A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears to follow the same narrative. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again. Out of the exile of Babylon, the handful that returned to resettle and rebuild the land faced the might of new empires. The Jews who returned from the exile of one evil empire some twenty-six hundred years ago were forced to decide whether they would be a people with their own faith and history, or the colony of another empire, with its history and beliefs. Jerusalem's wealthy elites threw in their lot with the empire and its ways. But out in the rural heartland where the old ways where still kept, a spark flared to life. Modi'in. Maccabee. And so war came between the handfuls of Jewish Maccabee partisans and the armies of Antiochus IV’s Selecuid empire. A war that had its echoes in the past and would have it again in the future as lightly armed and untrained ar
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The Fake Hijab Hate Crimes Witch Hunt
They struck at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Two white males ran out of a car, tore off her hijab, hit her and stole her wallet. One of these mysterious muggers was wearing a Trump hat. The president of the Muslim Students Association claimed that the attack had rattled the campus. The ACLU was “outraged” and was as eager as the “victim” to connect the attack to Trump. It was even more outraged that the imaginary attackers had, “shouted slurs and wore Donald Trump clothing.” It was only hours after the election and the media eagerly jumped on the story. But the 18-year-old Middle Eastern student had made it all up and police charged her with filing a false report. A month later they stuck again. Yasmin Seweid, an 18-year-old Baruch College student in New York City, claimed that “three white racists” tried to tear off her hijab, shouted Trump’s name, along with, "Look it's a fucking terrorist", "go back to your country" and "take that rag o
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Obama Plans to Rule America Outside the White House
Barack Obama has two faces. After Trump’s victory and Hillary’s defeat, the public Obama has been gracious and diplomatic. His lectures to Trump, directly and indirectly, are couched in praise. He echoed the feeling of millions on both sides when he said, "We are now all rooting for his success”. That’s a lie. Or rather a disguise. Obama and his aides had, in one insider narrative, decided to don the “mask of decorum”. The contempt for Trump still seeps through the mask. And the mask hides Obama’s next big move. President Obama is over. He knows that. There are still some things that he can do before he leaves office, but everything except the most destructive, can be undone by his successor. The next phase of his campaign will not be fought from the White House. It will be fought against the White House . The other Obama is emerging in conference calls with his supporters. “One of the challenges that I’ve discovered being president is I’d like to be organizer-in-chief, bu
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Trump or Hamas
The Islamic Society of North America was named by the Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator in funding Hamas. It was linked to two Hamas funding fronts, the Holy Land Foundation and KindHearts. ISNA’s checks were made payable to the “Palestinian Mujahadeen” or “Holy Warriors” which was a name used by Hamas. ISNA’s co-founder Sami Al-Arian was the local head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Mousa Abu Marzook, a top Hamas official listed by the Treasury Department as a Specially Designated Terrorist, received tens of thousands of dollars from ISNA. This should have come as no surprise as both ISNA and Hamas are arms of the Muslim Brotherhood. But the American Jewish Committee has decided to team up with the financiers of the murder of Jews to oppose Trump. The left wing Jewish group and an Islamist organization that wrote out checks to Islamic terrorists enabling them to kill Jews have formed the “Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council”. Statements from both ISNA and the AJC
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Immigration Can Kill the Democrat Party
The specter of identity politics is haunting the left. It shows up at teary-eyed election parties in Berkeley, debates over craft beers in Williamsburg and the editorial pages of the big opinion shaper papers. No less an icon of the left than Bernie Sanders has been grumbling that his movement needs to reconnect with working people again. He even tentatively denounced identity politics. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me.’” Bernie bears a grudge. That’s obvious. But the old Socialist has a history of spouting the old Socialist working class denunciations of immigration. Bernie is really arguing that the Democrats ought to emphasize class more and race less. Similar left-wing squeaks have popped up in a handful of editorials. But they aren’t likely to travel very far. The Democrats are losing the Rust Belt, just like they lost the South, because they have become an urban political machine. Identity politics is just urban organizing with a lot of
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A Date That Will Live Forever in Infamy
Naval Base Bombed, Shinto Worshipers Fear Backlash - New York Times - December 8 1941 A day after planes passed over their peaceful village on the way to attack the Naval Station at Pearl Harbor, local fishermen are still picking up the pieces. "I don't know what any of this is about," a man who would only give his name as Paji said, holding the remains of a net which he had used to earn a living. "All I know is that the killing has to stop." In Washington, government officials urged the public to stay calm and not to jump to any conclusions warning that such reactions might play into the hands of the militant extremists responsible for the attack. Early copies of President Roosevelt's upcoming speech to Congress likewise warn the American public of the dangers of overreaction. "We are not at war with Japan," it says. "We are at war with a tiny handful of extremists who are attempting to drag the Japanese people into a conflict. But
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5 Lessons for Republicans from Trump's Win
What can Republicans learn from Trump’s victory? The biggest lesson is that the old way of politics is dead. McCain and Romney showed that twice. Now Trump has shown how Republicans can actually win. 1. Find Your Natural Base The GOP is ashamed of its base. It doesn’t like being associated with the very voters who made 2016 happen. Its autopsy last time around searched for ways to leave the white working class behind. There’s a party that did that. Their symbol is a jackass. They just lost big because they ran out of working class white voters. The Democrats have tried to manufacture their base using immigration, victimhood politics and identity politics. The GOP has wasted far too much time trying to compete on the same playing field while neglecting its base. Trump won by doing what the GOP could have done all along if its leadership hadn’t been too ashamed to talk to people it considered low class because they shop at WalMart. The GOP wanted a better image. It cringed at
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Being Thankful for the Left
When we celebrate Thanksgiving, after being thankful for family and friends, for health and comfort, for food and shelter; we shouldn't forget to be thankful for the left. There is no light without darkness and without evil, the good often fails to find their own voice. It is in the presence of slavery that we remember the worth of freedom. Men and nations are forged in war; not only the war of shell and shot, but the war of ideas. War teaches us to fight for what we have. Wars of ideas teach us to stand up for what we believe. It is because conservatives are basically hopeful and confident that we are also prone to extremes of despair. Too many us were shocked at the decline of our society because of our great confidence in it. The faith that conservatives have in America makes them vulnerable to being crushed by the latest victory of the left. I have seen far too much despair and defeatism, too many comments that suggest there is no hope for America and the only thing left
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A Tiny Minority of a Million Muslims in America
The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) is boasting that its voter registration campaign “One Million Voters” across mosques and schools has doubled the number of registered Muslim voters to over a million. The media is cheering this development even though USCMO has a history that makes the KKK look downright sunny. USCMO was in the news last year for its statement denying the Muslim genocide of Armenians and arguing that any recognition of the massacre must also recognize “Muslim suffering.” USCMO's Secretary General Oussama Jammal had engaged in 9/11 Trutherism at a rally backing a Hamas supporter. He was president of the Bridgeview Mosque which raised money for the head of Islamic Jihad. The Chicago Tribune described this as the result of a “hard line” takeover of the mosque. The Bridgeview mosque had been interlinked with the Islamic Association for Palestine which had been set up by the Muslim Brotherhood and featured Hamas operatives such as Mousa Abu Marzook. J
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You Are Being Lied To
Media schizophrenia. Every quantum leap in mass communications also made possible a vast improvement in propaganda techniques. Nazi and Soviet propaganda looks as crude to us as a Babbage calculating machine. Virtual reality isn't something that's coming. It's here. It's been here for a while. The potent combination of media budgets and crowdsourced social media distribution has allowed for a previously unparalleled level of propaganda that creates and inhabits its own virtual reality. There's a name for that sort of thing. Schizophrenia. What happens when the schizophrenic media reality collapses when it comes into too sharp of a conflict with reality is the same behavior that schizophrenics exhibit when their perceptions of the world conflict with the real world. The people venting and rioting and screaming were living in a cozy reality. Everyone in that progressive reality understood that history was on their side, that the majority was with them and that
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Let's All Go To the Arafat Museum
On the anniversary of his death, it is important that we remember Yasser Arafat (8 or 9 other names, including the ubiquitous Mohammed, may be added as needed) as a murderer, a liar and a thief. Twelve years ago, Arafat, the Egyptian terrorist leader who founded an imaginary country on mass murder and our foreign aid, died covered in his own vomit and diarrhea. The possible causes of death, in order of probability, were AIDS, according to his private doctor and the head of the PFLP terror group, an Israeli laser, according to the Palestinian ambassador to Sri Lanka, thallium poisoning by Israel, polonium poisoning by his Palestinian rivals and the trained ape from Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. The investigation into Arafat’s death went on for over a decade and dragged in the Institut de Radiophysique in Switzerland, Russia’s Federal Medical-Biological Agency and a mysteriously nameless team of French experts. Arafat’s “temporary” mausoleum, a building that looks like a Florida mo
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