Hillary Clinton Defends Islam: All Religions Have Extremists

(Pat Dollard) If Neo Aztecs throw Hillary Clinton in a Volcano... are they the extremists or the moderates? What is liberal about assuming other people's viewpoints?

Anat Kam may sue Haaretz

(Carl)Anat Kam, who got a four-year jail term for leaking documents she obtained during her IDF service, while her handlers at Haaretz got off scot free, is now threatening to sue Haaretz and reporter Uri Blau for - get this - exposing that she was his source (link in Hebrew). Here's part of a Google translation:

Kam intends to file suit against a newspaper "Haaretz", Uri Blau, due to its exposure as a journalist, he found today (Monday) lawyer, attorney Ilan Bombach, during an appeal filed up to the Supreme Court against the sentence four and a half years imposed on it for delivery of documents IDF's secret. However, the claim will be filed only after the appeal decision, which depends on the sentencing Blau at the Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court, after reaching a plea bargain with the prosecution for possession of confidential information.
...
Bombach also reminded the Tali Fahima convicted in December 2005 into contact with a foreign agent and providing information to the enemy, because of "the tone of regret" was sentenced to three years in prison. "Got completely cooperated with the ISA, once admitted, did not have to shake it or bring the Captain George". Attorney Bombach also argued that KM is not correct to attribute improper ideological motive. "She was young and acted frivolously," he said. He also claimed to be reckoned with in articles and talkbacks against it, that she acquired the label of a traitor, and that she sat for nearly two years under house arrest. He added that if released today, life will be as before, and she always walk around with a mark of Cain.

1,800 documents is an awful lot of documents to give someone 'frivolously.' Something smells really bad here.
Tali Fahima was dating the head of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. She wasn't in the IDF. Yes, she was a traitor, but at least she wasn't stealing information as part of her IDF duty. Sorry, but Kam should stay in jail, although Blau should be there with her.

journalists do have ethical responsibilities to protect their sources... not sure if Israel has laws for this.

Universal Muslim Economic Failure

(SultanKnish) If Romney accomplished nothing else during his Israeli visit, he did manage to offend every single Palestinian Arab terrorist group, all of whom, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and the DFLP, issued press releases denouncing him. Their American media outlets, on a desperate gaffe hunt, seized on his statement that the GDP Per Capita differences between Israel and the territory under the control of the Palestinian Authority are the result of different values.

The official media narrative is that these differences are the results of eons of oppression, checkpoints and blockades. Fair enough. But then why does the IMF put Israel's GDP Per Capita well ahead of the oil rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia?
Saudi Arabia has no Israeli checkpoints, no Israeli soldiers or planes flying overhead. It has wealth literally pouring out of the ground with a fifth of the world's petroleum reserves. And yet the IMF puts it 13 places behind Israel and the World Bank puts it 8 places behind Israel. The only Muslim countries with a better GDP Per Capita rating than Israel are small monarchies drowning in oil.
The non-oil Muslim countries who are closest to Israel are Malaysia and Lebanon, 32 and 33 places behind Israel. Both countries also have sizable non-Muslim populations. Muslims make up only 50 percent of Lebanon and only 60 percent of Malaysia.
38 places below Israel is Turkey, which until recently was a secular country and actually has a statistically significant atheist population. And that's it. Below that we fall off a cliff into places like Belarus, South Africa and Grenada; all of whom still have better GDP Per Capita rates. No Muslim country without oil has a better GDP Per Capita than a Muslim country that has sizable Christian or Buddhist minorities.
What Romney didn't mention, but should have, is that the Palestinian Authority dealt yet another blow to its economy when it drove out the Christian population. Christians in the territories have traditionally made the best businessmen and the capital of the Palestinian Authority was actually started by Jordanian Christian refugees escaping Muslim persecution. And their decline follows a pattern of Christian communities across the Middle East declining and disappearing under Muslim rule.
Meanwhile Israel is burdened with 1.2 Muslims inside the Green Line, many of whom work in an unreported black economy, and account for 52 percent of national social benefits. Israel's national  unemployment rate is 5.6 percent. The Arab unemployment rate is 27 percent. Only 59 percent of Muslim men and only 19 percent of Muslim women are officially part of the workforce.  That's compared to 56 percent of Jewish women and 52 percent of Christian women.
The average Israeli family has double the monthly income of the average Arab family. Half the Arab sector officially lives in poverty. According to many NGO's this is due to racism. According to many economic statistics this is due to working for a living and then reporting your income.
The Israeli Jewish GDP is nearly three times higher than the Arab-Israeli GDP. This could be blamed on the usual scapegoat of racism, but the Israeli Arab GDP of $6,750 is actually better than the $5,900 GDP in neighboring Jordan, the $6,540 GDP in Egypt and the $5,041 GDP in Syria. This is the same range in which most non-oil Arab Muslim states are grouped and it is clear that there is no escaping it without a big petroleum reserve. Or like Lebanon with its $15,523 GDP, a whole lot of Christians to actually work for a living.
Again culture is still the determinant. Israel within the Green Line only has about 150,000 Christians and about as many Druze, and both groups perform better economically. Christian Arabs have a higher employment rate and a better rate of higher education than Muslims. 
Apart from that official 1.2 million, Israel is also responsible for the 4 million in the Palestinian Authority (some of whom overlap with that 1.2 million and some of whom are imaginary and exist only to collect benefits from international agencies) who are still Israel's responsibility, according to them and to the world, even though they also continue insisting that they want their own state.

The reason why the GDP in Palestinian areas is so terrible is because its inhabitants live in a giant welfare state. Their income comes entirely from foreign aid. They don't need an economy because the United States and the European Union are their economy. They don't need a state because the UNRWA is their state. Palestinian Arabs were already receiving 725 dollars in per capita assistance. Despite their absolutely terrible GDP, only 16 percent of their population in the West Bank lives below the poverty line. That's a better rate than that of Israeli Arabs, who don't have an entire UN agency dedicated to taking care of them, and do actually have to work for a living.
It's easy to admire Israel for what it has accomplished, but it stands out so much because of the region it's in. Singapore and Hong Kong are less remarkable because they are in a region where countries don't just give up and wait around for foreigners to come and find oil on their land or for the Mahdi to arrive. In Asia, countries make things happen for themselves. In the Middle East, if you're not Jewish or Christian, and you don't have oil, then you have economic problems.
But let's leave the Middle East and head over to Asia. India and Pakistan are divided by a GDP Per Capita difference of almost a thousand dollars. India is naturally in the lead. Within India, Muslims are at the bottom of the economic ladder. Their per capita GDP is lower, their literacy rate is lower and they perform worse than Hindus. And yet the average Indian Muslim annual income at 513 dollars is still higher than the average annual income in Pakistan at 420 dollars. This remains consistent with the higher Arab-Israeli income and lower Jordanian Arab income model meaning that Muslims in non-Muslim countries will earn less than the majority, but more than they would in a majority Muslim country.
In Africa, Muslim Somalia sits next door to Ethiopia and Kenya and its GDP is so small it can't even be registered compared to $1,093 and $1,746 for them. You might try to blame Somalia's civil war, but Rwanda, which experienced a genocide, has a $1,341 GDP. Niger with an 80 percent Muslim population and a $771 GDP sits next door to Chad with only a 53 percent Muslim population and a $1,865 GDP. Next door Cameroon has a 70 percent Christian majority and a $2,257 GDP.
Now let's head over to Europe. In Britain the myth of the hardworking Bangladeshi or Pakistani storekeeper is practically sacred. In reality 70 percent of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis live in low income households, compared to 50 percent of Africans, 30 percent of Indians and 20 percent of the natives. Bangladeshis and Pakistanis not only have dramatically higher unemployment rates than natives, but they have higher unemployment rates than Africans.
If the issue were racism, then their unemployment rates would be in line with far lower Indian unemployment rates. Instead Muslims have the worst economic record in the UK. Pakistani Muslims in the UK are three times more likely to be unemployed than Hindus. Indian Muslims are twice as likely to be unemployed as Indian Hindus.
Again this fits the same model of Muslims from non-Muslim countries being less economically inept than Muslims from majority Muslim countries. The crucial difference between minority Muslims and majority Muslims is culture. Minority Muslims do have their own culture, but no minority group can entirely escape the values of the majority culture. Arab Israelis and Indian Muslims absorb enough of the values of the majority culture to perform better than their neighbors in Jordan or Pakistan. And they even carry on these absorbed values when they move to another country.
We can see the direct consequences of those values in action. In the UK, Muslims have the highest dropout rate and lack of qualifications of any religion. They have the highest male and female unemployment rates. This isn't racism, this is Islamism.
Muslims have the highest unemployment rate in Ireland. In Belgium, Moroccans and Turks have a five times higher unemployment rate of the native population. In Australia, Muslims have twice the unemployment rate of non-Muslims and forty percent of their children live below the poverty line. Muslims also have the highest unemployment rate in Canada, 14.4 percent to a national rate of 7.2 percent.
The response to all these numbers is the usual cry of racism, but racism fails to explain why Muslims fail more comprehensively at home than they do abroad. If Muslims fail in the West Bank, then Israeli checkpoints are to blame. If they fail in Canada, Australia and Europe, then racism is to blame. But if they fail in Pakistan, Somalia and Saudi Arabia-- who is to blame?

It can't be Mitt Romney or Benjamin Netanyahu, because neither of those men run Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. The answer can't be racism, because Saudi Arabia gets everything it wants and it still fails. It can't be colonialism, because these days the Muslim world is doing the colonizing. So what's left?
Responsibility is the missing element. It's the character value without which there can be no economic success. The temptation by leftists and Muslims to respond to Romney's comments and these statistics by finding someone else to blame is revealing and damning. These statistics are only the tip of the iceberg of larger statistics about illiteracy, violence and corruption that account for Muslim economic malaise.  
The same lack of responsibility that manifests itself after a Muslim terrorist attack, when Muslims rush to position themselves as the victims, rather than dealing with the violence in their midst, also manifests itself in the economic arena and in every aspect of life. This lack of responsibility is a failure of values that cannot be escaped or ascribed to racism, checkpoints or the boogeyman.
Muslims have failed to deal with their problems and so we are left dealing with them instead. But just because the Muslim world insists on pretending that the problems aren't there or blames them on third parties does not make the problems go away.

Wikileaks Publishes Fake Column from “Bill KeIler”

That’s not a typo in the headline. You’ll see what I mean as you read on.
So Wikileaks published a phony article — purportedly by New York Times editor Bill Keller, but really by an imposter — which was supportive of Wikileaks. The hoax was very well done and fooled a lot of people into thinking Keller truly supports Wikileaks to the hilt. The article was published at the phony Web address opinion-nytimes.com instead of their actual opinion pages at nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.html, and looked like this:

TIME explains further:

The phony column was posted on a website that looks exactly like the online version of the New York Times Opinion Page — the pranksters even loaded the site with similar-looking ads and links to other (legitimate) Times webpages. But that wasn’t all. The WikiLeaks hoax-masters injected some tromp l’oeil magic into their scheme. The article was initially tweeted by @nytkeIler, a ripoff of Keller’s real Twitter handle, @nytkeller. (In Twitter’s standard font, a capitalized “I” and lowercase “l” are nearly indistinguishable.) And while the host domain of the article, http://opinion-nytimes.com, clearly varies from that of the paper’s actual Opinion site (http://nytimes.com/opinion), it was approximate enough to fool readers.

(Note that the “substitution of the capital I for the lower-case L” trick was used against Jennifer George from California during Weinergate, when a hoaxster imitated her @blogarsay account with a hoax account called @bIogarsay.)
TIME also explained how the verisimilitude of the piece was enhanced by genuine Keller quotes lifted from an email sent to a blogger, who republished the email on his site.
There are those who say this stunt undermines Wikileaks’s “credibility.” I’m not sure what “credibility” a site necessarily has that publishes stolen and even “hacked” information. But to the extent that Wikileaks had credibility with anyone, publishing a hoax certainly isn’t going to enhance that credibility. I mean, it’s not like it’s April Fool’s Day or anything. (*Ducks*)
What this is, I think, is a reminder that hackers are not always going to publish the truth. Just because someone releases a huge cache of supposedly hacked emails, for example, does not mean they haven’t sprinkled a few false gems in there. Yet people will always seem to take the word of the leaker/hacker over that of the established entity, regardless of the squirrelly nature of the publisher.
It is reminiscent of Justice Scalia’s views on stories about Supreme Court deliberations, as expressed in the video I linked last night. Justice Scalia says that one should not credit stories about internal deliberations, because if they are not a lie, they are based on the word of people who are unreliable — because they have promised not to reveal those deliberations, and then turned around and did it anyway.
He has a point. I think if such stories are properly corroborated — as much of “The Brethren” appeared to be, for example — they can provide a useful insight into court deliberations. But you always have to remember that you’re trusting the word of people who promised not to tell these stories. Meaning you’re ultimately relying on unreliable people.
One final question on the Wikileaks deal: a hoaxster in the orbit of Julian Assange, you say? A dirty-tricks type guy moving the world of hackers? Someone familiar with the Weinergate-era trick of using a capital “I” in place of a lower-case “L” in a Twitter handle?
I wonder who that could be.

via patterico.com

I find this amusing. It isn't like Assange and Co. didn't have a charming part of their shtick.

Romney Points Out Exceptionalism

(Lid) These were Romney's comments which the liberal media twisted:

I was thinking this morning as I prepared to come into this room of a discussion had across the country in the United States about my perceptions about differences between countries. And as you come here and you see the GDP per capita for instance in Israel which is about 21,000 dollars and you compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority which is more like 10,000 dollars per capita you notice a dramatic, stark difference in economic vitality. And that is also between other countries that are near or next to each other. Chile and Ecuador, Mexico and the United States. I noted that part of my interest when I used to be in the world of business is I would travel to different countries was to understand why there were such enormous disparities in the economic success of various countries.

I read a number of books on the topic. One, that is widely acclaimed, is by someone named Jared Diamond called ‘Guns, Germs and Steel,’ which basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth. And you look at Israel and you say you have a hard time suggesting that all of the natural resources on the land could account for all the accomplishment of the people here. And likewise other nations that are next door to each other have very similar, in some cases, geographic elements. But then there was a book written by a former Harvard professor named ‘The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.’ And in this book Dr. Landes describes differences that have existed—particularly among the great civilizations that grew and why they grew and why they became great and those that declined and why they declined. And after about 500 pages of this lifelong analysis—this had been his study for his entire life—and he’s in his early 70s at this point, he says this, he says, if you could learn anything from the economic history of the world it’s this: culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference.

And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things. One, I recognize the hand of providence in selecting this place. I’m told in a Sunday school class I attended— I think my son Tagg was teaching the class. He’s not here. I look around to see. Of course he’s not here. He was in London. He taught a class in which he was describing the concern on the part of some of the Jews that left Egypt to come to the promised land, that in the promised land was down the River Nile, that would provide the essential water they had enjoyed in Egypt. They came here recognizing that they must be relied upon, themselves and the arm of God to provide rain from the sky. And this therefore represented a sign of faith and a show of faith to come here. That this is a people that has long recognized the purpose in this place and in their lives that is greater than themselves and their own particular interests, but a purpose of accomplishment and caring and building and serving. There’s also something very unusual about the people of this place. And Dan Senor— And Dan, I saw him this morning, I don’t know where he is, he’s probably out twisting someone’s arm—There’s Dan Senor, co-author of ‘Start-up Nation,’ described— If you haven’t read the book, you really should— Described why it is Israel is the leading nation for start-ups in the world. And why businesses one after the other tend to start up in this place. And he goes through some of the cultural elements that have led Israel to become a nation that has begun so many businesses and so many enterprises and that is becomes so successful.

this would piss off the left... it sure would. Sultan Knish has some data to show you

baby jihadi on Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=194957170616989&set=a.101977443248296.4121.100003081213167&type=3&theater.
(h/t: Jay)

Click for full-size view.

via 1389blog.com

aw!