the Nineties, the Israelis have been following the American battle plan from Vietnam: sign a worthless peace accord, pull out and then ignore what happens afterward. Just as Egypt doesn't have Russian winters, Israel doesn't have a 6,000 mile distance from its last war.
…
That same year, PLO terrorists carried out the "Mother's Bus Attack" taking the passengers of a bus, filled with women on board, hostage and demanding the release of all imprisoned terrorists. The terrorists killed two hostages and Israeli Special Forces moved in, killing the terrorists and saving the lives of all but one hostage.
In response, Israeli commandos stormed Tunis, killing Abu Jihad, a former Muslim Brotherhood member and the number two Fatah leader after Arafat . The United Nations Security Council met and passed Resolution 611, noting with concern the "loss of human life", particularly that of Abu Jihad, and vigorously condemned the "act of aggression", Not a single member of the Security Council voted against it. The United States abstained.
…
In 1972, the year of the Munich Massacre, there were three Security Council resolutions condemning Israel. Not a single one condemning the massacre of Olympic athletes at an international event. Not a single one condemning the countries which armed, trained, harbored and controlled the terrorists. The countries that had refused that their flags be lowered in response to the massacre.
This was the law of the jungle disguised as international law. Against the law of the jungle, tears are futile. Jungle law cannot be debated away, it cannot be disproven, it cannot be defeated with Hasbara, it cannot be subdued with the speechifying of an Abba Eban or a Benjamin Netanyahu. It cannot be moralized into decency or signed away with peace treaties. It can only be met with resistance.
Tears don't protect against murder. Bullets do.
FP: What can I say that I have not said countless times already?
Facing withering criticism that the Obama administration's Syria policy is too little, too late, and laced with too many yawns, Hillary Clinton has flown to Turkey to express some love for the Syrian opposition. From WaPo:
ISTANBUL — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sought Saturday to broaden U.S. contacts with political opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad beyond a fragmented group of exiles with limited influence inside the country.
The top U.S. diplomat also pledged more military and intelligence cooperation with Turkey, a close U.S. ally now receiving a daily tide of refugees from the 17-month conflict.
This close ally is becoming increasingly Islamist, and may not be a "close ally" much longer.
“We have been closely coordinating over the course of this conflict, but now we need to get into the real details of such operational planning,” Clinton said during a day of meetings with Syrian opposition figures, refugees and top Turkish officials.
“Our intelligence services, our military have very important responsibilities and roles to play so we are going to be setting up a working group to do exactly that,” she said.
Let us note that this conflict has been going on for 17 months. Clinton's statements are pathetic, reflecting a pathetic policy. Essentially, she admits that we're just getting started.
The question is whether these opposition groups, some of which may have been influenced by extremists, still are interested in us, and whether they'll be our allies should they gain power. They owe us nothing.
Increasingly, we seem diminished, and not at all the leader.
FP: I have not been, am not and I won’t be for US intervention in Syria (or any other Arab country for that matter). But decline is decline is decline.
Gallup reports that its Economic Confidence Index was negative in all 50 states in the first half of 2012...but positive in the District of Columbia. Of course. That's where the federal government is. I mean, do you laugh or do you cry? The only place in America where people feel confident about the future is the federal government. Have the feds noticed that there's a country out there? Please send them maps. Small ones will do.
But old tricks don't always work in the new Egypt. Muwafi's admission that the GIS knew an attack was on the way provided Morsy with an opportunity to clean house -- a stunning move made possible only by the fact that he can claim a popular mandate. Out went Muwafi, North Sinai governor Abdel Wahab Mabrouk, and Hamdi Badeen, the powerful commander of the Military Police.
The SCAF, the GIS, and Ministry of Interior may yet respond, but they are in a difficult political position. How do they justify opposing the president for removing the people ostensibly responsible for failing to prevent the deaths of Egyptian troops? In the new, more open Egypt, people are demanding accountability and Morsy is giving it to them, which may be why Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the SCAF, has so far yielded to Morsy. Yet Tantawi's position is made all the more precarious because if he does not respond in some way, he is signaling that there is no price to be paid for defying Egypt's defense and national security establishment, opening the way to further efforts to undermine the deep state.
…
As the New York Times, theWashington Post, and other major newspapers all dutifully reported, the violence in Sinai was an "urgent" and "crucial" test of Morsy in his "tense relationship with the military." It was, indeed, an early test, and Egypt's new president seemed to pass with flying colors. Against all expectations, Morsy made the most politically out of the Rafah killings. To be sure, this episode was not exactly Anwar Sadat's takedown of Ali Sabri, Gen. Mohamed Fawzi, and Gen. Sharawi Guma in 1971 for allegedly plotting a coup d'état that ended with all three behind bars and went a long way toward consolidating Sadat's power. Yet if Morsy can make the dismissals stick, he will not only have made a convincing case that he is much more than the weak transitional figure the SCAF has sought to make him, but he also will have begun a process that could alter the relationship between Egypt's security elite and its civilian (and now elected) leadership.
FP: Just as I predicted. The military is no match to Islamists. Shades of Turkey, and Egypt is much more vulnerable to a more extreme Islamism than Turkey.
Muslim Brotherhood President al-Mursi has just removed the two commanding generals of the Egyptian military. Does he have a right to do this? Who knows?There’s no constitution. That means all we were told about not having to worry because the generals would restrain the Brotherhood was false. Moreover, the idea that the army, and hence the government, may fear to act lest they lose U.S. aid will also be false. There is no parliament at present He is now the democratically elected dictator of Egypt. True, he picked another career officer but he has now put forward the principle: he decides who runs the army. The generals can still advise Mursi. He can choose to listen to them or not. But there is no more dual power in Egypt but only one leader. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces which has run Egypt since February 2011 is gone. Only Mursi remains and Egypt is now at his mercy.
Muslim Brotherhood President al-Mursi has also just named the editors of the top Egyptian newspaper and other media outlets. They are state-owned, you know, and there are a half-dozen good little independent newspapers.
But one of them, al-Destour (ironically meaning “The Constitution”), has just had a full issue seized on charges of “fueling sedition” and “harming the president through phrases and wording punishable by law.” We know this through a report in the Middle East News Agency, the state-owned monopoly.
And what was the inflammatory report? That the Brotherhood was going to seize power and that liberals and the army should join together to stop the country from being turned into an Islamist regime.
So some think the army has already been checkmated.
I realize this is not a statement anyone can make lightly, but: this morning’s column by Thomas Friedman, "Syria is Iraq," is the single most incoherent thing he has ever written. It’s… well, breathtaking is the only word.
Others, like Glenn Greenwald, have already pointed out the column's most obvious contradictions. But for those who missed it, here are two passages that were written, not as a joke, by the same human being in the same opinion column. Start with passage #1:
And, for me, the lesson of Iraq is quite simple: You can’t go from Saddam to Switzerland without getting stuck in Hobbes — a war of all against all — unless you have a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts to manage the transition. In Iraq, that was America.
Got that? Here’s the second passage:
Because of both U.S. incompetence and the nature of Iraq, this U.S. intervention triggered a civil war in which all the parties in Iraq – Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds – tested the new balance of power, inflicting enormous casualties on each other and leading, tragically, to ethnic cleansing that rearranged the country into more homogeneous blocks of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.
This pair of passages can be summed up in a Friedman-syllogism:
1. Syria will not become Switzerland unless it has the kind of help America gave to Iraq.
2. When America helped Iraq, it triggered a terrifying four-sided civil war that left the country reeling in blood-soaked, genocidal chaos and hopelessly partitioned along ethnic and religious lines – very much like Switzerland, where a diverse collection of ethnic groups speaking different languages live peacefully under democratic rule.
3. Therefore, when your wife needs help giving birth, she should hire a midwife who stands outside the door and carries an automatic weapon.
This column today is so crazy I have to think Friedman is kidding. The line about how everyone on the ground in Iraq trusts America is especially awesome. Of course! True, you can’t even open a Humvee door there to dump a pebble out of your shoe without getting your face shot off, but still, they trust us!
And yet the best thing of all is the rhetorical flourish at the end – a rare triple-figurative dismount, which he sticks with Nadia Comăneci-esque confidence:
Without an external midwife or a Syrian Mandela, the fires of conflict could burn for a long time.
God bless this man. There’s never been another like him!
Editor's note: Thanks to Justin Elliott at TwitLonger, who notes that this is at least the ninth time that Friedman has written a column calling for an Arab Mandela -- and at least the third time he has used the winning Arab-Mandela/midwife imagery combination.
FP: And for this the NYT and audiences pay him big bucks. So he is not the biggest problem.
Former Governor Arnold Schwarznegger of California has co-founded a think tank at the University of Southern California and will become a professor at the school. I suspect that this development will raise the general intellectual level of American higher education, and possibly lead to greater physical fitness in the academic world as well.
FP: I rest my case. And the problem is not the sausage governor, it’s USC.
A MAJOR WORLD EVENT, NOT – The United Nations General Assembly has denounced Syria's crackdown on its own citizens, and it did this before going to dinner. Both Russia and China voted no. There is no word that the Syrian government even took note of the vote, which is expected to have no effect.
INCREDIBLE – The Obama campaign and several Democratic organizations are suing the state of Ohio to strike down a law that makes it easier for those in the military to vote. A May Gallup poll showed Romney ahead of Obama among veterans, 58-34 percent. Presumably, Democrats believe active-duty military personnel will vote the way veterans vote. During the tense recount following the 2000 presidential election, Democrats tried to challenge a number of military votes cast.
RUSSIA IN SYRIA – Russia is sending three large ships with marines aboard to the Syrian port of Tartus, where Moscow has a naval base. It is another proof of Russia's active support for the Assad regime. The presence of Russian troops also makes other outside intervention more complicated. Russia is determined to hold Tartus, which services Russian naval vessels in the Mediterranean.
IT WAS RAHM – Newly released e-mails show that Rahm Emanuel, when he was Obama's chief of staff in the White House, was the key figure behind the failed Solyndra loan, which has become the symbol of Obama's bad investments of tax dollars. Solyndra made solar panels, and was supported by some heavy-hitting Obama contributors. Emanuel is now the mayor of Chicago. If he wants a really good investment for his city, may I suggest bulletproof vests.
Iftikar and Farzana Ahmed, strict Muslims who are first cousins from the same village in Pakistan, were jailed for life after being found guilty of the 2003 honour killing of their “determined” and “ambitious” daughter Shafilea. They were told they would serve at least 25 years.
They suffocated the 17 year-old in front of their four other children at their home in Warrington, Cheshire after she rejected a forced marriage in Pakistan.
The couple escaped justice for almost nine years, accusing officers of victimisation and stereotyping for suspecting them after her body was found months later in a river in Cumbria.
Phil, it was when the Ottoman elites absorbed the European notion of majoritarian rule that they decided they had to turn all the inhabitants of the empire into "Turks," or ethnically cleanse them (e.g., the Armenians). That was a major element in the chaos of the Empire's collapse. The Turkish Republic could become majoritarian
because the Empire had lost the Balkans (including Ataturk's own native city, Salonica), leaving mostly only so-called "Turks" inhabiting Anatolia. It then got rid of the remaining "Greeks" in exchange for other "Turks," and it defined Kurds as "Mountain Turks" (they have not stopped rebelling as a result). Most of the Empire's successor states--Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon especially, in what I call the "Fragile Crescent"--contain all the variety of the Ottoman Empire, but little of the Ottoman tolerance for linguistic, sectarian, religious and ethnic differences. And so someone is always in open rebellion--Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, whatever. Those differences will never go away, they can only be moderated, and the attempt to impose a nation-state model on them has failed. So what will be the next model?
FP: And then the Western colonial powers came in and imposed artificial national boundaries on that mess. And now that the West is going down, the ME is reverting to its own self.
Mitt Romney is under furious attack from the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and pro-Obama media for pointing out the truth about why culture matters in the economic success of Israel.
How would these people have reacted if Romney gave this speech:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania the Palestinian Territories, and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest Middle East, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Rabin administration, and the Bush Netanyahu administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrantIsraeli sentiment or anti-tradeJewish sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
I suspect the reaction would have been what it now is, with absurd charges of racism and cultural insensitivity.
What a difference a continent makes.
FP: I guess in Obama’s distorted world Pennsylavnians are worse than Palestinians. Upside down and backwards.
At the urging of Valerie Jarrett, President Barack Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden on three separate occasions before finally approving the May 2, 2011 Navy SEAL mission, according to an explosive new book scheduled for release August 21. The Daily Caller has seen a portion of the chapter in which the stunning revelation appears.
Ziad al-Bandak, an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, recently visited the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where 1.5 million people were killed during the Holocaust. Bandak's visit constituted a rare recognition of the Holocaust by a Palestinian official.
The opposing Hamas party, which rules the Gaza Strip, was outraged by the Bandak's visit. Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said: "It was an unjustified and unhelpful visit that served only the Zionist occupation." Barhoum continued by calling into question the scope of the Holocaust, saying the visit was "a marketing of a false Zionist alleged tragedy."
