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| Only one candidate will restore Amerabia and the Koran (Source: Debbie Schlussel ) |
The first time I met Arieh O’Sullivan was in the predawn darkness of a winter morning in Jerusalem in 1997, when he came to pick me up in a jeep emblazoned with the Confederate flag on its spare tire.
I was just starting out as a journalist and working as a cub reporter at The Jerusalem Post, and O’Sullivan, a veteran of The Associated Press, was the Post’s seasoned military correspondent. I thought O’Sullivan had one of the coolest jobs in the world, and it turned out that this diminutive Jew with an Irish name and a Southern accent was a pretty cool guy, too.
While you can take the boy out of Mississippi, you can't take Mississippi out of the boy. My jeep had a red and white Rebel Flag on the back spare tire and a plastic statue of General Robert E. Lee stuck on the dash, making it most likely the only Confederate shrine in the Middle East.
And somebody had had the chutzpah to steal my jeep from in front of my house. A decade ago, we had joined about 200 families and built a new village in the forested hills above the Elah Valley: nice modest villas surrounded by vineyards and olive groves in central Israel. Every now and then thieves would steal a car, but I never thought they'd set their sights on the old General.
Were they Palestinians? Bedouins? Jews? Or (good gracious) damn Yankees?!
"Forget about it," a police officer told me. General Lee was likely deep in the West Bank, a region to which Israelis have long stopped venturing. "Probably already in a chop shop."...
Two days passed and I got a midnight call from a friend, a former agent from the Israeli Antiquities Authority. The whole underworld is only two degrees removed from everyone. My buddy knew Arab ancient grave robbers, who knew car thieves, who knew car thieves, who were holding General Lee. They were Palestinians in the Hebron hills, and they were willing to sell it back. The catch was that I had to deliver the cash personally to an area fraught with danger for a Jew.
Arieh O’Sullivan left South Mississippi in 1981 to join the Israeli army. He has made a life as a journalist and olive farmer in that country, but holds tight to his Southern heritage in ways that sometimes perplex his friends, co-workers and even his mother. On Wednesday, he further tightened his connection to the region of his birth by taking the oath of the Sons of Confederate Veterans at Beauvoir.
O’Sullivan, who holds dual American and Israeli citizenship, is proud of the service given by his great-great-grandfather, Alabama Calvary Lt. George A Johnson. In the oath administered by Wallace Mason of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, O’Sullivan pledged to uphold the traditions of faith in God; honor; chivalry and respect for womanhood; a passionate belief in freedom for the individual; and a military tradition of valor, patriotism, devotion to duty and a spirit of self-sacrifice.
O’Sullivan said there is an unconscious nationalistic soul many Jews carry with them that is similar to the camaraderie shared by Confederate descendants.
“I feel it flowing through me,” he said. “If you have a sense of history that you carry with you, you are enriched by it.”
O’Sullivan is the son of former Ocean Springs Police Chief Efraim O’Sullivan.
A self-proclaimed “Jewish redneck,” O’Sullivan carried a Confederate flag with him into battle with his unit, the Fighting Farmers. He kept the flag, purchased at Gettysburg when he was 12, in the spare grenade pocket of his Israeli army uniform.
He named his jeep the General Lee and attached an image of the Confederate leader to the dashboard. The jeep has a battle flag for a spare tire cover. O’Sullivan said he gets bizarre looks from people sometimes because of his conspicuous affinity for the Confederacy.
“I try to educate them,” he said. “It’s about people who stood up for something they believed in.”
Toward the end of the Second World War, Thomas O'Sullivan of Bantry, County Cork, decided to join the British army. He was assigned to the Coldstream Guards which was the first unit to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war he was transferred to the Sixth Airborne Division and was posted in Egypt along the Suez Canal. In 1947 his unit was moved to Palestine where his anti-British sentiments led him to befriend some members of the local Hagana Jewish underground. One night, fortified with a few belts of whiskey, O'Sullivan roared out of his base in Haifa with a "liberated" Cromwell tank. It was the Jewish state's first tank.
O'Sullivan stayed in Israel to fight in its war of independence and married a Jewish girl who had been raised in the Cayman Islands. Eventually they moved to Louisiana, U.S.A. where they raised a family together. Their son, Ephraim O'Sullivan, was a policeman in New Orleans when the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973. He decided to enlist in the Israeli army and serve the fledgling Jewish nation. After the war he worked briefly as a policeman in Israel before deciding to return to the United States. Ephraim pursued a career in law enforcement and went on to become the police chief of Ocean Springs, the first Jewish chief in the history of Mississippi.
In 1981, Ephraim's son, Arieh (Hebrew for lion), dropped out of Louisiana State University to join the paratroopers in Israel. He fought bravely in Lebanon in the summer of 1982 after which he became a war correspondent for the Jerusalem Post. He covered conflicts in the Congo, Ethiopia, the Balkans, as well as the Middle East. He and his wife are presently raising their three O'Sullivan children in the Holy land.
"Well, the truth is that US President Barack Obama has a quick and safe way to prevent Israel from attacking Iran.
He should just say: “Trust me!” – but in a persuasive way."
Gov. Chris Christie tonight laid into the New York Police Department for spying on New Jersey Muslims, saying he doesn’t know if the actions were "born out of arrogance, or out of paranoia, or out of both."
At a briefing Thursday, the governor wouldn't weigh in on whether he thought civil rights were violated, saying that wasn't his job and that he would leave that to any agencies investigating the NYPD's intelligence operations.
"My view, politicians shouldn't be involved in that. Leave it to law enforcement," Christie said. "If there were any violations of law by the NYPD, I am sure the attorney general will take whatever steps he deems appropriate."
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told federal lawmakers this week that the Justice Department was reviewing requests to investigate the NYPD’s intelligence operations amid the scandal.
"We’re in the process of reviewing those letters to determine what action, if any, we should take," Holder told a House appropriations subcommittee.
Christie, who was U.S. attorney when the surveillance took place, reiterated that he and his top-level staff don’t recall being briefed on the operation. Neither New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg nor Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has apologized for the department’s actions, further incensing leaders on this side of the Hudson River.
"My concern, and I don’t know all the details yet, but my concern is, why can’t you be communicating with law enforcement here in New Jersey?" he asked. "Are we somehow not trustworthy?"
Nonetheless, Christie's latest comments drew praise from at least one Muslim leader in New Jersey, Aref Assaf, head of the Paterson-based American Arab Forum.
"I'm so gratified. I'm honored to be a resident of the state of New Jersey under his leadership," Assaf said. "He doesn't mince words; he was unambiguous about the incursion of the NYPD into our state without proper protocols."
Muslim leaders have been invited to a meeting Saturday in Trenton with state and federal law enforcement officials to discuss New Jersey's response to the NYPD surveillance operations.
Christie conceded that as the top federal prosecutor in the state he didn’t always tip off municipalities on corruption busts, but it was not required.
"I had federal jurisdiction, so we could go anywhere," he said of his U.S. attorney job. "This is the New York Police Department. I know they think their jurisdiction is the world. Their jurisdiction is New York City. My concern is this kind of obsession that the NYPD seems to have that they’re the masters of the universe."
Moreover, Syrian Christians have until now been overwhelmingly supportive of the regime, fearing that if the regime collapses, then Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood would rise to power and focus on marginalizing the Christians. The scenarios in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Iraq and Morocco have not been encouraging.
While the older generation among the Christians is more or less rallied behind the government, the younger generation is less ideological and more forward-looking. The Western-educated, Internet-savvy Christians refuse to buy the argument
Given the rise of Islamic zeal throughout Syria, there is fear that the public would be outraged if Christians are allowed the right to run for president. Since violence erupted last March, the government has been trying hard to appease the religious clerics who have been very influential in the anti-Assad demonstrations. Many of the clerics, needless to say, are religious dictators. The regime has tried to win over the clerics by bending to their demands, like shutting down the Damascus casino or allowing the establishment of an Islamic TV channel -- Nour al-Sham -- that contradicts everything the secular Baathists had stood for since the mid-1960s.
“I want to answer that, and my campaign folks would probably tell me that I shouldn’t,” he began. “I never, ever, ever did, or would have, called David Storobin a neo-Nazi.”
“I’m not so internet savvy … I used the word ‘ties’ instead of ‘links,’” he explained. Adding that he “never once raised it in public,” while Mr. Storobin “continues to raise it in public.”
… “Again, he’s responding to comments that I made to a group of young Democrats at a bar, where I thought we were in a private room,” he added. “Look, if I was 25, I’m sure I would have used ‘links’ instead of ‘ties,’ I wish I was 25.”
Mr. Fidler, however, chastised Mr. Storobin over his handling of the interviews. “If I had had the poor judgment, or the poor taste, to interview a white separatist on two occasions and write about it,” he said, “by the time I was done, there would be no doubt that I considered his views repugnant, and I doubt that anything I wrote on the subject would be linked on a hate site.”
Mr. Fidler, who recently received three prominent endorsements, from former Mayor Edward I. Koch, Senator Charles E. Schumer and Gregory Davidzon, a Russian immigrant and political power broker.
If we had resolute leadership in the White House, we would have explained that these Islamic terrorist enemy combatants detained at the Parwan facility used the Koran to write jihadist messages to pass to others.
In doing so, they violated their own cultural practice and defiled the Koran and turned the Koran into contraband.
The Islamic cultural practice and Parwan detention facility procedures support burning the “contraband.”
Instead here we go again, offering apology after apology and promising to “hold those responsible accountable.” Responsible for what?
So Israel would, without warning, put US troops and Western civilians at direct risk of terrorist assaults
and only set back Iranian nuclear development for a few years - and make it, or a Third World War based on religion, inevitable
My own fear is that global recruitment for Jihad would boom as well - reversing all the gains of the last three years.
The war would also galvanize Islamist parties in the new Arab democracies, giving Israel more ammunition in blocking any rapprochement between the US and the Muslim world.
And following this essential blackmail, the Israeli government would doubtless rally much of the US Congress, the entire GOP, its media outlets (like Fox, and the Washington Post), and a key part of the Democratic fundraising machinery to side entirely with Israel against the US president.
Netanyahu's war would be designed to rile up not only his own neo-fascist base, but also encourage American evangelical voters to turn out against Obama, the "anti-Christ",
A global war which polarizes America and the world is exactly what Netanyahu wants. And it is exactly what the GOP needs to cut through Obama's foreign policy advantage in this election. Because it is only through war, crisis and polarization that extremists can mobilize the emotions that keep them in power. They need war to win.
Here's a prediction. Netanyahu, in league and concert with Romney, Santorum and Gingrich, will make his move to get rid of Obama soon. And he will be more lethal to this president than any of his domestic foes.
Public schools in San Antonio have installed video cameras, not to monitor for foul play or intruders, but to spy on kids’ eating habits. Federal food police in North Carolina have begun confiscating preschoolers’ homemade lunches because they didn’t meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines. Aghast parents have noted that one 4-year-old’s confiscated lunch of a turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips and apple juice sounds more nutritious than the state-provided chicken nuggets. But that entirely misses the point. In America, parents are free to give their kids pizza and pudding with Twinkies and Twizzlers, and the government has no right to intrude.
"Barack Obama wants politicians and bureaucrats to control America?s entire medical system. Go to hell Barack," the ad says.
Moran wrote a letter to Metro general manager Richard Sarles calling for the removal of the advertisement.
"The ad is deeply disrespectful of the President of the United States and does not belong in the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) network," he wrote.
It was sometime in the fall of 1980. I had just returned from two years in Israel, where just a few months before I had a friend murdered in cold blood for the crime of singing Sabbath songs on the streets of Hebron on a Friday night. I started law school at NYU because that's the best school that accepted me. Until I got there, I knew nothing of NYU's politics, and that the hard Left in those days turned down Harvard and Yale for Washington Square.
Sometime during the first half of that semester we became hooked on the idea that Jimmy Carter would sell Israel down the creek if he were reelected. And so, we started walking around with Ronald Reagan buttons. In Hebrew.
It took a while until someone who actually read Hebrew told the Leftists what the buttons said. And the acrimony soon followed. It's been too many years - I don't remember what was said. But that semester I became the first member of my family to vote for a Republican since my forebears landed at Ellis Island.
There was no teleprompter. Andrew had no notes. He just got up on the stage and shmoozed with the audience. This talk is notable because Andrew identifies his Conservative awakening with a Reform rabbi so dopey, so liberal, that he delivered a pulpit speech in support of race-hustler Jesse Jackson in the immediate aftermath of Jackson’s ghastly Hymietown comment.
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