Monday, April 27, 2015
Sunday, April 26, 2015
ALERT: Top Navy Officer FIRED by Obama For Exposing Massive Threat to US
ALERT: Top Navy Officer FIRED by Obama For Exposing Massive Threat to US
That seems to be the case with Capt. James Fanell, a senior Navy intelligence leader who was relieved from his position as the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s director of intelligence and information operations because he made public information about China that Obama didn’t want you to hear.
Fannell said the following about Chinese naval intentions: “(We believe) the (People’s Liberation Army) has been given the new task to be able to conduct a short, sharp war to destroy Japanese forces in the East China Sea following with what can only be expected (as) a seizure of the Senkakus or even southern Ryukyu (islands).”
Those actions could potentially lead to something along the lines of World War III.
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Adm. Harry Harris, in charge of PACFLT, relieved Fannel from his position as an intelligence director. According to Military Times, he was reassigned as an aid to Rear Adm. Randy Crites at PACFLT’s maritime headquarters — which is a long fall from his previous position.
In other words, he was punished for exposing a massive threat to the United States that Obama and his administration didn’t want you to know about.
Fannell reportedly has plenty of support within the naval intelligence community for voicing his views on China’s growing aggression toward countries like Japan and even the United States.
As a 29-year naval intelligence officer, Fannell has more credibility and insider knowledge than most others in his branch of service.
We salute Capt. Fannell for having the bravery to expose the growing threat from China, regardless of the consequences.
BREAKING: Another Top General Risks His Career to Expose Obama’s Destruction of the Military
BREAKING: Another Top General Risks His Career to Expose Obama’s Destruction of the Military
Earlier this week, Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly issued a warning about the possibility of Ebola at the U.S. Mexico border via West African illegals sneaking across it and entering the U.S. Kelly stressed that pitiful border security and the Obama Administration’s inexplicable refusal to enforce immigration laws could lead to catastrophe.
The Army currently has 510,000 active duty members, but Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is working with Army leaders to shrink that number to somewhere between 420,000-450,000 by deactivating brigades and firing mid-level officers. Budget cuts and spending battles between Congress and the White House are largely to blame. So is having a Commander in Chief who’s totally unequipped to command the military.
Stars and Strips reported that over 500 Army majors will be forced out of the military by next spring; almost 1,200 captains have also been cut as part of the Obama Administration’s downsizing plan. Army leaders received heavy criticism for notifying 48 of the captains while they were serving overseas in Afghanistan. Wait, what? The Army leaders caught flack for following the Obama Administration’s orders – orders that ultimately put our national security at risk, no less. You really can’t make this stuff up.
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Friday, April 24, 2015
Obama, the Jewish president
Obama, the Jewish president
As a young man, the future leader of the free world absorbed the Yiddishkeit of a host of liberal-Jewish mentors, chief among them Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf
April 16, 2012, 3:27 pm
Editor’s note: The following article was adapted from a chapter in Peter Beinart’s book “The Crisis of Zionism.” Read the full chapter here.
* * *
To
understand how Obama came to embody the Jewish liberalism that
America’s leading Jewish organizations have abandoned, one must
understand his relationship with a rabbi named Arnold Jacob Wolf. And to
understand Arnold Jacob Wolf, one must understand his relationship with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Heschel arrived in the United States in 1940,
having spent most of his life in the cloistered embrace of Hasidic
Poland. He walked off a boat in New York City and saw a black man
shining a white man’s shoes. It was the first black man he had ever
seen, and he identified with him fiercely, as a Jew.
Over the next three decades, Heschel — with
his unruly hair and snow-white goatee — became America’s image of a
Hebrew prophet. Again and again, he invoked God to challenge unjust
human power. Heschel denounced McCarthyism, marched with Martin Luther
King Jr., and erupted in anger during a meeting with Robert McNamara at
the height of the Vietnam War. Again and again, he chided Americans, and
American Jews, for their smug indifference to the evil done in their
name. “Above all,” he wrote, “the prophets remind us of the moral state
of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible.”
At Hebrew Union College, where he was studying
to be a rabbi, Arnold Wolf served as Heschel’s private secretary,
frequently accompanying him to the movies, which Heschel attended in
hopes of losing his Yiddish accent. A Reform Jew and a fourth-generation
American whose grandmother had seen Abraham Lincoln campaign, Wolf’s
background was worlds away from that of his mentor. But he sponged
Heschel’s prophetic example.
In 1957, Wolf established Temple Solel on
Chicago’s North Shore and began causing trouble. He brought Martin
Luther King Jr. to speak; he took congregants to Selma to march for
voting rights; he picketed a Jewish hospital on behalf of striking black
workers even though some of Temple Solel’s most prominent members
served on the hospital’s board. He so passionately denounced the Vietnam
War that in 1967 FBI agents infiltrated the synagogue and recorded one
of his antiwar sermons.
Turning anguish into a crusade
Abraham Joshua Heschel died in 1972, just as
American Jewish organizations were turning against the prophetic
liberalism he embodied. In his declining years, he had grown
increasingly anguished by Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip and Arnold Wolf turned that anguish into a crusade. Like his
mentor, Wolf was a committed Zionist: For twelve straight years, Temple
Solel paid for its Hebrew school graduates to spend the summer in
Israel; on the eve of the 1967 war, Wolf mortgaged the synagogue’s
building and sent Israel the money.
Hyde Park was, in its way, a lot like the Harvard Law Review. It was intellectual (the neighborhood’s largest employer was the University of Chicago), it was racially integrated, it was heavily Jewish, and it was hegemonically liberal.
But by the 1970s, Wolf’s devotion to Israel
was leading him toward a confrontation with its government. In 1973, he
helped start Breira (“Alternative”), the first American Jewish group to
endorse a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
The reaction from the organized American Jewish community was savage.
Benjamin Epstein, coauthor of “The New
Anti-Semitism,” urged the ADL’s parent organization, B’nai B’rith, to
fire employees who associated with Breira. The Conservative movement’s
Rabbinical Assembly denied Wolf — who had branched beyond Reform Judaism
— a seat on its executive council. Members of Meir Kahane’s Jewish
Defense League attacked Breira’s inaugural conference, trashing the hall
and beating conferees.
What does all this have to do with Barack
Obama? Actually, quite a bit. Far more than any previous president,
Obama spent his adulthood in the company of Jews. His most important
professional mentors were Jews; most of his big donors were Jews; many
of his neighbors were Jews; his chief political consultant was a Jew. As
Wolf himself would later say, Obama was “embedded in the Jewish world.”
But Obama was not embedded in the Jewish
world; he was embedded in one specific Jewish world — a world of Jews
who in the 1960s had opposed segregation and the Vietnam War and after
1967 applied the same liberal democratic principles when it came to
Israel. Woven into the life stories of many of the Jews who most
influenced the young Barack Obama was a bitter estrangement from the
see-no-evil Zionism of the American Jewish establishment. In Chicago,
those Jews constituted a geographic and moral community, a community
that bred in Obama a specific, and subversive, vision of American Jewish
identity and of the Jewish state. And at the heart of it all was Arnold
Jacob Wolf.
In 1985, 24-year-old Barack Obama answered an
ad in The New York Times. Three white community organizers, two of them
Jewish, were looking for an African American colleague to give them
credibility on Chicago’s largely black South Side, and Obama answered
the call. Their leader was Jerry Kellman, who as a Jewish teenager in
New Rochelle, New York, had petitioned the school board to stop teaching
“Little Black Sambo” and had boycotted his high school graduation in
protest against the Vietnam War.
While working with Kellman, Obama gravitated
toward Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church, partly because of the
church’s deep commitment to social justice, partly because it offered
him the authentic African American experience he craved, and partly
because it provided him a potential power base in black Chicago. But
despite his yearning to be accepted in African American circles, and
despite jeers from black nationalists, Obama always kept his community
organizing work multiracial. As his biographer David Remnick has noted,
he had come to Chicago not merely to find a black community, but to find
a latter-day civil rights movement, and that movement, he believed,
required whites, and especially Jews.
After community organizing, Obama attended
Harvard Law School, where he became president of the law review.
Accounts of Obama’s law school career sometimes describe Harvard as a
place of bitter racial tensions, which Obama helped to soothe. But on
law review, where Obama spent much of his final two years, there was
also considerable ideological harmony. Some of Obama’s associates on law
review were black, many were white, many of the whites were Jews, and
with the exception of a few marginal conservatives, liberalism reigned
across the color line. In his campaign for president of the law review,
Obama’s main rival was David Goldberg, a Jewish New Yorker who, if
anything, stood slightly to Obama’s left.
Obama places a note in the Western Wall during his 2008 presidential campaign (photo credit: Avi Hayon/Flash90)
“On the law review,” remembers one of Obama’s
colleagues, “the black-Jewish alliance was intact.” Blacks and Jewish
liberals “saw the world in pretty much the same way.”
When Obama returned to Chicago after law
school, he settled in Hyde Park, whose largest synagogue, KAM Isaiah
Israel, was led by Arnold Jacob Wolf. Hyde Park was, in its way, a lot
like the Harvard Law Review. It was intellectual (the neighborhood’s
largest employer was the University of Chicago), it was racially
integrated, it was heavily Jewish, and it was hegemonically liberal.
So as in his community organizing, and as on
the Harvard Law Review, Obama found himself not merely in the company of
Jews, but Jews who, like him, wished to reconstruct the civil rights
coalition. When Obama ran for the Illinois state senate in 1996, Wolf
was one of his earliest and most prominent supporters. By the time he
ran for president twelve years later, Obama had moved across the street
from KAM Isaiah Israel, and the synagogue took a proprietary interest in
his campaign. “This is a congregation,” explained Darryl Crystal, who
became the rabbi after Wolf retired, “where the question wasn’t, ‘Are
you going to vote for Obama?’ The question was, ‘What state are you
going to help canvass?’”
Stressing the similarities
How did all this shape Obama’s view of Israel?
In his pre-presidential career, the answer is clear: Obama saw Israel
in much the same way Wolf did. In 2000, he reportedly told a Palestinian
American activist named Ali Abunimah that he supported American
pressure to make Israel change its policies, a view with which most of
his Jewish friends would have concurred.
During his run for the US Senate in 2004, in
response to a questionnaire from the Chicago Jewish News, he criticized
the barrier built to separate Israel and its major settlements from the
rest of the West Bank, a remarkable statement given that that same year,
after the International Court of Justice condemned the barrier, 361
members of the House backed a resolution supporting it. When his US
Senate campaign — at the request of local Jewish activists — submitted a
position paper on Israel, the activists deemed it too weak, and
obtained a rewrite.
Obama’s description of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict in his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” is also
telling. In the one paragraph Obama devotes to the conflict, his central
theme is the similarity between Israelis and Palestinians. He describes
talking “to Jews who’d lost parents in the Holocaust and brothers in
suicide bombings” and hearing “Palestinians talk of the indignities of
checkpoints and reminisce about the land they had lost.”
During his run for the US Senate in 2004, in response to a questionnaire from the Chicago Jewish News, Obama criticized the barrier built to separate Israel and its major settlements from the rest of the West Bank, a remarkable statement given that that same year, after the International Court of Justice condemned the barrier.
Flying by helicopter over Israel and the West
Bank, he says he “found myself unable to distinguish Jewish towns from
Arab towns, all of them like fragile outposts against the green and
stony hills.” While such rhetoric is hardly radical, it subtly
contradicts the view of major American Jewish leaders, who usually
reject any equivalence between Jewish and Palestinian suffering. The
American Jewish establishment generally stresses the moral dissimilarity between Israelis and Palestinians; Obama in “The Audacity of Hope” does the opposite.
Perhaps most revealing of all, as an insight
into Obama’s view of Israel’s occupation, is the fact that he read, and
vividly remembers, David Grossman’s 1988 book, “The Yellow Wind.”
Grossman is not only one of Israel’s leading novelists, he is among its
leading intellectual doves, and “The Yellow Wind” is his searing account
of the occupation, as he witnessed it during seven weeks on assignment
in the West Bank for an Israeli newsweekly. It is difficult to read “The
Yellow Wind” without being profoundly disturbed by its portrait of
Palestinian life under Israeli rule. That Obama read it, along with the
novels of another famed Israeli dove, Amos Oz, lends further credence to
Arnold Wolf’s claim that in his pre-presidential years, Obama “was on
the line of Peace Now.”
* * *
Peter Beinart is the editor of Open Zion and the author of “The Crisis of Zionism.”
Is Barack Obama the First Jewish President?
Is Barack Obama the First Jewish President?
If
Bill Clinton was the first black president, as Toni Morrison famously
observed, then could Barack Obama be the first Jewish president? That's
the interesting case Jeffrey Goldberg makes at The Atlantic. Goldberg tells how he gave Obama a copy of a new Haggadah he contributed to:
Politicians spend much of their time trying to convince voters that they share a cultural understanding and affinity with voters—that they're "one of us," or at least that they get us, whether "us" is people of a particular religion, a particular social class, or a particular region. Their less successful attempts, like Mitt Romney saying "y'all" and proclaiming his newfound affection for grits, are widely noted and mocked. George W. Bush tried with the Jews—as he said, in my favorite Bush quote of all time, "I couldn't imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah." But here's a case where Obama really does have an ease with, and an understanding of, a particular group. Yet he doesn't get a lot of credit for it.
Or maybe he does. Polls of Jews don't happen that often, because there are so few of them and that makes getting a sample of reasonable size time-consuming and expensive. But in 2008, Obama won 77 percent of the Jewish vote according to exit polls, about what other Democrats have gotten in recent years. For all the bleating from the American Likudniks (and yeah, I'll keep calling them that as long as they keep pretending that the only way to "support Israel" is to support the vision of the right-wing faction in Israeli politics) that Obama is anti-Israel, I don't think most Jews are going to buy it. Between now and November, I'm sure we'll see more articles like this one ("Has Obama Lost the Jewish Vote?"), after which he'll get right around the same proportion of votes from Jews as he did four years ago.
When I handed him the Haggadah, President Obama, who famously stages his own seders at the White House, (which is a very nice philo-Semitic thing to do, IMHO) spent a moment leafing through it and making approving noises. Then he said (as I told the Times): "Does this mean we can't use the Maxwell House Haggadah anymore?"Most conservatives wouldn't go as far as to accuse Obama of being an anti-Semite, but they certainly believe he's anti-Israel. Which is insane, of course, but what I've always found so striking about this question is how sidelined Jews themselves have become in today's discussions of Israel. That isn't to say there aren't particular Jews who are plenty involved, but the American Jewish community as it actually exists in America—mostly politically liberal, living its Judaism more as a culture than as a religion, troubled by the policies of the Israeli government in multiple areas—is increasingly estranged from the discussion, as more and more of that discussion is dominated by people like Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum. It's the world of post-Jewish Zionism, where Israel's most vehement advocates are people who see it mostly as a tool to use in a holy war between Christianity and Islam. As someone who grew up in a household where liberal Zionism was the primary expression of Jewish identity, I can't begin to describe how alienating it is to watch people like Palin waving Israeli flags around. And I'm pretty sure there are lots of other Jews who feel the same way.
George W. Bush was, in his own way, a philo-Semite, but he never would have made such an M.O.T. kind of joke (see the end of this post if you're not sure what M.O.T. means). Once again, Barack Obama was riffing off the cosmic joke that he is somehow anti-Semitic, when in fact, as many people understand, he is the most Jewish president we've ever had (except for Rutherford B. Hayes). No president, not even Bill Clinton, has traveled so widely in Jewish circles, been taught by so many Jewish law professors, and had so many Jewish mentors, colleagues, and friends, and advisers as Barack Obama (though it is true that every so often he appoints a gentile to serve as White House chief of staff). And so no President, I'm guessing, would know that the Maxwell House Haggadah -- the flimsy, wine-stained, rote, anti-intellectual Haggadah you get when you buy a can of coffee at Shoprite) -- is the target, alternatively, of great derision and veneration among American Jews (at least, I'm told there are people who venerate it).
Politicians spend much of their time trying to convince voters that they share a cultural understanding and affinity with voters—that they're "one of us," or at least that they get us, whether "us" is people of a particular religion, a particular social class, or a particular region. Their less successful attempts, like Mitt Romney saying "y'all" and proclaiming his newfound affection for grits, are widely noted and mocked. George W. Bush tried with the Jews—as he said, in my favorite Bush quote of all time, "I couldn't imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah." But here's a case where Obama really does have an ease with, and an understanding of, a particular group. Yet he doesn't get a lot of credit for it.
Or maybe he does. Polls of Jews don't happen that often, because there are so few of them and that makes getting a sample of reasonable size time-consuming and expensive. But in 2008, Obama won 77 percent of the Jewish vote according to exit polls, about what other Democrats have gotten in recent years. For all the bleating from the American Likudniks (and yeah, I'll keep calling them that as long as they keep pretending that the only way to "support Israel" is to support the vision of the right-wing faction in Israeli politics) that Obama is anti-Israel, I don't think most Jews are going to buy it. Between now and November, I'm sure we'll see more articles like this one ("Has Obama Lost the Jewish Vote?"), after which he'll get right around the same proportion of votes from Jews as he did four years ago.
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Thursday, April 23, 2015
Fleet of Iranian ships heading to Yemen turns around after being tracked by US warships
Fleet of Iranian ships heading to Yemen turns around after being tracked by US warships
Now Playing Iranian warships arrive nears the coast of Yemen
The sources said the nine-ship convoy is south of Salalah, Oman, and now headed northeast in the Arabian Sea in the direction of home. The ships, which include seven freighters and two frigates, had sailed southwest along the coast of Yemen heading in the direction of Aden and the entrance to the Red Sea. They appeared to drop anchor in the north Arabian Sea, after the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the USS Normandy and a half-dozen other American ships arrived in the Arabian Sea on Monday, and U.S. officials said that they could intercept the convoy.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt, a 100,000-ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier known as the “Big Stick” and her escort, the USS Normandy, a guided missile cruiser, have been shadowing the convoy for the past few days, the sources said.
Fighter jets taking off from the carrier have been relaying the convoy’s location to the U.S. Navy's higher command since the start of the week.
The Iranian Navy ships are characterized as "smaller than destroyers," a Pentagon official with knowledge of the convoy said Tuesday. Asked what type of weapons the freighters are carrying, one Pentagon official said, "they are bigger than small arms."
The reversal was welcomed by Pentagon officials, but they expressed caution saying, “this isn’t over yet,” and insisted Roosevelt will maintain observation on the convoy.
Iran backs the Houthi rebels, who chased the Yemeni president from Sanaa and are fighting for control of the Gulf nation. Warships from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, who back Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, are positioned to the southwest of the convoy, forming a blockade of the Gulf of Aden and the port city of Aden.
Western governments and Sunni Arab countries say the Houthis get their arms from Iran. Tehran and the rebels deny that, although Iran has provided political and humanitarian support to the Shiite group.
The U.S. also has been providing logistical and intelligence support to the Saudi-led coalition launching airstrikes against the Houthis. That air campaign is now in its fourth week, and the U.S. also has begun refueling coalition aircraft involved in the conflict.
The campaign meant to halt the rebel power grab and help return to office Hadi, a close U.S. ally who fled Yemen.
The defiant Shiite rebels pressed their offensive in the country's south on Thursday, apparently ignoring an overture from Saudi Arabia earlier this week, while the kingdom's warplanes continued to target their positions, officials said.
The rebels’ prized goal -- the port city of Aden -- remained an elusive one, in part thanks to the Saudi-led airstrikes.
Meanwhile, Pakistan's top leaders, including Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and army chief Gen. Raheel Sharif, arrived Thursday in Saudi Arabia to push for negotiations in the Yemen conflict. The two are to meet with King Salman to discuss the crisis, according to Pakisitan's Foreign Office spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam.
Both predominantly Sunni majority countries, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are close allies, and Islamabad has supported the Saudi-led coalition, though it declined to send troops, warplanes and warships to join it.
The kingdom and Gulf Arab allies launched the airstrikes March 26, trying to crush the Houthis and allied military units loyal to ousted President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
The Saudis believe the rebels are tools for Iran to take control of Yemen.
Loud explosions shook the cities of Taiz and Ibb in western Yemen on Thursday, as well as Aden when coalition warplanes bombed the rebels and their allies, witnesses said.
Residents also said the Houthis and Saleh's forces were attacking the city of Dhale, one of the southern gateways to Aden, with random shelling.
All Yemeni officials and witnesses spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media or feared for their safety amid the fighting.The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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I also find it interesting that as much as the author decries the rebranding of being pro-Israel as "support[ing] the vision of the right-wing faction in Israeli politics," he buys into their language by billing folks like Palin and Santorum as "Israel's most vehement advocates." Does this mean they're winning?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4IA8TKAbsA&feature=related
"...the right eye is not the same..."