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The Peel Commission Report, July 1937
"The shortage of land is due less to purchase by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population. The Arab claims that the Jews have obtained too large a proportion of good land cannot be maintained. Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamps and uncultivated when it was bought."
The founding of Tel Aviv ~ 1909
... I was interviewed by the BBC. At their studio they had a moderate Arab expert commenting on anti-Semitism, and everything he said was received with warm approval from the interviewer. His argument: It is true that Jews around the world today feel threatened by increasing anti-Semitism. But who is to blame? The Israeli government of course, for it launched a brutal campaign of death and destruction against the Palestinians in Gaza, without taking into account how much its actions would endanger the well-being of Jews around the world. Strangely enough, this logic is widely accepted by much of the free world today.
I have heard this kind of argument before. In my years as a member of the Israeli government, I faced countless situations where the world forced us to choose between protecting our citizens and facing international condemnation, on the one hand, and letting our citizens face suicide bombers and rocket attacks while winning world sympathy, praise, and understanding for our “restraint,” on the other.
Putting us in this situation is, itself, a form of anti-Semitism. Seventy years ago, the Peel Commission refused to allow Jewish immigration for fear of upsetting the Arabs and destabilizing the Middle East. Then as now, Jewish survival was seen as an inconvenience to the Western world. Then as now, Jews were forced to choose: Either live and be hated, or die and be loved.
Thirty-three months after dramatically [and illegally] filling in for a stroke-stricken Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - facing a number of corruption allegations - formally tendered his resignation to President Shimon Peres on Sunday evening. Olmert entered and left Beit Hanassi by a side entrance, thereby avoiding the press, and met with Peres for some 30 minutes.
Following the meeting, the president met the media and said this was a "difficult evening" for Olmert, and that he appreciated "the respectful way in which he is handing over his power."
Five months later, Olmert's still prime minister ... and up to his eyeballs in corruption charges.
(IsraelNN.com) Shula Zaken, former top aide to outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, incriminated him on bribery charges concerning his purchase of a home on Cremieux Street in Jerusalem in 2004, News 1 reported Saturday night.
Police on Friday questioned the Prime Minister, a former mayor of the capital, apparently for the last time, concerning the purchase. Zaken, a long-time trusted assistant and former manager of his office, has exercised her “right to remain silent” in all other probes against her former boss.
Journalist Yoav Yitzchak, who was the first to expose the charges nearly three years ago, wrote that Zaken told police she acted on Olmert’s behalf to gain municipal permits to allow renovations at the house. In return, the seller gave him a reduction of $330,000 from the true value of the property.Her testimony contradicts Olmert’s insistence to police that he did not try to intervene to secure the permits.
How many rockets this Shabbes? The AFP claims it was seven:
JERUSALEM (AFP) – Palestinian militants in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip fired seven rockets at Israel on Saturday, according to the Israeli military, further straining a fragile month-old ceasefire.
No one was killed or wounded in the attacks, with two of the rockets striking near the Israeli town of Ashkelon, around 21 kilometres (13 miles) from the impoverished territory.
One rocket damaged a school, which was empty for Shabbat, the Jewish rest day, the military said.
Palestinian militants have fired more than 100 rockets and mortar rounds at Israel since the fragile January 18 truce that ended Israel's massive military offensive on Gaza, which killed more than 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.
Israel has in turn carried out several air raids targeting alleged militants, weapons caches and smuggling tunnels beneath the Gaza-Egypt border....
Arutz Sheva has a different count (and slant):
(IsraelNN.com) A Sabbath morning "improved" Grad rocket attack struck an Ashkelon school on the Sabbath, returning Israel to the days before the Cast Lead operation that was carried out to end the terrorist strikes. The rocket caused extensive damage and forced the hospitalization of several people in the area for trauma.
The missile was more powerful than previous models, and the one that hit the school broke through the fortifications designed to protect students and teachers from an attack. The school was closed because of the Sabbath, preventing a tragedy, and officials canceled classes at the school for Sunday.
First graders in Ashkelon
A second rocket exploded in an open field at the edge of the city. Three other attacks took place on the Sabbath. A Kassam rocket struck the Eshkol region on Saturday morning, and two Kassam rockets hit Sderot Friday night. Another Kassam hit the southern Negev Saturday night. None of the explosions caused damage or injuries.
The Olmert administration, with the encouragement of Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, ended the three-week-long Operation Cast Lead in mid-January with the declaration that the rocket attacks from Gaza had been reduced to near zero. Livni also reached a “Memo of Understanding” with the United States by which advanced technology and international monitors were to be stationed at the Egyptian border to prevent terrorists from smuggling arms into Gaza.
Channel 2 television reported Thursday night that long-range rockets are being brought into Gaza through tunnels along the border and that Israeli bombing of several tunnels, in retaliation for rocket attacks, is having little effect.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit has claimed that a virtual ceasefire exists in Gaza while his government continues to mediate talks between Israel and Hamas for a longer-term ceasefire.
In Cairo, Egypt reported rapid progress in talks between the rival Fatah and Hamas factions for a new unity government, which would force Israel and Western nations to accept the Palestinian Authority led by chairman Mahmoud Abbas despite its inclusion of Hamas, or boycott it because of Hamas’s participation.
(A) June 16th 2008
Mujahideen Monitor U.S. Economy, Attempt to Undermine Dollar (MEMRI)
Numerous postings on Islamist websites in the past two years reflect the mujahideen's growing interest in the state of the U.S. economy. As was argued in a 2007 MEMRI analysis, [1] many of the jihadists and their supporters have come to view their struggle against the U.S. and the West as an economic war. More specifically, they have come to the conclusion that it is financial, rather than military, losses that will prompt the U.S. to change its policies in the Middle East and elsewhere. Consequently, they emphasize the importance of targeting U.S. interests around the world, and of directing their military jihad primarily at targets that affect the U.S. economy.
The mujahideen's growing interest in undermining U.S. economy is reflected, for example, in an article in the 26th issue of the GIMF's e-magazine Sada Al-Jihad (Echo of Jihad), recently posted on Al-Hesbah and on other Islamist websites. [2] The article, titled "Why the Dollar Collapsed and How America Controls the Price of Oil," discusses the factors that contributed to the devaluation of the dollar in recent years.
The author lists among the key factors the economic damage caused by Hurricane Katrina; the losses caused by the September 11 attacks; the cost of the war on terror and of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the U.S.'s persistent trade deficit and growing government debt; investors' growing faith in the Euro; the recent subprime crisis in the U.S.; and the fact that financial institutions around the world have started to reduce their dollar reserves, thereby flooding the market with dollars and decreasing the demand for this currency.
The author ends his analysis with the following threat: "The dollar can expect two additional blows that will break its back... [namely] the announcement of the return of the Caliphate..." and the reinstatement of the gold standard in international monetary trade.
"Get Rid of [Your] American Dollars... and Buy Gold"
A recent posting on the Al-Ikhlas forum urges the mujahideen and their supporters to sell their dollars, if they have any, because Al-Qaeda is planning a strike inside the U.S. so that it will undermine the American economy: "[I advise you] to get rid of [your] American dollars... and buy gold instead... or real estate. The next attack inside the U.S. is imminent... Zawahiri will convey his instructions [regarding this attack] in his next [message]... This attack will put an end to the so-called United States of America and destroy its economy completely... The day of the attack is very near..." [3]
Given that it is highly atypical for Al-Qaeda to give prior warning of its attacks, the message is probably an attempt to pressure Muslims to sell dollars, in order to generate pessimism in the dollar market and thus accelerate the drop in its value.
[1]See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 387 "The Battle... Is Economic Rather than Military" - An Economically Oriented Concept of Jihad Emerges in Islamist Discourse," September 11, 2007, http://memriiwmp.org/content/en/report.htm?report=2371.
[2]http://www.myhesbah.net/v/showthread.php?t=182568.
[3]http://www.ek-ls.org/forum/showthread.php?t=152815.
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GWU/Battleground |
09/07 - 09/11 | 1000 LV | 3.1 | 44 | 48 | McCain +4 |
| Associated Press/GfK | 09/05 - 09/10 | 812 LV | -- | 44 | 48 | McCain +4 |
| FOX News | 09/08 - 09/09 | 900 RV | 3.0 | 42 | 45 | McCain +3 |
| Gallup Tracking | 09/07 - 09/09 | 2714 RV | 2.0 | 43 | 48 | McCain +5 |
On Thursday Sept 15, 2008 at roughly 11 AM The Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw down of money market accounts in the USA to the tune of $550 Billion dollars in a matter of an hour or two.
Money was being removed electronically.
The Treasury tried to help, opened their window and pumped in $105 Billion but quickly realized they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. So they decided to closed down the accounts.
Had they not closed down the accounts they estimated that by 2 PM that afternoon. Within 3 hours. $5.5 Trillion would have been withdrawn and the entire economy of the United States would have collapsed, and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed.
[Must-See VIDEO: Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania explains what former Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chairman Bernanke told congress during the September 2008 closed door session ... that shocked them into supporting the first $700 billion bailout.]
* Interesting to note that this attack on our economy was 16 years -almost to the very day- since George Soros "broke the Bank of England" on "Black Wednesday" in September 1992.
By Steven Mufson and Anthony Faiola
As the world watched Congress struggle yesterday with a plan to bail out the U.S. financial system, foreign leaders balked at similar fixes for their own economies, a few even dismissing the credit meltdown as an American problem. Some foreign investors who had previously provided crucial injections of capital remained on the sidelines.
Senior U.S. officials, notably Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., have in recent days urged the leaders of other industrialized countries to help prop the global financial system. But the appeals have fallen short. While policymakers and economic analysts in Europe and Latin America said yesterday that they recognized the severity of the challenge facing the global financial system, they saw little need at the moment for major rescue packages in their own countries.
"The situation we face here in Europe is less acute, and member states do not at this point consider that a U.S.-style plan is needed," said Joaquín Almunia, the European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Policy in Brussels.
Meanwhile, the sovereign wealth funds of Asian and oil-rich Middle Eastern nations, which have come to the rescue of U.S. firms before only to see these investments erode, showed little interest in taking a similar gamble.
"We are not responsible for saving foreign banks," said Badr al-Saad, managing director of the Kuwait Investment Authority, in remarks broadcast by al-Arabiya satellite television Tuesday.
Note: "Boycotting enemy's commodities - as part of the economic jihad" is No. 38 of the "39 ways in the sake of the Jihad" written by Mohammad Bin Ahmad Al-Salem, and completed in Saudi Arabia in July 2003.
Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) “The core of the bill is we give the Secretary of the Treasury $700 billion to buy up bad loans all over the world… And frankly, I believe ‘all over the world’ is more the motivation than the local bank, because I think the—this is just my theory, so I’m not passing around as fact—but I think China and Saudi Arabia are holding a lot of these securitized mortgages. And I think they’ve basically said they’re not going to loan us any more money until we buy them back. And if they don’t give us loans every day, we default on our loans [because] we have so much debt as a nation. So, we’re going to borrow more money to try to make this situation right. There’s nothing else for me, Mark, that explains the urgency in using a sledgehammer to fix something that most of us know a few screwdrivers could fix.”
on The Mark Levin [radio] Show:
Election of Barack Hussein Obama, who...
Note: An alleged representative of Sutton's family "retracted" his statements, saying that he "misspoke," and the Obama campaign denied the story -- but both only later, six months after the broadcast, when the video finally gained public attention.
UPDATE: See also Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis by former White House staff economist and budget analyst James Simpson - at American Thinker, September 28, 2008.
... the goal is ... malevolent - the failure is deliberate. Don't laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
... railing against George Will and the "bankrupt flat earth crowd" who don't necessarily share his religious faith in global warming.
Here's the money quote: "our climate is scary."
.... Dragging up long-discredited myths about some non-existent scientific consensus about global cooling from the 1970s does no one any good. Except perhaps a bankrupt flat earth crowd. I hate to review the record and see that someone as smart as George Will has been doing exactly that as far back as 1992. And it's especially troubling when the very sources that Will cites in his February 15th column draw the exact opposite conclusions and paint very different pictures than Will provides, as the good folks at ThinkProgress and Media Matters for America have demonstrated so thoroughly.
This has to stop. A highly organized, well-funded movement to deny the reality of global climate change has been up and running for a long time, but it doesn't change the verdict: the problem is real, it's accelerating, and we have to act. Now. Not years from now.
No matter how the evidence has mounted over two decades -- the melting of the arctic ice cap, rising sea levels, extreme weather -- the flat earth caucus can't even see what is on the horizon. In the old Republican Congress they even trotted out the author of Jurassic Park as an expert witness to argue that climate change is fiction. This is Stone Age science, and now that we have the White House and the Congress real science must prevail. It is time to stop debating fiction writers, oil executives and flat-earth politicians, and actually find the way forward on climate change.
This is a fight we can win, a problem we can overcome, but time is not on our side. We can't waste another second arguing about whether the problem exists when we need to be debating everything from how to deal with the dirtiest forms of coal as the major provider of power in China to how to vastly increase green energy right here at home....
See also UN apologises for giving Kerry letter from Hamas:
... the agency's chief spokesman said ...the incident did not detract from the UN agency's neutrality.
Ben Smith at Politico:
White House aides told Jewish leaders on a conference call today that the United States will boycott the United Nations' World Conference on Racism over hostility to Israel in draft documents prepared for the April conference.
The aides, including an advisor to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, Jennifer Simon, and longtime Obama advisor Samantha Power, said the administration will not participate in further negotiations on the current text or participate in a conference based on the text, sources on the call said.
They left open the option of re-engaging on a "much shorter, much different text," a source said.
The draft outcome document, typically negotiated in advance and available here (.pdf), contains sharp and specific criticism of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, and Western European nations and Canada have also signaled that they may boycott the conference in Geneva.
The conference is known informally as Durban II after a 2001 conference in South Africa that included a heavy focus on Israel and calls to reinstate a U.N. resolution equating Zionism and racism. Libya is chairing the preparatory meetings for this year's conference, one of several factors prompting boycott calls.
Obama is expected to issue a statement on the subject later this afternoon, and the participants were asked not to discuss the call until a formal statement is released.
Some of the comments are sickening and bring to mind the phrase, "the arrogance of ignorance." If something sounds even vaguely anti-Israel, people are ever so anxious to jump on board and defend it... even if they have no understanding of what's involved. It doesn't help that Smith omits the specifics of the "several factors" prompting nations to boycott this obscenity.
(Hey Ben, see Anne Bayefsky's encyclopedic Durban Watch for the background which you lack, consider unworthy of mention, or purposely ignore.)
A little over a week ago, Rick Richman wrote at contentions that Obama was
in the process of making either a low-level, half-hearted diplomatic effort before withdrawing from Durban II, or a low-level, half-hearted diplomatic effort before participating in it: we will learn which in due course.
So here we are at "due course," but the Obamalot is slippery lot, leaving open "the option of re-engaging." Let's hope that, even though the Israel Lobby is no longer widely respected, it is still feared (and revered) in some circles.
In Genesis/Bereshis of the Holy Torah:
He (Ishmael) will be a wild man. His hand will be against everyone, and everyone's hand will be against him. Still he will dwell undisturbed among all his brothers.
Then, in Numbers/Bamidbar, the pagan prophet Balaam means to curse Am Yisrael but is forced by Hashem to bless us instead:
... from their beginning, I see them as mountain peaks, and I behold them as hills; it is a nation that will dwell alone, and will not be reckoned among the nations.
Rashi explains:
It is a nation that will dwell alone: This is [the legacy] their forefathers gained for them - to dwell alone, as the Targum [Onkelos] renders it [it is a nation that is alone destined to inherit the world].
and will not be reckoned among the nations: As Targum [Onkelos] paraphrases, they will not perish along with the other nations, for it says, “for I shall make an end of all the nations…” (Jer. 30:11); they will not be reckoned with the rest. Another interpretation: When they rejoice, no other nation rejoices with them, as it says, “God alone will guide them [to future happiness]” (Deut. 32:12) ....
Yehi ratzon... May it be Your will, Hashem our Gd and the Gd of our ancestors.
President Obama lectured voters during the campaign about the need to make sacrifices for the environment. But now it's warm and toasty in the White House -- so much so that aides have likened it to a tropical hot house -- and Obama is under fire for turning up the heat.
Obama made climate change a staple of his stump speech last year, calling on Americans to lower their energy use and set a model for the rest of the world in combating climate change.
During a campaign event in Oregon in May, Obama said we have to "lead by example." "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times," he said.
"That's not leadership. That's not going to happen."
But for the first few weeks of his presidency, that's precisely what has happened in the White House.
On the first day of his presidency, Obama allowed staffers to venture into the Oval Office without wearing coat and tie, which had been obligatory under President Bush. Fashion observers called it a new age of business casual at the White House.
Obama's aides had a simpler explanation. Though he's spent more than 20 years in Chicago, the president was born in Hawaii. And so he "likes it warm" in the Oval Office, said Chief of Staff David Axelrod. "You could grow orchids in there," he told the New York Times.
Meanwhile...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The government says the economy shrank at a staggering 6.2 percent pace at the end of 2008, the worst showing in a quarter-century. Consumers and businesses ratcheted back spending, plunging the country deeper into recession. The Commerce Department figure shows the economy sinking much faster than the 3.8 percent annualized drop for the October-December quarter first estimated by the government last month.
