Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

McCain not the Republican Voice of Reason

Many Democrats are using John McCain's death to politicize their hatred of President Trump, calling him the GOP voice of reson; so the neocon war hawk that was lockstep with Bush 43 is the voice of reason? John McCain never saw a military solution he didn't like. That includes Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and had harsh words against the Russian incursion into Georgia; in a precursor to his fecklessness Obama stated, "I think it is important at this point for all sides to show restraint and to stop this armed conflict,"(once President, Obama pretty much courted the Russians for the entire 8 years he was in office; the selling of US uranium to Russia was believed tied to Russia backing the Obama/Kerry Iran agreement) "The bitter battle over who's performed best has already begun. A McCain aide calls Obama "bizarrely in sync with Moscow." Obama's campaign suggested McCain had a conflict of interest because his foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, had lobbied for Georgia." the voice of reason?.

McCain was also vehemently against the Iran agreement, saying he agreed with President Trump. “I did not support the nuclear deal at the time it was proposed, and many of its specific terms will make it harder to pursue the comprehensive strategy we need. In that sense, I agree with the President that the deal is not in the vital national interests of the United States," ...Trump had twice certified Iran's compliance with the deal. But on Friday, he declared that Iran had violated the "spirit" of the accord with its non-nuclear behavior, citing its support for Assad and militant groups in the Middle East in addition to its ballistic-missile program."

McCain also roundly criticized President Obama's Israel policies, referring to the President's rhetoric as a "temper tantrum". McCain's also condemned President Obama's feckless Ukraine policy, calling the President, "the most naive president in history." This was consistent with McCains worldview of Russia, stating at one point “[Vladimir] Putin is not America’s friend, nor merely a competitor,” McCain said. “Putin is America’s enemy, not because we wish it so but because he has chosen to be.”
The left now calls McCain the voice of reason is becasue he was a "never Trumper", to the point of sending an emissary to pickup the fabricated Trump dossier, and passed it on to Comey, not knowing the FBI already had a copy. Further McCain was the key vote that stopped the Senate from repealing Obamacare.

Thursday, February 16, 2017

The Left is Still In Denial Why They Lost Presidency As They Double Down on Rhetoric

The Democrats have lost about 1200 political positions across the country in the last 6 years, with Republicans running primarily on the repeal of ObamaCare. With it's one size fits all, high premiums and even higher out of pocket prepays (averaging $4,000 to $6000 a year), ObamaCare meant most Americans are being forced to buy healthcare that only kicks in after some catastrophic episode;  IOW no different than not having healthcare, but having to pay for it nonetheless.

The Democrats lost if for no other reason they have lost touch with working Americans as they they have ruled against the will of the people. The Democrats also continues to encourages the reactionary alt-left to shout down anyone that disagrees, which has devolved into a violent opposition to countries Democratic principles and a war on free speech.

The Democrats have pushed for open borders and are demonizing the arrest of criminal illegal aliens. They support Black Lives Matter (an openly racist and terrorist organization), who openly push violence against the police, while they defend captured vicious criminals if they are black. The left refuses to even speak the word(s) "Muslim terrorists"or "Radical Islam". When it comes to Islam they seem to have lost all sense of sanity. They are forever apologetic for Islam, who's laws subjugate women to the level of property and arrest women if they report they have been raped (rape is also dolled out as a punishment). They ignore religious freedoms, when they push homosexuality and abortion on Christianity and Islam. Obama turned his back on Israel (actually sending operatives to Israel to campaign against Netanyahu) while he has ignored the atrocities and buddied up with Muslim terrorists countries, including Hamas who has just announced a collaboration with ISIS. Then Obama tries to bully schools into letting boys use the girls bathroom. All this while they campaign against the American voter calling them Deplorables; and of course racists. The point being the Democrats lost because they have drifted so far from the main stream, while Trump won because he said this idiocy and given a chance, he will make America great again.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

The Gaffe That Wasn't a Gaffe

Last July Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney identified Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Most of American press had a field day with this such as the Christian Science Monitor headline, Romney:  Another City, Another Gaffe. What makes "gaffe" even more interesting is that in 2008 Presidential Candidate Barrack Obama made the same Gaffe in front of a American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington! Of course it was not reported as a gaffe, because it isn't. By traveling to Israel and calling Jerusalem the capital of Israel, you are aligning yourself with Israel in the land dispute for Jerusalem. For decades the both Republican and Democratic platforms have included the statement that Jerusalem  is the capital of Israel to show support to the country. However this year is different; while the Republicans continues to back Israel with it's platform  “We support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state with secure, defensible borders; and we envision two democratic states—Israel with Jerusalem as its capital and Palestine—living in peace and security,” the Democrat platform has removed any wording that would aline itself with Israel on the fate of Jerusalem , falling back on,  "the status of Jerusalem is an issue that should be resolved in final status negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians." What is really in question here is how the media could be so misinformed that it would call the Romney statement a gaffe; of course as an example of the media's continual distortion of the news to favor the liberal agenda, the the answer is self evident.

This article based in part on this Wall St Journal posting;
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/09/04/obama-attacked-over-party-platform-on-jerusalem/

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Airline Security; Isreal Gets it Right, TSA Doesn't Get It

All the rhetoric we have been hearing from Homeland Security and their minions are more concerned with maintaining an obviously flawed, but financially lucrative direction. The inherent flaw in the America airport security system is it creates a false sense of security by relying on a narrowly focused (and imperfect) technology, that has limited human input and is always one step behind the terrorists. The only reasonable way to stop terrorists is to screen out the vast majority of obvious non-threat passengers, using background checks, so searches become threat based. You still screen 100% of the passengers, but only a small percentage actually get searched. There is perhaps nothing more absurd than the concept of random searches, which have no logical bases and is definitive of an incompetent government bureaucracy that has lost the trust of the people. Here you have bureaucrats that are so rigid and unyielding that they actually required pilots to be searched. Is there anyone that has forgotten that in the 911 attacks the weapons were the airliners themselves? What were the pilots going to do, take themselves hostage with a smuggled penknife? It is interesting to note, that in Israel the citizenry do not take these freedoms for granted as we do in the United States and still demand their government treat them with dignity and even intelligence.

50 years ago the Israelis faced the same safety issues America has been facing since 9/11. The first salvo was much the same as ours, but the reaction was much different. In his article, "The Israelification of Airports; High Security, Little Brother,” Cathal Kelly discusses the Israeli approach to airport security with Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. "Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don't take s--- from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, 'We're not going to do this. You're going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport."

What Israel devised was a 6-layer system that is hands down the world standard for safety. As you enter the parking lot, Israeli security agents contact you in your vehicle and simply ask each person two questions, “How are you? Where are you coming from?” But the security agents are not just being friendly; they are paying very close attention to your answer. If there is anything wrong with the way you answer you are detained and separated from your luggage. Further military service in Israel is compulsory, so every security person you talk with is not only highly trained in airport security, but also a veteran soldier. When any Israeli agent converses with you, they are looking you straight in the eye; something that while being bit unnerving, leaves no doubt that they are paying attention to everything you say and do.

Next you are directed to the airport building where there are armed guards at the entrance. These guards, as those in the parking lot are behavioural profiling. They look for someone in distress, someone who does not look right, someone that is displaying any one of a laundry list of behaviors they have been trained to watch out for. “At this point, some travelers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnometer. ‘This is to see that you don't have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious,’ said Sela.”Once you are inside you go to the check-in counter. Passengers are staggered so they don’t bunch up (one of the biggest complaints of the current American system by security experts is the damage that could be done by a luggage bomb detonated amongst the hundreds of passengers that are often waiting in roped off blocks in the check-in lines). Here you asked a series of questions, “Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?” Your luggage is moved to a specially deigned baggage area where it is scanned. “The screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive.”

The last check is for passengers and carry-on. But there are no conveyor belts, no body scanners, no enhanced pat downs. Just security officers watching you and scrutinizing your mood and behavior, "’… there's almost no line. That's because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes. They're not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you,’ said Sela. ‘Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, or how you behave. They will never look into your eyes ... and that's how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys.’”

Once in the airport lounge it looks no different than any other airport. But there is a difference. Every employee from the Starbucks girl to the janitor are also trained in some form of behavioural profiling. If they see anything that doesn’t look right they are encouraged to report it; any one in the lounge, employee, passenger or security can lock down the airport; and unlike anywhere else, they are encouraged to do so. If anyone sees something that doesn’t looks right and they hit the shut down button, they are always praised, never degraded for being too paranoid.

So yes there is a better way to secure an airport than treat the passengers as if their Constitutional rights are suspended every time you get near an airplane. But there is another issue that is rarely addressed and that is competence. I have watched TSA workers go about their job and most are what you could call “professional” but none really appear competent. If anything occurs out of the ordinary (and I use the term loosely), it usually results in having to call a supervisor and then an administrator. In a recent incident made famous on YouTube a passenger, John Tyner opted out of the scanner and took exception to the enhanced pat down (who could have guessed that would ever happen?). The result was organizational idiocy were the police were called, one supervisor told him to leave the area, then an administrator was called who told Tyner he broke civil law for leaving and would be fined (Since TSA is not a law enforcement agency, all their actions are controlled through civil authority. Apparently there is a civil law that once a person has opted out of the full body scan, they must not leave the screening area without being screened in some manner. Since they have no law enforcement authority the TSA agents can’t detain or arrest anyone, all they can do is fine. The idea is to stop a terrorist from leaving the screening area for fear he will be discovered, but one has to wonder about the logic that an al Qaeda terrorist would actually stop for fear of being fined).

Michael J. Aguilar, chief of the TSA office in San Diego, later called a press conference to emphasize that Tyner was in a lot of trouble and assured everyone his actions would lead to prosecution and “civil penalties” of up to $11000. The next day however the head of the TSA John Pistole said John Tyner would not be fined, saying the agency is "trying to be sensitive to individuals issues and concerns," but added, "the bottom line is, everybody who gets on that flight has been properly screened." Unfortunately Pistole notion of "properly screened" is defined narrowly by his boss Janet Napolitano, who seems to have been bought and paid for by political corruption and conflict of interest that includes ex-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff pushing the use of full body scanners in 2005 while the manufacturer Rapiscan became a client of his consulting Chertoff Group shortly after he retired in 2009.

The Israelis have shown us, and the world that safety can be achieved while preserving personal freedom and privacy. As I said before, the end result in America has been a complete lack of trust that our politicians are competent or has our best interest at heart; or even worst, that our government has become a separate entity, independent from the will of the people, who is either incapable of keeping up safe, or refuses to do so without us trading away some of our most basic human rights. Seal seemed to sum it up when he said, "Do you know why Israelis are so calm? We have brutal terror attacks on our civilians and still, life in Israel is pretty good. The reason is that people trust their defense forces, their police, their response teams and the security agencies. They know they're doing a good job. You can't say the same thing about Americans and Canadians. They don't trust anybody.”

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Good Riddance to Helen Thomas

So, Helen Thomas has been let go because she is at best an anti-Zionist or worst antisemitic. Ms. Thomas remarks at a White House hosted Jewish Heritage Celebration, said that Jews who live in Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "Go home... to Poland and Germany."; I guess because they did so well there during WWII. Of Course, Helen Thomas has been anti-Zionist ( meaning Israel has no right to exist) since the Kennedy Administration. This may have culminated in one infamous occasion during a press conference, prompting Bush (43)s then press secretary Tony Snow, to respond to Ms Thomas, "Well, thank you for the Hezbollah view."

The illegality of occupied annexation is based on the Fourth Geneva Convention (GCIV) of 1949 and Protocol I, an amendment to the Geneva Convention in 1977, which prohibits an occupying power to annex land. The issue here however is one of national sovereignty. Israel, like many countries (including the US) have never signed on to these provisions. It is these issues of sovereignty that have been the bane of the UN, that has espoused world governance since it's inception. However the UN's tendency toward oppression and re-distribution, tends usurped the voluntary compliance needed for the UN to have any real authority.

Of course the whole annexation of occupied territory is a red herring anyway. After WWI the area that now encompasses Jordon, Israel and the West Bank, was a territory under British Mandate, referred to generally as the Palestine Territory. In 1923 the area was to be divided between Israel and an Arab Palestine State, separated along the Jordon river, that became Jordon. However in 1947 the UN created a second Arab Palestine State out the Israel partition on the along the West Bank; a year later the "Palestine Jews" finally declared their own State of Israel and became “Israelis” . In 1967 Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordon, occupying the Golan Heights on the Syria Border, Judea-Samaria on the Jordon border and the Sinai Desert on the Egyptian border; if one looks at a map this creates what Israel called defensible borders. In 1982 Israel returned the Sinai Desert to Egypt, with Israel maintaining control over the Gaza Strip. In regards to the Palestinian problem, in the 18 years Judea-Samaria was under Jordanian control, there was never an attempt to give the Arab Palestinians their own state. Also, there have certainly been Jews in the middle-east since recorded history; the historical bible is an obviously source for this. There are also the "Arab Jews", or the Jewish population that originated in Arab countries. These Jews constitute 1/3 or 2 million of the Jews in Israel.

The reason for this Readers Digest history of Palestine is to place Helen Thomas' comments in historic prospective. Her call for the Jews to “get the hell out of Palestine”, is not call out of the occupied land taken in 1967. No, she defines Palestine as the British Mandate territory taken from the Ottoman Empire. Thomas further statement that the Jews "go back home" to Germany and Poland, is the anti-Zionist belief that the 1947 borders of Israel, drawn by the United Nations, is an annexation of occupied territory and not the granted territory by the United Nations; conveniently ignoring that the UN is the arbitrator of International Law. So, knowing the history of how Israel came to be, it would be a stretch to believe Helen Thomas is an anti-Zionist based of some violation of International law.

In the final analysis, Thomas is simply antisemitic; she blamed Israel for 911 and has sided with the PLO, Hezbollah, Hamas and any other governance or terrorist organization that has called for the destruction of Israel. How an antisemitic like Helen Thomas achieved her front row center seat by the White House Press Corp is inexcusable. The only caveat is that Thomas has never carried any weight as a journalist, but there were still apologist for Thomas, one saying tht because she never used the word Jew, her remarks were not antisemitic. But it was a straight forward remark by Robert Gibbs that put Thomas' hate speech in a proper prospective, “"I think those remarks were offensive and reprehensible. She should and has apologized because obviously those remarks do not reflect certainly the opinion of most of the people in here and certainly of the administration."

Print Page

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Israel vs The Flotilla

Well the socialist pro-Hamas group Free Gaza is angry. Why? Well it's because CNN and Fox are twisting the violence that occurred when the IHH run “Peace” flotilla tried to run the Israeli blockade of Gaza; the result was 9 dead activists (Israel and Saudi Arabia currently have a blockade of Gaza to stop weapons smuggling). The problem is IHH is a charity front with ties to al Qaeda' and has been caught purchasing automatic weapons for it's smuggling operations. Further it was discovered that rather then being a humanitarian relief operation, the IHH flotilla's stated purpose was to run the embargo to open up smuggling routes through Gaza to Hamas. Also, rather then being the non-violent peace activist they claimed to be, the IHH recruited mercenary al Qaeda' members who were reported ready to martyr themselves for the cause. According to the Israeli Debkafile, when the passengers were later questioned:


(The) passengers attested to more than a hundred members of terrorist organizations aboard acting like a quasi-military group with a command hierarchy, whose leader forced the other four or five hundred passengers to fall into line behind them. The group was split into sub-sections, each in charge of a section of the ship before and after it set sail from Istanbul. Its members were all armed with an assortment of chains, iron bars and knives as well as night goggles and gas masks. Although they appeared to hail from different terrorist organizations from various countries, they were all ordered to say they belonged to the IHH.

When Israeli commandos repelled onto the decks of the ships from helicopters, on 5 of the 6 ships, they were met with non-violent resistance. However on the sixth ship they were attacked by men armed with chains and clubs, leading the commandos to eventually kill 9 of their attackers in self defense. More from Debkafile:

Israel intelligence agencies too have questions to answer - principally, how they missed spotting the terrorist presence aboard the putative aid-for-Gaza convoy and let a naval force undertake the mission to divert the ships to Ashdod, without preparing them for a violent confrontation with a determined, well-organized group of violent men.


When the conversation starts to shift to why didn't Israel prepare better for a higher level of violence, the Free Gaza narrative pretty much falls flat. The entire incident would seem to be the moral equivalent of a flotilla of Islamic terrorist trying to run the security blockade at Guantanamo Bay with humanitarian aid. Hopefully the powers that be would not buy into to some false rhetoric of non-violent resistance, and the Navy Seals would show up with something more potent than paint balls. It is to both Israel's humanity and their discredit, that they disarmed themselves believing IHH intentions were honorable. As the saying goes, if the Arabs would lay down their arms there would be peace in the Middle east; if Israel laid down their arms, they would be annihilated. As always, the argument is ideological and not of facts.

Print Page