Secretary of State Kerry, in an op-ed that I believe just appeared tonight on the NYTs website, does not mince words in defining the elimination of ISIS as America's mission going forward.
Social media, like Twitter and Facebook, has the effect of tamping down diversity of opinion and stifling debate about public affairs. It makes people less likely to voice opinions, particularly when they think their views differ from those of their friends, according to a report published Tuesday by researchers at Pew Research Center and Rutgers University.
There has been more debate among dagbloggers discussing ISIS, Syria, Iraq -- the Middle East -- than there has been in the Congress over the past couple of weeks. It is election season and folks are back home raising money and kissing babies.
The president is on the job still but today, with commendable candor, stated that the United States did not yet have a strategy for dealing with ISIS. Commendable yes, but not entirely reassuring when you hear it from the commander in chief. That is not the point of this piece.
I'm hoping that this article by Amos Harel, defense correspondent for Israel's Haaretz newspaper, comes through the paywall. Harel is someone I read regularly. He has this no-nonsense straight-forward way of writing that I find refreshing, and many others might find dull. But he knows his stuff. Here's his not so positive assessment of what the future looks like for Israelis and Palestinians.
Some of you recall that earlier in the summer I posted something on increased anti-semitism in Europe, and it bothers me more than you might expect that at least one regular poster stopped posting after things got tense in the comment thread. I really do regret that happened, and I wish I could turn back the clock and bring back anyone who hasn't posted because of that.
For decades, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has been to support “moderates.” The problem is that there are actually very few of them. The Arab world is going through a bitter, sectarian struggle that is “carrying the Islamic world back to the Dark Ages,” said Turkish President Abdullah Gul. In these circumstances, moderates either become extremists or they lose out in the brutal power struggles of the day.
President Obama is considering airstrikes or airdrops of food and medicine to address a humanitarian crisis among as many as 40,000 religious minorities in Iraq who have been dying of heat and thirst on a mountaintop after death threats from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, administration officials said on Thursday.
America means different things to different people and a bunch of folks were asked by the NYTs to talk about what America means to them. Fascinating stuff.
My wife and I spent part of our honeymoon in Athens, and of course I insisted we visit the Jewish Museum while we were there -- tucked away in a little building and hardly advertising what's inside. But inside is the glorious two thousand year old history of Jews in Greece -- principally in Salonika, but also in places like Crete, and it is recounted in loving detail. Of course, the Jews of Greece were decimated during WWII, with women, men, and their children exterminated in Nazi ovens.
France has Europe's largest remaining Jewish population, with more than one-half million Jews. We have family in Paris, and both of my daughters came to know their grandmother's first cousin quite well when they studied there. She and her husband survived the war and they are fiercely French.
So what is the future for European Jewry? With the far-right garnering 25 percent of the French vote in the recent EU elections,and with a growing and increasingly hostile segment of the muslim population, Jews -- or at least visibly Jewish Jews -- are genuinely concerned.
Prosecutors allege that Gov. Scott Walker was at the center of an effort to illegally coordinate fundraising among conservative groups to help his campaign and those of Republican senators fend off recall elections during 2011 and '12, according to documents unsealed Thursday.
About a year ago or so I posted a news item about Yair Lapid, and the possibility that he would at some point exert influence on Netanyahu and those to his right. Lapid is a former popular television commentator and ventured into politics only recently. His political party, Yesh Atid ("There is a Future") won enough votes to become a power broker in the formation of the current Knesset majority, and he was named and continues to serve as Israel's Finance Minister.
Not too much bigger news than what we learned today, that the pilots at Jet Blue overwhelmingly voted to be represented by ALPA, the Air Line Pilots Association, International (which represents 50,000 pilots in the U.S. and Canada.
Now Jet Blue is one of those airlines that is supposed to be better and cheaper -- and some have suggested or explicitly opined that the airline's success is due to the lack of unions in the company. It is an airline whose pilots don't need unions because life is good. . .yadda yadda.
Good for Justice Sotomayor, taking on Chief Justice Roberts and his views on race, and how he meshes that with constitutional jurisprudence. In short, in her dissent to the Michigan affirmative action decision written by Justice Scalia, Sotomayor reminds the world that Roberts in a 2007 decision expressed the street corner view that so-called "reverse" racism is worse than the racism that continues to create a permanent underclass of African Americans.
So Michael Wilner is a Jewish guy and an American citizen who has never lived in Israel. But he is the Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post and Saudi Arabia has denied him a visa to cover his beat when the president visits Saudi Arabia. Did I say that Wilner is an American citizen?
Reason number 6 million times infinite for the existence of the Jewish State.
