A fun and easy way to learn about 19th century jihadists (corsairs or Barbary pirates) in interaction with America. Jefferson and Madison are central figures, but many lesser known Americans play a part. The struggles and arguments are much the same as today, but at least the charactersaredifferent!
The Ollie administration can now add a new height of evil to its record of corruption and cowardice. It won't last long. The Gemorra teaches us that the heaviest darkness comes right before the light of dawn.
The "intelligence war" between Iran and Israel is gaining momentum, as both countries' intelligence services are increasing efforts to recruit Hebrew and Farsi speakers to their ranks.
The Iranian regime needs Hebrew speakers to work as translators, intelligence agents and as part of its propaganda machine against Israel. The main source of Hebrew speakers is Palestinian students studying abroad or Palestinian terrorists sent for military training in Iran and Lebanon.
One of the most prominent centers for Hebrew studies is located at Iran's embassy in Beirut, where Hizbullah members learn Hebrew at the Islamic Culture and Education Center.
The embassy owns a vast library of Hebrew newspapers and books, including even children's' books. It was there that Hizbullah had trained, with the aid of Palestinians, a large group of fighters who were placed in charge of tapping Israeli communication systems, in a bid to collect intelligence on the "Zionist enemy" before and during the Second Lebanon War.
According to the Shin Bet, Israeli Arab students studying out of the country are an attractive target for Hizbullah, because it is easier for the organization to recruit and train them abroad.
Only recently a young Israeli Arab woman who was studying dentistry in Jordan was arrested at the Allenby Bridge border crossing on suspicion of collaborating with Hizbullah. The woman admitted in her investigation she was contacted by the group's agents in Amman and was offered to serve as its agent in Israel.
Boker tov. The world is "back to basics" this morning: What is hate? What is a crime? What is sacred? What is right and what is wrong? And how do people decide? What you might think is black and white now falls into a huge abyss we'll call the Grey Zone. Come with me for a tour.
(IsraelNN.com) The Civil Lands Administration destroyed a one-year-old synagogue built on Mount Gerizim near the Samarian city of Shechem on Monday afternoon. The structure was built not far from one of the holiest sites in the Jewish world.
Government officials maintained that the building was erected without a permit, and was not a synagogue.
Dozens of Breslov Chassidim and other rabbis and students worshipped there daily, learning Torah between the services. The rabbinical students vowed not to give up the site without opposition. “If the synagogue is destroyed, it will be re-built,” vowed one student before the house of worship was razed to the ground.
The structure was built by the students in order to study as close as possible to the burial place in Shechem of the biblical Joseph, son of the Jewish matriarch Rachel and Jewish patriarch Jacob, following its capture and destruction by Palestinian Authority Arab hordes in October 2000. There have been many clandestine pilgrimages by Jews – and some not so clandestine – to the tomb since then.
Echoes of the past reverberate in the hills around the grave of the biblical Joseph, whose bones were brought to rest in Samaria by the Children of Israel when they escaped from Egyptian slavery thousands of years ago.
"The bones of Joseph which the Children of Israel brought up from Egypt were buried in Shechem in the portion of the field that had been purchased by Jacob." (Joshua 24.32)
The Tomb of Joseph, whose sons headed two of the twelve tribes of Israel, was to remain accessible to Jews under the terms of the Oslo Accords signed by Israel with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which represented the PA.
The area around it, including the city of Shechem, was handed over to the PA, then an administrative body whose leaders had promised to protect the site.
But Jewish access to the tomb was blasted away by PLO terrorists in October 2000 a scant few days after the start of the second intifada, which many refer to as the Oslo War.
Israel Border Police officers spent days fending off terrorist attempts to capture and destroy the tomb. Within a week, the government of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, currently Israel’s Defense Minister, caved in and ordered IDF troops to abandon the site.
Another Joseph was also abandoned that day in 2000 - a Druze Border Policeman named Madhat Yusuf (Joseph, in Arabic) who was left to bleed to death as soldiers waited for the order to rescue him. It took five precious hours for then IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz to negotiate with the PLO for his evacuation to safety, but by then it was too late. The government later told journalists the talks were necessary in order to avoid the risk of killing PA civilians.
The PA promise to preserve Joseph’s Tomb and allow Jewish access was violated within two hours after Yusuf’s body was carried away. A flood of PA Arabs entered the compound and razed the synagogue to the ground, burning furniture and holy books as the PA policemen who had vowed to protect the site stood idly by.
Two days later, the dome of the tomb itself was painted “evil eye green” as some people refer to the color, which in Arabic tradition wards off the evil eye. Bulldozers cleared away the remnants of the orgy of violence that had taken place there, transforming the holy Jewish monument into a Muslim religious site.
7 Breslov hassidim were shot by an Arab terrorist near Kever Yosef, in Shechem. Two of the injured are listed in serious condition. Police arrested 9 other Jews for the crime of praying at the holy site, and upsetting the local Arabs. According to Israeli law Jews are forbidden to enter into territories which have been surrendered to the Arabs.
.... Hate is an emotion, and we should not have emotional laws. We're getting into a dangerous area here. We're not anywhere near as bad as the poor Euros, but it's (cliche coming) a slippery slope.
Another comment refers Bill O'Reilly to this YouTube video :
This is (way) off the Israel advocacy topic, but I'm wondering if - and how quickly - this Maryland case might be drawn into the national conversation on abortion. I can see it achieving media traction on the level of Terri Schiavo.
The headline at the NY Times is "Bodies of 4 Infants Found..." -- although police said that "None of the bodies appeared to be full term."
... a male fetus in the 26th week of gestation found in a vanity under a bathroom sink.
Two other corpses were found in plastic bags in a trunk in Ms. Freeman’s bedroom, and another in a bag in a small recreational vehicle parked in her driveway.
So are they infants or fetuses? Corpses, or the collateral damage of a medical procedure? In a country where "almost every third baby conceived... is killed by abortion," isn't it the height of hypocrisy to charge this mom with murder?
I used to have enormous respect for citizen journalist Michael J. Totten. Now I have even more. If you want to know what our soldiers are doing in Baghdad, moment by moment, read this latest post by Michael, who's embedded with the 82nd Airborne.
And please donate to his endeavor - by PayPal, money order, check, or becoming aBlogPatron.
... The Olmert government's enthusiastic embrace of capitulation as a national policy toward the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria merely serves to strengthen the US view that Israel is a strategic liability rather than an asset.
Yet the lessons of the Cold War, and those of the past 15 years remain clear. The Saudis remain at best fair-weather friends to the US, while Israel's strength or weakness directly impacts US national security and geopolitical interests. As was the case during the Cold War, so too today, the US's best option for checking Russian and Iranian expansionism and neutralizing Sunni jihadists is to back Israel.
If the US were willing to understand the clear lessons from its Cold War experience in the Middle East, it would not be pushing Israel to weaken itself still further through land giveaways to Iran's Palestinian proxies. It would not be actively undercutting Israel's national security by supplying sophisticated weapons to the Saudis. It would be admonishing the Olmert government for its irresponsible behavior and exhorting Israel not to go wobbly because it is needed for the larger fight.
Read it all, especially anything you see about JDAMs.
Moshe Feiglin was interviewed by Arutz Sheva's Shimon Cohen. Here's an excerpt.
Cohen: Briefly, what is your position on the status of Gush Katif and northern Shomron?
Feiglin: We believe very strongly in a return to, and full annexation of, these areas, and in fact of all Judea and Samaria. I very much admire the returnees to Homesh and Nisanit, but we all realize that without a national leadership that will appreciate them, their goals will remain dreams. Now is a rare opportunity for us in the "faith" camp to take the leadership into our hands, and return Israel to the people. It's not beyond our grasp. The polls show that we are doing very well, and that we can win. Our goal is victory, and it is within our ability to do so and put a belief-based leadership at the head of the Likud.
This may be Feiglin's money quote:
.... They think that the country is divided into left and right-wing, into religious and secular. But it's not true – the country is divided between "Jews" and "Israelis," between those who want to maintain their Jewish identity to one extent or another, and those who don't.
So far, neither Washington nor Riyadh is spending any time thinking about containing the chaos that will follow the inevitable American withdrawal [from Iraq].
You have to give credit where credit is due. The Timesdid spend time thinking about this. And after considering the list of possibilties - reprisals, ethnic cleansing, destabilizing refugee flows, power grabs, proliferation of terrorist activity and "even genocide" - the Times concluded that
It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit....
Here's the Times plan:
... American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.
It would be hard to imagine that anyone in Washington or Riyadh could match this kind of brilliance, but what do I know? Maybe they do listen to PinchJunior.
