This would be even funnier if it wasn't TRUE!!

Here we go, the recent unemployment report explained -- COSTELLO: I want to talk about the unemployment rate in America. ABBOTT: Good Subject. Terrible Times. It's 7.8%. COSTELLO: That many people are out of work? ABBOTT: No, that's 14.7%. COSTELLO: You just said 7.8%. ABBOTT: 7.8% Unemployed. COSTELLO: Right 7.8% out of work. ABBOTT: No, that's 14.7%. COSTELLO: Okay, so it's 14.7% unemployed. ABBOTT: No, that's 7.8%. COSTELLO: WAIT A MINUTE. Is it 7.8% or 14.7%? ABBOTT: 7.8% are unemployed. 14.7% are out of work. COSTELLO: IF you are out of work you are unemployed.

Five Things You Should Know About Syria And Russia’s S-300 Missile System

Charles Recknagel
 
Russia's S-300 missile system could dramatically change the stakes in the Syrian conflict if it is sent to Damascus, which Russia has signed a contract to do. RFE/RL lays out five things to know about the air-defense system.

What are the capabilities of the S-300 system?
The S-300 missile system is designed to shoot down aircraft and missiles at a range of 5-to-150 kilometers. That gives it the ability to destroy not only attackers in Syrian airspace but also any attackers inside Israel.

It can track and strike multiple targets simultaneously at altitudes ranging from 10 meters to 27,000 meters.

Pro-Israel New Yorkers Protest 92nd St Y’s anti-Israel Speaker

Richard Allen of JCC Watch said, "There has been a pattern - first with [BDS activist] Roger Waters and now with Alice Walker. All of our efforts to speak with the 92nd Street Y administrators have been met with closed doors, closed ears and closed minds."

By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

The Jewish Press
Published: June 1st, 2013

Alice Walker sparred with protesters outside the 92nd Street Y on May 30, 2013, telling them about Israel, "it wasn't your land."
Photo Credit: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

“She can say whatever she wants, but not in ‘our’ building,” was Manhattan attorney Robert Sidi’s response when finding out that the 92nd Street Y was hosting vocal Israel-hater novelist Alice Walker.

Mandatory Reading Of The Day

Aussie Dave | 

An important op-ed in Ynet:
Ya’alon, let IDF win

Following months of academic discussions on whether a third intifada has erupted or not, the time has come for an operational debate on the issue, which will probably conclude that while a third intifada has not been launched, we are in the midst of a pre-intifada period.
Our hostile neighbors are once again investing overtime hours in their old ballistic habits. All day long they throw stones at Israeli vehicles travelling in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and hurl Molotov cocktails with the frequency in which fireworks light up the sky on Independence Day.

Bennett: Israel Belongs to the Jews, Period

The only way to fight anti-Semitism is “to call a spade a spade”, says Minister Naftali Bennett at Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism.

By Elad Benari

 

The only way to fight anti-Semitism and any racism is “to call a spade a spade” and speak the truth, said Minister Naftali Bennett on Tuesday.

Speaking at the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism, Bennett, who serves Minister of Diaspora Affairs, told attendees, “I’m asking all of you – go out. Don’t relent. Don’t be quiet. Speak up.”

One of the more clever methods of anti-Semitism is to claim that Israel’s sole mission is to be a refuge for Jews after the Holocaust, thereby asserting that the land of Israel isn’t Jewish land, said Bennett.

“Part of the truth is that this land, where we are right now – Jerusalem and Israel – is the land of the Jewish people,” he declared. “It’s so very simple: Israel belongs to the Jews. Period. It’s not a compensation for the Holocaust. Israel is the Jewish State. We have to say that again and again.”

He added, “Friends should absolutely criticize us, which is fine. We’re far from perfect. No one’s perfect, but we’re trying to strengthen the only pillar of democracy in an ocean of radical Islam which is out to wipe out the world. We’re here fighting. It’s not easy, but we’re doing it. We’re doing it and we’re creating start-ups. We’re trying to do good. We don’t always succeed, but we try.”

“We’re doing our best and we’re going to continue doing our best, but we need you guys to go out and tell people the truth, and the truth is that Israel is the land of the Jews and we’re here to stay, and we’re not going to be silent anymore,” said Bennett.

 

Bethlehem's Female Mayor Faces Smears, Threats

Khaled Abu Toameh

Fatah's armed wing, Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, issued a leaflet, urging the intimidated mayor to withdraw her complaint.

The good news is that Bethlehem has its first female mayor.
But the bad news is that Mayor Vera Baboun, elected in October 2012, has since been facing a smear campaign that reached it peak last week when assailants damaged her private vehicle.
The assault on the mayor's car serves as a reminder of the ongoing tensions between the Christian minority and Muslim majority of Bethlehem. It also highlights the huge challenges facing Palestinian women in a conservative society.

With desalination, a once unthinkable water surplus is possible

Extracting the Mediterranean Sea’s water could provide Israel with an unquenchable supply of the resource it lacks

By Ben Sales

<img width="635" height="357" src="http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2013/05/pipes-635x357.jpg" class="attachment-large wp-post-image" alt="Water from the Mediterranean Sea rushes through pipes en route to being filtered for use across Israel in a process called desalination, which could soon account for 80 percent of the country's potable water. (photo credit: Ben Sales/JTA)" title="Water from the Mediterranean Sea rushes through pipes en route to being filtered for use across Israel in a process called desalination, which could soon account for 80 percent of the country's potable water. (photo credit: Ben Sales/JTA)" />

Water from the Mediterranean Sea rushes through pipes en route to being filtered for use across Israel in a process called desalination, which could soon account for 80 percent of the country's potable water. (photo credit: Ben Sales/JTA)

PALMACHIM, Israel (JTA) – As construction workers pass through sandy corridors between huge rectangular buildings at this desalination plant on Israel’s southern coastline, the sound of rushing water resonates from behind a concrete wall.

"Reprise"

Ah that I were a mind reader.  But, alas, I am not.  So I garner as much information as I can, and rely on my analysis and my intuition.  Sometimes that's not enough.

 

Last time I wrote, I alluded to a statement by Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz (Likud), who had  criticized Peres' eagerness for that "two state solution" and his fawning over Abbas.  Peres doesn't speak for the government, he said, and, "every declaration of this sort, certainly on the eve of negotiations, does not help Israel's stance."  

 

I caught that "on the eve of negotiations," and pointed it out with some unease, but with no certainty about what he was saying.

Politics as game theory

Dr. Haim Shine

"Equality of the burden" is the latest buzz phrase in Israel. Yet since the establishment of the state, there has never been equality of the burden in Israel. During the most difficult days of Israel's War of Independence, the sons of the rich went abroad to study law at British universities, and later returned to Israel to teach the concepts of equality and democracy.

During that same period, others sat in cafes on Tel Aviv's Dizengoff Street and, in the midst of their alcohol consumption, analyzed the war's progress on napkins. These were the same people who in later years told us that the IDF is an occupation army, that Meir Har-Zion and the fighters from 101 Unit were hotheads, and that settlers are an obstruction to peace. Throughout Jewish history there have always been small groups of people who carried the burden of the nation on their backs without feeling like suckers.

International Red Cross (ICRC) accepts Palestinian Red Crescent using ICRC money for terror glorification

ICRC denies PA daily report that it participated
in ceremony to honor terrorists,
 but fails to condemn the Palestinian Red Crescent's use of donor money for the ceremony

Red Cross:

Each national branch has the right
"to define its own priorities and activities
and to allocate funds accordingly"

http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=9085

by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik

Earlier this month, Palestinian Media Watch reported on a ceremony in the Palestinian Authority celebrating the International Red Cross' 150th anniversary. The official PA daily reported that the International Red Cross (ICRC) together with the Palestinian Red Crescent planted 150 trees bearing the names of "veteran prisoners," meaning security prisoners who have been imprisoned for many years.

Following PMW's report, the International Red Cross, in a letter to Weekly Press Pakistan - Canada that published the report, denied its involvement in the ceremony:

"Please note that ICRC was not present during the planting of the trees ceremony reported by your website."

Why Liberals Love Islam

EDWARD CLINE May 29, 2013
 

In my spare moments, which are few and far between, I have often imagined what the ideal socialist-communist utopia envisioned by Progressives and their ilk would be like and how it would function.

Over the years I have read various collectivist utopian novels, particularly those that envisioned ideal communist or socialist societies, and dismissed them as unrealistic fables whose authors had an agenda other than projecting their politics, short-changing their readers on the political and economic facets and means of their tales. Among many such novels, Edward Bellamy's talky Looking Backward: 2000-1887, published in 1888, was the best of a literally unbelievable lot. The most significant and ominous thing about Bellamy's novel is that for many years it was a best-seller, trailing behind Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben Hur. It helped to popularize socialism in the U.S.

"What Is This?"

It passes for "diplomatic" news of a sort, but consists in good part of unmitigated nonsense.

 

The World Economic Forum in Jordan has just ended; in attendance were Israeli President Shimon Peres, Secretary of State John Kerry and putative president of the PA Mahmoud Abbas -- all of whom spoke.

 

And it was the words of President Peres that caused many here in Israel to want to tear their hair out.  His statement included, first, this:

"...President Abbas, you are our partner and we are yours. You share our hopes and efforts for peace, and we share yours. We can and should make the breakthrough..."
And then, far worse:

From London to Ramallah: The Bloody Hands of Islam

Ari Lieberman

On May 21, in an act of sheer barbarism, obscene even by Islamist standards, two Muslims armed with knives and machetes brazenly hacked to death and nearly beheaded British soldier Lee Rigby on a London street in Woolwich in broad daylight. The attackers yelled Allahu akbar – God is Great – a common Islamist war chant, while engaging in their orgy of depravity.  A passerby videotaped the culprits, one of whom seemed pleased by his deed and offered a host of Islamist-inspired explanations justifying his actions. His hands were visibly stained with the blood of the slain trooper.

Pursuing the TSS is like pursuing a mirage

Ted Belman
I attended an all day conference in Tel Aviv today entitled The Arab Peace Initiative (API) – Current Status backed by the S Daniel Abraham Center for Strategic Studies and highlighting the Israel Peace Initiative (IPI). As you can imagine there were a lot of lefties there.
The IPI supports “the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gazaon the basis of the ’67 lines and territorial swaps on a 1:1 basis in limited scope.” The state will be “demilitarized with strict security measures on its borders.” And of course, Jerusalem to be divided and refugees to return only to Palestinian state with symbolic and agreed exceptions”

They’ll Take Sweden

Bruce Bawer

Night after night last week, as the tumult in Stockholm not only continued but kept spreading to more and more neighborhoods and then to other Swedish cities, the media in that country, by and large, kept pretending that it was all about things like unemployment and social marginality, all of which were supposedly aggravated by Swedish racism (and, especially, by the insufficiently respectful attitude of police officers toward immigrant “youths”); meanwhile, the foreign media, which, as the disorder persisted, found it increasingly difficult to pretend that all this wasn’t happening (the New York Times finally ran a four-sentence Reuters item about the bedlam on Thursday), largely echoed the domestic disinformation.

My Name is Bosch and I’m a Recovered Muslim

Bosch Fawstin

Author’s note: This was originally published in Dec. 2011 in Front Page Magazine and it was the most popular piece I’ve written until this piece of mine. I’m a cartoonist, so the only essays I write are ones that I cannot express in any other way but words, and here- in light of the latest Jihad attack in London, and the latest “Islam vs “Islamism”” debate going on- is what I think is my most comprehensive piece on Islam, Muslims & Jihad.
My name is Bosch and I’m a recovered Muslim.
That is, if Muslims don’t kill me for leaving Islam, which it requires them to do. That’s just one of the reasons I’ve been writing and drawing against Islam and its Jihad for a number of years now. But fortunately for us, Islam hasn’t been able to make every Muslim its slave, just as Nazism wasn’t able to turn every German into a Nazi. So there is Islam and there are Muslims. Muslims who take Islam seriously are at war with us and Muslims who don’t aren’t.

Savages of Stockholm

Sultan Knish

Europe has many fine traditions. Its newest tradition is the burning car. Why burn cars? Because, as George Mallory once said of mountains, they're there. There are lots of car around and if you're a member of a perpetually unemployed tribe that wandered up north and forages on social services, you might as well do something to pass the time.

Burning houses is a lot of work and house fires spread. Car fires are simpler. In a welfare state
everyone has houses but not everyone has cars. Burning cars is a way to stick it to those who work for a living. It's also a way to drive off the members of the sickly Swedish tribe and claim the area for your own. And it's also fun.

Either you have a plan for buying a car or for burning a car. Considering the Muslim unemployment rates in Sweden, France and everywhere else, it's safe to say the car burners don't have future plans that involve saving up for a car or taking out a loan for a car or finding work. Cars are things that they steal, either the usual way or by defrauding social services. They might get a car by dealing drugs, but those cars are disposable. One day they'll have to burn them anyway.

If you're the product of an industrialized culture, then you think of a car as a product of work. You realize that it's the product of countless raw materials, that the metals had to be dug out of the earth, that the machines that make it had to be assembled and that men had to stand around putting that into place. And you might be one of those men. And if you aren't, then you might know someone who is.

West concerned as Europe Muslims join Syria fight

By JOYCE VAN DE BILDT

 

Intelligence information indicates a rise in European Muslims travelling to Syria to join Islamic groups fighting the Assad regime.

Woman shouts slogans during protest against Assad Photo: REUTERS/Osman Orsal

Western leaders are concerned about the increasing amount of European Muslims who are fighting in Syria for ideological reasons. Since the fall of 2012, intelligence information indicates a rise in European Muslims travelling to Syria in order to join Islamic groups fighting the Assad regime. Hundreds of Muslims from the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and Belgium, among other places, are reported to have left for Syria over the last year. In the Netherlands, the amount has increased from a few dozen a couple of months ago, to at least one hundred in April 2013.

In March 2013, video footage appeared of Dutch-speaking Islamist fighters active in Syria. About a hundred Dutch jihadists are said to have joined radical combat groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra, which they themselves refer to as ‘an Islamic resistance army.’ Their objective in travelling to Syria is to help “their brothers and sisters” in their struggle against the Assad regime. Among them are boys and girls in their twenties, especially but not exclusively from the cities of Delft, the Hague and Rotterdam. So far, at least two Dutchmen have been killed in Syria, the 21-year old Mourad and the 20-year old Soufian.

Israel's interests in Syria

Efraim Inbar

Several prominent Israelis have expressed their preference for a victory by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the civil war in Syria. This approach is mistaken, for both moral and strategic reasons.

First, siding with a dictator who butchers his own people and even uses chemical weapons in order to stay in power is morally disgusting. At the normative level, Assad's brutal dictatorship is not an acceptable preference for a democratic state like Israel, even if the alternatives to Assad are not very enticing (the Syrian opposition includes radical Sunni elements, such as al-Qaida, that have not displayed great sensitivity to human rights either). In the real world, there is sometimes a tacit necessity to tolerate a dictatorship for a variety of reasons, but explicit support for it is a moral embarrassment.

Second, Israeli statements that favor one side or another in the domestic struggles within Arab entities are always a mixed blessing. Nobody in the Arab world wants to be "tainted" by an association with the Jewish state. While links with Israel could be very useful, explicit closeness to Israel has an undesirable delegitimizing effect. Even if Israel has its favorites, Israeli leaders should keep their mouths shut.

The need to enlist some wisdom

 Uri Heitner

The publication of the Peri Committee's proposals has sparked a stormy public debate, as expected.

The proposals are being attacked from two primary directions. One is from the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) population, which vehemently opposes the proposed reforms aimed at altering the status quo, which it finds amenable. The other side opposes what it calls the overly compromising nature of the proposals. What kind of burden equality can there be, they argue, when enlistment for haredi men is postponed until they turn 21, and when 1,800 yeshiva students will be given exemptions every year?

I won't deal here with the criticism voiced by the haredim. Basically, I view draft dodging as an immoral act, which undermines the foundations of Jewish solidarity, contradicts the fundamental Jewish principle of vouching for your fellow man, and runs counter to the obligation we all have to do our part in our righteous war to be here. And what can be considered more of a "righteous war" than the struggle for the Jewish state's existence and for the peace and security of its citizens, a struggle that has continued since the creation of the state and for which more than 25,000 people have sacrificed their lives?