Iran's supreme leader recently said his country would help any Muslim nation or group that attacks Israel. He's called the Jewish state a cancerous tumor that will be cut out of the Middle East.With Iran's nuclear weapons program advancing daily, that goal may be in sight.In author Andrew Bostom's book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, he describes Islam's early conquests of Jewish tribes in Arabia."Mohammed's frustrations in spreading his message were frequently recompensed by murderous attacks on the Jews," he told CBN News.Bostom explained that Mohammed demonized Jews because they rejected him as a prophet"Mohammed himself invokes some of these themes," he said. "For example, one of the punishments of the Jews is their transformation into apes, or apes and pigs, the verses that are commonly heard now."This "apes and pigs" imagery is found in Islam's core texts, like the Koran and hadiths. The most notorious is the following hadith, often quoted by al Qaeda, Hamas, and other Islamic terror groups."Judgment Day will come only when the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, until the Jew hides behind the tree and the stone, and the tree and the stone say, 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'"Today, Jews play a central role in the end times ideology of Iran's mullahs. They believe the Mahdi, or Islamic messiah, will return to earth, conquer Jerusalem, and massacre the Jewish inhabitants of Israel.Former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani said that while Israel is a one-bomb country, Iran and the Islamic world could survive a nuclear exchange with the Jewish state.According to this view, the heavy losses would be worth it for the greater good of wiping Israel off the map.
Anti-Semitic sentiments in European countries are at "disturbingly high levels," says a poll issued by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released Thursday.A great deal of the European population is proscribing to “classical anti-Semitic notions such as Jews having too much power in business, being more loyal to Israel than their own country, or ‘talking too much’ about what happened during the Holocaust,” the ADL Website notes.Compared to a similar poll conducted by the ADL in 2009, this year presents “dangerously high levels” of anti-Semitic attitudes among a wide percentage of the population.
The ADL poll examined ten different European countries and surveyed 5,000 adults, Five hundred in each of the ten countries and found that approximately one-third of those surveyed espoused anti-Semitic beliefs.
While all the media continued yesterday to assume (and indeed hope) that the Toulouse killer was a 'white racist' Iquestioned the rationality of the assumption, because it was clear to me that the attacks seemed more in keeping with Islamic terrorism.This morning we hear - surprise, surprise - that the killer is Mohammed Merah, an Islamic terrorist of Algerian origin, who claimed that the killings were in revenge for 'Israel killing Palestinian children and for French military involvement in the Middle East.But no sooner was this announced than the media was already spinning the story in a way to suit its own narrative again. I just watched Sky News coverage and they were stressing that the killer and his family lived in a very poor housing block surrounded by wealthier neighbours, and that clearly social deprivation and poverty were a key factor. She said that it was all down to the racist climate in France which had been made worse by Nikolas Sarkozy in the last five years and she picked out, as an example of racist lack of tolerance, the burka ban he had introduced.So there you have it in a nutshell. When a terrorist grabs tiny Jewish children by the hair and shoots them through the head this can only be the work of a white racist who actually hates Muslims as much as Jews (Tuesday's media headlines). But when on Wednesday we discover he is a Muslim terrorist then suddenly his actions are justified by poverty and are a natural reaction both to anti-Muslim attitudes in France and the actions of Israel against Palestinians. And of course the real victims in all of this are Muslims.
While some sought to explain the alienation felt by Merah, others perversely seemed to justify his actions. Most notoriously, EU Foreign Minister Lady Ashton, in a statement, equated the killings of the Jewish children in Toulouse with the suffering of children in Gaza. (Later, she apparently added a reference to the children of Sderot.)Isabel Kershner of the New York Times wrote that Lady Ashton’s remarks were “perceived” by Israeli leaders as equating the two situations. Kershner compounded this at the end of the article:But no Palestinian children have ever been targeted by Israel for murder. Quite the reverse: Israel regularly puts its own soldiers in harm’s way in order to minimize civilian casualties in military operations against Palestinian terrorists and their infrastructure which it undertakes solely to protect its own people from further murderous Palestinian attacks. Any Palestinian child casualties in such operations occur solely as a tragic and inadvertent by-product of war — and as often as not because the Palestinians have put their own children in harm’s way.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Friday he may recall the Israeli ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council and cut ties with the body.
His remarks came after the 47-member council voted to establish a fact-finding mission to probe the "effects of settlements on Palestinian human rights."
Lieberman also said Israel may choose not to cooperate with the council in its investigation, adding that he plans to ask the US to quit the council as well.The resolution to “investigate the implications” of the settlements on “the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including east Jerusalem” was passed by a vote of 36 to 1, with 10 abstentions.The UN Human Rights Council also adopted four other resolutions condemning Israel on Thursday. Only the US voted against the raft of anti-Israel resolutions.Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reacted to the decision on Thursday, saying the council is “hypocritical” and should be “ashamed of itself.”
Israel announced on Thursday night that it would not be cooperating with the United Nations Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) new “fact-finding mission” to investigate alleged Israeli violations relating to communities in Judea and Samaria...saying that Israel “will not give legitimacy to a body that is not legitimate.”Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was quick to issue a statement denouncing the UNHRC. “This is a hypocritical council with an automatic majority against Israel. This council ought to be ashamed of itself," he said."Until today, the council has made 91 decisions, 39 of which dealt with Israel, three with Syria and one with Iran," the prime minister noted. "One only had to hear the Syrian representative speak today about human rights in order to understand how detached from reality the council is. Another proof of its detachment from reality came last week when it invited before it a representative of Hamas, an organization whose ideology is based on the murder of innocents.”Earlier this week, the Palestinian Authority announced it plans to approach the UNHRC and ask it to investigate the ‘Israeli crimes’ in Judea and Samaria.
The Islamic regime in Tehran was not satisfied with the public support the Iranian Jewish community’s was forced to confer on the Global March to Jerusalem for which Iran is recruiting Islamists worldwide. Now, the event’s organizers, Majlis Speaker Hossein Sheikh-ol-Eslam and Salim Ghafouri, have ordered the community to send a Jewish delegation to march with the Islamist groups in Lebanon,DEBKAfile’s Iranian sources disclose.The delegations are scheduled to mass on the Lebanese and Jordanian borders with Israel and at West Bank and Gaza checkpoints on March 30, when Israeli Arabs mark Earth Day every year.Iran’s ancient Jewish community of around 15,000 souls (9,000 in Tehran, 4,000 in Shiraz and 1,300 in Isfahan) has been living in fear of reprisals should Israel or the United States carry out a military operation against the country’s nuclear facilities. Now, they face a fresh danger of murder and abduction by Hizballah and Palestinian gunmen and terrorists in Lebanon.They suspect that this ploy is meant to prevent Israeli soldiers from firing on the trespassers for fear of killing the Jewish contingent, while at the same time, exposing them to violence when the event is over at the hands of al-Qaeda linked Palestinian groups under Hizballah protection.
At last weekend’s Left Forum 2012, the annual pep-rally for liberal thought, renown leftist professor and activist Frances Fox Piven shown some light onto the makeup of the current America Left. In this minute of audio, Piven tells the packed auditorium which worldview philosophies embody their movement:“There is room for all of us. Religious leftists, people who think peace is the answer, those who think that wholesome food is what we really need, ecologists and old-fashioned Democrats, Democratic Socialists, Socialists and Communists.”
Piven goes on to discuss the major undertaking that the leftist movement is working on and why these ideologies must unite:
“We can work together because we have a really huge task before us, transforming America and the World.”
What would life be like without money?In his new book, "The End of Money," author David Wolman tackles that intriguing question for 21st-century citizens
"The End of Money" also chronicles Wolman's trip around the world to meet figures who are leading the way to a cash-free civilization in the years to come.
In Sweden, for example, the country's public buses will no longer accept cash. Tickets must be prepaid or purchased by commuters with a cellphone text message.
A growing number of Swedish businesses and banks have also stopped accepting cash.
The Royal Canadian Mint is also looking to the future with the MintChip, a new product that could become a digital replacement for coins.
If you are not familiar with the petrodollar system, it really is not that complicated. Basically, almost all of the oil in the world is traded in U.S. dollars.In 1973, a deal was struck between Saudi Arabia and the United States in which every barrel of oil purchased from the Saudis would be denominated in U.S. dollars. Under this new arrangement, any country that sought to purchase oil from Saudi Arabia would be required to first exchange their own national currency for U.S. dollars. In exchange for Saudi Arabia's willingness to denominate their oil sales exclusively in U.S. dollars, the United States offered weapons and protection of their oil fields from neighboring nations, including Israel.
By 1975, all of the OPEC nations had agreed to price their own oil supplies exclusively in U.S. dollars in exchange for weapons and military protection.
Once you understand the petrodollar system, it becomes much easier to understand why our politicians treat Saudi leaders with kid gloves. The U.S. government does not want to see anything happen that would jeopardize the status quo.
So what happens if the petrodollar system collapses?
Well, for one thing the value of the U.S. dollar would plummet big time.
U.S. consumers would suddenly find that all of those "cheap imported goods" would rise in price dramatically as would the price of gasoline.
If you think the price of gas is high now, you just wait until the petrodollar system collapses.
Yes, the days of the U.S. dollar being the primary reserve currency of the world are definitely numbered.
It will not happen overnight, but as the U.S. economy continues to get weaker it is inevitable that the rest of the world will continue to question why the U.S. dollar should automatically have such a dominant position in international trade.
The level of prosperity that we are enjoying today would not be possible without the petrodollar system. Once the petrodollar system collapses, a lot of our underlying economic vulnerabilities will be exposed and it will not be pretty.
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