Tag: power

We have become a rationing society. Our industries and our people are literally starving in the midst of plenty. Farmers are kept from farming, factories are kept from producing and businessmen are kept from creating new companies and jobs. This is done in the name of a variety of moral arguments, ranging from caring for the less fortunate to saving the planet. But rhetoric is only the lubricant of power. The real goal of power is always power.

Eventually, it became the story of the boy who cried wolf.

Those who think that Hamas and other Islamic groups do not have a strong presence in the West Bank are completely detached from reality. True, these groups are lacking in arms and ammunition in the West Bank, but they still enjoy broad public support among Palestinians.

Yishai presents a recent class given by Rabbi Zev Reichman about the sanctity and power of physicality and its center in Israel.

If Muslim fanatics cannot tolerate moderate and secular Muslims, why should they be expected to accept those who belong to other faiths?

There is no political ideology, government program, or redistribution of wealth that is going to cure humanity’s ills. In today’s secular, even anti-religious, Western society, religious people are seen as aggressive, intolerant, and foolish. But there are two things a decent religious person possesses that others don’t: A belief that there is a divine judge, which may make them curb their behavior; and a desire for self-improvement, to reduce their sins and strive for something higher.

Haredi consumers are not, by and large, part of Israel's social protest movement, but their shopping savvy, it turns out, is evolving constantly.

The next era in the Middle East will be dominated by the debate over whether Islamism is the way to go. Islamists will radicalize the regional scene, carry out terrorism at home and abroad, and inflict repression on their own people wherever they get power.

Few understand better than the Germans how economic self-destruction can bring a nation and the world to the edge of abyss. The crushing debt imposed on them at the end of World War I led to unprecedented hyperinflation as they monetized their obligations, running their printing presses to create millions of worthless marks.

There are those who claim that the Islamization of Egyptian society reflects "the will of the people." But history teaches us that the will of the people is not always beneficial. Eight decades ago, the will of the German people brought Adolf Hitler to power, plunging mankind into genocidal wars and massacres that claimed more than fifty million lives. This example allows us to criticize the current cultural wave sweeping over Egypt.

Egypt's Coptic Christian minority fears that the restoration of parliament, which will grant greater powers to Islamists, will be used to institute Sharia law and stifle religious freedom.

Here we are in the middle of 2012, and all of the events of the last eighteen months don’t seem to have taught the current administration’s policymakers or its supportive scribes anything. Can’t they even consider: “Hmm, perhaps this “Arab Spring” thing isn’t working out so well … “, or, “Maybe the rapid rise of revolutionary Islamist movements is just a little bit scary. Maybe we should be cautious about promoting it”? Can’t they?

Books. Some people love them; others claim they can do without them. For Zalman Alpert, they are essentially his life. For the past 35 years, Alpert has served as a reference librarian at Yeshiva University (YU). Educated at Columbia University’s School of Library Services and New York University’s School of Education, where he attained a master’s degree in Modern Jewish History, Alpert is one of those individuals who knows a little (sometimes a lot) about everything. Over the years, he has contributed articles to such works as Encyclopedia of Hasidim; Jewish American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia; Encyclopedia of Jewish American Popular Culture; Midstream; and The Jewish Press.

Because of political reasons and especially due to the ideological monopoly of certain forces over Western institutions, most of the academics, analysts, journalists, and politicians who speak on these issues get away with pushing the moderation thesis. They are virtually never asked to provide proof. This wrong idea thus sets current U.S. policy and creates a great risk of future crisis, instability, repression, and severe damage to U.S. interests.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was featured in a video message Tuesday night at the Independence Day celebration at the U.S. Ambassador’s home in...

The victory of the Zionist movement was won despite long odds, desperate hardships and grievous costs in blood. The men and women who battled those odds did so in the face of the conventional wisdom of their day that told them they had no chance of forcing the British Empire to make good on its promise to create a National Home for the Jews or to defeat an Arab and Muslim world determined to crush the newborn state of Israel. They needed not only courage but also an iron will and the patience to bear great suffering while never losing sight of their goal.

The traditional view of the United States Supreme Court as the ultimate, objective, arbiter of our system of government and thereby protector of our liberties took an enormous hit last week when the court upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare.

We must not let our concept of the purpose and character of a tax be corrupted, precisely because taxing us is a power accorded Congress in the Constitution. The definition of “tax” is, in fact, the most important limit on what Congress can do with its power to tax. In the wake of the Obamacare ruling, defining “tax” is defending our liberty – or, from the opposite perspective, attacking it.

My oldest son, Elie, spent today in the Reserves and will be in for a few weeks later this summer. It is what happens when they finish their service in the standing army – a yearly commitment to stay ready; to be prepared.

The American chief executive has a great deal of power and a chief executive who dons imperial robes is a danger with few precedents. There have been conflicts between the branches, but even FDR made a pretense of bowing to some outside authority. Obama never has, with the exception of the King of Saudi Arabia.

Lenin once reportedly said that he would get the capitalists to sell him the rope with which to hang them. But Egypt is a far clearer case of such a situation. Will the dhimmis finance the consolidation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s power in Egypt? It sure looks like that will happen though they probably will be cheap about it.

A series of violent storms sweeping the mid-Atlantic region have left 13 dead and three million people without power in oppressive summer heat.

This is what a tax now looks like? This is an open invitation to “tax” via whatever mandate sounds good to you. What sort of unequal-before-the-law mandate would not fit this definition of a tax? Congress can do anything it wants, by the logic of this decision, with the judicial precedent set that levying mandates equals using the power to tax.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Democrat-appointed justices to rule 5-4 that Congress has the power to impose the healthcare mandate under its power to levy taxes.

Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf: "There is something in the grim assuredness of these Muslim thinkers, learned and gifted in Western scholarship, powerful, forthright in expression and in ideal[s] that makes my blood run cold.”

What should we make specifically of this most recent event, the certification of al-Mursi’s victory? Certainly, it is another step forward for the Brotherhood toward capturing the most important Arab country. A confident Hamas has launched a war against Israel by firing dozens of cross-border rockets from the Gaza Strip and other means which the “international community” and democratic West are ignoring.

The United States has drifted into lawlessness, into laws that are the guns of government. Want to force everyone to buy health insurance? Pass a law. Ignore any questions of legality because legality doesn't matter. If people come out to protest, send out your SEIU thugs to beat them. If you lose your Senate majority, use Reconciliation to pass it. If the Supreme Court threatens to investigate the Constitutionality of the law, threaten the Court.

In light of the situation in which the kingdom must stand up to external challenges - principally an Iranian threat to the territorial integrity of Saudi Arabia - it is not clear whether the population of the kingdom will indeed lend strong support to the leadership of the ruling family.

The Israeli left is one of the few socialist movements in the First World to lose power because of immigration. Around the same time that Western immigration policies were being tuned to bring in populations with less investment in their new nations, new Israeli immigrants were more patriotic and nationalistic.

The candidacy of New York City Councilman Charles Barron for Congress against New York State Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries to replace the retiring Edolphus Towns has attracted much more than the usual interest.