Ahmadinejad to Obama: Choose Between Israel and Iran

That's the headline of a story in Ha'Aretz today. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, addressing the 25th Session of the Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation (COMCEC) of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Turkey, said that U.S. President Barack Obama should make a choice in order to fulfill his campaign promise of change. And that choice was between support for Israel or friendship with Iran.

Let's see now. On the one hand we have Iran, a country that conspired with Hezbollah to murder 220 U.S. Marines in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing and over 60 people in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy that same year; that supports the insurgents who have murdered U.S. troops in Iraq; that works with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez to subvert U.S. interests in Latin America; that is rapidly developing a nuclear weapons capability in defiance of the U.S. and Western Europe; and that is now doing its best to separate Turkey from NATO. It is also a brutal dictatorship that crushes dissent and is conducting show trials and executions of the regime's political opponents.

On the other hand, we have Israel, a democratic country that is probably one of the most pro-American nations in the world, that supports U.S. positions in the United Nations and the international arena more consistently than any other nation, that provides the U.S. with important technological developments, and whose port city of Haifa, according to GlobalSecurity.org, is the favorite port of call of the U.S. Navy Sixth Fleet, accounting for roughly 50% of all visits in the Eastern Mediterranean, with an average of 20 vessels, including aircraft carriers, visiting the port each year, many to utilize the harbor's excellent and unique repair and servicing facilities.

Gee, I know which one I would choose.

How Victory in the Cold War Gave Way to the Islamist War

In a column in today's Wall Street Journal, entitled "From Berlin to Baghdad," Professor Fouad Ajami describes how the victory over Soviet-led Communism in the Cold War was closely followed by a new challenge to Western Democracy from Islamic jihadists.

Fort Hood Terrorist Tried to Contact Al Qaeda, Attended Extremist DC-area Mosque

As our flag flies at half mast at a U.S. Army base in Afghanistan (photo above), we are beginning to learn more about the shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, including a report carried in UK's Daily Telegraph that he attempted to make contact with Al Qaeda prior to the massacre, and that he had attended the controversial Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, at the same time as two of the September 11 hijackers. At the time, that mosque was led by Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American-born Yemeni imam. Awlaki left the US the following year, eventually going to Yemen, from where he targets Muslims in America with radical online lectures. It emerged on Monday that Hasan had been in contact with Awlak within the last year.

Thank goodness that the British press is investigating and reporting this story fully.

Kaaba Survives 2012

2012, the soon-to-be released disaster flick, depicts the destruction of the world as supposedly predicted for the year 2012 by the Mayan calendar. (That calendar does end in 2012, but I understand it actually just starts over again, like an odometer reaching 100,000 miles.) For the umpteenth time in cinema, Los Angeles is gleefully destroyed. A tidal wave takes out Washington, D.C., crushing the White House with the aircraft carrier U.S.S. John F. Kennedy.

Christian religious symbols are not spared. Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican crashes down on worshipers. In Rio de Janeiro the giant statue Christ of the Andes collapses over the city below.

However, one religious site is spared. Jonathan Crow at Yahoo! Movies reports that while director Roland Emmerich wanted to destroy the Kaaba in Mecca, Islam's most sacred site, on screen, he was talked out of it by his co-writer, Harald Kloser, who told Emmerich, "I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie." Emmerich continued:

"We have to all, in the western world, think about this. You can actually let Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have ... a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. So it's just something which I kind of didn't [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out."

In Hollywood, courage of conviction is shown by unfavorable depictions of George W. Bush, capitalism, the United States, the Roman Catholic Church, Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists (which are not the same, although Hollywood does not know it), Mormons, Christianity in general, and Orthodox Jews. These are all fairly safe targets, because they have not been known to violently retaliate.

I do not know the entire story line of 2012, but presumably, if the whole planet earth goes, the Kaaba goes with it, even if its destruction is not portrayed on screen. It would go too far for the film to end with the Kaaba floating in outer space like the monolith from 2001, A Space Odyssey. Still, if the Muslim world demands it, perhaps Mr. Emmerich will change the film's ending.

Iran Wants Nukes--Really!

In a column in today's Wall Street Journal, entitled "When No Really Means No," Bret Stephens recounts the sorry history of six years of negotiations aimed at stopping Iran's march toward nuclear weaponry. Iran's leaders have consistently and unequivocally refused to halt its nuclear enrichment program. When will the U.S. and Europe begin to take them at their word? More importantly, when will the U.S. and Europe resolve to do something about it? And Holy Multilateralism, does anyone really believe that China and Russia are willing to be part of the solution rather than the problem?

The End of 2500 Years of Jewish Life in Yemen

As noted in an editorial today in the Jerusalem Post, the month of Tishrei 5770, or October 2009 on the secular calendar, marked the end of 2500 years of Jewish life in Yemen. Last month the United States State Department completed a clandestine operation to transfer the last 60 Yemenite Jews to the U.S. So ended a process that began with "Operation Flying Carpet" in 1949-1950, in which most of the Jewish population of Yemen, some 49,000 of my holy brothers and sisters, were flown to the newborn State of Israel.

This is the end of Jewish life in Yemen, but not the end of Yemenite Jewry. The "Teimani" as they are called in Hebrew, have made a huge cultural contribution to Israel, especially in the areas of religion, music, dance, art, crafts and cuisine.

Yemenite Jews even persist as a distinct group in the Diaspora. For example, my own kehillah (community) of North Hollywood boasts a Yemenite synagogue, which follows the prayer customs of Yemenite Jewry. This synagogue is the only one I have ever encountered that retains the 2000-year old custom of having a "meturgeman," or Aramaic translator, translate the weekly Torah portion into Aramaic as it is read in Hebrew. Jews instituted this custom when Aramaic supplanted Hebrew as the common tongue of the Jewish people during the period of the Second Temple. Indeed, the Talmud is written mostly in Aramaic. Ironically, since most Yemenite Jews today are fluent in Hebrew but use Aramaic only in their Talmudic study, the targum--Aramaic translation--has the opposite effect of its original purpose. It began as a way of making the weekly Torah portion in Hebrew--when Hebrew was the language of religious scholarship, but not commonly spoken or understood--comprehensible to an Aramaic speaking populace. Now it translates the Torah from Hebrew, once again a living language that its listeners largely understand, into Aramaic, a language that survives only in religious scholarship and a notorious Mel Gibson movie.

So Yemenite Jewry lives, but Yemen itself is "judenrein," Jew-free, as the Nazis use to so delicately put it. Yemenite Jews always lived as a tolerated minority, sometimes more tolerated, sometimes less. One of the most famous letters of Rabbi Moses Maimonedes, the great 12th century Torah scholar, philosopher and physician (he even became the personal physician to Saladin), the Letter to the Jews of Yemen, was a response to a request for counsel from a Yemenite rabbi, regarding the persecution the community was undergoing from the Shia Muslims who then ruled Yemen. Among the questions of Jewish law that Maimonedes addressed in this letter was whether members of their community who had been forcibly compelled to convert to Islam could be welcomed back into the Jewish community once the conditions of persecution eased.

Of course the Jewish community of Yemen is only one of the many Arabic Jewish communities--in Morocco, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria--that were forced into exile. The number of Arab-speaking Jews who were forced out of their millennia-old communities to Israel, the United States and France in the period 1948-1960 exceeded 750,000--coincidentally about the number of Arab refugees that resulted from the creation of Israel. Many of the Jewish exiles had been wealthy businessmen in their Arab homelands, and almost all of them had to live their wealth behind and flea with a few shipping trunks and suitcases. Israel is often accused of genocide or ethnic cleansing against Palestinian Arabs, but there are undeniably millions of Arabs who live in Israel as citizens with full legal and civil rights, and the Arab populations of Gaza, Judea and Samaria--the so-called occupied territories--have dramatically increased under Israeli occupation. In contrast, only a few thousand Jews remain in Morrocco and Tunesia, and less than one hundred Jews still live in Egypt, Iraq and Syria. Now no Jews are left in Yemen.

Arab apologists will counter that the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands came about only because of Zionism. Historically, that is an accurage statement, but it begs the question of why the Arab world could not tolerate Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel. Jews were tolerated in the Arab world only so long as they maintained their sharia status as Dhimmi, subservient second-class citizens, who could not bear arms, paid a special tax, were banned from many trades and professions, could not ride a horse but only a donkey, and whose places of worship had to be lower in elevation than the local mosques. In many cases they could and would be attacked and killed by Muslims with impunity and no legal recourse. The unforgivable sin of Zionism was the establishment of a Jewish nation in the middle of the dar al-Islam, the territory of Islam, a nation in which Jews would have equal status with Moslems. Once that occurred, Arab regimes no longer trusted that their domestic Jewish populations would be content with dhimmi status. The Jews had to leave, and they did. Their departure from Arab nations may have impoverished the Jewish refugees in the short term, but in the longer term (as has repeatedly occurred throughout the history of Jewish exile) it has impoverished the nations that expelled them, depriving them of their intellectual elites, their leading merchants and financiers, and their hope of modernization in the post-colonial era.

Mortal Fear in Israel

Everyone has their own personal goblins, I suppose. For me, ghosties, ghoulies, zombies, werewolves, vampires and things that go bump in the night have never been as frightening as other human beings, such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Yossi Klein Halevi, in today's Wall Street Journal, recounts how many Israelis share that existential fear, and see no happy ending. If Israel refrains from attacking Iran, within a few years Israel will live under a constant threat of nuclear annihilation. However, if Israel were to attack Iran, it may not be able to do much more than delay Iran's nuclear weapons program, it would face immediate retaliation from the missile arsenals of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah (both of which now have missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv), and it would suffer even greater diplomatic isolation. Of particular interest to U.S. readers should be Halevi's description of the uneasiness that Israelis feel regarding the Obama Administration:

In the past few months, Israelis have begun asking themselves a new question: Has the Obama administration's engagement with Iran effectively ended the possibility of a military strike?

Few Israelis took seriously the recent call by former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski to shoot down Israeli planes if they take off for Iran. But American attempts to reassure the Israeli public of its commitment to Israel's security have largely backfired. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent threat to "obliterate" Iran if it launched a nuclear attack against Israel only reinforced Israeli fears that the U.S. would prefer to contain a nuclear Iran rather than pre-empt it militarily.

Israelis are also understandably skeptical about the ongoing negotiations over Iran's uranium assets:

In fact, Israelis from the right and the left have reacted with heightened anxiety. "Kosher Uranium," read the mocking headline of Israel's largest daily, Yediot Aharonot. Media commentators noted that easing world pressure on Iran will simply enable it to cheat more easily. If Iranian leaders are prepared to sign an agreement, Israelis argue, that's because they know something the rest of us don't.

Perhaps it is intended that Israel face this existential fear, feeling weak and helpless, without hope of aid from other nations, and having only one place to turn . As one of her prophetic sons said, (Isaiah 41:14): "Fear not, you worm Jacob, you men of Israel, says the Lord, for I am with you."

Fixing Global Warming With a Helium Balloon and a Couple of Miles of Garden Hose

What if global warming, whatever its source and whatever its potential effects, could be fixed on the cheap? What if the recent warming trend in our planet's climate could be reversed, say, by using a helium balloon and a couple of miles of rubber hose to pump harmless sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere? If you are Al Gore or a member of his camp, you would be delighted, right? I mean, it's a win-win, right?

If that is your reaction, then you totally misunderstand the motivating forces and objectives of the anti-global warming movement. That movement has very little to do with finding a scientifically sound solution to an environmental threat, and a great deal to do with increasing public spending, asserting greater federal control over the U.S. economy, and imposing greater international regulatory control over the economies of all developed nations, especically the democratic, capitalist West. In short, it is a green Trojan horse.

As proof of that proposition, witness the reaction to a chapter on global warming in SuperFreakonomics, the new book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner, the authors of the 2005 runaway best seller Freakonomics. As recounted by Bret Stephens in today's Wall Street Journal, the new book champions an idea conceived by Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm founded by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold. As described by Mr. Stephens, "The basic idea is to engineer effects similar to those of the 1991 mega-eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which spewed so much sulfuric ash into the stratosphere that it cooled the earth by about one degree Fahrenheit for a couple of years."

One would think that a rational and scientific response to this novel idea would be study and research into its feasibility and efficacy. One would think that anti-global warming activists would strongly advocate such study and research.

Wrong. The reaction from anti-global warming advocates has been ferociously hostile--they are resorting to language normally reserved for attacking former President George W. Bush. Mr. Stephens notes:

Mr. Gore, for instance, tells Messrs. Levitt and Dubner that the stratospheric sulfur solution is "nuts." Former Clinton administration official Joe Romm, who edits the Climate Progress blog, accuses the authors of "[pushing] global cooling myths" and "sheer illogic." The Union of Concerned Scientists faults the book for its "faulty statistics." Never to be outdone, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman scores "SuperFreakonomics" for "grossly [misrepresenting] other peoples' research, in both climate science and economics."

You see, for these people, nothing less than an unprecedented allocation of financial resources and international regulation of the world economy will do for a global-warming solution, even if it doesn't work.

Los Angeles: The Deli Capital of the USA?

That's what the author of a New Book, Save the Deli, says:

It's a very difficult business to be in," Sax says, "but the [delis] that are most inspiring, the ones that people cling to, the ones that people enshrine for years and years are the traditional Jewish delis. And Los Angeles just happens to have more of them than any city I've been to."

To die-hard deli aficionados and sandwich fans, this assertion is heresy. It certainly wasn't what Sax, a Toronto native who now lives in Brooklyn, expected to discover. But in "Save the Deli," a book that traces the rise and fall of Jewish delicatessens from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the suburbs of middle America, he makes that very claim. . . .

On a two-month cross-country trip, Sax hit all the major deli hubs: Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and, of course, New York, even working for an evening as a counterman at the legendary Katz's deli on Manhattan's Lower East Side. But he also fanned out across North America to Denver; Detroit; Scottsdale, Ariz.; St. Louis; Cleveland; Las Vegas; Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.; Montreal; Toronto; and a dozen other cities. He even made a trip across the Atlantic to visit delis in London, Brussels, Paris and Krakow, Poland, one of the birthplaces of the modern Jewish deli.

Well, that's one of many things we Angelenos have over Yankee fans: better delis.

MSM Reacts Mildly to Obama White House Enemies List--It's a Matter of Whose Fox is Being Schorred!

Those of us old enough and politically savvy enough to remember the Nixon White House cannot help but compare the Obama Administration's war on Fox News to the Nixon White House campaign against Daniel Schorr (photo at left) and other journalists who had earned its ire. It was a great career boost for Schorr, who became a featured speaker on the civil liberties banquet tour and may well in part owe his present "Senior News Analyst" position at NPR to the ill-advised persecution campaign initiated by President Nixon.

Charles Krauthammer has written one of the best columns I have seen regarding the foolishness of the Obama Administration's attempt to discredit Fox News in order to discourage criticism of the President's policies and performance. That column may be read at Townhall.com among other places.

While there have been some lukewarm and unduly respectful attempts by other media outlets to question or criticize the Obama Admnistration's anti-Fox campaign, generally the reaction of the news media has been shameful. One can only imagine the media reaction that would have ensued had the George W. Bush Administration conducted a similar campaign against MNBC, whose criticisms of President Bush more than matched those of the Obama Administration by Fox News, both in viciousness and lack of respect.

The media community's reaction to the heavy-handed Obama Administration tactics has been muted and mild. MNBC stars such as the odious Keith Obermann and Rachel Maddow have actually applauded it.

NPR political commentator Ken Rudin felt compelled to make a public apology for merely comparing the Obama Administration's anti-Fox News campaign to the attacks on the media by President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew. To his credit, Mr. Rudin had made the following observation on NPR's Talk of the Nation:

"Well, it's not only aggressive, it's almost Nixonesque. I mean, you think of what Nixon and Agnew did with their enemies list and their attacks on the media; certainly Vice President Agnew's constant denunciation of the media. Of course, then it was a conservative president denouncing a liberal media, and of course, a lot of good liberals said, 'Oh, that's ridiculous. That's an infringement on the freedom of press.' And now you see a lot of liberals almost kind of applauding what the White House is doing to Fox News, which I think is distressing."

Stung and chastened by the flood of criticism of his remarks from the outraged politically correct left, Mr. Rudin made the sort of public confession of error that one normally expects from a purged Chinese Communist Party official rather than an American political analyst. He described his comparison as a "boneheaded mistake" and said that his comparison was "foolish, facile, ridiculous and, ultimately, embarrassing to me." It probably cost him invitations to some reallly good White House holiday parties as well.

To my knowledge, NPR's Daniel Schorr has been absolutely silent on the subject.

While it is certainly true that the Nixon Administration went far beyond what the Obama Adminstration has so far attempted, to the point of employing illegal wiretaps and FBI investigations of its media critics, if the press continues to be cowed by the Obama White House, we can expect more of the same bully boy tactics, and even more objectionable ones.

I guess that with the liberal media, it is a question of whose Fox is being Schorred.

Mitt Romney on America Standing With Its Allies - Including Israel

Romney's op-ed in today's Manchester Union Leader (an interesting place for him to be writing) is a must-read. I imagine Ralph will want to comment on this one; Romney prominently mentions Israel as an ally who's been getting the short shrift from the USA recently.

My co-blogger John Schroeder comments extensively too, at Article VI Blog.

Some excerpts:

Keeping our word to our allies is a matter of honor, but it is also a matter of self-interest. The United States needs allies for economic, political and national security reasons. Good allies and strong alliances allow us to share the burdens we carry, complement and supplement our efforts and present a united front against those who wish us harm.

When we treat any ally in a desultory manner -- and especially if we act in a way that causes them to question our reliability, our resolve, our commitment and staying power -- then they as well as our other allies, all of whom are watching closely, will turn to others for their security.

When Poland and the Czech Republic are humiliated by us, they lose confidence in America's support for them, and they may decide that they must incline more toward Russia.

If our friends in Latin America like Colombia become convinced that we are turning our back on them, they may feel compelled to become more accommodating to Hugo Chavez.

If Japan believes the United States is weakening its commitment in the Pacific, it may distance itself from America and draw closer to China.

When defenders of democracy and the rule of constitution and law in Honduras find that we have sided with their pro-Chavez illegal opposition, freedom fighters across the world, recalculate their chances for success.

And if Arab nations believe that we will accommodate Iran's ambition to dominate the Middle East with nuclear weapons, they will move closer to that very nation.

Read the whole thing.

Obama's Foreign Policy Naivete and Uncertainty Produce Predictable Results

President Barack Obama may have won the Nobel Peace Prize, but American foreign policy interests are taking a pounding, as Charles Krauthammer, in the Jerusalem Post, and John R. Bolton, in the Los Angeles Times, recount.

Read on the Web: What Joe Wilson Should Have Shouted

"Joe Wilson should have said 'God Damn America!' because then Obama wouldn't have heard it."--Annika's Journal, Sept. 13, 2009.

For those readers with poor memories, here's a YouTube reminder of a speech by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, President Obama's former pastor, exemplifying what then Senator Obama claimed never to have heard during his years of attendance at Reverend Wright's church.

Obama's Peace Prize: It's More About Europe Than America

Joel Kotkin is a well-respected and perceptive observer of American socio-political matters. In New Geography today, he suggests that "Barack Obama's seemingly inexplicable winning of the Nobel Peace Prize says less about him than about the current mentality of Europe's leadership class. " Kotkin's opening comments:

Lacking any strong, compelling voices of their own, the Europeans are now trying to hijack our president as their spokesman.

There's a catch, of course. In their mind, Obama deserves the award because he seems to think, and sound, like a European. In everything from global warming to anti-suburbanism to pacifism, Obama reflects the basic agenda of the continent's leading citizens--in sharp contrast to former President George W. Bush.

Indeed it's likely that if Obama wanted to run for presidency of the E.U., he could mail it in. Unfortunately for him, he presides over a country that faces a very different future from that of Europe.

Read the whole thing.

Obama Wobbliness Discomforts Our Allies and Encourages Our Foes in Afghanistan and Pakistan

So writes Robert J. Kaplan in the Atlantic, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

Saturday Night Live Poking Fun at Obama - Again

The Nobel Prize
by speakmymind01

Knowing how thick-skinned the president is, I am sure this won't bother him at all.

Ancient Egyptian Coins Reportedly Found Bearing Name and Image of Joseph

Count me as a cautious skeptic until further verification, but if this story is accurate, this is one of the biggest archaelogical discoveries ever. The fact that the discovery was made by Egyptian archaeologists (who preumably would have no political incentive to provide evidence of ancient Jewish ties to the Middle East--quite to the contrary, actually) bolsters the reliability of the report. According to an article in the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram, those scientists, while examining the hordes of unsorted artifacts at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, came across ancient Egyptian coins bearing the name and image of Joseph.

The biblical story of Joseph, found in Genesis, relates how his brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt, where he rose to become the Viceroy, after God gave him the ability to interpret the Pharoah's dreams as a prophecy of seven years of plentiful harvests followed by seven years of famine. He proposes that Pharoah appoint an overseer to collect the surplus harvest in storehouses during the years of plenty, to feed the population during the famine that will follow. Pharoah immediately appoints him as the overseer. During Joseph's rule, his father Israel, his brothers and their families, the Children of Israel, immigrate to Egypt to escape the famine in the land of Canaan. After the death of Israel, Joseph and his brothers, the Bible relates that a new Pharoah "who knew not Joseph" enslaves the Children of Israel, settng the stage for the Exodus led by Moses. (Interestingly, Jewish sages differed on whether the enslaving Pharoah was a new Pharoah who actually did not know Joseph, or the same Pharoah, who in a display of collosal ingratitude, acts as if he did not know Joseph.)

Muslims also revere Joseph as a prophet, and he is discussed in the Koran.

According to the news story Al Ahram, "A thorough examination revealed that the coins bore the year in which they were minted and their value, or effigies of the pharaohs [who ruled] at the time of their minting. Some of the coins are from the time when Joseph lived in Egypt, and bear his name and portrait." The scientist noted that along with Joseph’s image the coins bore his two names: Saba Sabani, the Egyptian name Pharaoh gave him when he became Egypt’s treasurer; and his “original name, Joseph.” Some of the Joseph coins have an image of a cow, possibly alluding to Pharoah's dream of seven fat cows who are devoured by seven lean cows.

In addition to verification that Joseph is a historical figure, not merely a creation of the human authors of Genesis, the discovery lends credence to the historical accuracy of the Biblical narrative of the Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt. Many historians, archaeologists and Biblical scholars, and one prominent Conservative Rabbi in Los Angeles, have cast doubt on the historicity of the Biblical narrative of the Exodus, due to the absence of archaelogical evidence. However, as author Nassim Nicholas Taleb has taught us in his book "The Black Swan, the Impact of the Highly Improbable," the absence of proof is never proof of absence.

These coins may also may resolve the question of the identity of the Pharoah of the Exodus. If the coins attributable to Joseph's time identify the Pharoah he served, then either that Pharoah or the next one is the Pharoah who enslaved the Children of Israel after the death of Joseph and his brothers, and the one after that is the Pharoah of the Exodus.

Interestingly enough, the Al Ahram story did not focus on the evidence of the truth of the biblical narrative, perhaps because believing Moslems would never doubt it. Rather, the news article relates that the significance of the find is that archeologists have found scientific evidence countering the claim held by some historians that coins were not used for trade in ancient Egypt, and that this was done through barter instead.

Here are links to the a news report about the discovery in the Jerusalem Post, and at the online service of the Weekly Blitz (an anti-jihadist news service based in Bangladesh, which promotes interfaith harmony). My account above draws from both sources. And here is a link to a MEMRI report that translates excerpts from the Al Ahram news story.

Hat Tip to my friend and Mishna study partner Vic Marmon for alerting me to this story.

Going Dutch: The Netherlands Alternative of Using Private Insurers to Provide Universal Healthcare Coverage

The Netherlands provides its citizens with affordable universal healthcare coverage, without any disqualifications for prior conditions, without any threat of the loss of coverage upon a change of employment, and without a public option. Jonathan Chait describes how it is done in this column in the New Republic. Lowell and Hedgehog Readers, is this an viable alternative for the U.S.?

Happy Sukkot from Dry Bones and the Hedgehog Blog

["Hag Sameah" or "Chag Sameach" are alternative tranliterations of the Hebrew greeting "Happy Holiday!" For more information about the Sukkot festival, here is a link to a "golden oldie" post from two years ago. Dry Bones has additional cartoons about Sukkot as well.]

"When France Chides You for Appeasement, You Know That You Have Hit Rock Bottom."

On September 24, 2009, for the first time in history, the President of the United States presided over a meeting of the United Nations Security Council. As recounted by Charles Krauthammer in his current column at Townhall.com, "Unknown to the world, Obama had in his pocket explosive revelations about an illegal uranium enrichment facility that the Iranians had been hiding near Qom. The French and the British were urging him to use this most dramatic of settings to stun the world with the revelation and to call for immediate action." Indeed, French President Nicolas Sarkozy had included a discussion of the grave implications of the Qom discovery in his own address to the Security Council, assuming that he would be able to demonstrate support for an Obama call to action.

However, President Obama remained silent. He delayed disclosure of the discovery of the secret Iranian nuclear facility until the following day at the G-20 summit. President Sarkozy was forced to scrap the Qom portion of his U.N. speech.

Why didn't President Obama take advantage of the high-profile setting of the U.N. Security Council meeting to make the explosive disclosure, and perhaps even urge a Security Council resolution? Mr. Krauthammer reports:

Because Obama wanted the Security Council meeting to be about his own dream of a nuclear-free world. The president, reports The New York Times citing "White House officials," did not want to "dilute" his disarmament resolution "by diverting to Iran."... "The administration told the French," reports The Wall Street Journal, "that it didn't want to 'spoil the image of success' for Mr. Obama's debut at the U.N."

In other words, to President Obama, chairing a meeting of the U.N. Security Council wasn't about stopping the Iranian nuclear weapons development program; it was all about President Obama and enhancing the Obama international image. To actually initiate action to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, real ones, would have tarnished the pristine beauty of President Obama's declaration of his dream of a nuclear-free Planet Earth.

President Sarkozy reportedly was incredulous, as evidenced by his own comments at and following the meeting. While he did not himself mention the Qom plant, Sarkozy remarked at the council table, with Obama at the chair, that "we live in a real world, not a virtual world." He explained: "President Obama has even said, 'I dream of a world without (nuclear weapons).' Yet before our very eyes, two countries are currently doing the exact opposite." And the clincher: "President Obama, I support the Americans' outstretched hand. But what did the international community gain from these offers of dialogue? Nothing."

As Mr. Krauthammer notes, when the President of France accuses the President of the United States of appeasement, it is time to recalibrate American foreign policy.