Bloodthirsty Liberal

We have a lot to thank him for

Odoardo Focherini, whom Yad Vashem honored as a Righteous among the Nations in 1969, was beatified on Saturday by the Roman Catholic Church in Carpi, his hometown in the province of Modena in northern Italy.

Focherini is the first Righteous Gentile to be sent on the road to sainthood, the first Catholic to be named a blessed martyr for losing his life in order to save Jews during the Nazi era.

His beatification process began in 1996 when the Carpi Catholic Diocese presented an official document.

Pope Benedict XVI signed the decree attesting to Focherini’s martyrdom on May 10, 2012.

Strong positive reactions have begun pouring in from representatives of world Jewry.

Renzo Gattegna, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, offered “homage with deference and deep feeling.”

“Odoardo Focherini was a person of the highest values and principles. An extraordinary commitment, paid at the price of his life… His courage, his ideals, his love for life will not be forgotten. His memory will continue to be a source of inspiration, also for future generations,” Gattegna said.

The American Jewish Committee issued a statement in Rome saying it was “deeply moved.”

“Odoardo Focherini acted selflessly in accordance with the highest moral principles shared by our two fraternal religions,” it said. “This act will create yet another bond between Christians and Jews, further enriching our deepening dialogue. May the recognition and memory of Odoardo Focherini’s profound faith and humanity be a blessing to all the world’s peoples.”

Focherini’s extraordinary acts have been remembered and honored through the years. In 1955, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities presented his family with a gold medal in his memory, for having “applied himself as an activist, tirelessly, for a long period, to help Jews and in particular to save those who were being persecuted.”

In 1969, Focherini and Father Dante Sala, the parish priest of San Martino Spino near Mirandola who sustained Focherini’s frenetic activity in helping Jews cross over to Switzerland, were inscribed in Yad Vashem’s Album of the Righteous among Nations. In 2007, the Italian Republic commemorated his devotion and sacrifice with a Gold Medal for Civil Merit.

Father Giangiuseppe Califano, the postulator (the person who guides a cause for beatification or canonization through the Church’s judicial processes) of Focherini’s Cause for Beatification, said that Focherini “was martyred by the Nazis in odium fidei,” that is, he was murdered out of “hatred for the faith,” for giving witness by risking his life to save persecuted Jews.

Focherini is described as having been happily married and a loving father of seven who was a devoted Catholic activist whose path led to martyrdom because he followed his conscience and his faith.

He worked first as an insurance agent and then as a journalist for the Bologna-based L’Avvenire d’Italia newspaper.

Focherini (known as “Odo”) began building a clandestine network, producing false documents and escorting more than a hundred Jewish refugees across the Italian border into Switzerland, when the archbishop of Genoa, Cardinal Pietro Boetta, asked the editor-in-chief of L’Avvenire d’Italia, Raimondo Manzini, to help some Polish Jews to escape from Genoa.

Manzini entrusted Focherini with this delicate and dangerous task. The word of possible salvation quickly spread among Jewish refugees.

Focherini continued to save as many lives as he could with the help of Sala.

On March 11, 1944, after delivering his last false documents to Enrico Donati, a Jewish refugee in the Hospital of Carpi, Focherini was arrested by Italian Fascists and submitted to interrogation regarding a letter in which he wrote that he was helping Jews “not for profit, but out of pure Christian charity.”

This served as his death warrant.

From a prison in Bologna he was brought to the Fossoli concentration camp in Carpi, then to the Gries camp in Bolzano, and finally deported to the Flossenburg concentration camp in Germany.

He died at a subsidiary camp of Flossenburg in Hersbruck on December 27, 1944, at the age of 37, from blood poisoning caused by a leg wound.

A Catholic partisan friend, Teresio Olivetti, also interned at Hersbruck, had been hidden and saved by Focherini when the Nazis were seeking victims for a reprisal following a partisan attack in which 10 Germans were killed.

Olivetti conveyed Focherini’s last words: “I declare I am dying in the purest apostolic Roman Catholic faith and in full submission to the will of God, offering my life as holocaust for my diocese, for Catholic Action [a lay group], for the pope and for the return of peace to this world.”

More at the link, but I am too teary to read it now. Nice to know that there are people like him in our world.

- Aggie

Chutzpah!

- Aggie

Alternate headline: Flipper Flatlines While Foreigners Frolic

A dolphin who died in the southern Chinese city of Sanya Monday has sparked nationwide anger after pictures surfaced of tourists near the shore mistreating and posing with the dying animal were spread on Weibo, China’s most popular social network site.

The dolphin died off the shore in Dadonghai, a resort in Hainan Province, due to injuries to its tail, likely from a collision with a fishing boat, according to state news agency Xinhua.

The injured dolphin was found on a beach Sunday. A witness surnamed He said the animal was still alive when tourists start to take pictures with it, according to local portal news hinews.cn.

Photos on China’s microblogs showed that tourists — instead of helping the dolphin — were lifting and mistreating it before rescuers arrived. One of the pictures showed a man flexing his muscles in front of a group of swimmers holding up the dolphin soon went viral on the social network sites.

Irritated netizens criticized harshly for the tourists’ cruelty. A writer posting by the name @Justin_joe called the tourists “a group of animals.”

“China is now filled with people lacking moral values, ignorance, and decreasing civility of the citizens,” added @Jiangxiangsiyi.

While many showed their anger, others say Chinese netizens have overreacted to the incident.

“I think people have focused on the wrong thing. They don’t care when people die, but to care about dolphin,” wrote @Woaijialin.

How do they know they’re “tourists”? And if they are, where does that cute chick in the aqua top come from? Talk about a tidal surge!

Anyway, I have conflicting feelings. The seeming indifference to animal suffering is not unique to the Chinese (or their tourists). It’s disturbing, but it’s universal (or rather not limited to certain nationalities or ethnicities).

But I kind of agree with everyone: “China is now filled with people lacking moral values, ignorance, and decreasing civility of the citizens.” Yep. “I think people have focused on the wrong thing. They don’t care when people die, but to care about dolphin.” Ditto.

But what intrigued me was this note in another account of this story:

Last month, news reports said a Chinese scuba diver had picked up living marine coral from the Maldives.

Weeks after, a 14-year-old Chinese boy was reported to have inscribed his name on the wall of an ancient Egyptian temple during a family trip.

Egypt is now run by an ideology that would dynamite such “ancient temples” if given half a chance. They’ve threatened it, and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Islamic militants in Mali have actually done it. So how bad is a teenage Chinese boy tagging some dusty piece of dynastic rubble?

As America’s power and influence recedes, owing to Obama’s deliberate subterfuge, China and Islam are left to fight over the spoils. Who’s your money on? I would have said China, but I’m reconsidering. Islam is in it for the long haul.

At least have the decency to introduce yourself before you croak me:

[I]t remains bewildering that the Democratic party would remain so wedded to abortion. To late-term abortion! And in the wake of the Gosnell trial.

But so it is. The White House has issued a veto threat against the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.

A Statement of Administration Policy explains that:

The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 1797, which would unacceptably restrict women’s health and reproductive rights and is an assault on a woman’s right to choose. Women should be able to make their own choices about their bodies and their health care, and Government should not inject itself into decisions best made between a woman and her doctor.

Forty years ago, the Supreme Court affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to privacy, including the right to choose. This bill is a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade and shows contempt for women’s health and rights, the role doctors play in their patients’ health care decisions, and the Constitution. The Administration is continuing its efforts to reduce unintended pregnancies, expand access to contraception, support maternal and child health, and minimize the need for abortion. At the same time, the Administration is committed to the protection of women’s health and reproductive freedom and to supporting women and families in the choices they make.

If the President were presented with this legislation, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto this bill.

That’s insanity.

Did you catch the name of the bill? “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.” What does killing a “pain-capable unborn child” have to do with women’s health? How does this administration do anything to “minimize the need for abortion”? That’s language worthy of Goebbels! So is the whole eugenic initiative launched by that arch child killer, Margaret Sanger.

Best of the Web Today doesn’t say it, so I will: how full of [bleep] is the New York Times?

Two Papers in One!

“Once again [Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, in handling a crisis that began with a relatively minor urban development issue but morphed into a broad uprising against his rule, had inserted himself in a matter that in other countries would have long been settled by a local planning board.”–New York Times, June 14, 2013

“Hours after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. vowed unyielding American support for Israel’s security here on Tuesday, Israel’s Interior Ministry announced 1,600 new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem. Mr. Biden condemned the move as ‘precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.’”–New York Times, March 10, 2010

Paper of record my ass.

Then you don’t hail from Chicago:

It was a bloody Father’s Day weekend in Chicago, but police said murder and shooting rates are significantly below those at the same time last year.

Seven people were shot to death and there were 26 “shooting incidents” from Friday to Sunday, according to Chicago Police Department spokesman Adam Collins.

But to put it into perspective, Collins said, eight more people were shot on the same weekend last year. He said overall crime in Chicago is down 14%, the lowest since 1963.

Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy issued a statement regarding the weekend’s violence, saying that “while we’ve had fewer murders to date this year than any year since the mid-1960s, there’s more work to be done and whether it’s police, clergy, community organizations, parents or residents, we all have a role to play in continuing to reduce violence and no one will rest until everyone in Chicago enjoys the same sense of safety.”

The city ended 2012 with a marked increase in homicides, with 506 people killed that year, up from 433 in 2011. Forty-three people were killed in January 2013 alone.

So seven dead Chicagoans is good news?! My bad. Congratulations!

But the city has used more than 75% of its overtime budget, and despite the success, not everyone agrees this is the best way forward.

U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois announced a plan last month to arrest thousands of gang members — a plan that was called a “white boy solution” by U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush of Chicago.

So, they’re almost out of overtime $$, and the race card is getting played so hard it’s practically torn in two. But only seven people were shot to death over the Father’s Day weekend. Chicago is… my kind of town.

Is the cratering of Marco Rubio’s once-promising career in the Republican Party:

The White House is playing a larger role in developing the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill than its supporters publicly admit, according to a forthcoming article in The New Yorker.

“‘No decisions are being made without talking to us about it,’ the official said of the Gang of Eight negotiations … ‘This does not fly if we’re not O.K. with it,’” a senior Obama official told author Ryan Lizza for the pending article.

…

Obama met with four top Democrats pushing the bill on Thursday, and a White House spokesman said earlier that White House lawyers are participating in the drafting of the bill.

But Obama and White House officials have kept a low profile to avoid deterring GOP cooperation.

However, they expect to seize the credit from Latinos once a bill is signed, the New Yorker article said. “We’re not worried about short-term political credit. We’ll get plenty of it if it gets signed,” the official told The New Yorker.

…

“There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it,” a Rubio aide told Lizza. ‘“There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly,” said the aide.

Given the unemployment rate in the African American community (nearly twice the national average), that statement comes awfully close to a racist trope. But Rubio didn’t say it; an aide did.

What ruins Rubio’s reputation among conservatives is his judgement in lying down with these dogs in the first place. It may be a “scoop” that Obama was writing the immigration bill all along, but it had to be presumed. He wrote ObamaCare, he wrote the stimulus; no big initiative gets done without he gets the final word. That can’t even be argued. Does Rubio think Obama’s going to agree to a bill that actually punishes illegals for breaking our laws and secures the border once and for all? No way.

Rubio keeps threatening to walk away from a bill that doesn’t meet his standards, but look how that stance plays in his own party:

McCain also complained to Sen. Chuck Schumer, the leading Democrat in the gang, about Rubio’s tactics to win support from other GOP.

“Schumer often found himself mediating disputes between Rubio and McCain, who felt that Rubio’s public statements sometimes positioned him positively with [GOP] conservatives at the expense of the Gang,” said the article. “McCain would call Schumer and fume, ‘Look what Rubio’s doing!’”

We know Obama is smarter than McCain (few aren’t), but I don’t think he’s smarter than Rubio. But has Rubio outsmarted himself?

As if pro-Israel groups have ever been involved in terrorism

Is this the most antisemitic administration in US history?

Eliana Johnson of National Review Online reports that Cincinnati-based IRS agent Gary Muthert told the House Oversight Committee that the IRS does, in fact, subject pro-Israel tax-exempt groups to higher scrutiny–by sending their applications to a special IRS unit that investigates them for ties to terrorism.
It is unclear whether the IRS subjects anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, or Islamic groups to the same scrutiny. However, the revelation could provide a partial explanation of why pro-Israel groups such as Z Street were subjected to excessive inquiry and delay. Johnson notes that, as reported by Breitbart News, anti-Israel groups had been pressuring the Treasury to investigate (only) Jewish charities for assisting beneficiaries in the disputed West Bank–though not even those groups thought to describe such activities as “terrorism.”

Z Street, Johnson observes, was not told that its application was being reviewed for possible terrorism ties, but rather that it was being scrutinized for possible conflicts with the Obama administration’s foreign policy. The administration has worked closely with a left-wing non-profit called J Street to push Congress toward a tougher approach to Israel, and to attack critics of the Obama administration’s policy and its appointees.
The irony of pro-Israel groups being screened for terror, when some of those groups exist primarily to assist victims of terror, is compounded, Johnson notes, by the fact that there is a record of anti-Israel groups supporting terror, such as the Holy Land Foundation, to which Muslim groups such as CAIR were linked.

We live in a fascist police state.

- Aggie

Consider this a companion piece to the one below:

President Obama’s admirers—who include most of the press corps, the Nobel committee and President Obama—believe above all in the power of his oratory: A “major speech,” in Philadelphia, Tucson or Cairo, can always calm troubled political waters. Which makes the silence of this wordiest of Presidents all the more unusual and dangerous amid the political uproar over National Security Agency antiterror surveillance.

In the 11 days since the story broke, Mr. Obama has offered only one brief and elliptical defense of the NSA programs. “I welcome this debate,” he said, adding that “We’ll have a chance to talk further during the course of the next couple days.”

Mr. Obama went on to spend the next couple days avoiding the debate he said he welcomed. Between fund-raising appearances in Miami Beach and Santa Monica, he squeezed in an event welcoming the women’s professional basketball championship team to the White House, an Ed Markey for Senate rally in Boston, and a celebration for gay pride month. The core national-security obligations of the Presidency? Nada.

With Mr. Obama’s face on the surveillance milk carton, the case for data-mining and digital eavesdropping has fallen to NSA chief Keith Alexander and the bipartisan leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees. Meanwhile, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper continued his pattern of doing more harm than good with his line about answering congressional questions in “the most truthful or least most untruthful manner,” which helps to explain why people are skeptical of U.S. spooks.

…

If Mr. Obama wants to maintain public support for the U.S. antiterror architecture he inherited and has robustly used, he is going to have to publicly defend it in the context of American interests and values. Without such a defense, the political vacuum will be filled by speculation and demagoguery as it has been for nearly two weeks.

As a Senator, Mr. Obama might have joined the demagogues. Yet as President he has largely erred on the side of keeping the country safe, which confirms the truism that the world looks different from the Oval Office than from an Iowa fairground. He has bombed terrorists to death by the hundreds even as his rhetoric continues to suggest that he has saved the nation from George W. Bush’s antiterror tyranny. This contradiction between his talk and action is now undermining support for Mr. Obama’s powers.

All of this follows an unfortunate national-security pattern: Mr. Obama ramped up the Afghan campaign while undercutting the counter-insurgency strategy from the start, and he barely spoke of it again except to trumpet withdrawal. He threw in with the Europe-led Libya coalition at the last second, only to abdicate once Gadhafi fell and to the point that a U.S. Ambassador was murdered without consequence.

Last month he all but declared the war on terror wrapped up. And then last Thursday he left the explanation for his abrupt change of heart to (lightly) arm the Syrian rebels to his deputy national security adviser.

When the going gets tough, the tough go to Germany and give a speech (another one!) in front of the Brandenburg gate.

I don’t want to say that President Obama is a narcissist, but if he were any more in love with himself, he’d have to leave Michelle to be with his “soul mate”.

Drei, drei again:

Oops! Wrong president! How’d that get in there?

When U.S. President Barack Obama visits Germany on Tuesday and Wednesday, he’ll get the opportunity he was denied as a presidential candidate in 2008: a speech at Berlin’s most famous landmark, the Brandenburg Gate.

But the audience will have lost its euphoria for him. In Germany, which viewed him as the great hope of world politics five years ago, there is disappointment that the Obama administration hasn’t changed U.S. foreign and security policies as much as hoped.

Revelations about the scale of the U.S. National Security Agency’s Internet surveillance program Prism have caused much anger in Germany, where data privacy is seen as an important aspect of personal freedom—so much so that even Google Street View has raised hackles.

Although Mr. Obama remains personally popular in Germany, the exposure of Prism has compounded disillusionment here and elsewhere in Europe with his administration’s use of lethal drone attacks and its failure to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay as pledged. “Barack Obama has lost his mystique,” Germany’s mass-circulation tabloid Bild wrote last week. Under the headline “Yes We Scan,” Bild criticized the U.S. for “snooping on an unthinkable scale” on the Web.

Ha! Good one, Germany!

Wednesday’s speech will be a smaller affair. Mr. Obama will address several thousand invited guests, while the zone around the Brandenburg Gate will be shut down for the general public, with even residents barred from using their balconies and roof terraces.

Still, it will be nice to stand in front of real columns, not styrofoam columns. And to stand where JFK once stood.

D’oh! I meant President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, not John Forbes Kerry!

That’s more like it. (Is there anyone who hasn’t appeared at the Brandenburg Gate before Obama?) We know how much it means to President Obama to be seen in just the right places. The telepromter can be set up anywhere. But iconic images are harder to come by.

Patience, my good man.

Yes, yes, yes!

Economy Minister and chairman of the Habayit Hayehudi Party Naftali Bennett proclaimed Monday that the two-state solution had reached a dead end.

“Never has so much time been invested in something so pointless,” he said. “We need to build, build, build. If the money spent on caviar in cocktail parties dealing with the idea of a Palestinian state would have been used for building interchanges (in the territories) – everything would be different.”

Speaking at a Yesha Council meeting in Jerusalem, Bennett said, “There has never been a Palestinian state here. We need to change our conception and say we’re here because it’s our home. We need to start thinking about how we conduct ourselves from now on, with that concept behind us.”

Occupation? What “occupation”?

“Those who dare say that the occupation corrupts and talk about occupation all day, what occupation are they talking about? How can you be an occupier in your own home? This is our home.”

Needless to say, he’s singing my song. But also the song of international law:

The Mandate system was instituted by the League of Nations in the early 20th century to administer non-self-governing territories.

The mandatory power, decided by an international body, was to consider the relevant territory a temporary trust and to see to the well-being and advancement of its population.

In July 1922, the League of Nations entrusted Britain with the Mandate for Palestine.

Recognising ‘the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine’, Britain was called upon to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine-Eretz Israel (Land of Israel).

Shortly afterwards, in September 1922, the League of Nations and Great Britain decided the provisions for setting up a Jewish national home would not apply to the area east of the Jordan River, which constituted three-fourths of the territory included in the Mandate.

This area would later become the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

The British Mandate authorities granted the Jewish and Arab communities the right to run their internal affairs.

The Yishuv liberation movement then established the Elected Assembly and the National Council. The economy expanded, a Hebrew education network was organised and cultural life flourished.

However, the Mandatory government failed to maintain the letter and spirit of the Mandate.

Under Arab pressure, it withdrew from its commitment, especially with respect to immigration and land acquisition. The White Papers of 1930 and 1939 restricted immigration and acquisition of land by Jews.
Later, immigration was limited by the 1930 and 1939 White Papers, and land acquisition by Jews was further restricted by the 1940 Land Transfer Regulations.

After the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution to partition Palestine on November 29, 1947, Britain announced the termination of its Mandate over Palestine, to take effect on May 15, 1948. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed.

From the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the League of Nations Mandate in 1922, the idea of a Jewish state has been “walked back” and whittled down—mostly by the British—into a sliver of its promised size. There never was a “Palestinian” state, the area was never “self-governing”. Even the United Nations, in its declaration 242 after the Six Day War, called upon Israel to return territory seized—notably not all territory. In the Sinai (1978) and Gaza (2005), Israel has returned well over 90% of such territory. Where is its promised peace?

Build, build, build.

Lord Snowden is at it again

Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.

The revelation comes as Britain prepares to host another summit on Monday – for the G8 nations, all of whom attended the 2009 meetings which were the object of the systematic spying. It is likely to lead to some tension among visiting delegates who will want the prime minister to explain whether they were targets in 2009 and whether the exercise is to be repeated this week.

Hehehee. Snortle. How did they do it?

This included:

•Setting up internet cafes where they used an email interception programme and key-logging software to spy on delegates’ use of computers;

•Penetrating the security on delegates’ BlackBerrys to monitor their email messages and phone calls;

•Supplying 45 analysts with a live round-the-clock summary of who was phoning who at the summit;

•Targeting the Turkish finance minister and possibly 15 others in his party;

•Receiving reports from an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow.

- Aggie