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Builders of the new Evil Empire. Above: Ahmadinejad, Assad and Nasrallah. Below: Hamas Honcho Haniyeh with Pharaoh Mohamed Morsi of Egypt.
In case you had any doubts - Gaza publicly thanks Iran on billboards for Iranian supplied rockets used to strike Israel:
(CNN) -- The Palestinians are seeking to upgrade their status at the United Nations Thursday, through a vote in the General Assembly as to whether "Palestine" will be granted recognition as a "non-member state."
The vote, which many observers believe will pass, would amount to an implicit recognition of Palestinian statehood from the international body. It would strengthen their chances of joining U.N. agencies and the International Criminal Court in order to attempt to exert international pressure on Israel.
Rick Richman at Commentary:
.... The irony is that between 2000 and 2008, the Palestinians received three formal offers of a state, and rejected them all — the modern equivalent of the Three Nos. Now one group of Palestinians seeks UN recognition as a “non-member state,” when they fail to qualify as a state at all, and they ignore the fact they could already have been a member-state three times over (or more), had they simply said yes.
[....]
Once again, “Palestine” is all set to be a failed state.... Article 10 of the Montevideo Convention provides that the “primary interests of states is the conservation of peace.” The Palestinian gambit at the UN is not intended to produce peace, but to provide a platform for law-fare. It will do nothing to bring the Palestinians closer to the state they could have had long ago, if a state were really what they wanted, and it will in fact put peace further away.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this morning ... at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, made the following statement:
"Israel is prepared to live in peace with a Palestinian state, but for peace to endure, Israel’s security must be protected. The Palestinians must recognize the Jewish State and they must be prepared to end the conflict with Israel once and for all. None of these vital interests, these vital interests of peace, none of them appear in the resolution that will be put forward before the General Assembly today and that is why Israel cannot accept it. The only way to achieve peace is through agreements that are reached by the parties directly; through valid negotiations between themselves, and not through UN resolutions that completely ignore Israel’s vital security and national interests. And because this resolution is so one-sided, it doesn’t advance peace, it pushes it backwards.
As for the rights of the Jewish people in this land, I have a simple message for those people gathered in the General Assembly today: No decision by the UN can break the 4000-year-old bond between the people of Israel and the land of Israel."
Given that (with or without Krauthammer's blessing) the subject of the day is taxes, you may be interested to know that a new WaPo-ABC poll finds 60% support raising taxes on "the rich" in the U.S.
Meanwhile, In the U.K., two thirds of their millionaires have left the country to avoid high taxes. This mass evasion has prompted the government to reduce (next year) the top tax rate... from 50% to 45.
Charles Krauthammer begs the question of media manipulation:
Why are Republicans allowing the entire debate to be about taxes, and about the war among Republicans over holding a line on the Norquist pledge or not, when what Obama is proposing on raising the rates on the 2% is a triviality? It will reduce the deficit from $1.10 trillion to $1.02 trillion, eight cents on the dollar. It is nothing, it's lunch money, it's a rounding error. And yet that's all the debate that we're hearing.
Obama understands this. He's not trying to fix our fiscal issues and problems, he's trying to destroy the Republicans by insisting that there is a split among the Republicans on this issue which has held them together, the same way it destroyed President Bush Sr. when he went back on the pledge he made. This is a political attack on Republicans. There is no evidence right now that he has any interest in the real fiscal issue, because he would have to talk about spending and entitlements and he isn't.
From where I sit, it seems Republicans have no influence whatsoever over the content of national debate. The subject of any and all public debate appears predetermined by the White House and duly propagated by the Obama loyalists who constitute the so-called MainStreamMedia. This MSM is utterly untrustworthy, sordid, morally ignoble if you will, in its dedication to diverting if not entirely thwarting the free flow of ideas and any conversation thereof.
This presents a terribly grave threat to American liberty and even after a decade-long encounter of it, I still have no clue as to what could be done to remedy the situation ... other than perhaps to ignore it and hope it will go away.
If we could only be left in peace.
But I think we shall not be left in peace."
--Theodor Herzl, 1896
... [E]very concession Israel has made has further restricted not only its ability to defend itself, but even its ability to do basic things such as build residential housing in the capital of its own nation. Every gesture and agreement Israel has signed has bound it to ever more restrictive terms.
The Mandate for Palestine, July 24, 1922
And none of them have brought any peace. All they have ever done is set the bar higher for the next round of concessions demanded by the enemy and its aiders and abettors in the next phase of negotiations.
This is not a peace process, and it has never been one. It is a public lynching. It is the lynching of a country whose only real crime is that its existence offends the religious fanaticism and prejudices of a billion Muslims...
Pillar of Defense Live Blog at Times of Israel (now closed):
05:08 Thursday morning
One unlikely outcome of the eight days of fighting from Gaza seems to be the forging of a new alliance between US President Barack Obama and his Egyptian counterpart Mohammed Morsi, according to the New York Times.
According to the paper, the two leaders spoke three times in 24 hours, and six times over the course of a few days, about the conflict in Gaza.
Obama was “impressed with the Egyptian leader’s pragmatic confidence. He sensed an engineer’s precision with surprisingly little ideology,” in the Times’s words.
According to Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood:
Kadima Party lawmaker and former chief military spokesman Nachman Shai yesterday (before the ceasefire was agreed upon):
“Hamas poses a real challenge to the State of Israel, both militarily and diplomatically,” he said. “Eventually, we will have to talk to them.”
