Category: Commentary

“What was it like to be in Belgrade during the NATO bombings?”

It wasn’t boring, that’s for sure!

This is going to be a long writing. I’ll try to share my own experience, rather than going through well known facts. After all, I guess that’s what this question is all about. I’ll also share my own thoughts about events I describe. I might (try to) throw a joke, here or there. All the pictures used in this answer were found on the Internet.

So, to begin with, let’s set the theater of operations: Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). For the readers are not familiar with the recent history of the Balkans, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the official (or spiritual or … call it whatever you like) successor of Socialistic Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). SFRY consisted of 6 republics: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Montenegro and Macedonia. After the secessionist/civil war that took place between 1991 and 1995 (although it started way before 1991, but that’s another story), the SFRY was turned into: FRY, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and Macedonia. Obviously, FRY consisted of two republics: Serbia and Montenegro. Kosovo, where most fights in 1999 took place, is a southern province of Serbia. Some would say “was a province of Serbia” (but that’s also another story and I won’t tackle it here). Kosovo is bordering with Albania and in 1999 was mainly inhabited by ethnic Albanians (and still is, I think we can all agree on that). Some political movements among the population of Albanian origin have been calling and pushing for Kosovo independence for several decades before the war of 1999. Some of them got radicalized along the way. The capital of Serbia is Belgrade. The capital of Kosovo is Pristina. Take a look at the following picture.

You can continue reading this account by Đorđe Đurđević published on Quora here:

Daniel Greenfield: Identity Politics and American Anti-Semitism

When Robert Bowers walked through the door of the Tree of Life synagogue with murder on his mind, he was propelled by identity politics. As a white supremacist, his brand of identity politics is more politically incorrect than the ones that led Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour of the Women’s March to support Louis Farrakhan, but it’s no more violent, racist or evil.

Before the massacre, the most recent high profile anti-Semitic attack had been carried out by a Muslim who was caught on video beating a Jewish man while shouting about, “Allah” and his hatred for Jews.

Another hate crime, also caught on video, was a violent assault with a baseball bat by a black man.

Such assaults are less devastating than the mass murder of eleven people, but also much more commonplace. They repeat from month to month and year to year. They make up much of the toll of anti-Semitic hate crimes so that they top the list of hate crime statistics every single year.

The Tree of Life massacre has been greeted with editorials mourning a “loss of innocence” by American Jews. Such editorials come from a bubble of privilege that is cut off from the way many Jews live.

In 1991, New York City’s first black mayor stood and watched while a violent mob whipped up, by among others, Al Sharpton, went on a violent anti-Semitic rampage in Crown Heights. The Crown Heights Pogrom, as it would become known, took three lives and terrorized a neighborhood.

Sharpton, the black supremacist linked to the anti-Semitic violence, went on to speak at the Democratic National Convention, host a show on MSNBC and become a regular visitor to the Obama White House.

The distance between Crown Heights and Squirrel Hill is more than mere geography, it’s social and cultural. Anti-Semitic violence by black supremacists and Muslim terrorists tends to happen in poorer, urban neighborhoods and is directed against a poorer and more religious class of Jews. White supremacist attacks tend to target more suburban, prosperous and less diverse Jewish areas.

Those are home to the same Jewish populations who are much more likely to write editorials about a loss of innocence. But innocence is a privilege that Jews in poorer urban neighborhoods never had.

> Read the rest of this great essay at “Sultan Knish”

The Würzburg Jihad Attack, German Interior Minister de Maizière and my High School history teacher

German author Vera Lengsfeld reported that German Interior Minister Lothar de Maizière said that: the attacker was a single perpetrator who had been “incited” by the IS, there were no indications in his video of an “order” by the IS, it was unknown how the video got from the apartment of his host family, where it was recorded, to the IS, and however there were no indications of any connection to the IS.

Reminds me somehow of when our history teacher in high school reassured us that his generation did not get wind of the Holocaust in any way, because the walls of the concentration camps had been far too high to be able to look beyond them.

[Comment originally posted on Frontpagemag.com]

Another Israeli Murdered on the Altar of Political Correctness

Another horrific Palestinian terror attack has left another Israeli dead. IDF soldier, 21-year-old Tuvia Weissman, was stabbed to death Thursday evening in a Rami Levy supermarket at Sha’ar Benyamin. Weissman was shopping in the market in civilian clothes when he was attacked by two 14-year-old terrorists.

He leaves behind a wife and a infant child only a few months old.

Look who’s Germany’s “Commissioner for Immigration, Refugees and Integration”!

From Wikipedia:

Aydan Özoğuz (born 31 May 1967) is a German politician. She is a member of the Bundestag for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) (since 2009), and was elected deputy chairperson of the party in 2011. She currently serves as Minister of State in the German Chancellery and Commissioner for Immigration, Refugees and Integration (since 2013).

[…]

She was born on 31 May 1967 in Finkenau, Hamburg to Turkish parents, who came to Germany in 1958. She grew up in Hamburg-Lokstedt. Her parents went later into their own food business. Aydan Özoğuz acquired the German citizenship in 1989. She has two brothers, Yavuz and Gürhan.

[…]

Özoğuz is on the board of trustees of the “Muslim Academy in Germany” (German: Muslimische Akademie in Deutschland), a foundation in Berlin. Since 2010, she is also deputy member of the board of the trustees of the German Historical Museum and the Foundation for History of Federal Republic of Germany (German: Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland). Continue reading Look who’s Germany’s “Commissioner for Immigration, Refugees and Integration”!

Obama the peace dove turns out to be more of an (atomic) warmonger

The irony […] is that Obama came to power via the siren call of multilateralism and the glories of the United Nations. And he will leave office having emasculated the Security Council’s potential to promote international peace and security and enforce non-proliferation, destroyed the credibility of the world’s nuclear watchdog agency, and undermined the relevance of treaties for American foreign policy from here on.

Anne Bayefsky, What Obama doesn’t want you (and Congress) to know about his Iran deal, Fox News, September 08, 2015

Martin Sherman on the “debate” on “Jewish terrorism”: “Jewish hate crimes and vandalism are NOT terrorism”

We can and we do [b]urn children alive, execute murderous, inhuman, incomprehensible terror. And no, we’re no better than them…. – Sima Kadmon, “We’re no better than our enemies,” Ynet

They are no different than ISIS… this is Jewish jihadism, identical in every detail to Islamic jihadism – Ron Ben-Yishai, Ynet

Israelis stab gay people and burn children. There isn’t a shred of slander, the slightest degree of exaggeration, in this dry description – Gideon Levy, Haaretz

 

The events of last week cast doubt on the ability of Israel to survive the merciless brutality that surrounds it.

Deplorable acts by fringe elements 

The insanity – and there is no other word to describe the frenzy that seized the public debate over acts, however heinous, perpetrated by a handful of individuals (some yet unidentified) – [sic; closing dash here, not after “society”, where it should be (I suspect the editor); RR] on the outermost fringe of Israeli society, betrayed a dangerous and dysfunctional disability in the nation’s capacity to order its priorities.

For in what is arguably the most fateful 60-day period in recent decades for the Jewish state, when all the nation’s energies should be focused with laser-like intensity on foiling the perilous Iran nuclear deal before Congress, attention has been diverted by sanctimonious hand-wringing and moralistic self-flagellation over crimes of individual perpetrators on the very margins of society.

[…]

It is an attempt to paint all ideo-political adversaries with the same brush; to taint with the delegitimizing stain of religious fanaticism, all those, who, for a variety of reasoned arguments – security imperatives, historical significance, national heritage, economic pragmatism – oppose p [sic] territorial concession and political appeasement in the conflict with the Palestinian-Arabs.

Source: The Jerusalem Post (online), 6 June 2015

“Who is the perpetrator, who is the victim?” German public TV “reporting” on the anti-Semitic Har Nof massacre – an example of the “balanced” German approach to the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”

Blessed be your quality weapons, the wheels of your cars, your axes and kitchen knives. By Allah, these are stronger than the arsenals of our enemy, because [they are being used] according to Allah’s will. We are the soldiers of Allah. – Sultan Abu Al-Einein, Senior Advisor of Mahmoud Abbas and Member of the Fatah Central Committee, one day after the massacre

How beautiful is your Martyrdom. / You have placed a crown [upon my head] / … / O Ghassan and Uday, / who carried out the operation / blessed be your hands and the tips of your fingers. / Blessed be the womb that bore you /… / Yesterday [I gave] the most beautiful gift. / The Martyrs’ blood was not spilled in vain. / I am a Palestinian. – Mother of Uday Abu Jamal

That – in stark contrast to the Jews or even any other people for that matter – the Germans have learned a lot from the Holocaust has long been perfectly clear. So far, they have already played a leading role in preventing a “new Auschwitz” in Kosovo, Serbia, coincidentally defeating in the process once again their (former!) “arch-enemy”, the Serbs, and carving a second Albanian “state”, a Muslim one, out of sovereign Serbian territory, where now, after a series of anti-Serbian, anti-Christian pogroms, if not much else, you can at least make good money if you’re an Albanian Hitler look-alike. In fact, the Germans have learned so much so that in the evening after the horrific slaughter of five people (four Rabbis and a Druze policeman) and the wounding of 10 others in a synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood last November, an anchor of the major German public television station ZDF, Marietta Slomka, was able to stay perfectly “neutral” and – as they say in Italian – to “take things with philosophy” without letting even this story remind her and her public of anything.

The following is a commented unabridged translation of the entire introduction by Slomka and of the entire following “report” by a ZDF correspondent in Israel for the news program “Heute Journal”. Continue reading “Who is the perpetrator, who is the victim?” German public TV “reporting” on the anti-Semitic Har Nof massacre – an example of the “balanced” German approach to the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”

Iran Deal: Remember the last time the entire world seemed to be as trustful as John Kerry is now?

“Unlike North Korea, [the Iranians] have not pulled out of the NPT. Unlike North Korea, they haven’t exploded any nuclear device, and the supreme leader of Iran has said, we’re not going to seek a nuclear weapon.” – John Kerry

The Supreme Leader of Iran already made it clear that the war will continue

until America is destroyed. That may be the only common ground he has with Obama. Both America and Iran are governed by fanatics who believe that America is the source of all evil. Both believe that it needs to be destroyed.

Carter made the Islamic Revolution possible. Obama is enabling its nuclear revolution.

Today Tehran and Washington D.C. are united by a deep distrust of America, distaste for the West and a violent hatred of Israel. This deal is the product of that mutually incomprehensible unity. It is not meant to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. It is meant to stop America and Israel from stopping it.

[…]
The deal assumes that Iran wants lower electricity rates. Iran’s constitution tells us that it wants Jihad. And unlike Obama, Iran’s leaders can be trusted to live up to their Constitution.
Source: Daniel Greenfield, The Myth of Iran’s Peaceful Nuclear Program, 23 July 2015

Oops, someone (Israeli UN ambassador Ron Prosor) speaks the truth about what the “P5+1” and the UNSC have just done

Israel’s ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor took on the United Nations Security Council on Monday, just after it unanimously approved a draft resolution implementing the Iranian nuclear deal with the West.

“You have awarded a great prize to the most dangerous country in the world,” Prosor began. “I hate to be the one to spoil the party, but someone has to say the emperor has no clothes.”

Source: Arutz Sheva

Pushing harder to push the Jews out of their own land by means of illegal settlements

Now the Obama administration seems to care even less about the Oslo Accords into which the Clinton administration pressured the tiny state of Israel, enabling a bunch of defeated terrorists to set up a “legal” anti-Semitic terror base within what should be Israel’s own sovereign territory: State Dept. Tells Israel to Leave Illegal Arab Settlement.

As Adolf Hitler stressed: “Menschenrecht bricht Staatsrecht” (“human rights trump state law”) – while it is “us” who define what is a “human right” and what is not, at least when it comes to the Jews of Israel (or, well, to the Serbs).

Martin Sherman on the folly of the “Iran deal”

Astonishingly, nearly all the decisions of the Joint Commission, tasked with overseeing/ administering the implementation of the deal, are to be made by consensus – which in effect gives Iran veto power over them. In the case of inspection access, it is sufficient for two of its eight members (say China and Russia) to abstain for Iran to block any decision it dislikes. Continue reading Martin Sherman on the folly of the “Iran deal”