By Barry Rubin

I’m not going to bash or rant about a Newsweek article about Turkey by Owen Matthews–shocking and dangerous as it is–but rather talk about what is wrong and inaccurate about it. That article is part of a new wave of defeatism sweeping the West, though it still remains subordinate to the more ostensibly attractive idea that there is no real conflict or at least one easy to fix by Western concessions.

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by Johanna Markind*

Is Muhammad more deserving of reverential treatment than Jesus? The New York Times seems to think so.

A Times article reporting on the collapse of Christian communities in the Middle East contains two references to Jesus. Not “Christ,” which is a religious title, or “Jesus Christ,” but simply “Jesus,” who was (or may have been) a historical figure. The same is true of other Times stories and wire service articles published by the Times which no longer appear on its website (but still appear on other sites under different titles and are linked below). A December 21 story entitled “First Jesus-Era House Discovered in Nazareth” (AP byline) contains ten references to Jesus and none to Christ. Ditto another item, “Mass. School Denies Suspending Student for Drawing” (also AP), about a second grader who may have been suspended for drawing a figure of Jesus on the cross. Three references to Jesus, none to Christ.

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by Phyllis Chesler

Everywhere I turn — or so it seems — attacks on Israel and Israelis are in process. The other day, after a long day of writing, I idly, instinctively channel surfed — and there was the infamous Christiane Amanpour grilling Israeli Foreign Minister Ehud Barak. Oh, how this half-British, half-Iranian journalist relished this task. All her questions were hostile and were meant to embarrass or castigate both him personally and Israeli policies in general. CNN’s poor excuse for Oriana Fallaci never paused to take a breath; she gave Minister Barak absolutely no quarter. Except once. That’s when Amanpour told Barak that he was still saying the same things about peace that he’d said ten years ago when she’d interviewed him, at which moment, she flashed back to that very interview. Continue reading…

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

All you Jew-haters and Israel-haters (same thing) think you know what’s best for the rest of us, just like Hitler and Stalin did. The problem is that you’re completely out of step with the collective intelligence of the greatest nation in the world, the U.S.:

… The findings of the February 19, 2010 Gallup poll put President Barack Obama at odds with the US public, when it comes to attitudes toward the Jewish state, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Arabs, Muslims and Islamic terrorism.

For example, Israel maintains its traditional spot among the five most favored nations by 67 percent of the US public, despite Obama’s “even-handed” approach toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, in spite of his attempts to force Israel into sweeping concessions, and in defiance of the US “elite” media and academia.

On the other hand, the Palestinian Authority is ranked — along with Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan — at the bottom of the list, favored by only 20% of the US public.

According to an August 10, 2009 Rasmussen poll, Israel is ranked as the third most favorable ally (70%), preceded only by Canada and Britain. The low regard toward Egypt (39%) and Saudi Arabia (23%) demonstrates that Americans remain skeptical — at least since 9/11 — of Arabs and Muslims, even as these countries are portrayed by the media and the administration as supposedly moderate and pro-American.

Moreover, only 21% of adult Americans expect that the US relationship with the Muslim world will improve in a year, while 25% expect that it will get worse. …

WASHINGTON (January 28, 2010) — The latest government data show that over one-fifth of incarcerated criminals in America are foreign-born. A large share of these individuals may have violated immigration laws and could be subject to deportation. Immigration status may be relevant to investigations of criminal activity, so officers in every police and sheriff’s department need a basic understanding of immigration issues and policies and how they intersect with public safety matters.

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Written by Stephanie Miles, a freelance writer for Guide to Online Schools, an accredited online degrees and online college website.

From major blogs like the Huffington Post and Daily Kos to the smaller, more niche sites like FiveThirtyEight, it is impossible to ignore the impact that bloggers have had on politics over the course of the past few years.

From 2003 to 2005, the number of Americans who reported that they regularly read one or more blogs increased from 11 percent to 58 percent, according to surveys done by the Pew Research Group. These figures reflect just how quickly the medium has expanded in a short period of time.

Still, despite the sheer number of niche websites that are run by individual writers out of their own homes, a relatively small number of bloggers still comprise the top echelon of online political power players — and research has found that less than a dozen bloggers account for 20 percent of all incoming links to political websites in The United States.

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A Film By: Franco Sacchi, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner

Reviewed by Fern Sidman

In an hour and a quarter, filmmakers Franco Sacchi, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner take us through a tumultuous journey to the final scenario of the world as we know it, as they present the religious prophecies of the 50 million strong American Evangelical Christian movement in a new and powerful documentary entitled, “Waiting For Armageddon.” Riding the wave of the all pervasive eschatological (or End Times) phenomenon that has, in recent years, been highly touted in the media and in literary circles; the filmmakers provide an in depth view of what some interpret to be the Biblically mandated perspective on the final days of our universe. Told in the first person voices of mainstream Christians who subscribe to the beliefs of the evangelical church, they inform us that the end of days will occur in the Land of Israel, with the Jewish people figuring prominently in this venue.

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By David North, CIS.org

The open-borders supporters continue to push the linguistic boundaries as they seek to impose on all of us new and fuzzier ways of discussing immigration policy, a subject covered in an earlier blog of mine.

There was extensive coverage last month of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s use of the phrase “undocumented immigrant” in one of her first high court opinions. According to the New York Times this was the first time that this term had been used in a Supreme Court document; “illegal immigrant,” a slightly more precise term, had been used often before.

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The good people over at HonestReporting have documented how some Muslims continue to live in the Stone Age and harbor the most terrible hatreds:

… Canadian investigative journalist Terry Glavin recently reported on an odious story that British Columbia Muslim newspaper Al-Ameen Post had carried, which “reported” on an alleged Israeli conspiracy to kidnap 25,000 Ukranian children in order to harvest their organs. The report was entitled “Ukrainian kids, new victims of Israeli organ theft.” …

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By Barry Rubin

It’s a heartening story just made for this season and the Western media : two seriously injured children, one Israeli and one Palestinian, becoming friends together in a hospital, with an innocence that transcends the hatred of their peoples. The New York Times article is written precisely balanced, two families, two causes, absolutely identical. Oh how foolish is this unnecessary conflict. What folly drives humanity!

On one level, who can object to such a story, so fair, balanced, so humane and touching? Nowadays, to treat Israel on an equal footing with the Palestinians is rare enough and thus should be sufficient.

Yet something bothers me about this story, everything it leaves out and misleads about.

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By Phyllis Chesler

The mainstream media continue to decry the Swiss referendum on minarets. To date, The New York Times has published one editorial and five additional articles on the subject, including one today. Perhaps The Paper of Record views the 30% of the electorate who actually voted in Switzerland as traitors to their own multicultural, anti-racist, politically correct belief system.

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By Andrew Whitehead

The recent Islamist terror attack against American warriors preparing for combat deployment from Fort Hood, Texas, serves as a harsh reminder that the threat of terror from home-grown radical Muslims remains a very real danger to our country. Major Hasan, the alleged terrorist murderer, appears to have been long under suspicion for his anti-American, pro-radical Islamist statements.

Following the shooting, many leading mainstream American press outlets blamed Major Hasan’s attack on “loneliness”; of being angry over his treatment as the result of his Muslim faith, or his reluctance to support the war on terror by deployment to a war zone.

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BY: P. DAVID GAUBATZ and PAUL SPERRY

REVIEWED BY: FERN SIDMAN

The Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian based Islamic terrorist organization appears to be alive and well and cloaking itself in legitimacy in our nation’s capitol under the guise of a front group say intrepid undercover agents P. David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry in their new book, “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America” (World Net Daily Books 2009). Investigative journalism reaches new levels in doughtiness and concludes with a shocking crescendo in this tome, as Gaubatz, his son Chris and Paul Sperry infiltrate the shady Washington, DC based organization known as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); the nation’s largest and purportedly mainstream Muslim-American “civil rights” advocacy agency. The frightening facts published in this book are supported by more than 12,000 pages of confidential CAIR documents and hundreds of hours of video captured in this unprecedented undercover operation.

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by Joshua Muravchik
Encounter, 350 pp. $25.95

Reviewed by Michael Rubin*

On January 21, 2005, George W. Bush looked out over the crowds gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol for his second inaugural and declared, “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

He was lambasted from all sides. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a moderate Democrat, told CNN that the focus on democracy was not “practical.” Patrick J. Buchanan said it was “a recipe for endless war.” At a conference I attended in Rome just days later, a senior U.S. embassy official told a largely European audience during a question-and-answer period that his boss’s speech was “stupid.”

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By Phyllis Chesler

We are entering an all-spin zone, a wild, weird and spooky season and I am not talking about Halloween.

With a few exceptions, the mainstream media continue to kill stories about honor killings and attempted honor killings in North America. How often did you read stories about the honor killings that took place in Toronto (2007), Dallas (2008), Atlanta (2008), Oak Forest, Illinois (2008), Alexandria (2008), Buffalo (2009), and Kingston, Canada (2009) — on and on, until the most recent attempted honor killing in Phoenix? Continue reading…

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