Sunday, September 13, 2009
china confidential
Israel Should Have No Illusions About Obama
Gold Meir was famous for saying she could not tolerate fooling herself--wishful, delusional thinking. The Israeli premier knew something about that: she and her aides and cabinet members had fooled themselves into thinking that Egypt and Syria would not attack Israel, only weeks before the nearly catastrophic Yom Kippur War of October 1973. The third Arab-Israeli conflict, which began with a coordinated, Egyptian-Syrian sneak attack on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, almost cost Israel its existence.
Today's Israeli leaders should learn from this experience, for the situation is much worse in many respects than it was in 1973. Then, the United States, under President Richard Nixon, came to Israel's defense--with an 11th hour airlift of arms and a stern warning to the Soviet Union not to intervene on Egypt's side in the Sinai fighting. In contrast with the Nixon administration, however, the Obama administration is not likely to be of any use to Israel in the coming conflict with Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas (and Syria, too, possibly). On the contrary; the Obama administration has allowed Iran time to develop nuclear weapons and add to its offensive and defensive missile forces. The administration has also threatened to punish Israel if it preemptively strikes Iran's nuclear sites.
President Obama is not Israel's friend. An appeaser of Islamism and anti-American, Third World dictatorships, he is bent on aligning with "the Muslim world" at Israel's expense. His administration is riddled with critics--and outright enemies--of Israel, people who regard its miraculous rebirth after World War II and the Holocaust as a mistake. Their goal is to demonize and isolate Israel ahead of its step-by-step (peace-by-piece-by-piece) dismantlement or physical destruction.
Israel is on its own. It must do whatever it must do to protect its citizens and fulfill its promise to the Jewish people: Never again!Father of Green Revolution Dies; US Nobel Prize Winner's Work Saved Hundreds of Millions of Lives
AFP reports: Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Prize winning scientist whose work on disease-resistant wheat is credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, has died at the age of 95.
The acclaimed agriculturalist, often credited with sparking the Green Revolution, died late on Saturday in Dallas, Texas, due to complications from cancer, according to Texas A&M University, where Borlaug served since 1984.
Borlaug was best known for his work developing high-yield disease-resistant "dwarf" wheat, which dramatically increased food production in Asia and Latin America.
"Norman E. Borlaug saved more lives than any man in human history," Josette Sheeran -- the head of the World Food Programme -- said on Sunday.
"His total devotion to ending famine and hunger revolutionized food security for millions of people and for many nations."
Continue here.
Regarding criticism of his work--from Third World radicals and environmental extremists--Wikipedia observes:As Borlaug's name is nearly synonymous with the Green Revolution, over the decades environmentalists, nutritionists, progressives, and economists have mounted many criticisms of the Green Revolution. Throughout his years of research, Borlaug's programs often faced opposition by people who consider genetic crossbreeding to be unnatural or to have negative effects. Borlaug's work has been criticized for bringing large-scale monoculture, input-intensive farming techniques to countries that had previously relied on subsistence farming. These farming techniques reap large profits for US agribusiness and agrichemical corporations such as Monsanto Company and have been criticized for widening social inequality in the countries owing to uneven food distribution while forcing a capitalist agenda of US corporations onto countries that had undergone land reform.There are also concerns about the long-term sustainability of farming practices encouraged by the Green Revolution in both the developed and developing world.
Other concerns of his critics and critics of biotechnology in general include: that the construction of roads in populated third-world areas could lead to the destruction of wilderness; the crossing of genetic barriers; the inability of crops to fulfill all nutritional requirements; the decreased biodiversity from planting a small number of varieties; the environmental and economic effects of inorganic fertilizer and pesticides; the amount of herbicide sprayed on fields of herbicide-resistant crops.
Borlaug had dismissed most claims of critics, but did take certain concerns seriously. He stated that his work has been "a change in the right direction, but it has not transformed the world into a Utopia". Of environmental lobbyists he stated, "some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things".North Korea Preparing Third Nuclear Test
Click here for the report, based on information provided by North Korean defectors living in the South.
The Obama administration's appeasement of North Korea--a continuation of the Bush administration's failed policy--is providing the Stalinist/Kimist regime with time to further develop its nuclear arsenal.
North Korea's partner in nuclear crime, Islamist Iran, is benefitting and learning from the failure of the United States and the so-called international community to force Pyongyang to abandon atomic arms.Volkswagen Was Originally Designed by a Jew
Hitler ripped off his work, had him arrested and fired, and twice tried to assassinate him. The true story of the real father of the Volkswagen Beetle--Josef Ganz--click here.
Click here to visit the website pictured above, which provides more information about a forthcoming book and documentary, here for a fascinating Wikipedia article, and below for a video glimpse of a courageous and talented Dutch journalist's pursuit of the forgotten--and suppressed--story of the origins of an iconic car.
Sunday, 13 September 2009
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