I know I’ve been inactive lately (“lately” being very loosely applied here!), but I came across this and was so inspired and enthusiastic about sharing it that I had to find my way back to my blog if only to share this.

Apparently, the NY Times—in its warped sense of “balance”—figured it would balance its recent track record of 19 anti-Israel op-ed pieces (out of 20 Israel-themed pieces total) with a single op-ed solicited from Netanyahu.

That the NY Times isn’t actually looking for real balance, but simply a token piece, is evident by the fact that they rejected a pro-Israel piece recently submitted by majority leader of the House of Congress, Eric Cantor (R-VA) and the minority whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD), in which they jointly oppose the Palestinian Authority’s recent unilateral statehood bid.

Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s senior advisor, had this beautiful response to the NY Times:

Dear Sasha,

I received your email requesting that Prime Minister Netanyahu submit an op-ed to the New York Times. Unfortunately, we must respectfully decline.

On matters relating to Israel, the op-ed page of the “paper of record” has failed to heed the late Senator Moynihan’s admonition that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but that no one is entitled to their own facts.

A case in point was your decision last May to publish the following bit of historical revision by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas:

It is important to note that the last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states. In November 1947, the General Assembly made its recommendation and answered in the affirmative. Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued.

This paragraph effectively turns on its head an event within living memory in which the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan accepted by the Jews and then joined five Arab states in launching a war to annihilate the embryonic Jewish state. It should not have made it past the most rudimentary fact-checking.

The opinions of some of your regular columnists regarding Israel are well known. They consistently distort the positions of our government and ignore the steps it has taken to advance peace. They cavalierly defame our country by suggesting that marginal phenomena condemned by Prime Minister Netanyahu and virtually every Israeli official somehow reflects government policy or Israeli society as a whole. Worse, one columnist even stooped to suggesting that the strong expressions of support for Prime Minister Netanyahu during his speech this year to Congress was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby” rather than a reflection of the broad support for Israel among the American people.

Yet instead of trying to balance these views with a different opinion, it would seem as if the surest way to get an op-ed published in the New York Times these days, no matter how obscure the writer or the viewpoint, is to attack Israel.

Even so, the recent piece on “Pinkwashing,” in which Israel is vilified for having the temerity to champion its record on gay-rights, set a new bar that will be hard for you to lower in the future.

Not to be accused of cherry-picking to prove a point, I discovered that during the last three months (September through November) you published 20 op-eds about Israel in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. After dividing the op-eds into two categories, “positive” and “negative,” with “negative” meaning an attack against the State of Israel or the policies of its democratically elected government, I found that 19 out of 20 columns were “negative.”

The only “positive” piece was penned by Richard Goldstone (of the infamous Goldstone Report), in which he defended Israel against the slanderous charge of Apartheid.

Yet your decision to publish that op-ed came a few months after your paper reportedly rejected Goldstone’s previous submission. In that earlier piece, which was ultimately published in the Washington Post, the man who was quoted the world over for alleging that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza, fundamentally changed his position. According to the New York Times op-ed page, that was apparently news unfit to print.

Your refusal to publish “positive” pieces about Israel apparently does not stem from a shortage of supply. It was brought to my attention that the Majority Leader and Minority Whip of the U.S. House of Representatives jointly submitted an op-ed to your paper in September opposing the Palestinian action at the United Nations and supporting the call of both Israel and the Obama administration for direct negotiations without preconditions. In an age of intense partisanship, one would have thought that strong bipartisan support for Israel on such a timely issue would have made your cut.

So with all due respect to your prestigious paper, you will forgive us for declining your offer. We wouldn’t want to be seen as “Bibiwashing” the op-ed page of the New York Times.

Sincerely,

Ron Dermer
Senior advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu

In light of some recent (although hardly surprising) reporting by the NY Times, my father had these particularly insightful comments to make, ending with a pair of questions that I challenge any honest person to answer:

According to the “paper of record”, Israel’s killing of terrorists responsible for killing Israeli civilians (including children) ignited cross-border clashes between Israel and Hamas after months of relative silence.

Of course, according to NYT’s warped values, the killing of Israeli civilians isn’t enough to “ignite cross-border clashes”.  It takes something really disgusting, such as killing the terrorists that killed the civilians to ignite cross-border clashes.  After all, what right does a “vermin country” like Israel have to kill people who kill their civilians?  Only every other country in the world has that right.  But, of course, not Israel.

And, of course, according to the NYT, the scores of bomb that were sent into Israel prior to this current flare-up, is called “relative silence”.  If scores of bombs were sent into any other country, that would be cause for declaring war.  But for Israel, it’s “relative silence”.

In my opinion, this reporting is so biased, it borders on anti-Semitism.

By the way, there was an article recently in the Jewish Week written by a former NYT reporter who was assigned to cover the 1991 Crown Heights riots.  The riots were the result of a Hasidic Jew accidentally killing a Black child with his car.  The reporter, who was in the field, sent reports to the NYT home office describing the riots as a pogrom against the Jews and the writer at the home office deliberately altered the report in the final article to make it seem like the pogrom was really merely a clash between Blacks and Jews.

The NYT couldn’t accept the fact that Blacks were attacking Jews (and even killed Yankel Rosenbaum) and that Jews weren’t fighting back.  The NYT, with its warped values, believed it would be racist to report that Blacks were attacking Jews.  So it just changed the facts to make it seem like Blacks and Jews were clashing.

Those of you who read this garbage newspaper should ask yourselves whether the twisting of the facts occurs only in relation to Jews or does they twist their facts in all of their reporting.  If the answer is that they do this in all of their reporting, why do you read a paper that can’t be trusted to report the facts?  If they only do it in regard to issues dealing with Jews, why do you read an anti-Semitic paper?

With all this talk lately of Warren Buffet calling for “millionaires” to pay higher taxes (somehow that term includes not only the 237,000 people who actually DO make over a million dollars, but also another 3.92 million people who make more than $200K, calling the actual sneakily-used term severely into question), we should all take a step back and look at exactly what Buffet is talking about, is he telling the truth, is his proposal lucrative, and, finally, why the hell doesn’t that big mouth just cut a check to the IRS himself if he’s so damn rich and solve some of our problems???

Well, thankfully an editorial in the WSJ saves us all the legwork involved in that and has served up those answers on a nice little platter:

Barney Kilgore, the man who made the Wall Street Journal into a national publication, was once asked why so many rich people favored higher taxes. That’s easy, he replied. They already have their money.

That insight is worth recalling amid the latest political duet from President Obama and Warren Buffett demanding higher taxes on “millionaires and billionaires.” Mr. Buffett is repeating his now familiar argument this week, coinciding with Mr. Obama’s Midwestern road trip on the economy. Since the media are treating Mr. Buffett as a tax oracle, let’s take a closer look at some of the billionaire’s intellectual tax dodges.

• The double tax oversight. The Berkshire Hathaway magnate makes much of the fact that he paid only 17.4% of his income in taxes, which he considers unfair when salaried workers often pay more. But Mr. Buffett makes most of his income from his investments, in particular from dividends and capital gains that are taxed at a rate of 15%.

What he doesn’t say is that much of his income was already taxed once as corporate income, which is assessed at a 35% rate (less deductions). The 15% levy on capital gains and dividends to individuals is thus a double tax that takes the overall tax rate on that corporate income closer to 45%.

This onerous tax on capital is a U.S. competitive disadvantage in the global economy, which is why Congress agreed in 2003 to cut the rates on dividends and capital gains. Even as the rest of the world is cutting tax rates on corporate income, Mr. Buffett wants to raise U.S. rates in a way that would make America less attractive for investment. Under a sensible tax reform, the feds would impose either a corporate tax or a dividend and capital gains tax, but not both.

• The middle-class bait-and-switch. Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Buffett speaks about raising taxes only on the rich. But somehow he ignores that the President’s tax increase starts at $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples. Mr. Obama ought to call them “thousandaires,” but that probably doesn’t poll as well.

The President needs to levy his tax increase at such a lower income level because that’s where the money is. In 2009, 237,000 taxpayers reported income above $1 million and they paid $178 billion in taxes. A mere 8,274 filers reported income above $10 million, and they paid only $54 billion in taxes.

But 3.92 million reported income above $200,000 in 2009, and they paid $434 billion in taxes. To put it another way, roughly 90% of the tax filers who would pay more under Mr. Obama’s plan aren’t millionaires, and 99.99% aren’t billionaires.

Mr. Buffett says it’s only “fair” to raise his taxes, but he’s lending his credibility to raising taxes on millions of middle-class earners for whom a few extra thousand dollars in after-tax income is a big deal. Unlike Mr. Buffett, those middle-class earners aren’t rich and may earn $250,000 for only a few years of their working lives. How is that fair?

• The charity loophole. For billionaires like Mr. Buffett, the single most important deduction in the tax code is for charitable giving. Middle-class earners can’t give nearly as much money away to reduce their overall tax burden. Yet we don’t hear Mr. Buffett calling for the elimination of that deduction in the name of fairness.

Mr. Buffett has also already sheltered the bulk of his fortune from federal taxes by putting them into a foundation that will give the money away. That’s an act of generosity, but if the government’s purposes are so vital, why doesn’t he simply give the money to the IRS?

Rebecca Quick of CNBC put that question to Mr. Buffett in 2007. His answer: “Well, that’s a choice and it’s an option . . . If I had to give it to a single individual, or make some young Buffett a multibillionaire, or give it to the government, I’d absolutely give it to the government. I think that on balance the Gates Foundation, my daughter’s foundation, my two sons’ foundations will do a better job with lower administrative costs and better selection of beneficiaries than the government.”

Mr. Buffett is no doubt right about the relative efficiency of private donors, but should billionaire philanthropists get such a large tax preference? Another case of fairness?

Mr. Buffett is one of the great stock-pickers of his time, and we don’t begrudge him a single dollar of his wealth. We only wish that, having already made himself rich, he weren’t so intent on making it harder for others to become rich too. If he’s worried about being undertaxed, we’d suggest he simply write a big check to Uncle Sam and go back to his day job of picking investments.

Here’s a great clip of “some common sense” from your average taxpayer:

Tom Gross, an renowned and influential journalist with years of expertise in Middle East reporting, reported on the recent UN commission that found Israel’s naval blockade to be legal, as reported in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. As he often does, Gross added some great commentary of his own to the story:

The Israeli paper Ha’aretz reports that “The final findings of the UN commission that investigated the events concerning the Turkish-led flotilla in May 2010 do not call for Israel to apologize, and conclude that the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza is legal and is in accordance with international law and a country’s right of self-defense.”

The UN committee investigating the events of last May’s Gaza flotilla is headed by the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Geoffrey Palmer, who is an expert on international maritime law.

The UN report also sharply criticized the Turkish government’s behavior in its dealings with the committee. Palmer added in the report that Israel’s independent commission led by Judge Turkel had investigated the events in a “professional, independent and unbiased” way.

By contrast, Palmer concluded that “the Turkish investigation was politically influenced and its work was not professional or independent.”

The Palmer Committee also criticizes the IHH group that organized the Gaza flotilla as well as its ties to the Turkish government, suggesting Turkey did not do enough to stop the flotilla last year. (By contrast, the Turkish authorities cooperated with Israel this year to ensure the flotilla didn’t sail from Turkey – Tom Gross.)

According to the final draft of the UN probe, Israel has not been asked to apologize to Turkey, but the report does recommend it expresses regret over the casualties.

Palmer said that although international law permits the interception of ships outside territorial waters, Israel should have taken control of the flotilla when the ships were closer to the limit of the naval blockade – 20 miles off the coast. Israel responded by saying that its interception of the flotilla further from the coast was due to military and tactical considerations, following the organizers’ refusal to stop.

***

Tom Gross adds: the above information was widely reported last week in the Israeli media, but why do all those influential international media, which criticize Israel day after day, not report properly that the UN committee has ruled Israel was right in its assertions after all?

Unlike journalists at other media, Reuters did run a piece last year, which I attach at the end of this dispatch, explaining how Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza is indeed legal under international law.

And why is the UN always spending huge amounts of money investigating supposed Israeli wrongdoings while not investigating countless wrongdoings by other governments which occur daily and most of which are barely reported by the media?

With everyone distancing themselves as quickly as possible from the miserable, vile, despicable anti-Semite, John Galliano, I was incredibly surprised today to find that Amazon.com is actually featuring his products—for children, no less—on their high-end apparel sister site, MyHabit.com.

I am absolute amazed by this association with such a rabid, drug-addicted,  frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic , and I can only hope they come to their senses quickly.

Feel free to take a moment or two to register your shock with them, using their convenient Contact Us form.

In the midst of all this speculation regarding Anthony Weiner’s potential resignation decision and his wife’s role in it, the WSJ’s James Taranto is the only commentator who actually makes sense by pointing out the absurdity of expecting his wife to “talk him into resigning”.

He writes:

House Democrats are anxious to be rid of Anthony Weiner the Tumid Tweeter, National Journal reported yesterday:

They conceded that their best strategy for getting to that point is hoping that Weiner’s wife will persuade him to go.

“We’re hearing he might resign in a couple of days,” said Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y. “He’s waiting for his wife to come home. That’s what we’re hearing from his friends.” . . .

A senior Democratic aide said there was much anticipation expressed by members–if not desperation–that Weiner might be talked into resigning by his wife, Huma Abedin, later this week.

Right, just like Mrs. Weiner’s boss, Hillary Clinton, persuaded her husband to quit politics amid a sex scandal.

Why in the world would the Dems expect Mrs. Weiner to press her husband to resign, thereby cutting the household income in half? Even if the marriage fell apart, the prospect of collecting alimony and child support would leave her with a continuing interest in his gainful employment.

Is Mrs. Clinton threatening Mrs. Weiner’s employment or advancement in order to pressure Mr. Weiner to resign? That’s the only way in which this plan would make sense. Though as the Democratic aide suggested, it could just be a desperate hope. And hope is not a plan.

 

James Taranto posted this great piece in his Best of the Web Today column on the WSJ site:

Administration officials and sympathizers have continued to fire back against the argument that the Osama bin Laden raid vindicates the Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. As we noted Friday, the counterarguments have been notably weak, and that continues to be the case.

Tom Donilon, President Obama’s national security adviser, was interviewed by Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” Wallace asked him: “Why is shooting an unarmed man in the face legal and proper while enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding of a detainee under very strict controls and limits–why is that over the line?”

Donlon tried to evade the question by giving a long justification for the shooting of bin Laden, but Wallace pressed the matter:

Wallace: Mr. Donilon, let me just make my point. I’m not asking you why it was OK to shoot Osama bin Laden. I fully understand the threat. And I’m not second-guessing the SEALs. What I am second guessing is, if that’s OK, why can’t you do waterboarding? Why can’t you do enhanced interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was just as bad an operator as Osama bin Laden?

Donilon: Because, well, our judgment is that it’s not consistent with our values, not consistent and not necessary in terms of getting the kind of intelligence that we need.

Wallace: But shooting bin Laden in the head is consistent with our values?

Donilon: We are at war with Osama bin Laden.

Wallace: We’re at war with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Donilon: It was a military operation, right? It was absolutely appropriate for the SEALs to take the action–for the forces to take the action that they took in this military operation against a military target.

Wallace: But why is it inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

Donilon: I didn’t say it was inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Wallace: You said it was against our values.

Donilon: I think that the techniques are something that there’s been a policy debate about, and our administration has made our views known on that.

Writing in The Daily, the usually sensible Judith Miller offers this bit of sophistry:

Effectiveness should not be the sole standard in determining how America treats terrorist suspects [sic] in detention.

Terrorism, after all, was an effective tool for bin Laden, at least for a while. That made it neither moral nor politically justifiable.

This analogy is completely empty. Not only are bin Laden’s means (murdering civilians en masse) not comparable to America’s (frightening mass murderers in ways that pose no actual threat of physical harm), but the ends are not comparable either. The objective of an al Qaeda attack is not to save civilians.

The atrociously poor quality of the arguments against enhanced interrogation are all the more reason to think the bin Laden raid vindicates it.

 

THESE PEOPLE ARE DISHONEST, DECEPTIVE, SCAMMERS!
This is a public service announcement!

I’m taking a brief break in my usual articles to post this public service announcement in the hopes that this can save even at least one other person from getting taken in by the following dishonest sites:

http://computechnologiesinc.com
http://computerpartsnmore.com

These sites are operated by a company called CompuTechnologies, and I would like to share with everyone an outrageous experience with them.

On March 14, 2011, an order was placed on their site. Following the placement of the order, a very strange email was received showing no return address and no contact information, and containing FIVE PAGES of pseudo-legal mumbo-jumbo. Within that text, a promise was made for another followup email within 5 business days with further details.

That email never came.

Finding no contact information in the email and then going back and finding no contact information on the site itself, an inquiry was made with the credit card used. The inquiry resulted in no response from the merchant, CompuTechnologies.

About a month later, a letter was received from CompuTechnologies. This letter was the most bizarre thing imaginable. For starters, it was dated 3 months prior to the sale date. But, that was only the beginning. What followed in the letter was two pages chock full of lies, along with a $60 “penalty” for disputing the charge, along with a blatant threat to send it to a collection agency and report it to the major credit agencies.

A reply is being sent today with a vehement response, clearly illuminating their deceptive practices and lies.

To save anyone possible hassles, and because there is nothing to hide, I am attaching here on this blog the reply with all the related documentation so that this can be seen by anyone who might do business with them. I am submitting this page to Google along with all other related pages in the hopes that this will turn up in searches for their company as well.

The other related pages can be found at:

arking.com/computechnologies
arking.com/computerpartsnmore
indisputableblog.com/2011/05/05/computechnologies
echabotdb.com/computechnologies
echabotdb.com/computerpartsnmore

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/computechnologies-aka-computechnologiesinccom-aka-computerpartsnmorecom-c463465.html

http://www.scaminformer.com/scam-report/compu-technologies-aka-computechnologiesinccom-aka-computerpartsnmorecom-c31214.html

Please feel free to pass this around!!!

The reply is as follows (and all the attachments can be seen here in this PDF):

CompuTechnologies
PO Box 472
Denville, NJ 07834

Re: File number 0133

To whom it may concern:

I recently received your “notice of chargeback/dispute repayment” and have found it to be fraught with errors and unsubstantiated claims. Furthermore, the entire nature of your operations is rife with poor, if not outright deceptive, business practices.

I will call attention to some of these right here in this letter, and you can be sure that if this matter is not dropped immediately, that I will be calling similar attention to these and other inconsistencies in your communications to not only the major credit reporting agencies, but also to the Federal Trade Commission, the Attorneys General in your region of business, and the Better Business Bureau, as well as any other consumer affairs agencies. For a further idea of what will be disseminated, feel free to visit the sites listed in Exhibit A, which I have set up or collaborated with in order to help prevent others from being taken in by your deceptive practices.

Let’s start with your letter.

As you can see from Exhibit B (a copy of your letter), your facts are so ungrounded in truth and accuracy that even the date of your letter (highlighted) is an impossible December 10, 2010—prior by over 3 months to the placement of the order by your own statements!

Next, the terms and conditions that were displayed prior to checkout (as mentioned by your letter) differed from the terms and conditions that were sent via email following the purchase, notably the lack of any such statements regarding chargeback and collections, shipping times, etc.

As for your claims to have “clearly outlined in more than five emails” the procedures for contacting your company, that it an outright lie. For one thing, I only received a single email from you, not five emails, and that one email was anything but clear in this aspect.

Exhibit C (the email) was lacking standard protocol headers, namely a “From:” header, thereby cloaking where the email was sent from. Additionally, the only email address in the entirety of the email headers (see Exhibit D, a complete list of the email’s headers) was “compute1@spectra.superdomainzone.com”, an email address which is not a working destination (see Exhibit E, the failed mail status from my postfix server).

So, to recap so far, you sent one email, not five, and that one email was sent from an invalid return path and was missing the protocol-required “From:” mail header. To round out the discussion of this email supposedly containing “clearly outlined” procedures for contacting your company, the only thing written there was the following (highlighted in Exhibit C):

COMMUNICATION : The buyer understands they must contact our company via the support site provided by company. The buyer is not to use any other contact method other than the support link provided by the company. The support site information will be given to the buyer shortly after the completion of the checkout process. There will be a link in each email sent to email address which has been provided by the buyer on the checkout process. Buyer understands they must contact our company with any questions via this support link only and by no other means. Buyer understands they are responsible for the receipt of these emails at the email address which has been provided to company by them. The buyer is responsible to ensure they have a valid email address and checking any type of spam filter software or any other application or methods which prevent the transmission of any information by our company.

The buyer will receive all the necessary purchase information from our company, no later than five business days from the date of purchase.

So, in short, your policy states that the only contact permitted is via the support site information, which will be given to the buyer shortly after completion of the checkout process, or at the very latest within five business days from the date of purchase. Well, as I pointed out, nothing further was sent to me, thereby leaving me with absolutely no valid method of contacting your company.

Furthermore, contrary to honest business practices, your site itself contains absolutely no contact information (email, telephone, postal mail, etc.). In fact, your site contains a link labeled “Contact”, which points back to the home page containing no such information (see Exhibit F, a screenshot of the link hovered over in my browser with the destination URL exhibited at the bottom by the browser’s built-in function).

So, when left with no further communication from your company, despite your own self-admitted contractual promise for further communication within five days which never came, and thereby constituting your own breach of the supposed contract, I was left with no contractual or communicative alternative but to have my credit card company try to contact you on my behalf. I therefore opened a case with them which had them then attempt to contact you for information regarding the purchase. As you can see from Exhibit G, you were given several weeks to respond to them, which you never did; apparently, you are unreachable not only to customers, but to your affiliated credit card agencies, as well!

Next, let me address your statement that I “purposely lied to credit card company stating he had contacted company and cancelled order.”  This it completely false, and I have the record of my initial online complaint to American Express to prove this. You have similar access to my claim with American Express, so you can look it up for yourself: I simply stated the truth, which was that I placed an order a week prior and never received the promised further communication from you within the promised five day period, and had no way to contact you for any information. That was the extent of my complaint. At no point was there any mention of having contacted you, nor was there any mention of cancelling the order. Again, feel free to reference the case with American Express, which you have access to as a merchant with them.

Next, let me address your statement that “USPS has been attempting to delivery [sic] product since March 31, 2011” and that I am “purposely playing games into not accepting delivery of item”. For starters, being that I never cancelled the order, I would have no reason not to accept delivery. Had the delivery come, I would gladly have accepted it. Unfortunately, though, the delivery never came. There have never been any problems with receiving any products from USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, or any other carrier to that shipping address. Furthermore, I personally queried each person at that address who might accept or refuse deliveries and was told emphatically that at no time did any of them refuse any such deliveries. They are willing to sign notarized letters to that effect if it comes to that.

At this point, based on your own breach of your own supposed contract and your own “games” that I have clearly outlined here in this letter, the burden of proof is on you to prove that your delivery was attempted by USPS and that I refused delivery. Please show the delivery receipts/attempts, or any tracking information that can substantiate your statement. Otherwise, as I stated at the outset of this letter, I demand that you drop this matter immediately and save us all the hassle of dealing with the Federal Trade Commission, the relevant Attorneys General, and any other consumer affairs agencies—all hassles that I will gladly pursue until final resolution of this, on principle alone.

I receive regular monthly reports from the major credit agencies, and at the first sign of any such false claims by your company either by those credit agencies or by any collection agencies, you can be sure that all such action just outlined will be initiated to the fullest extent of my abilities, sparing no expense.

One last point: if I do hear back from you within a reasonable timeframe that you have reconsidered and are willing to drop this frivolous matter, then I will consider removing the web pages listed in Exhibit A based on such reasonable action.

Just a reminder: all the attachments can be seen here in this PDF):

Marilyn Penn, blogging at Political Mavens, had this great piece last week:

When it comes to provocateurs who are anti-American, the bastions of liberalism march in lockstep to defend whatever freedom is at stake.  Refusing to say the pledge of allegiance?  Freedom of speech.  Nazi march through a community of survivors?  Same and warum nicht? Building a mosque at Ground Zero?  Freedom of religion.  Defacing Christian or Jewish symbols in artwork?  Art trumps religion so long as it’s not Danish cartoons or a South Park show lampooning Mohammed.  Publishing the Pentagon Papers or Wiki-Leaks?  Freedom of the press.  Strangely, when the provocation comes from the right in the person of Terry Jones, now labeled the Koran-burning pastor, the civil liberties guardians are silent.  Where is Michael Bloomberg to declaim that if we don’t continue in our tradition of free expression, the terrorists will have won?  Where are the cadre of celebrities usually trotted out to protest censorship of any kind?  We know how many times Americans have burned flags and draft cards and used patriotic symbols as objects of degradation – all part of our unrivalled liberty.  What, besides kowardice, makes the Koran eligible for exception from the rule?

The New York Times, publisher of both the Pentagon Papers and Assange’s Wiki-Leaks, refused to print even one of the Danish cartoons though it’s a newspaper that goes out of its way to illustrate its articles in dramatic and confrontational ways.  The Sunday Times of April 3rd features an oversized photo of Palestinians attending the funeral of three Hamas terrorists;  the size of the image would be appropriate for the funeral of an assassinated head of state.  There is no commensurate photo for the 19 non-Muslim people killed and the 81 injured in Afghanistan in the brutal murders of UN workers ordered as retaliation for the Koran burning.  The headline calls these murders deadly protests as if they were the unintended consequence of an unruly mob rather than the deliberate acts of violence which also extended to torching a girl’s high school in a part of the world that insists on keeping its women veiled and uneducated.

One need not sympathize with Terry Jones who certainly intended that his act create a firestorm far beyond the limited book-burning.  Whether from the left or the right, people who burn books are not examples of America’s most rational voices of objection – we can do better than that and should.  We should however, also be mindful of the hypocrisy in our civil libertarians when they ignore the bill of rights they summon to justify the same behavior  from their own political spectrum.  Let’s not pretend that jihadi murder requires incitement to be turned against us.  The press in particular should recall that Daniel Pearl was decapitated on camera to the jubilation of the Muslim world for no reason other than his being an American Jewish journalist.  For radical Islam, provocation requires nothing more than our existence.

 

Omar Al-Ghoul, one of PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s advisors, had the audacity to say this publicly regarding the Hamas attack on a school bus that left one young boy brain dead:

The [school] bus wasn’t that badly damaged, but Israel wants to use the attack on the bus as an excuse for its latest war crime against our people

This disgusting, miserable excuse for a human being should have his tongue cut out, the stump cauterized, and then be told: “Aw, c’mon, you didn’t lose that much blood. Don’t use this as an excuse to complain.”

Hey Goldstone, nice of you to wake up. Now go back to sleep. Or, better yet, drop dead.

I’ve posted many posts about Richard Goldstone’s libelous and scandalous report, and now, almost two years later, that buffoon wakes up and says “maybe I was wrong”.  It’s a bit late for that, the damage has been done.

But, worse than his sitting on the truth for two years is the fact that even now, when he’s supposedly admitting his mistakes, he still can’t do so without reservation. He still has to qualify some remarks or, worse, offer some offensive “explanations” for his statements.

Melanie Phillips did a good job dissecting this new load of crap from the crapmaster in a recent Spectator article:

In an extraordinary article in the Washington Post, Richard Goldstone has now admitted that his infamous report was wrong. Having fuelled the blood libel that in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza Israel had targeted civilians and possibly had committed crimes against humanity, he now says that, as a result of the final report of the UN committee of independent experts and other evidence that has emerged since his report was published, he accepts that

civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy

and further states that

if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

What self-serving rubbish. There was ample evidence at the time from numerous sources that Hamas was telling lies about the number of civilians who were killed by Israeli fire. There was ample evidence that Hamas was deliberately putting civilians in harm’s way. There was ample evidence that Hamas does not operate under the rule of law or uphold human rights. There was ample evidence that Israeli rules of engagement required the IDF to avoid hitting civilians wherever possible. There was ample evidence that Israel always investigates allegations of misconduct made against its soldiers and holds them to acount under the rule of law. Yet Goldstone, having accepted the poisoned chalice from the UN Human Rights Council to subject Israel to a show trial whose verdict preceded the evidence (despite his protestations that he modified this odious remit), chose to believe the propaganda put out by Hamas and its proxies among NGOs with a long track record of malevolent hostility to Israel.

Even now, in this purported mea culpa, Goldstone does not take responsibility for the Big Lie he helped perpetrate with such terrible consequences in putting rocket-fuel behind Israel’s delegitimisation as a pariah in the eyes of the world. Instead, he blames his false conclusions upon Israel’s refusal to co-operate with his inquiry.

So for the second time, he is again blaming Israel for its own victimisation – first at the hands of Hamas, and now at his own hands.

Ludicrously, he now says that his report’s

allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion.

The protestation that he had no alternative but to believe Hamas is quite astounding. Hamas is a terrorist organisation with a solid track record of lies, distortions and ‘Pallywood’-style fabrications as a strategy of aggressive warfare.  Israel, the victim of that aggression, has a solid record of telling the truth. Yet Goldstone chose to believe the Hamas version of events. Nor was this all. As he says in the Washington Post:

Some have suggested that it was absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations. At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel….

In the end, asking Hamas to investigate may have been a mistaken enterprise. So, too, the Human Rights Council should condemn the inexcusable and cold-blooded recent slaughter of a young Israeli couple and three of their small children in their beds.

I continue to believe in the cause of establishing and applying international law to protracted and deadly conflicts….Regrettably, there has been no effort by Hamas in Gaza to investigate the allegations of its war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

Can you believe this? He appears to have expected genocidal aggressor Hamas to behave in a civilised fashion by investigating its alleged abuses — while he chose to throw the book at its democratic victim, Israel. And now the most he will acknowledge is that expecting Hamas to do so

may have been a mistaken enterprise.

By his own admission, the man stands revealed as at best an abject idiot and at worst a moral and judicial bankrupt. His report blackened Israel’s name for defending itself against existential attack; encouraged its attackers to ratchet up their onslaught safe in the knowledge that the international community now had official confirmation that Israel was morally beyond the pale; put Israeli civilians, along with Israel’s very survival, at increased risk by helping delegitimise Israel as a global pariah; and fuelled the pressure on Israel not to defend its civilians by military means against the attacks which have relentlessly increased in audacity and scope.

Regardless of its manifest moral and intellectual inadequacies, however, his recantation carries inescapable consequences. All those who have used Goldstone’s report as a basis for their own delegitimisation of Israel now also stand revealed as having endorsed one of the worst officially sanctioned international falsehoods in history. All their attacks on Israel which relied upon Goldstone’s report are now shown to be equally baseless and discredited. Any future such attacks which use this report as an authority will be demonstrably false and malicious. The UN should now declare the Goldstone report null and void. Any less will make it knowingly and demonstrably party to a travesty of justice.

But of course, like all previous blood libels against the Jews, the poison this one has injected into the global bloodstream has no antidote. The damage is done – and no amount of self-serving recantations by Richard Goldstone will undo the terrible harm he has done.

 

Obama had another one of his usual bullcrap-laden speeches last night, which is no surprise given his irresistible attraction to the media.  But, here’s a nice surprise:  the media’s irresistible attraction to Obama may finally have reached its breaking point with the Libyan war.

AP put out not one, but two distinct reports, both extremely critical of his speech (to the point of virtually calling Obama a liar).

One of them is the straight-up “FACT CHECK: How Obama’s Libya claims fit the facts“, which debunks many lies spewed by Obama during the speech, such as these excerpts (click the link for the full text):

OBAMA: “Our most effective alliance, NATO, has taken command of the enforcement of the arms embargo and no-fly zone. … Going forward, the lead in enforcing the no-fly zone and protecting civilians on the ground will transition to our allies and partners, and I am fully confident that our coalition will keep the pressure on Gadhafi’s remaining forces. In that effort, the United States will play a supporting role.”

THE FACTS: As by far the pre-eminent player in NATO, and a nation historically reluctant to put its forces under operational foreign command, the United States will not be taking a back seat in the campaign even as its profile diminishes for public consumption. . . .

___

OBAMA: “Our military mission is narrowly focused on saving lives.”

THE FACTS: Even as the U.S. steps back as the nominal leader, reduces some assets and fires a declining number of cruise missiles, the scope of the mission appears to be expanding and the end game remains unclear.

Despite insistences that the operation is only to protect civilians, the airstrikes now are undeniably helping the rebels to advance. U.S. officials acknowledge that the effect of air attacks on Gadhafi’s forces — and on the supply and communications links that support them — is useful if not crucial to the rebels. . . .

___

OBAMA: Seeking to justify military intervention, the president said the U.S. has “an important strategic interest in preventing Gadhafi from overrunning those who oppose him. A massacre would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya’s borders, putting enormous strains on the peaceful — yet fragile — transitions in Egypt and Tunisia.” He added: “I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.”

THE FACTS: Obama did not wait to make that case to Congress, despite his past statements that presidents should get congressional authorization before taking the country to war, absent a threat to the nation that cannot wait.

“The president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” he told The Boston Globe in 2007 in his presidential campaign. “History has shown us time and again … that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the legislative branch.”

Obama’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, said Sunday that the crisis in Libya “was not a vital national interest to the United States, but it was an interest.”

___

OBAMA: “And tonight, I can report that we have stopped Gadhafi’s deadly advance.”

THE FACTS: The weeklong international barrage has disabled Libya’s air defenses, communications networks and supply chains. But Gadhafi’s ground forces remain a potent threat to the rebels and civilians, according to U.S. military officials.

Army Gen. Carter Ham, the top American officer overseeing the mission, told The New York Times on Monday that “the regime still overmatches opposition forces militarily. The regime possesses the capability to roll them back very quickly. Coalition air power is the major reason that has not happened.” . . .

___

OBAMA: “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

THE FACTS: Mass violence against civilians has also been escalating elsewhere, without any U.S. military intervention anticipated.

More than 1 million people have fled the Ivory Coast, where the U.N. says forces loyal to the incumbent leader, Laurent Gbagbo, have used heavy weapons against the population and more than 460 killings have been confirmed of supporters of the internationally recognized president, Alassane Ouattara.

The Obama administration says Gbagbo and Gadhafi have both lost their legitimacy to rule. But only one is under attack from the U.S.

Presidents typically pick their fights according to the crisis and circumstances at hand, not any consistent doctrine about when to use force in one place and not another. They have been criticized for doing so — by Obama himself.

In his pre-presidential book “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama said the U.S. will lack international legitimacy if it intervenes militarily “without a well-articulated strategy that the public supports and the world understands.”

He questioned: “Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma? Why intervene in Bosnia and not Darfur?”

Now, such questions are coming at him.

The other report, entitled, “Analysis: Obama doesn’t mention Libyan rebels“, contained some lines such as these:

…the war he described Monday doesn’t quite match the fight the United States is in.

It also doesn’t line up with the conflict Obama himself had seemed to presage, when he expressly called for Moammar Gadhafi’s overthrow or resignation. Obama’s stated goals stop well short of that. And although Obama talked of the risks of a long war, he did not say just when or on what terms the United States would leave Libya.

…If the purpose of the U.N.-sanctioned military action is to protect civilians, does that include pro-Gadhafi civilians who are likely to be endangered in places like Sirte that are in the rebels’ crosshairs? If not, it is difficult to see the Western intervention as a neutral humanitarian act not aligned with the rebels.

…the role of Western air power then went beyond that initial humanitarian aim, to in effect provide air cover for the rebels while pounding Gadhafi forces in a bid to break their will or capacity to fight.

…Obama still faces questions about why Libya and not Yemen, or not Syria. One of his closest national security advisers, Denis McDonough, told reporters Monday that the administration doesn’t “get very hung up on this question of precedent.”

 

 

 

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.

Melanie Phillips, an Orwell Prize-winning British journalist and author, has some exceptionally good advice for Israel, which one can only hope they heed.