Yes, you’re seeing it live: The thrashing death throes of the left-wing establishment imploding — actually putting themselves out of our misery, finally. Come on, comparing the GOP’s rhetoric on health care to the propaganda used by Goebbels? Ah… Rep. Cohen: You’ve crossed the line; you’re desperate; you’re having a tantrum because you and your ilk can’t bulldoze your agenda down Americans’ throats. From Rachel Rose Hartman:

Following calls to tone down political rhetoric in Washington, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) invoked the phrase “blood libel,” the Holocaust and Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to attack Republicans on the issue of health care on the House floor late Tuesday night. …

Here’s what the “Honorable” Rep. Cohen actually said:

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Why believe the rabid, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel Big Lie being promoted by the Left (e.g., public radio’s “Democracy Now”), the Palestinian Authority, and the Islamists? Just ask Palestinians themselves, as did Pechter Middle East Polls and the Council on Foreign Relations. They found that 39% of East Jerusalem Palestinians want to be citizens of “apartheid” Israel (see also here):

… The most striking finding relates to East Jerusalemite preferences for citizenship after a two-state solution has been reached. When asked if they preferred to become a citizen of Palestine, with all of the rights and privileges of other citizens of Palestine, or a citizen of Israel, with all of the rights and privileges of other citizens of Israel, only 30% chose Palestinian citizenship. Thirty five percent chose Israeli citizenship and 35% declined to answer or said they didn’t know. A similar question asked respondents if “most people in your neighborhood” would prefer to become citizens of Palestine or of Israel: 31% estimated that most people prefer Palestinian citizenship; 39% estimated that most people prefer Israeli citizenship; and 30% declined to answer or said they didn’t know.

Furthermore, when asked if they would move to a different home inside Israel, if their neighborhood became part of Palestine, 40% said they were likely to move to Israel. …

Respondents were asked to provide the top 2 reasons they chose one citizenship over the other. Those who chose Israeli citizenship most often mentioned freedom of movement in Israel, higher income and better job opportunities, and Israeli health insurance. …

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by Phyllis Chesler

Celebrity leftists such as filmmaker Michael Moore, British film and television director Ken Loach, Australian filmmaker John Pilger, and British human rights activist, Jemima Khan, have hailed Julian Assange as if he were Roman Polanski and Che Guevara rolled into one. They have pledged money for lawyers to defend him against rape allegations in Sweden. They view Assange as a revolutionary outlaw, an internet “artiste,” the new Daniel Ellsberg, a war-stopper, a show stopper, the people’s hero.

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by Daniel Pipes*

The sudden and as-yet-unexplained exit of Tunisia’s strongman, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, 74, after 23 years in power has potential implications for the Middle East and for Muslims worldwide. As an Egyptian commentator noted, “Every Arab leader is watching Tunisia in fear. Every Arab citizen is watching Tunisia in hope and solidarity.” I watch with both sets of emotions.

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by Hilal Khashan*

Recent developments in Lebanon have shown that the preconditions for restoring its sovereignty have not yet materialized. The demise of the “Cedar Revolution” and the fragmentation of the “March 14 Coalition” have set the country back to the era of Syrian domination. The crisis associated with the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri and the formation of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) afford yet another stark demonstration that the country remains a victim of regional encroachment and that the loyalties of its leaders remain as sectarian as ever.

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By Stephen Steinlight, CIS.org

Despite execrable historical roots, the primary rhetorical strategy employed in the Washington Post editorial “Immigration impasse ahead” (given a different title online) is the Big Lie. Whether consciously or not, its authors effectively turn George Orwell’s critique of mass disinformation in 1984 into praxis to make their central point.

In 1984, Orwell primarily analyzes the Big Lie by exploring the ways it has been used by totalitarian regimes. Patent untruths, often the more unbelievable the better, are repeated unceasingly until a battered public loses the will or capacity to resist them. A measure of the public’s susceptibility to this cognitive numbing is illustrated in when Orwell describes how the State’s weathermen revise reports about yesterday’s weather, and the public accepts it. Not so different, when I spent several months in Krakow, Poland, before the fall of communism and Gorbachev visited the city, the Party hung enormous posters everywhere showing the Soviet leader’s face without the huge signature wine stain. I was amazed, but my Polish friends shrugged it off: reality is whatever they say it is.

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WASHINGTON (January 10, 2011) — By May 2011, all states must be in compliance with the first 18 security benchmarks of the federal secure driver’s license law known as the REAL ID Act. REAL ID was prompted by the fact that the 9/11 hijackers acquired a total of 30 state-issued IDs and driver’s licenses in order to embed themselves here (and board airplanes).

The Center for Immigration Studies has published a review of the current state of REAL ID: ‘REAL ID Implementation: Less Expensive, Doable, and Helpful in Reducing Fraud’ was prepared by Janice Kephart, a former 9/11 Commission counsel and currently the Center’s National Security Policy Director. The paper is online at www.cis.org. Among the findings:

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by Phyllis Chesler

On January 24, 2011, the distinguished Lars Hedegaard, the President of the Danish Free Press Society and the International Free Press Society, will stand trial for telling the truth about Islamic gender apartheid.

Europe, once the birthplace of freedom, is fast becoming its graveyard.

True, the Church tortured and burned many geniuses as heretics; Dutch Jews excommunicated Spinoza; wars for religious supremacy raged for hundreds of years. Still, concepts such as free speech and individual human rights over and above the divine rights of Kings gradually ruled the European zeitgeist. Americans and other former colonists romanticized Europe as “the” place for artists, free thinkers, and free spirits.

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By Barry Rubin

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s remark about how the Arizona shooting is just like September 11 is such a superb example of everything wrong with Western policy toward the Middle East. Let’s summarize the issue by coining a phrase which sounds a bit Zen but has a very practical meaning:

The ear doesn’t necessarily hear what someone else’s brain thinks.

Or, to put it a different way, there are cultural or situational differences that make people think differently and interpret stuff in different ways. The job of the expert or diplomat or journalist is to make that translation effectively. Often, they fail.

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By Fern Sidman

On Sunday afternoon, January 9th, “Stand With Us”, the pro-Israel student advocacy organization, staged two counter-protests in New York City, as they faced off against hundreds of seething Hamas supporters and anti-Israel apologists assembled for vitriolic demonstrations in New York’s Herald Square and outside of the Israeli Consulate in midtown Manhattan.

Spearheaded by Al-Awda NY - The Palestine Right to Return Coalition along with a litany of similar far left radical offshoots such as the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, American Muslims for Palestine, Siege Busters Working Group, Existence is Resistance, ANSWER - NY and the International Socialist Organization, the demonstrators marked the two year anniversary of Operation Cast Lead which saw an Israeli incursion into Gaza; with the focus being the deterrence of Hamas sponsored rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. Calling for an “end to the occupation of Palestine” and railing against purported “IDF atrocities” against civilians in Gaza, the demonstrators held aloft signs declaring, “No US Aid to Zionist Racism and Murder!”, “Bring Zionist War Criminals to Justice!” and “Free Palestine”.

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

Recent remarks by Attorney General Eric Holder on the threat posed by “radicalized” American Muslims are revealing — not just because of what they say regarding the domestic situation, but for their international implications as well. According to Holder:

“[T]he threat is real, the threat is different, the threat is constant. The threat has changed … to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens — raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born. It is one of the things that keeps me up at night. You didn’t worry about this even two years ago — about individuals, about Americans, to the extent that we now do.” Holder noted that while he was confident in the United States’ counter-terrorism efforts, Americans “have to be prepared for potentially bad news…. The terrorists only have to be successful once.”

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By Thomas Drewing

The GOP still doesn’t get it. They think that people will be mollified by the appearance of taking the Constitution and “We The People” seriously. And they know that far more people will be satisfied by the “news” that they are going to actually read it aloud, than will actually tune in and listen to that very reading.

What is lost on many of them though is the fact that this will be the first time many, if not most, of the actual Congress Critters themselves, have actually heard the words our country is founded upon. And in their desire to appear as though they have gravity and thoughtfulness, they will sit there, and place themselves in a thoughtful appearing state to listen. And actually… that is enough to make the difference.

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by Daniel Huff*

On December 29, Scandinavian authorities arrested five terrorists planning an attack in Denmark. Almost as interesting as what they targeted is what they spared and the lessons it holds for future counterterrorism efforts.

The plot was to storm the Copenhagen newsroom of Jyllands Posten and murder its staff. It was the fourth attempt this year by Islamic extremists to punish the newspaper that published the Mohammed cartoons. But the terrorists are guilty of selective prosecution. They have yet to strike Politiken, which also published the cartoons, even though its offices are literally next door.

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By James R. Edwards Jr., CIS.org

An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy so that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectively checked and restrained by the others. — Thomas Jefferson, 1784¹

The Obama administration enjoyed two years in which both houses of Congress were under the control of its own political party. One-party rule in Washington may ease a president’s getting his wishes. It also can result in a lack of scrutiny — congressional oversight, the exertion of constitutional checks and balances toward the executive branch – from Congress. This dynamic arose in 2009 and 2010 where immigration policies are concerned.

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By Jonathan Spyer

US President Barack Obama’s recent decision to appoint a new ambassador to Damascus is further proof positive of the effectiveness of the strategy pursued by Syria over the last half decade. It also showcases the sense that the current US administration appears to be navigating without a compass in its Middle East diplomacy.

The appointment of experienced and highly regarded regional hand Robert Ford to the embassy in Damascus is not quite the final burial of the policy to “isolate” Syria. The 2003 Syria Accountability Act and its sanctions remain in effect. But with Syria now in possession of a newly minted American ambassador, in supposedly pivotal negotiations with Saudi Arabia over the Special Tribunal in Lebanon, with its alliance with Iran intact, having repaired relations with Iraq, and in continued, apparently cost-free defiance of the International Atomic Energy Agency over inspections of its nuclear sites, the office of President Bashar Assad could be forgiven for feeling slightly smug.

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