Category Archives: culture

Taliban and ISIS

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ISIS has expanded the systematic destruction of Iraq’s cultural treasures. In Mosul, the tomb of Jonah, revered by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike, has been “turned…to sand” by ISIS explosives placed so as to achieve the barbarity in one explosion.   The Nabi Younes Mosque which housed the shrine also has been destroyed.

This gang has been systematically destroying all of the shrines and graves in the territory it has seized from Iraq, under the claimed…theory…that it’s unholy to worship at such things or to venerate anyone but Mohammed. On the other hand, they also find it convenient simply to rob from valuable collections of antiquities, such as the Mosul Museum.

How does one discriminate between this barbarian and that one? It isn’t necessary. Both want the same response.

The Border Children Crisis

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“The president of the United States is the world’s sugar daddy and that has to stop. That’s the incentive for those kids to come here” protested Congressman Mo Brooks (R, AL) one of the most-conservative voices in the House. “To spend billions of dollars on foreign children that we don’t have is financial insanity.”

As someone noted earlier, the House should appropriate the funds, or most of them, with suitable spending reduction offsets, and with the vast bulk of the funds block granted to the border states for their use in dealing with the crisis and with border control, and the remainder allocated to the Federal government for the mandated purpose of transporting the present children back to their countries of origin.

Amnesty and Rights

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Attorney General Eric Holder now is claiming amnesty to be both a civil and a human right. In his rambling way, he makes says this [emphasis in the cite]:

Creating a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in this country is essential. The way we treat our friends and neighbors who are undocumented—by creating a mechanism for them to earn citizenship and move out of the shadows—transcends the issue of immigration status. This is a matter of civil and human rights.

I’ll leave aside the distinction and lack of overlap between civil rights and human rights, except to note that a distinguished lawyer such as our Mr Holder should know better.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) has a response in a larger speech on the Senate floor. The part relevant to this subject begins at around 0+50.

The Obama administration officials have gone so far as to describe amnesty as a civil right. That’s an argument against the very idea of a nation state and the idea of a nation’s borders. Of course, there can be no civil right to enter a country unlawfully and then to demand lawful status and even citizenship. Of course, there’s not. How can this possibly be that the Attorney General of the United States would assert that people have a Constitutional right to enter unlawfully and be given amnesty? That’s the kind of thinking that’s got us into this fix, and it’s encouraged the unlawful flow of immigration. The actual legal rights that are being violated here, today, I suggest are the rights of the American citizens, and as Civil Rights Commission Member of the US Commission on Civil Rights, Peter Kirsanow, warned, our African American citizens often are the ones that are hurt the most and also recent immigrant arrivals and working Americans. So what about their rights? … What about the right of every citizen to the protection of immigration laws that we have in America today?

One small part of this larger question, as an aside: the Attorney General asserts that people have a Constitutional right to break the law? Well, that is consistent with this President’s cavalier attitude toward American law, even toward the supreme Law of our Land.

Moral Equivalence Pollution, Second Installment

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The Obama administration accused Israel on Thursday of failing to do all it can to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza during cross-border attacks.

Of the Gaza beach attacks that killed four cousins on Wednesday, [Jen] Psaki called the attack “horrifying.”

“The tragic event makes clear that Israel must take every possible step to meet its standards for protecting civilians from being killed,” Psaki said. “We will continue to underscore that point to Israel.”

Asked whether the US believes Israel has not done enough to prevent civilian casualties, Psaki said: “We believe that certainly there’s more that can be done.”

Never mind that Israelis, openly and publicly, are warning the civilians in the area that an attack is imminent and encouraging them to leave. Never mind that this also gives the terrorists warning and allows those who were in the target zone also to leave and so to survive to attack Israel again, a few hours later.

Never mind that Palestinian civilians wouldn’t be in danger if the Palestinian Authority terrorists didn’t use them for shields, didn’t hide their weaponry in civilian buildings—homes and mosques, for instance—or didn’t fire their rockets from within those civilian buildings. Never mind that Palestinian civilians wouldn’t be in danger if the PA didn’t insist on attacking Israel.

Not to be outdone, the UN is adding to this moral equivalency sewage.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also urged Israel on Thursday “to do far more to stop civilian casualties,” calling the killing of four boys on a beach in Gaza City “appalling.”

On the other hand, maybe the UN really isn’t engaging in moral equivalence. They’ve been utterly silent about the PA’s rocket firings against the Israeli nuclear power plant in Dimona, even though the UN itself defines attacks on nuclear facilities as nuclear terrorism. This bit of naked terrorism is fine, apparently.

Flagrant UN Treachery

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Some 20 rockets were found Wednesday in a school in Gaza operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the organization confirmed Thursday.

Israel is being generous in its characterization of the situation. Yigal Palmor, of the Israeli Foreign Ministry said this:

Yet again, Gaza terrorists abuse UN facilities to carry out their violent activities. Hamas and other terror groups are determined to put civilians in harm’s way and will respect nothing in their violent frenzy. We expect the UN and the international community to condemn and to act strongly against this brazen violation of international humanitarian law, which endangers children and UN humanitarian activities.

Of course.

But larger questions remain unanswered: how could those missiles have been placed without UN complicity? How could those missiles have been placed without UN knowledge? It was the UN’s facility, after all.

And the UNRWA is the same agency that, during the last Israeli entry into the Gaza in response to then-Hamas terrorist rocket attacks, falsely claimed Israel had murdered Palestinian children in a hospital.