I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army…

Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting:  yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, picked up on it… but, yet, somehow still found a most bizarre way to “link” one of the perpetrators to none other than Sarah Palin, the liberals’ favorite scapegoat for everything.

The caption for one of their photos of Cpl. Jeremy Morlock reads, “Morlock was the kind of bad-news kid who the Army might have passed on. He grew up not far from Sarah Palin in Wasilla, Alaska; his sister hung out with Bristol, and Morlock played hockey against Track.”

What makes this entirely shameful and inexcusable is the sheer transparency of the stunt; any intelligent person reading this can clearly see that this insane soldier has absolutely nothing to do with Palin other than his geographic proximity to her, and ends up wondering what in the world the editors at Rolling Stone could be thinking? Are they deliberately trying to smear the reputation of their own publication?

This is so bizarre for so many reasons. First of all, is Rolling Stone implying that Sarah Palin has anything to do with this sadist simply because they come from the same town?  Is Rolling Stone therefore implying that Wasilla is a town of sadistic, crazy people?

Next is the fact that Wasilla is a very small town with a population of about 7,000 people.  So, the fact that they grew up “not far” from each other pretty much goes without saying in a town that small. So, too, is the high probability that they might have relatives who are friends with each other, or who might have played hockey against each other. I’m surprised that Rolling Stone had nothing to say about the church they might have attended growing up…

So, ultimately, not only is there no link to Obama in the same way the media was so quick to pin Abu Ghraib on Bush… but, they actually go so blatantly and outrageously far out of their way to somehow find some cockamamie way to connect someone involved to anyone on the right!

That this “news” is already popular on some foaming-at-the-mouth, lunatic left blogs is not too surprising. But, for Rolling Stone to join their rabid ranks is just a disgrace.

A disgrace not just for Rolling Stone, but—if left unaddressed and un-reproached—for journalism itself.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences:

Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike. It was the first time Jerusalem had been hit by such a bomb since 2004.

Goldberg commented:

Those Israelis and their crazy terms! I mean, referring to a fatal bombing of civilians as a “terrorist attack”? Who are they kidding? Everyone knows that a fatal bombing of Israeli civilians should be referred to as a “teachable moment.” Or as a “venting of certain frustrations.” Or as “an understandable reaction to Jewish perfidy.” Or perhaps as “a very special episode of ‘Cheers.’” Anything but “a terrorist attack.” I suppose Reuters will mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by referring to the attacks as “an exercise in urban renewal.”

The mind reels.

This is truly disgusting. I suppose the Fogel bloodbath was just “a neighborly altercation” to those filthy scumbags at Reuters. I hope that someday the Palestinians “strike” at the Reuters corporate headquarters so honest journalists everywhere can have their last laugh.

What a disgrace.

At least the many visitors to that Reuters page saw through this. Here are a few of their comments:

catholicmom2 wrote:
You know, when something explodes on a civilian public transit vehicle in the middle of a civilian venue, that is, really and truly is, a Terrorist Attack. Not a “Terrorist Attack”. It is true when it happens in Sri Lanka; true when it happens in London; true when it happens in Moscow; and yes, it is *even* true when it happens in Jerusalem.

CalFed wrote:
“Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike.”

What a pathetic genuflection to political correctness. Reuters really has become the leader in cowardly double speak.

So planting a bomb next to a bus stop targeting civilians is now a “terrorist attack” in quotes. What’s next? Referring to 9/11 as urban renewal?

l2382 wrote:
25 people were wounded in a bomb near a supermarket. Police are calling it a “terrorist attack” – the British term for an IRA strike.

10 people were killed and 30 wounded in a bomb in a subway. Police are calling it a “terrorist attack” – the Spanish term for an ETA strike.

30 people were killed and 5 wounded in a roadside bomb in Iraq. Officials are calling it a “terrorist attack” – the Western term for anti-coalition strikes.

56 people were killed and 700 injured when bombs exploded in the underground. Officials are calling it a “terrorist attack” – the British and American term for Islamist strikes.

calj35 wrote:
Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike.

Reuters has become such a classy organization. It cannot even report on a terrible bombing incident without taking a cheap shot at Israel. If you get any classier, you might just overtake MSNBC in that department.

While reading last month’s issue of AAA’s Car & Travel magazine, I was surprised to discover that Bloomberg (with the FDNY behind him) is now trying to push a “crash tax” on anyone involved in a car accident, with such taxes ranging from $365 up to $490, depending on the severity of the crash.

The article mentioned the slippery slope of this harebrained scheme, as did this post by Gothamist, whereby this tax could lead to other taxes, like taxing shopkeepers who call the police to come apprehend shoplifters at a higher rate than other shops. In short, where would the line be drawn? When does it end up becoming “pay for service” for some of the basic services we expect from our city and from the taxes we already pay??

One repercussion of this that neither Car & Travel nor Gothamist mention (nor any opinion piece I’ve read yet), is the significant concern of increased hit-and-runs. Faced with an inevitable wallet gouging of several hundred dollars, you can be sure that many people will opt for the quick getaway—from the accident and from the unnecessary additional financial loss.

Mark my words: with this tax, the incidence rate of hit-and-runs will skyrocket.

Thankfully, though, the city council appears to be working hard to defeat this initiative, as reported in the Gothamist post mentioned above, as well as other numerous sources, like the Wall Street Journal.

Here’s hoping that this ludicrous initiative dies a quick and painless death.

The latest news out of Afghanistan is going to be really interesting to follow, if only to see how the media handles it.

According to the Guardian and other (so far relatively few) sources, pictures have now made their way out of Afghanistan (courtesy of Germany’s Der Spiegel) showing brutal and psychopathic activities by U.S. armed forces over the last year or so, including premeditated murder (after torture) of defenseless Afghan civilians, posing with dead Afghans, and taking “trophies” from the bodies of dead Afghans (fingers, teeth, etc.).

In fact, speculation is that the backlash over these pictures “could be more damaging than after the Abu Ghraib scandal”.

For that reason, in comparing it to Abu Ghraib, it’s interesting to note that so far this is not in any of the U.S. media’s top headlines, as they were in the days of Bush’s presidency; that so far there haven’t been any fingers pointing at Obama as the commander in chief, as they were in the days of Bush’s tenure; that so far there hasn’t been any accusations of this being “Obama’s unnecessary war” despite his “promises” to get us out of the region, as there were in the days of “Bush’s ‘unnecessary’ war”, etc.

So, will the mainstream media treat Obama the same way?  Or will they employ their usual double-standard? The suspense is just killing me…

Maybe the mainstream media will surprise me… who knows. After all, stranger things are happening (like some Democrats calling for Obama’s impeachment)!

In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes across in the context of the story being reported.

Among them is the New York Times, which—in its initial report of the massacre cached on Saturday night (click on the thumbnail at left to view Google’s cache of the story)—somehow found room to include these outrageous paragraphs:

Tensions in the West Bank have been worsening lately. Jewish settlers from the extreme fringes of the settler movement attacked Palestinian property in the northern West Bank in response to recent action by the Israeli security forces against illegal settler structures in an unauthorized outpost. This practice of revenge attacks has recently been condemned by Israeli military and political leaders, including Mr. Netanyahu.

The official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, cited reports from Palestinians in villages around Nablus on Saturday afternoon who said that several Palestinian homes had come under attack by settlers.

The Times—perhaps sensing the ensuing firestorm—wisely scrubbed those paragraphs from the final published version of the story.

Time Magazine is another interesting case. They start by describing “the gruesome attack, in which two parents and three young children were fatally stabbed as they slept”. For starters, note the passive tense of the verb; if you follow the link to the original article, you’ll find that it takes until the end of the next paragraph to find out that “Palestinian militants are presumed to have carried out the assault”…  yes, presumed (apparently their own publicly issued statement wasn’t good enough for Time).

Then, using a lot of language they lifted from Amy Teibel of Associated Press (who managed to mix all of this in with U.S. criticism of the Israeli construction plan), they reproduced this gem [emphasis mine]:

Israel has long contended that Palestinian textbooks and official media preach hatred toward Israel and that the killers of Israelis are often glorified.

On Sunday, a group of activists from Abbas’ Fatah movement dedicated a square in the West Bank city of Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, a female militant who carried out a 1978 bus attack that killed 37 Israelis. Aides to Abbas said they tried to stop the ceremony and the move was not officially sanctioned.

Still, Israel has not produced evidence that incitement contributed to the killings.

Do you understand that last sentence?  Because I have a pretty tough time doing so. As The Elder of Ziyon pointedly asks on his blog:

Evidence? Does Israel need to catch the murderer and dissect his brain to prove it to the NYT’s satisfaction?

[Note, The Elder of Ziyon references and links not to the Time Magazine article, but to a New York Time's article written using in fact much of the same language as Time Magazine, as lifted from Associated Press, which leads me to believe that the NYT actually did have that preposterous comment in their version as well as Time, but that they wisely scrubbed that, too, from their final version! A lot of retroactive scrubbing going on at the NYT editing desk!

At least they've been doing some scrubbing, though. Many other media outlets across the country, on the other hand, simply reproduced Amy Teiber's disgusting drivel verbatim without giving it a second thought.]

And, then, there is this doozy from the LA Times, where they flat out say simply that settlements provoke the butchering of babies—as if that’s even a chain of logic that we should ever accept! Simon Plosker of  HonestReporting.com analyzes it nicely:

The inhuman act of slitting the throats of a three-month old baby, two small children and their parents defies any understanding or justification for any political cause. But not for the LA Times, which contends that the brutal murder of the Fogel family are part of an ongoing “cycle of violence”:

We’re currently witnessing the cycle in real time. On Saturday, five members of an Israeli family living in the West Bank settlement of Itamar, near the Palestinian city of Nablus, were killed, including an 11-year-old boy, a 4-year-old boy and an infant girl, presumably by Palestinian militants. In response to this brutal tragedy, the Israeli government announced that it would build 500 more houses in existing settlements in the West Bank. Interior Minister Eli Yishai said Sunday that 500 was not enough and that Israel should build 1,000 new homes for every Israeli who is killed there.

Which is worse — stabbing children to death or building new houses in West Bank settlements? The answer is obvious. But that’s not the point. The point is that no matter how abhorrent the murders are, it serves no purpose to aggravate the provocation that led to them in the first place.

So according to the LA Times, baby killing  is a natural response to an Israeli provocation, in this case the act of building houses. Is this any different to the vicious rhetoric of Hamas, which justified the murders?

The LA Times asks:

How will building more houses for Israelis in the midst of the West Bank, in settlements that are almost universally acknowledged to violate international law, do anything other than keep the crisis going? Answer: It won’t.

Perhaps the LA Times should be asking how the butchering of babies, which is universally condemned, will do anything other than keep the crisis going? But instead, the paper cares little for placing responsibility for Palestinian actions on the Palestinians themselves let alone dealing with the very real issue of incitement in the Palestinian media and education system.

As for the claim that this brutal act is simply part of a “cycle of violence”, this is a charge that has been employed on a regular basis by lazy media that cannot differentiate between Palestinian terror, Israeli self-defense or non-violent acts of building homes. The Jerusalem Post eloquently debunked this as far back as 2008:

In truth, however, there is no cycle of violence. There is no spiral of attack and counter-attack relentlessly unfolding here.

What we have, rather, on the one hand, is a sovereign nation’s desperate effort to live in its homeland, seek peace with those of its neighbors who will partner it, and defend itself against those who seek its destruction. And, on the other, we have the forces of militant Islam, firing rockets across Israel’s sovereign borders, murdering Israelis wherever they can be found vulnerable, indoctrinating their people with a vicious intolerance of Jewish historical rights in this region, and simultaneously spreading a perverted interpretation of Islam that purports to require each and every believer to carry out personal jihad in the name of God against the infidels – be they Jews, Christians or unbelieving Muslims.

Next up, we have CNN, who headlined its report: “Family members killed in what military calls ‘terror attack’.” As Tom Gross points out on his web site, “in its report CNN referred to the terrorist or terrorists as ‘an intruder’ and neglected to mention the ages of the three children.”

Moving right along, we have the BBC. Tom Gross writes:

Interestingly (and surely there’s no collaboration here), the BBC website also referred to the terrorist as an “intruder” in its report. BBC online said: “The family – including three children – were stabbed to death by an intruder who broke into their home”.

The BBC – which likes to pretend that the Palestinian national movement rarely does anything wrong (only Israelis do wrong) – may be trying to suggest to its audience that the victims died in some kind of failed burglary attempt.

Even more extraordinarily, for the first 24 hours after the attack [it has since been changed, following complaints], the BBC piece was headlined:

Palestinian ‘kills five Israelis’ in West Bank

Can anyone explain the BBC’s use of quotation marks in this headline? Are they disputing the fact that five Israelis were murdered?

After all, the BBC’s own article started: “A Palestinian has killed five Israelis in an attack on a settlement in the West Bank, the Israeli military says.”

The BBC went on to give a lengthy explanation of just how wrong it is for Jews to live in Judea, as if these kids “had it coming”.

As I said before: Israel has no friends in this world. Every mainstream media outlet from the North America to Europe to the Arab world is intent on demonizing Israel in every way possible and when the job gets “complicated” by an “inconvenient” terrorist attack that dangerously courts world sympathy, the media does its damnedest to make sure that “proper balance” is restored and people can not lose sight of how “evil” Israel is.

For this, I hold responsible every idiot who continues to swallow the mainstream media’s drivel, not just the evil, morally bankrupt writers and editors behind it.

Udi Fogel, 36
Ruth Fogel, 35
Yoav Fogel, 11
Elad Fogel, 4
Hadas Fogel, 3 months

תהא נשמתם צרורות בצרור החיים

It is now two days after what has to be the most horrific, cold-blooded terrorist attack that I have ever heard about—the heart-rendering images of which are burned forever into my tear-obscured eyes—and I have yet to see any widespread reports of this, any widespread disgust and condemnation, any repercussions… anything.

Israel, this is your wake-up call: no one cares about you. If you thought you had friends in the world, think again.

No one cares when purely evil, inhuman Palestinian beasts descend upon your sweet, innocent families and utterly destroy the most innocent and precious of your resources.

No one cares when your innocent 3-month old babies are stabbed to death in their fathers’ dying protective arms.

No one cares when the bodies of your innocent children are left hacked up in pools of blood.

No one cares when your two-year-old children are found standing over their just-murdered parents screaming desperately for them to wake up.

No one cares when devastated twelve-year-old girls suddenly have to be the new “mommy” of their families because the real mommy and daddy have had their throats slit and hearts stabbed.

No one cares.

NO. ONE. CARES.

Israel, it’s time to wake up and realize that the only one that will ever care about you… is YOU. When the Palestinians are dancing in the streets and handing out candy to celebrate the cold-blooded murder of innocent Jewish babies—and the world looks the other way!—it’s a clear sign. A clear sign that it’s about time you stop worrying about what the world will think and start caring about your citizens, because the world doesn’t.

Worry only about yourselves. Worry only about your citizens. Worry only about innocent families like the Fogels, whose surviving family members will never be able to lead normal lives again.

Now is the time to take drastic action.

For starters, the Palestinian village of Avrata who took these demons in and hid them should be burned to the ground. The residents should have 24 hours to leave, after which the entire village should be leveled with incendiary bombs. The smoldering ashes of that village should be left and publicized to the entire Palestinian world that, going forward, this is what will happen to any and every village that harbors terrorists.

The same should apply to any town or village found celebrating such attacks, as those reports that have been coming in of Palestinians celebrating these attacks by handing out candy on the streets.

Next, I understand that a massive manhunt is supposedly underway by the IDF to find these people, so I am not going to suggest the obvious, but I will say that the death penalty should be reinstated and used for anyone connected in any way to terrorist attacks such as this. There should never be any possibility of demons like this ever being released as part of any prisoner exchange. Thankfully, there are calls for this already starting from some Israeli politicians. I hope that this catches on and is legislated.

But, the time is now.

Israel, please don’t ever let something like this happen again. At the very least, learn something from this horrific tragedy. You are alone in the world and you need to start looking out for your own people. Your people are desperate for some signs of leadership, protection, independence, and courage, and now is the time to show it.

May God comfort the family and friends of the victims, and all of Israel, and may Israel see no more suffering and tragedy.

May God protect Israel and shelter her from harm and give her the strength to rise up from this tragedy infinitely stronger and with a resilient and blazing ferocity, the likes of which the world has never before seen.

And may God show no mercy to the demons who committed this heinous act. May their physical bodies suffer the most tortured of deaths on this earth and may their souls suffer the most tortured of punishments for all eternity.

יִתַּמּוּ חַטָּאִים מִן הָאָרֶץ וּרְשָׁעִים עוֹד אֵינָם בָּרְכִי נַפְשִׁי אֶת יְהוָה הַלְלוּיָהּ:

I recently wrote about some smeared human excrement (yes, you’re reading this correctly) in the middle of a subway station ramp.  Well, guess what?  It’s still there, and it’s now going on over two weeks.

I just sent a whole new slew of letters to the same recipients as last week (Straphangers Campaign, MTA Chairman Jay Walder, MTA President Thomas Predergast, MTA Sr VP of Subways Steven Feil, and Mayor Bloomberg). This time, for good measure, I added City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and my local councilman to the list.  They each got a beautifully printed color 8×10 photograph souvenir of the excrement, too.  (And, if this is still there next week, maybe I should send them actual samples of it?)

And for even more good measure (“better measure?”), I sent in tips to CBS 2 News, NBC 4 News, Fox 5 News, ABC 7 News, MY9 TV News, and WB 11 News.

Just in case any MTA officials happen to be reading this in sheer and literal disbelief, allow me to share this high quality (if not highly distasteful) photo that I just took this morning (note that the caution sign has also been there all this time, indicating that the station employees have in fact all along been aware of this disgusting insult to all straphangers):

All the world over, Israel’s airport and airline security is held in the highest regard, receiving the highest forms of respect and recognition by other governments and private firms seeking to learn from and implement their methods.

All the world over, that is, except in Israel itself. Apparently, the judges on Israel’s Supreme Court, sitting in the ignorantly blissful comfort of their secure buildings, have decided that the methods used until now are just not politically correct enough, and that—proven security be damned—they need to be changed.

In question is Israel’s policy of questioning Arab passengers much more vigorously than Israeli passengers.

As Arutz 7 reports,

Israel’s Supreme Court issued a court order on Monday asking airport authorities to explain within 45 days why they cannot inspect all airport passengers using equal, objective and uniform criteria and why Arab passengers are automatically tagged a security risk.

Yes, apparently, no one told the Supreme Court that Israeli passengers don’t blow up or hijack planes, and that, to date, it’s the Arabs who hold virtually an exclusive monopoly on that practice. Maybe the judges should have opened a newspaper or something first, and then they might have been able to save face rather than officially ask such a stupid question.

Hopefully, those officials in charge of airport security won’t take this lying down. Arutz 7′s report gives some hope to that effect:

In response to the court order, an airport security official told Arutz Sheva’s Hebrew site on Monday: “it is unfortunate that the Supreme Court judges are sitting in their air conditioned rooms and do not understand the dangers posed just by debating the issue. The Twin Towers tragedy took place, the danger has not disappeared and peace has not come. The Supreme Court is endangering the security of Israeli citizens.”

P.S. Some of the comments on that Arutz 7 article page are just great! One of my favorites was this one, posted today by “Sonya”:

I think that if police is looking for a rapist it should not humiliate half of Israeli population, namely males. Just in case, check all women as well.

I’ve finally had enough.

For over a week now, I’ve had to walk past the same splatter of human excrement in the middle of a primary subway ramp at the 34th Street Herald Square station, and I’m genuinely outraged by the apparent lack of any effort by the MTA to clean it up. I know that they are aware of it because they took the time to put a “CAUTION” cone/pyramid next to it, but that appears to be the extent to which they’re addressing the problem.

For anyone else who goes through that station and is as sickened as I am by this blatant disregard for sanitary conditions (or even anyone who experiences similar problems in other stations or on the trains itself), I strongly urge you to write to as many officials as possible.

For inspiration, feel free to check out my own letter below. Some addresses of interest are:

Steven Feil
Senior Vice President, Department of Subways
MTA New York City Transit
2 Broadway
New York, NY 10004

Thomas Predergast
President
MTA New York City Transit
2 Broadway
New York, NY 10004

Jay H. Walder
Chairman
Metropolitan Transportation Authority
347 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10017

The Honorable Michael R. Bloomberg
Mayor, City of New York
City Hall
New York, NY 10007

Straphangers Campaign
9 Murray Street
New York, NY 10007

The text of one of my letters is:

Dear Mr. Feil,

I am writing to you concerning a shocking and blatant disregard for sanitary conditions—by even the most forgiving of standards—at your 34^th Street Herald Square station.

For over a month now, I have seen the same two unfortunately filthy homeless people literally living on one of the station’s largest access ramps (the main ramp leading down to the uptown B, D, F, and M platform), calling it their home. Their unfortunately horrible odor is offensive enough and strong enough to cause all commuters to pass them as quickly as possible in the widest arc around them as possible. (I can’t speak for others, but I personally have to hold my breath for most of my journey up the ramp, as the odor extends for at least 30 feet in all directions.)

Had this been the extent of the problem, I might not have gone to the effort of writing this letter, especially considering the homeless squatting that is rampant in the subway system. But, last week this was amplified to an entirely new level when the homeless people—for lack of a bathroom, I suppose—apparently decided that the ramp would also make a nice toilet.

The human excrement they left behind has been there for over a week. Rather than cleaning it up, the station’s maintenance crew last week simply put out one of those “CAUTION” pyramids (the ones they use when the floors are slippery).

I am not sure what the delay is but, after a week, there can be no rational explanation for human excrement still smeared across the middle of a subway station ramp.

I urge you to look into this matter without further delay and to please hold accountable all those employees responsible for not addressing this public health threat in a proper timeframe.

Diana West has written a great piece on the silence of the mainstream media regarding the terrible ordeal that CBS News’ Lara Logan recently suffered at the hands of an Egyptian mob.

For those who don’t know the story (which might not be so far-fetched, considering the lack of reporting and outrage), ten days ago, Lara Logan, a CBS News correspondent, was sexually assaulted by a mob screaming “Jew, Jew!” in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. She was flown out of Cairo by a network-chartered jet hours later and the story was quelled.

When the story finally broke several days later, I could understand why it was kept quiet. After all, the ordeal was bad enough for Logan, and if it were possible to keep it out of the news and avert the need for her to relive it through everyone else’s eyes and ears, all the better.

But, once the story did break, there was no longer any excuse to cover up details—especially details that would not inflict additional hardship on her, and especially details that are relevant to the story!

The detail in particular that all the media has been silent about, until the NY Post finally came out with it was the fact that the animals who were assaulting her were shouting “Jew! Jew!” as they did it.

Political columnist and author Diana West, shining the spotlight on the guilty-as-usual mainstream media, gave a great analogy to show the hypocrisy of the MSM, and had a few more poignant points on the subject:

Such a news blackout is hard to imagine if, for example, a star correspondent had been similarly violated by a mob of tea party-goers at, say, a massive Glenn Beck rally — and particularly if other correspondents had previously suffered unprecedented assaults and threats from the same crowd. A keening outcry would have arisen from the heart of the MSM (mainstream media) against the mob, accompanied by a natural zeal to investigate cultural or other reasons for the brutality. Not excuses. And not disinterest.

But in this singular Logan case we’ve seen both. First, only after news queries indicated the story was breaking did CBS on Tuesday release a brief rap sheet on the Friday crime. We were told of Logan’s accidental separation from her crew in the crowd. The prolonged assault by over 200 people “whipped into a frenzy.” The rescue by a group of women and 20 soldiers. What CBS didn’t mention — what was later attributed to an unnamed network source — was that as the thugs assaulted the 39-year-old journalist and mother of two, they shouted, “Jew! Jew!”

This essential piece of the story, this clue to the hysterical, obsessive anti-Semitism of the Islamic world including Egypt, was broken by the New York Post. It has sparked little comment, which in itself is worth comment. Imagine, again, if a tea party mob were implicated in such an assault, and, as if in answer to fervent leftist fantasy, it came out that 200 Constitution-loving thugs had been yelling racial slurs. The MSM would directly attribute it the fact that George Washington owned slaves.

But Islam, even with its Koranically enjoined anti-Semitism and misogyny, isn’t considered a factor here. Islam might as well not exist. Islamic misogyny might as well not exist. Islamic anti-Semitism might as well not exist. But imagine further if the foundational documents of the tea party movement, its official leaders and heroes, were steeped in equivalent hatred and misogyny. There would be no instinctive reaction in the MSM to universalize the attack and strip away all possible cultural or (considering those shouts of “Jew! Jew!” in the Logan case) religious context.

But that’s exactly what happened here. It took a tweet from a movie critic even to broach the misogyny topic in the MSM when Roger Ebert wrote, “The attack on Lara Logan brings Middle East attitudes toward women into sad focus.” (Given that Israel is in the otherwise Islamically dominated “Middle East,” Ebert is employing the quasi-accepted euphemism for Muslim.) Those few reports that even discuss the anti-Semitic angle do so without comment, or let it go slack, as when Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, noting the “undertones of pogromist anti-Semitism,” only concluded that “not everyone in Tahrir Square that night had democracy on their mind.” (The light might have dawnethed more brightly had the MSM actually reported on the widespread anti-Semitic iconography visible in the demonstrations, as amply archived by John Rosenthal at Pajamas Media.)

Missing is any acknowledgement of the fact — the overwhelming, highly upsetting but nonetheless unavoidable fact — that Islam’s teachings on women and particularly Jews are literally hateful. And that’s the Koranic truth, as copiously expressed by the late Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, Grand Imam of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, approximately Sunni Islam’s “pope.” As he put it, and with plenty of canonical support: Jews “are the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs.”

Rather than consider the sources of violent animus that appear to have been manifested in the assault on Logan, who, by the way, is not a Jew, the MSM let it all go. The crowd was “whipped into a frenzy” just as CBS said. But was the frenzy cultural? Religious? Don’t ask, and certainly don’t tell.

That would spoil the story.

A report from Fox News today, citing the Times of London, has revealed that “Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah reportedly told President Obama not to humiliate Mubarak and warned that he would step in to bankroll Egypt if the U.S. withdrew its aid program, worth $1.5 billion annually.”

Besides the obvious question of what the hell are we doing sending one and a half billion of our tax dollars a year to a dictatorship in the Middle East, one cannot help but wonder why Obama did not call Abdullah’s bluff on the “threat”?

In fact, Obama’s response should have been: “You call that a threat?! Sure! Go ahead and bankroll Egypt. In fact, why haven’t you been doing it all along, you cheap, pompous big talker?”

On a separate note: seriously, if Abdullah has that kind of money to spare (which he clearly does), why isn’t he helping his impoverished Arab brethren in his region? Why is he simply content to sit his fat inconsiderate ass back and let the Americans pour money there instead?

The news coming out of the New York Post is no surprise:  informants from within the Sanitation Department have come out secretly exposing that workers deliberately slowed down the blizzard cleanup efforts in an underhanded move to make Bloomberg look bad.

It was obvious to most New Yorkers (especially those in Brooklyn who were hit hardest) that the Sanitation Department was not doing its job. After all, this is not the first snowstorm we’ve had and the weather conditions related to the blizzard were well-known prior to the blizzard’s onset, giving the city plenty of time to prepare accordingly. So, no matter what some city apologists have been saying (“we were cut several hundred trucks from our fleet of several thousand”… and “there were higher winds than usual with this blizzard”), there is still no explaining why some parts of the city went 3 or 4 days before seeing their first snow plow.

Talk about a snow job. Watching those union bosses and sanitation officials on TV making one excuse after another as to why the cleanup was so slow… and now some informants from within the department have exposed the real—and brutally ugly—truth.

The NY Post writes (emphasis mine):

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department — and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan — at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.

The snitches “didn’t want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation,” Halloran said. “They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”

New York’s Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process — and pad overtime checks — which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.

The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.

…multiple Sanitation Department sources told The Post yesterday that angry plow drivers have only been clearing streets assigned to them even if that means they have to drive through snowed-in roads with their plows raised.And they are keeping their plow blades unusually high, making it necessary for them to have to run extra passes, adding time and extra pay.

One mechanic said some drivers are purposely smashing plows and salt spreaders to further stall the cleanup effort.

This is an absolute outrage.

Not only should those supervisors responsible be fired, but if the mayor has any brains and foresight, he would throw the book at these people and have them arrested and charged with public endangerment, criminal mischief, destruction of public property, obstructing emergency vehicles, and any and every other remote charge than can be found.

These people’s names and pictures should also be posted in the newspaper so that everyone knows clearly who they are, and they should be banned from ever getting another public job with the city or state of NY again.

Better yet: they should all be locked inside a burning building in Brooklyn and let them all wait for the fire trucks to figure out how to reach them through the snow.

If Helen Thomas has any family members who care at all about her, now is the time for them to step in and get her away from any public appearances. It seems that she can’t stop running her mouth about the evil Jews who secretly run the world.

It seems that the Elders of Zion is something very real to this insane woman. So real, that she has so far allowed her hatred to bring her career to a screeching halt, destroy her reputation, and now erase her name from awards named for her previous accomplishments in journalism.

One such award, the Helen Thomas Spirit of Diversity in the Media Award, awarded by Wayne State University, is now kaput in light of her latest acrid verbal explosion. At a diversity conference in Dearborn, Michigan, Thomas couldn’t resist spouting that “Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by the Zionists. No question.”

Wayne State University released a statement shortly thereafter, stating that “Wayne State encourages free speech and open dialogue, and respects diverse viewpoints… However, the university strongly condemns the anti-Semitic remarks made by Helen Thomas during a conference yesterday.”

See the full story here, and read more about her previous bouts of verbal diarrhea here and here.

Hamas routinely bombs Palestinian children.

Yes, you read that correctly. These “accidents”, as they are called by the Palestinians, are the result of Hamas building explosive factories right next to schools so as to avoid Israel targeting their factories, and then having “workplace accidents” where bumbling Hamas idiots cross the wrong wires or drop the wrong carton at the wrong time. If you ask me, this takes away quite a bit of the “accidental” aspect of these children getting hurt.

What makes this story (and this is a recurring story, as it happens every couple of months) so interesting is that it is strikingly absent from the mainstream media. You don’t have to look very hard to find every insinuation of Israeli “aggression” (even when it’s mostly fabricated by the Palestinians and then served up unverified by the media), but good luck finding any stories of Palestinians getting hurt by other Palestinians.

For example, did anyone hear about Hamas’s “work accident” on August 2, which severely injured 58 Palestinians, including 14 children and 9 women, completely destroyed seven houses and damaged another 30?  Probably not—because it wasn’t much reported. Yet, the same media which ignores stories like that, turned the 2002 battle that took place in Jenin—in which fewer Palestinians were killed (the vast majority of whom were confirmed terrorists)—into a “massacre”, reporting on it around the clock on every channel almost as though they had the scoop on a new holocaust!

Or how about another more recent incident, which occurred last month in the southern Gazan town of Rafah, in which five children and two women were injured according to AP (and 17 children according to Palestinian media) after a device in a Hamas weapons laboratory adjacent to a school accidentally exploded? Anyone hear about that? Nope. Credit does go to AP for actually running the story on their newswire, but that’s where it pretty much ends, because apparently none of the media outlets found it interesting and newsworthy enough to pass along to the public. Why? Because there was no way of spinning it to slander Israel?

Well, here are some of the picture you probably haven’t seen. Again, an unusual thank you to AP for actually sending out these pictures:

I find it shocking how there can be complaint after complaint of the TSA—with several new stories surfacing daily—and, yet, still nothing is being done about this outrage. The media is reporting on this daily, the news sites and blogs are blazing with these stories, and the government and civil liberties organizations are receiving complaints around the clock.

So, how is it that still nothing is being done? Why is there no “state of emergency” being declared?

TSA officials still insist in the face of hundreds of accusations that they’re doing nothing wrong. Janet Napolitano is quickly becoming the wicked witch of the west (does she get groped by her TSA officials before mounting her broomstick?). Congress is buzzing about this, but still hasn’t done anything. The same goes for the suddenly-impotent ACLU.

Finally, Obama—who is clearly a disaster when it comes to our economic situation, our foreign policy situation, our health care situation, and virtually ever other aspect of American life—also has nothing to say about this. Come on, this item should be a slam-dunk on anyone’s agenda! Here’s his golden opportunity to finally do something that will endear him (even if only temporarily and reluctantly) to the people! Of course, though, he’s too dense to recognize the opportunity.

And, so, the stories continue to pile up and American liberties continue to swirl down the toilet bowl of Obama’s new era of big government.

I can’t help but think with so many people taking a pass on standing up for something that is pissing off so many Americans, this is one more cause that the Tea Party can and should take on in its effort to continue growing stronger and even more relevant in the political environment.

And, for the morbidly curious, here is this morning’s roundup of new horror stories:

• KMOV-4, St. Louis, reports on a woman who had a TSA agent’s hands literally in her panties, as well as strongly groping her breasts and her genitals.
• WZZM-13, and ABC affiliate, reports on a woman who had a TSA agent’s hand go up inside her skirt between her legs with such force that she was lifted off of her heels and was still in pain for an hour after the incident.
• WBTV-3, a CBS affiliate, reports on a cancer surviving flight attendant who was traumatized when she was forced to take off her breast prosthesis for a demanding TSA agent, despite already having gone through the full body scanner and an “enhanced” pat-down.