NEWS FLASH: Jews don't have a monopoly on suffering

To many readers the New York Times coverage of the war in Gaza comes across as neutered or as having a pro-Israeli bias.

 

But not to Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador in Washington, who lambasts the paper for failing “to mention that a million Israelis were in bomb shelters yesterday as 100 rockets were fired at our civilian population.”

 

Mr Dermer is considered so close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he has been called “Bibi’s brain”.

 

He is also a former student and employee of Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist who produced a confidential booklet in 2009, promptly leaked, advising Israeli spokesmen how best to manipulate American and European public opinion.

 

“Don’t confuse messages with facts,” Dr Luntz advises the spokesmen as he explains how facts should be selected and best presented to make Israel’s case.

 

It is a sophisticated document based on wide-ranging opinion polls, suggesting, for instance, that the removal of Israeli settlements from the West Bank should be denounced as “a kind of ethnic cleansing”.

 

Dr Luntz stresses that spokesmen must demonise Hamas, but above all emphasise that they feel for the sufferings of Palestinians as well as Israelis. As a sample of what they should say, he gives: “The day will come when Israeli children and Palestinian children will grow up together, play together, and work together side-by-side not just because they have to but because they want to.”

 

The problem about this approach is that it sounds particularly hypocritical when, according to Unicef, 230 children have been killed in Gaza, an average of ten a day, and 2,000 have been wounded by Israeli bombs, shells and bullets.

 

 

Israeli spokesmen are now denying their responsibility for the most notorious and televised atrocities such as the strike on the UN hospital last week.

 

This is an old PR tactic, though not one recommended by Dr Luntz, which is sometime referred to as “first you say no story, then you say old story”. In other words, deny everything in the teeth of the evidence on day one and, by the time definitive proof of the massacre comes through, nobody notices when you have to admit responsibility.

 

A problem here is that propaganda that works in a short war comes back to haunt you in a longer one. This is now happening in Gaza. Israeli air and artillery strikes and Hamas mortars and rockets are often presented as if they balanced each other out in terms of lethality.

 

But the most important statistic here is that some 1,100 Palestinians have been killed as opposed to three civilians in Israel.

 

 

Despite his tutoring by Dr Luntz, Mr Dermer only speaks these days to the converted. Attending a Christians United for Israel Summit in Washington he replied to protesters who called him a “war criminal” by saying that “the truth is that the Israeli Defence Forces should be given a Nobel Peace Prize”. Stuff like this may explain why a Gallup poll shows that among Americans aged between 18 and 29 some 51 per cent said Israel’s actions were unjustified while only 23 per cent said they were.

 

For all the good advice of Dr Luntz there are signs of Israeli leaders getting rattled. Mr Netanyahu complained on CNN that Hamas wants “to pile up as many civilian dead as they can” and “to use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause.”

 

Even the best propaganda machine cannot explain away massacres of civilians as happened in Lebanon at Sabra and Shatila in 1982 and at Qana in 1996 and 2006.

Hubble Reveals Farthest Lensing Galaxy, Yielding Clues to Early Universe

"There are hundreds of lens galaxies that we know about, but almost all of them are relatively nearby, in cosmic terms," said Wong, first author on the team's science paper, which was published in the July 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. "To find a lens as far away as this one is a very special discovery because we can learn about the dark-matter content of galaxies in the distant past. By comparing our analysis of this lens galaxy to the more nearby lenses, we can start to understand how that dark-matter content has evolved over time."

Tran and her team were studying star formation in two distant galaxy clusters, including IRC 0218, when they stumbled upon the gravitational lens. In poring over the spectrographic data from Keck, Tran spotted a strong detection of hot hydrogen gas -- a clear signature of star birth -- that appeared to arise from a massive, bright elliptical galaxy. Previous observations had showed that the giant elliptical was an old, sedate galaxy that had stopped making stars a long time ago.

Another puzzling discovery was that the young stars were at a much farther distance than the massive elliptical.

"I was very surprised and very worried," Tran recalled. "I thought we had made a major mistake with our observations."

The astronomer soon realized she hadn't made a mistake when she looked at the Hubble images taken in blue wavelengths, which revealed the glow of fledgling stars. The images, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3, revealed a blue, eyebrow-shaped object next to a smeared blue dot around the big elliptical. Tran recognized the unusual features as the distorted, magnified images of a more distant galaxy behind the elliptical, the signature of a gravitational lens.

Multidisciplinary study reveals big story of cultural migration: culture is biologically associated with race

The visualization of birth-death network dynamics offers a meta-narrative of cultural history:

Europe 0-1856 CE.

 

Quantifying and transforming the history of culture into visual representation isn't easy. There are thousands of individual stories across millennia to consider, and some historical conditions are nearly impossible to measure.

 

Addressing this challenge, Dr. Maximilian Schich, associate professor of arts and technology at The University of Texas at Dallas, has brought together a team of network and complexity scientists to create and quantify a big picture of European and North American cultural history.

 

Schich, an art historian who works under the umbrella of the University's Arts and Technology (ATEC) Program, has reconstructed the migration and mobility patterns of more than 150,000 notable individuals over a time span of two thousand years. By connecting the birth and death locations of each individual, Schich and his team have made progress in our understanding of large-scale cultural dynamics.

 

Schich's research is detailed in the article "A Network Framework of Cultural History," published Aug. 1 in the journal Science.

 

"The study draws a surprisingly comprehensive picture of European and North American cultural interaction that can't be otherwise achieved without consulting vast amounts of literature or combing discrete datasets," Schich said. "This study functions like a macro-scope, where quantitative and qualitative inquiry complement each other."

 

 

Quantitative analysis involves objective, measureable data, while qualitative inquiry relies on subjective or "apparent" qualities.

 

Schich and his colleagues collected the birth and death data from three databases to track migration networks within and out of Europe and North America, revealing a pattern of geographical birth sources and death attractors.

 

A key finding in the study, Schich says, is that non-intuitive fundamental patterns, including the so-called "laws of migration," emerge from large numbers of specific events. The team also found evidence for massive fluctuations on a level of single specific locations.

 

"In practice, this means that cultural history is both an event discipline, where qualitative inquiry focuses on the specific, and a law discipline, where quantification helps to understand general patterns," Schich said.

 

Other findings show that despite the dependence of the arts on money, cultural centers and economic centers do not always coincide, and that the population size of a location does not necessarily point to its cultural attractiveness.

 

"In fact, outliers with outstanding cultural attraction, such as Hollywood, Calif., where we find 10 times more notable deaths as births, are found at all sizes, from villages to metroplexes," Schich said.

 

In addition, the median physical distance between birth and death locations changed very little between the 14th and 21st centuries, from about 214 kilometers (133 miles) to about 382 km (237 miles), respectively.

 

"There is really no average or typical cultural center," Schich added. "As a consequence, cultural historians really need quantification to complement their intuition based on qualitative inquiry. On the other hand, our results also send a message to complexity scientists. The massive fluctuations we find mean that qualitative inquiry has to complement quantification in order to fully understand the dynamics of cultural migration."

 

 

Schich said the topic of art and cultural history is an uncommon topic for papers in journals such as Science.

 

"A large amount of multidisciplinary expertise was necessary to arrive at the results we found," Schich said. "The paper relies on the fields of art history, complex networks, complexity science, computational sociology, human mobility, information design, physics and some inspiration from systems biology."

 

While the research that made the paper possible began in Boston and was continued in Zurich, Switzerland, Schich finished his project in Texas.

 

"The ATEC program at UT Dallas provides an environment where it is possible and encouraged to transcend disciplinary boundaries to understand culture as a complex system. This paper illustrates perfectly the type of work that is taking place in my Cultural Science Lab," Schich added.

Obama: 'The Blood of Africa Runs Through My Veins'

Obama: 'The Blood of Africa Runs Through My Veins'

 

"All men are created equal"? But apparently some people have the "blood of Africa" running through their veins, while others don't. Once you assume power, it is at that moment that the mantra of "all men are created equal," which you've purposely misinterpreted for decades, no longer proves useful to you, and so you discard it like a flaming bag of excrement, and you then proclaim proudly that the "blood of Africa" runs through your veins, for which you are enthusiastically applauded by your usurping accomplices.

 

But the street you tread upon runs two ways.

 

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The Blood of Europe runs deeply through our veins, and we care deeply about Europe's future. 

The Declaration of White Independence

Gaza: nothing more shameful than attacking sleeping children, says Ban Ki-moon

 

'World stands disgraced' as Israeli shelling of school kills at least 15

 

United Nations officials described the killing of sleeping children as a disgrace to the world and accused Israel of a serious violation of international law after a school in Gaza being used to shelter Palestinian families was shelled on Wednesday.

 

At least 15 people, mostly children and women, died when the school in Jabaliya refugee camp was hit by five shells during a night of relentless bombardment across Gaza. More than 100 people were injured.

 

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, said the attack was "outrageous and unjustifiable" and demanded "accountability and justice". The UN said its officials had repeatedly given details of the school and its refugee population to Israel.

 

Earth's Sixth Mass Extinction Is Now Underway, Wiping Out Species At An Alarming Rate: Report

Deforestation, climate change and the dramatic impact human societies have had in reshaping the Earth for the past few thousand years are taking an extraordinary toll on its animal species, which are dying off about 1,000 times faster today than they did before humans arrived.

It all adds up to the sixth mass extinction in the planet's history, the editors of Science Magazine report in a special series of scientific studies released Thursday, which both explore the implications of "anthropocene defaunation" and offer prescriptions for how we might re-colonize animal populations throughout the world.

As one study pointed out, over the past four decades Earth's human population has roughly doubled, while during the same period the number of invertebrate species -- like insects, worms, spiders, clams, snails and starfish -- has shrunk by about 45 percent.

"We were shocked to find similar losses in invertebrates as with larger animals, as we previously thought invertebrates to be more resilient." Ben Collen, a research scientist with the U.K.-based University College London and one of the study co-authors, said in an interview with USA Today.
Scientists point out that extinctions of individual species aren't uncommon, as more than 99 percent of all the known species ever to have existed on Earth are now gone forever.

What has changed is the speed with which species are going extinct, a phenomenon scientists chalk up to the impact humans have had on the planet for the past two centuries. Many argue we should call the age we're living in the "Anthropocene," or the Age of Man.

That's because the impact humans are having on the planet and its ecosystems -- killing off species by destroying their habitats for building cities and agriculture, hunting them and overfishing them to extinction, and by the industrial pollutants we pump into the atmosphere, and into our lakes, rivers and oceans -- are so dramatic that they constitute a definable geological time scale for the planet like the Holocene or the Pleistocene.

Of the roughly 5 million to 9 million animal species living on Earth today, between 11,000 and 58,000 species likely go extinct every year, the Science study notes. Mass extinctions like today's, however, are rare.

Earth has experienced five previous mass extinction events, most caused by giant meteors slamming into the Earth. The best-known of these is probably the one that killed off the dinosaurs, along with 75 percent of all other species, about 66 million years ago. Ninety percent of all animal species were lost in another extinction more than 250 million years ago, which has been called the "Great Dying."

What's different about today's extinction? "The underlying driving force for this is not a meteorite or a mega-volcanic eruption; it is one species - homo sapiens," Stanford University's Rodolfo Dirzo, one of the Science studies' lead authors, told USA Today.

The loss of a single species, while seemingly insignificant when compared to the overall number of animal species on Earth, leaves a much bigger hole in its ecosystem than humans know, the Science editors point out.

"Though for emotional or aesthetic reasons we may lament the loss of large charismatic species, such as tigers, rhinos, and pandas, we now know that loss of animals, from the largest elephant to the smallest beetle, will also fundamentally alter the form and function of the ecosystems upon which we all depend," the study says.

US restocks Israeli ammunition

The Pentagon confirmed a CNN report that the US had recently provided Israel with a shipment of ammunition. “The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to US national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready self-defense capability,” said Pentagon press secretary Rear Admiral Kirby. “This defense sale is consistent with those objectives.”

The Israeli military requested the addition ammunition on 20 July . The US defense department approved the sale three days later, Kirby said.

Two of the requested munitions were sourced from a secret stockpile the US keeps in Israel for emergencies. White House approval was not required to release the weaponry War Reserve Stockpile Ammunition-Israel (WRSA-I), Kirby added.

He did not say whether the White House was involved in the decision to supply the other ammunition apparently requested by the Israelis.

The provision of ammunition could prove controversial for Washington, which has expresssed growing concern about the deaths Palestinian civilians while maintaining support for its close ally.
In Congress, both Democrats and Republicans were working on a package of additional military support for Israel’s “iron dome” security system.

Israel’s decision to press ahead with its offensive in Gaza despite a chorus of international condemnation was reaffirmed on Wednesday, following a meeting of the Israeli cabinet.

UNRWA said it was the sixth time one of its schools had been struck. “Last night, children were killed as they slept next to their parents on the floor of a classroom in a UN-designated shelter in Gaza. Children killed in their sleep; this is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame,” said Pierre Krahenbuhl, commissioner-general.

Israel's rank and rotten fruit is being called fascism

The images from Gaza are searing, a gallery of death and horror. A dishevelled Palestinian man cries out in agony, his blood-soaked little brother dead in his arms. On a filthy hospital bed a boy of perhaps five or six screams for his father, his head and body lacerated by shrapnel. A teenage girl lies on a torn stretcher, her limbs awry, her face and torso blackened like a burnt steak. Mourners weep over a family of 18 men, women and children laid side by side in bloodied shrouds. Four boys of a fishing family named Bakr, all less than 12 years old, are killed on a beach by rockets from Israeli aircraft.

As I write, after just over a week of this invasion, the death toll of Palestinians is climbing towards 1000. Most are civilians, many are children. Assaulting Gaza by land, air and sea, Israel has destroyed homes and reduced entire city blocks to rubble. It has attacked schools, mosques and hospitals. Tens of thousands of people have fled, although there is nowhere safe for them to go in this wretched strip of land just 40 kilometres long and about 10 kilometres wide. There are desperate shortages of food and water, of medical and surgical supplies.

In an open letter to US President Barack Obama, Dr Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian surgeon working at Gaza's al-Shifa hospital, writes of "the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. Humans!

"Ashy grey faces – Oh no! Not one more load of tens of maimed and bleeding. We still have lakes of blood on the floor in the emergency room, piles of dripping, blood-soaked bandages to clear out ... the cleaners, everywhere, swiftly shovelling the blood and discarded tissues, hair, clothes, cannulas – the leftovers from death – all taken away... to be prepared again, to be repeated all over."

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The onslaught is indiscriminate and unrelenting, with but one possible conclusion: Israel is not fighting the terrorists of Hamas. In defiance of the laws of war and the norms of civilised behaviour, it is waging its own war of terror on the entire Gaza population of about 1.7 million people. Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing: the aim is to kill Arabs.

As none other than Malcolm Fraser tweeted this week: "If any other country went to war killing as many civilians, women and children, it would be named a war crime." But it is not, although the UN is asking the question of both sides.

Yes, Hamas is also trying to kill Israeli civilians, with a barrage of rockets and guerilla border attacks. It, too, is guilty of terror and grave war crimes. But Israeli citizens and their homes and towns have been effectively shielded by the nation's Iron Dome defence system, and so far only three of its civilians have died in this latest conflict. The Israeli response has been out of all proportion, a monstrous distortion of the much-vaunted right of self defence.

It is a breathtaking irony that these atrocities can be committed by a people with a proud liberal tradition of scholarship and culture, who hold the Warsaw Ghetto and the six million dead of the Holocaust at the centre of their race memory. But this is a new and brutal Israel dominated by the hardline, right-wing Likud Party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition. As one observer puts it: "All the seeds of the incitement of the past few years, all the nationalistic, racist legislation and the incendiary propaganda, the scare campaigns and the subversion of democracy by the right-wing camp – all these have borne fruit, and that fruit is rank and rotten. The nationalist right has now sunk to a new level, with almost the whole country following in its wake. The word 'fascism', which I try to use as little as possible, finally has its deserved place in the Israeli political discourse."

Fascism in Israel? At this point the Australian Likudniks, as Bob Carr calls them, will be lunging for their keyboards. There will be the customary torrent of abusive emails calling me a Nazi, an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, an ignoramus.  As usual they will demand my resignation, my sacking. As it's been before, some of this will be pornographic or threatening violence.

In fact, that paragraph within the quotation marks was written by an Israeli. Gideon Levy is a columnist and editorial board member of the daily newspaper Ha’aretz. Born in Tel Aviv to parents who fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, he despairs of what his country has become and the catastrophe its armed forces are visiting upon Gaza. After a recent column calling on Israeli pilots to stop bombing and rocketing civilians, his life was threatened and he now has a bodyguard day and night. It has come to that. In the worst insult of all, Levy is branded "a self-hating Jew".

Israeli propaganda is subtle and skillfully put. "If Israel were to lay down its arms tomorrow, she would be destroyed; but if Hamas were to lay down their arms, there would be peace," goes the line, parroted endlessly.

But in all these long and agonising decades, Israel has never offered the Palestinians a just and equitable peace. They would have only a splintered, vassal state, their polity and economy and even their borders and freedom of travel and trade managed and determined by Israel. The occupation of Palestinian lands would remain with the relentless expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank of the Jordan and the Dead Sea.

As the Palestine Liberation Organisation official Hanan Ashrawi put it this week in a television interview with the Australian journalist Hamish Macdonald: "No nation can accept being imprisoned, being besieged by land, by air, by sea and deprived of the most basic requirements of a decent life: freedom of movement, clean water. For seven years they have been under a brutal and lethal Israeli siege ... You shell them and you bomb them; you destroy homes, you destroy whole neighbourhoods. You obliterate, annihilate, whole families, and then you come and say that this is self defence?"

That is why the killing and the dying goes on. Ad nauseam, ad infinitum. And the rest of the world, not caring, looks away.

US Selling Israel Weapons for Use on Palestinians - Middle East Expert

NEW YORK, July 28 (RIA Novosti) –
While negotiating a truce between Israelis and Palestinian militants, the US continues to stoke the conflict by selling deadly weapons to Israel, a Middle East expert told RIA Novosti Monday.

“Even as the US government claims to be brokering a ceasefire, it continues selling weapons to Israel,” said Ken Klippenstein, a journalist who regularly covers the conflict.

On July 14, as violence flared between Israelis and Palestinians, the US State Department approved a $544 million sale of AIM-9x sidewinder missiles – which can be used on ground targets by F-16s – together with support services to Israel, the expert noted.

“Official US military aid to Israel is about $3 billion per year, which is part of a decade-long $30 billion military aid package. But this figure doesn't include the $504 million the US provides to Israel for missile defense,” Klippenstein said.

Gaza and southern Israel saw an upsurge in violence on Monday despite diplomatic efforts for a truce. Israel launched an offensive against Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza, three weeks ago after a surge in rocket fire. More than 1,000 Palestinians have died in the military operation. According to recent estimates, the Israeli side has lost more than 40 soldiers and three civilians.

Obama Said to Plan Bringing In Millions of Non-whites

 

President Barack Obama is considering using executive action to let millions of undocumented immigrants obtain work permits that would allow them stay in the U.S. legally, said a Democratic Senate aide.

 

White House officials have told allies in Congress to expect an announcement of a large-scale action most likely in September, just before the midterm congressional elections, the aide said, asking for anonymity to discuss an unannounced plan.

 

Large-scale action by Obama on immigration could improve Democrats chances of retaining control of the Senate in the November elections by energizing Hispanic voters, said Gary Segura, a political science professor at Stanford University in California and co-founder of the polling firm Latino Decisions.

 

The bigger impact would be on the 2016 presidential election by strengthening long-term Hispanic support for the party, he said.

 

A surge in turnout by Hispanics, who typically vote in low numbers in midterm elections, could be decisive for Democrats in the competitive Senate race in Colorado, and possibly in Georgia and North Carolina, he said.

 

Hispanics account for 15 percent of eligible voters in Colorado and 5 percent in both Georgia and North Carolina, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by the Center for American Progress.

 

Democrats would stand to make greater political gains from action by Obama on the immigration matter in the 2016 presidential election, when Hispanics typically vote in higher numbers. Obama’s order in 2012 to stop deportations of immigrants who came to the country illegally as children was “wildly popular” with Latino voters that year, Segura said.

 

In the 2012 race, 71 percent of Hispanics voted for Obama. Eight years earlier, then-Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry got 53 percent of the Latino vote as he lost to then-President George W. Bush, who supported revisions to immigration policy.

 

Deepening Democratic support in the expanding Hispanic population in key presidential battleground states “starts to create a demographic wall in the Electoral College” that determines the winner in presidential races, Segura said.

“There is no school tomorrow; there are no children left in Gaza”

WATCH: Far-right Israelis celebrate Gaza kids’ deaths

In video from Tel Aviv demonstration, crowd can be seen chanting, ‘There is no school tomorrow; there are no children left in Gaza’

A video has emerged of far-right Israeli protesters celebrating the death of children in Gaza during a counter-demonstration to an anti-war rally in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square over the weekend.

 

“There is no school tomorrow; there are no children left in Gaza,” the men can be seen chanting as part of a roughly formed song that also included the stanzas “I hate all the Arabs” and “Gaza is a cemetery.”

 

The mob also called for Israeli Arabs to be stripped of their citizenship.

 

Hundreds of far-right activists participated in the counter-rally at the scene, with police fanned out to prevent altercations between the two sides.

 

Some people can be seen in the video urging the demonstrators to stop singing, but they refuse to listen.

 

The anti-Arab protesters also voiced threats against Arab MKs Ahmad Tibi and Hanin Zoabi, both of whom have been voicing staunchly pro-Palestinian points of view of late.

 

“Ahmad Tibi, I want you to know, the next child that gets hit, is yours,” the crowd can be seen chanting. “I hate Tibi the terrorist.”

 

Earlier this week, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein rejected calls for a criminal investigation into Zoabi for allegedly inciting violence when she said in June that the kidnappers of three Israeli teens in the West Bank (later, the teens’ bodies would be found in a field) were not terrorists. On Tuesday she was suspended from Knesset deliberations for six months.

 

“This is the Jewish state; I hate you Hanin Zoabi,” the crowd chanted.

 

The demonstrations on Saturday were cut short when Hamas unilaterally ended a humanitarian truce with Israel and resumed rocket fire from Gaza.

 

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More on "God's Chosen People": here.

 

Netanyahu needs a lifeline

If war is a continuation of politics by other means, Israel's aggression on the Gaza Strip has been a political disaster. Apart from its mass killing of civilians and destruction of homes, the Israeli army has accomplished nothing to write home about. On the contrary, it has suffered heavy losses, particularly among its elite Golani brigade. This failure on the battlefield has rendered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu incapable of imposing the settlement he wants.

 

With the growing number of casualties and near paralysis gripping Israel, time is against Netanyahu and his war cabinet. After weeks of threats to widen the ground offensive, the Israeli troops are still stalled on the borders; unable to go forward, and too embarrassed to withdraw.

 

In the past, Israel has relied almost exclusively on the Egyptian intelligence to deliver its 'security' needs in Gaza. However, with the coming to power of the former head of military intelligence, Abdul Fattah Al Sisi, Netanyahu hoped that the time had come to make a decisive blow not just against Hamas in the Gaza Strip but the Palestinian national project as a whole. His gamble has proven to have been a grave blunder.

 

The political fallout for Netanyahu's latest adventure will have far-reaching consequences, domestically and externally. He will have to take full political responsibility before his people for this military humiliation. The world's most 'moral' army has exposed itself as a merciless killer of women and children. Meanwhile, despite the disingenuous 'claims' of being branded as 'terrorists', the resistance in Gaza has inflicted military losses on Israel; much more than it has disclosed to date.

 

There is no doubt Israel's prime minister is in dire need of a military victory of sorts before he decides to climb down from the high horse which he mounted. Unfortunately for him, the days of free political concessions to Israel are over. The next battle is almost now certainly not for the defence of Gaza but the liberation of Palestine.

Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League: The nation's top colleges are turning our kids into zombies

In fact, the group that is most disadvantaged by our current admissions policies are working-class and rural whites, who are hardly present on selective campuses at all. The only way to think these places are diverse is if that’s all you’ve ever seen.

 

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The above excerpt is from a recent article published in The New Republic. The word is getting out. How much longer before the politically correct dam breaks? Who knows, but when it does, it will break with a ferocity that will sweep away the ossified ruling class.

Hasrry Reid on more $ for Israel: 'We’ve got to get this done'

'We’ve got to get this done,' Reid says about passing legislation to give more aid. | AP Photo

The Obama administration’s $225 million request to aid Israel during its war with Hamas may not be enough, warned Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Monday afternoon.

At the request of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Senate Democrats folded $225 million for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system into a larger bill that offers $2.7 billion in emergency funding to deal with the influx of Central American migrants to the southern border. But Reid said Israel will need even more help from the United States if the war in Gaza continues, demonstrating the need to pass the funding package this week ahead of a five-week congressional recess.

Reid predicted that Hagel’s aid request for Israel may turn out to be “only temporary” given the steep costs associated with operating Iron Dome, which picks off Hamas’s rockets at a price-tag of $62,000 per missile, according to Reid.

“We should not give the Israeli people the minimum amount of aid and then cross our fingers and hope it all works out in the future,” Reid said. “We can do better and need to go further in protecting Israel.”

Delivering money to Israel during its pitched conflict with Hamas is sure to receive bipartisan support in Congress, but Democrats’ attempts to tie $2.7 billion in border funding, $615 million for wildfires and the Iron Dome money has not yet moved Republicans to support the $3.57 billion package.

Instead the GOP is pushing a standalone bill containing $225 million for Israel, hoping to bypass Democratic attempts to tie the border bill to Iron Dome funding.

“Republicans are united in support of our ally Israel. We have legislation that would allow Congress to meet the [Defense] Secretary’s request” for $225 million, said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell late last week. “We hope our friends on the other side will join us in coming to a sensible, bipartisan solution that can be passed quickly.”

But Reid said the Senate must vote to approve wildfire, border and Israel aid before recess, not just money for the Iron Dome. He accused Republicans of “slow walking” the border money as the recess deadline approaches, though he sounded open to splitting the requests into separate bills if they were considered “immediately.”

“We’ve got to get this done,” Reid said. “Leaving here with Israel being naked as they are, with these wildfires raging and a crisis at the border, it would be a shame if we did nothing.”

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We can't leave poor little Israel unable to commit genocide. It just wouldn't be right.

 

You might think that, with all the problems facing the US, there would be a great many other things that would take priority over subsidizing Israel's genocidal policy of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, but you would be wrong.

Boehner urges US solidarity with Israel

WASHINGTON (AP) — The leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, House Speaker John Boehner, said Monday that support for Israel must be the United States' main focus and not peace mediation in a subtle jab at the Obama administration.

 

"At times like this, people try to isolate Israel - but we are here to stand with Israel," Boehner said in remarks at the National Press Club. "Not just as a broker or observer — but as a strong partner and a trusted ally."

 

Boehner said the U.S. House will always support Israel's right to defend itself.

 

Boehner addressed the National Leadership Assembly for Israel, which was organized by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

 

Boehner expressed support for continued U.S. money for the Iron Dome missile defense system that Israel uses to intercept short-range rockets and mortars fired by Gaza militants.

 

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has asked Congress to provide $225 million for the Iron Dome program in the current budget year, but the money is linked to the divisive border security package and lawmakers may not act before their August recess.

 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, suggested last week that the Iron Dome money be considered separately. In a rare bit of unanimity, Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, signaled that he was open to such a step. Reid also said that the $225 million might not be enough.

 

"After weeks of fighting, Israel needs these funds to replace the weaponry used to destroy Hamas' incoming rockets but there is no guarantee Israel won't need our help again," Reid said in a speech on the Senate floor.

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"In a rare bit of unanimity," because if there's one thing the bought-politicians in Washington can agree on, it's misusing American taxpayers' money to subsidize Israel's indiscriminate, routine slaughter of Palestinians.

Rising tide of anti-Semitism in Britain as Jewish people face backlash over bloodshed in Gaza

 

 

 

More than 1,000 Palestinians, mainly civilians, have died as a result of Israel’s military strikes against Hamas, Gaza’s Islamist rulers, since the start of the conflict. Images of the bloodshed and wholesale destruction of impoverished neighbourhoods has led to international condemnation of the violence.

 

Forty Israeli soldiers and three civilians have also been killed in fighting aimed at stopping Hamas firing rockets across the border.

 

In Britain, peaceful protests against the violence have been marred by vile placards including one declaring: ‘Hitler you were right!’

 

At a Central London march, protesters confronted a Jewish woman with her two young children and told them: ‘Burn in hell.’ 

 

 

Thousands of protesters yesterday marched in central London against Israel's military campaign in Gaza.

 

Activists and supporters of the Palestinian cause gathered outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington, west London, before marching towards Parliament Square.

 

Carrying Palestinian flags and placards with slogans such as Stop the Killing and Free Palestine, the protesters chanted 'Israel is a terror state', 'Gaza don't you cry, we will never let you die' and 'Allahu Akbar' (god is great).

 

There has been also been an explosion of anti-semitic abuse on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.

 

One man called for a Jewish neighbourhood in London to be bombed so ‘Jews feel the pain’ of the Palestinians.

 

In a separate incident, a BBC journalist was reprimanded after seeming to suggest western politicians failed to intervene in the Middle East because they had been ‘bought’ by the Jews.

 

The anti-Semitic backlash has been mirrored on the other side of the Channel where there have been even more violent scenes.

 

 

Thousands of police officers were deployed in Berlin today as the authorities in Paris sought to ban further marches.

 

Protesters in France, which has the world’s third largest Jewish population, have attacked synagogues, smashed the windows of Jewish-owned businesses and set others on fire.

 

In Germany an Imam reportedly called on Muslims to murder ‘Zionist Jews’ and Jewish people have been attacked in the street.

 

Police had to step in to protect an Israeli tourist couple from protesters who charged at them shouting ‘Jew! We’ll get you.’

Israeli soldiers and members of the Breslauer Hassidic sect dance and bless artillery shells

This video was posted on the Facebook page of Tzinur Layla, a program of Israel’s Channel 10 that sources material from social media.

 

It shows members of the Breslauer Hassidim, a mystical Jewish sect, dancing and singing “Le’hiyot be simcha tamid” (“Always be joyful”) with Israeli soldiers manning an artillery battery.

 

The Breslauer Hassidim, a sect that typically attracts young men, affix stickers to artillery shells that may be about to be fired into the Gaza Strip

.

The stickers carry the phrase “na nach nachma nachman me’uman,” the mystical utterance that refers to the name of their spiritual founder, the eighteenth century Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.

 

The group explains that uttering the phrase “eases all the troubles and sweetens all the harsh judgements, all the sins and all the falls and all of the heresy of the world” and transforms everything “to good.”

 

They also say that the incantation “is enough to destroy the Other Side (the Evil Inclination).” This is a reference to taming their sexual libido, Israel expert Dena Shunra told The Electronic Intifada.

 

The video is reminiscent of a notorious image taken during Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon showing Israeli girls writing messages on artillery shells:

Israeli girls write messages on shells ready to be fired by a mobile artillery unit toward Lebanon on 17 July 2006.

 

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 The "Light Unto the Nations" has displayed this sick, inhuman, pathological celebration of genocide many times before, with similar consequences:

 

Spiteful, hateful, monstrous Talmudic revenge.

 

Let's see what "God's Chosen People" have to say:

 

 

 

 

 

And here's God's Chosen cheering as Palestinian civilians get slaughtered:

 

 

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But if you criticize these genocidal maniacs and their infernal machinations, you're an "anti-Semite":

 

“The Human Rights Council turned into the terrorists’ rights council long ago. We will continue to combat terrorism and we will continue to fight hypocrisy and anti-Semitism within bodies like the Human Rights Council.”  -- Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman

 

“I have two words for you: Get lost.” -- Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni

 

Livni's response to Navi Pillay, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, who said of recent Israeli military strikes on Gaza: “There seems to be a strong possibility that international law has been violated, in a manner that could amount to war crimes.”

 

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There's the "Light Unto Nations." There's "God's Chosen People." Their "religion" - as exemplified by the above - can be encapsulated as follows: self-preservation for them; genocide for Whites.

 

The Declaration of White Independence



Afrikaners demand their own state

The Boer-Afrikaner Volksraad says forthcoming talks with the government is a step closer to their right for self-determination.

 

Pretoria - Members of an Afrikaner group who call themselves the Boer-Afrikaner Volksraad view forthcoming talks with the government as a step closer to their “right for self-determination for our own people in a peaceful way”.

 

“The Boer Afrikaner people are distinctive people and we have been fighting for the past two centuries to gain our independence,” Andries Breytenbach, chairman of the Boer-Afrikaner Volksraad, told reporters in Pretoria on Wednesday.

 

“We see the willingness of government to hold talks with us in a positive light.”

 

The discussions that according to Breytenbach will include President Jacob Zuma, or his deputy Cyril Ramaphosa, or both, will be held before the end of August and will consist of the concept of territorial self-determination for what the organisation calls “Boer Afrikaner people”.

 

This follows a recent court application by the Boer-Afrikaner Volksraad to have their own state.

 

 

“In a letter received on 17 July from the State Attorney, the Volksraad was told that government chose to settle this issue through negotiations rather than litigation,” he said.

 

Breytenbach, who could not give the exact number of members belonging to their organisation, said that a possible poll among Afrikaners who want their own state would form part of the talks with government.

 

“We want a country of our own where we are allowed to run our own affairs.

 

We were a self-governing nation before 1994 and then we lost our independence. We are a minority and have no influence in the political course South Africa is taking,” he said.

 

“If we can attain our own territory we can be a stabilising factor for the whole southern Africa region.”

 

Israel’s ambassador to the United States says I.D.F. deserves the Nobel Peace Prize

Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

“That’s why I said this week the I.D.F. deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. I wasn’t joking.”

 

More than two decades and a renounced American citizenship later, Mr. Dermer is the Israeli ambassador to the United States, with such a close relationship to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he has been called “Bibi’s brain.” He is now at liberty to make a full-throated case for Israel.

 

In recent weeks, he has countered criticism of Israel’s invasion of Gaza and its mounting civilian toll in at least 55 television, radio and print interviews. He has also made Israel’s case on Capitol Hill, in briefings with administration officials and at a Christians United for Israel summit on Monday night at the Washington Convention Center. There, he responded to protesters who shouted “war criminal” by calling them “moral idiots” and asserting, “The truth is that the Israeli Defense Forces should be given a Nobel Peace Prize.”

 

Because of Mr. Dermer’s unabashed hawkishness and his role in organizing Mitt Romney’s 2012 visit to Israel, White House officials — including Denis McDonough, President Obama’s chief of staff — long resisted his appointment, according to people close to the administration. But in the renewed push last year for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, Secretary of State John Kerry, who attended Mr. Dermer’s Passover Seder this spring, thought having a Netanyahu confidant close at hand would present an opportunity to sway the prime minister.

 

That turned out to be a misreading. Nearly 10 months after Mr. Dermer became ambassador, it is clear in Washington that he is his boss’s ideological twin. “I can authoritatively speak for the prime minister here,” he said during a nearly two-hour interview on Thursday in the heavily fortified Israeli Embassy in Washington. “I think people understand that.”

 

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"Unabashed hawkishness" is such a benign phrase, much better than "genocide apologist." But then again, this article is from the New York Times, the same rag whose editorial board recently advised Obama to "go big on immigration".

 

The NYT openly favors a racist, genocidal ethno-state for Jews, and nation-wrecking, open-border, genocidal immigration for Whites. And, but of course, Whites pay for both.

Israeli undercover police in running street battles with Palestinian 'Day of Rage' protesters during Friday prayers in Jerusalem

An Israeli undercover policeman aims his gun at Palestinian demonstrators while his colleagues arrest a man during clashes following traditional Friday prayers near the Old City in East Jerusalem

 

Israeli undercover police were involved in street conflicts with Palestinian protesters in Jerusalem today as officers were put on high alert for flare-ups at the city's most important mosque during Friday prayers for the final stretch of the Ramadan Muslim holy month.

Hundreds of Palestinians protested in the traditionally Arab east of the city after Muslim noon prayers today. A dozen protesters threw rocks and fireworks at Israeli police, who fired stun grenades and water cannons.

Israeli aircraft meanwhile have struck 30 houses in the Gaza Strip today, killing a leader of the militant Islamic Jihad group and two of his sons, as Palestinians called for a 'Day of Rage' following the clashes between at least 10,000 protesters and Israeli security forces late yesterday in the West Bank and in east Jerusalem.

Last night's violence came after a UN school in Gaza, crowded with hundreds of Palestinians seeking refuge from fierce fighting, came under fire yesterday, killing at least 15 civilians and injuring more than 200.

 

A Palestinian protester brandishes a flare towards Israeli policemen during clashes following traditional Friday prayers near the Old City in East Jerusalem
 

A Palestinian man carries the body of one-year-old baby Noha Mesleh, who died of wounds sustained after a UN school in Beit Hanun came under fire, during her funeral today in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza Strip

 

A Palestinian carries the body of one-year-old baby Noha Mesleh, who died of wounds sustained after a UN school in Beit Hanun came under fire yesterday, during her funeral today in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza Strip
 

A Palestinian man inspects the rubble of a destroyed house after an Israeli air strike in the east of Khanyounis town in the southern Gaza Strip
 

 

State media said 'millions' of people joined the rallies nationwide, which were called to mark Iran's annual day of solidarity with Palestinians

Israeli aircraft have struck 30 houses in the Gaza Strip today. Pictured is a Palestinian man in an area damaged in an Israeli airstrike on a home in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip

Palestinian civilians inspect the rubble of a building following an Israeli military strike in Gaza City on Friday

The violence near Ramallah came after a UN school in Gaza crowded with hundreds of Palestinians seeking refuge from fierce fighting came under fire yesterday, killing at least 15 civilians and injuring more than 200