Saturday, 8 June 2013


IsraPundit


Arab World: Is Egypt losing the Nile?  

Egyptian politicians are enraged by Ethiopia’s plans to divert the waters of the Nile and some have gone as far as calling for military action.
Egypt is still in shock over Ethiopia’s May 28 announcement, in which it said it was diverting the flow of the Nile River to facilitate the building of a dam on the Blue Nile.
In the fourth century BCE, Greek historian Herodotus proclaimed Egypt the gift of the Nile – and this still resonates today. The mighty river surging from the depths of Africa to the Mediterranean, with its more than 4,000-mile course, is the lifeblood of Egypt and has made a flourishing civilization possible since the dawn of history.
(Read more…)

Samantha Power gets early boost from our “friends”  

Facing Senate confirmation with a trail of controversial quotes, Power’s pro-Israel bona fides win endorsement from ADL, Alan Dershowitz, Joe Lieberman, Rabbi Boteach and McCain.
WASHINGTON — The nomination of Samantha Power for America’s UN envoy garnered significant support Thursday, and not just from Obama backers.
Power’s nomination, announced Wednesday in a White House Rose Garden ceremony, may face a rocky confirmation process. As Foreign Policy’s The Cable blog noted, any case against Power would enjoy an “extended paper trail” owing to her “decades-long career as a journalist and Harvard scholar dedicated to human rights abuses and genocide.”
A sign of the partisan divide that may slow the nomination came from the main Democratic and Republican Jewish outreach groups. While the National Jewish Democratic Council expressed “full confidence” that Power would continue the US support for Israel at the UN, the Republican Jewish Coalition was more critical.
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Europe under attack, Israel beware  

1. Europe is on fire. It has been for some time. Roughly half a century after World War II, it is being conquered, by degrees, with no battle. That last terrible war destroyed the national idea and made Western-style democracy vulnerable to the dangers that threaten its existence with no real ability to cope with them.
The intellectual elite that once held those societies together is now working hard to destroy them. Sophisticated ways of thinking are being employed to keep these societies from defending themselves. Europe does not know how to deal with the millions of Muslims who do not want to integrate into Western society and do not accept Western codes, and some of whom state openly that their goal is Europe’s defeat.
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Muslim Civil Wars Stem from a Crisis of Civilization  

David P. Goldman:
… If we had a Syrian elite dedicated to modernization, free markets, and opportunity, we could have an economic recovery in Syria. But the country is locked into suppurating backwardness precisely because the dominant culture holds back individual initiative and enterprise. The longstanding hatreds among Sunnis and Shi’ites, and Kurds and Druze and Arabs, turn into a fight to the death as the ground shrinks beneath them. The pre-modern culture demands proofs of group loyalty in the form of atrocities which bind the combatants to an all-or-nothing outcome. The Sunni rebels appear quite as enthusiastic in their perpetration of atrocities as does the disgusting Assad government. …

My prediction: Please help prove it wrong  

Into the Fray: A determined domestic thrust is under way to compress Israel back into its precarious pre-1967 frontiers, imperiling the viability of Jewish sovereignty.
Maale Adumim
Maale Adumim Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Four percent of the country’s residents cannot decide that they are the only ones who know what’s right… It’s hard not to respect those who are willing to risk their lives and future for the sake of a goal they believe in, yet it becomes a whole different story when they risk the lives and future of others.
    – Yair Lapid, “Do the settlers care about us?” October 2, 2010

Wounded . . . and dangerous  

By Caroline B. Glick, JPOST
Israel cannot be lured into complacency by Kerry’s buffoonery or Obama’s apparent political weakness
US Secretary of State John Kerry looks like a bit of an idiot these days. On Monday he announced that he will be returning to Israel and the Palestinian Authority and Jordan for the fifth time since he was sworn into office on February 1. That is an average of more than one visit a month.
And aside from frequent flier miles, the only thing he has to show for it is a big black eye from PLO chief and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
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Israel hopes to reengage with UNHRC following 2012 break  

After leaving United Nations Human Rights Council for biased treatment, Israel requests to resume ties; Israel’s ambassador to UNHRC calls Israel’s relationship with Human Rights Council “complex”; ready to cooperate.
Israel has formally told the United Nations Human Rights Council in writing that it seeks to restore the ties it broke off with that international body in March 2012, to protest the biased treatment it had received at its hands.
“I have been instructed to write to you and, in response to your latest letter of 14 May 2013, re-affirm my intention to continue our close and fruitful dialogue,” Israel’s ambassador to the UNHRC, Eviatar Maner, wrote in a letter to the council. It was dated June 3, but was published on the council’s website only on Thursday.
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JNF will not fund Clinton speech  

Jewish National Fund pulls out of funding expensive Clinton lecture – priced at $500,000 for 45-minutes – after public outcry; ‘we decided to wash our hands of the event,’ JNF member says.  
The Jewish National Fund has backtracked its decision to pick up part of the bill for former-US President Bill Clinton‘s visit to Israel, taking place as part of President Shimon Peres‘s 90th birthday celebrations. 
“We have no intention of harming Clinton, the (Israeli) president, or the Israeli people. It is for the latter’s sake that we raise hundreds of million of dollars annually, and hence we have decided to refrain from participating in the event,” a member of the organization stated.  (Read more…)

The world of conservative intellectuals is very small.  

By Ted Belman 
Yesterday, I had the privilege of meeting Christian, Guy Milliere who was interviewed in this article which I published in 2011 A French Intellectual In Praise Of Israel.
He was a accompanied by his wife who is a former Muslim.
He was in Israel to deliver a number of lectures in French. His lectures are extremely well attended by French speaking Israelis because he is very well known and a rare conservative among French intellectuals. He is an avid reader of Israpundit. He called me up because he wanted to meet me. I was honoured.
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Richard Falk urges UN to expel UN Watch  

UN Watch:
“We do not take this lightly: the UN has in the past suspended NGOs for criticizing the wrong regimes”
GENEVA, June 6, 2013 – In a scathing and unprecedented attack on an accredited NGO, top UN Human Rights Council official Richard Falk is publicly calling on the 47-nation body to investigate and potentially shut down a watchdog organization after it mobilized world leaders—including his own boss, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon—to condemn his comments blaming the Boston Marathon bombings on “the American global domination project” and “Tel Aviv.”
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Pro-Palestinian Activists Claim ‘Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee’ on California Campuses  

In her controversial book, From Time Immemorial, which examined the false narrative concerning the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Joan Peters referred to something she identified as “turnspeak,” “twisted rhetoric artfully aimed at the hearts and minds of the West, originated by the Arabs, and rivaling the Soviets, who are veterans of ‘semantic infiltration’ and the word war. Just as, in their lexicon, totalitarianism translates into ‘democracy,’ and degradation becomes ‘freedom,’ so has the flawed but democratic Israel been branded ‘Zionist imperialist’ and ‘racist.’” First used in 1939 to describe German propaganda after its invasion of Czechoslovakia, “turnspeak” in that instance was used to invert truth, enabling Germany to blame the Czechs for the aggression and belligerency they themselves were perpetrating.
On campuses today, turnspeak is still alive and well, the latest instance of its use being the case of Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz and co-founder of the AMCHA Initiative, an organization that investigates, documents, educates about, and combats anti-Semitism at institutions of higher education in the U.S..
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Ted Belman
Jerusalem, Israel

Posted by Britannia Radio at 08:39