Posts Tagged ‘jordan’

Scarborough Booed, Allahpundit notes, Surber Waits, China Extracts and Jordan & the PLO Come Clean Under the Fedora

Posted: October 29, 2019 by datechguy in baseball, Israel, middle east, News/opinion, Sports, under the fedora
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

I have to give Joe Scarborough a lot of credit for taking a stance that is not popular with his new found friends on the World Series Booing Business:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Remember Joe wants Trump to lose in 2020 but’s he’s intellectually consistent here, and as a Baseball fan he knows it’s bad for the game.

Allahpundit made two good points concerning this story as well

The overlap between MAGA Nation and the sort of people who can afford a ticket to a World Series game in Washington D.C. is small… …virtually all Nats fans are lobbyists, journalists, lawyers, or politicians/staffers, he should treat their contempt as a badge of honor.

Or as Mollie Hemmingway put it:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Of course the media will spin it differently but what else is new?

Don Surber has officially announced that despite my suggestion after Sunday’s booing was rewarded by a Houston blowout he is not yet willing to put the Washington Nationals on the list. As he put it:

Until they’re destroyed, no Trumpenfreude.

That’s actually very fair. This is in fact baseball and as the last three games demonstrated the game isn’t over till that final out. Washington is a good team with an excellent pitching staff and a third baseman who is the closest thing to Brooks Robinson I’ve seen in decades. Furthermore Verlander who is pitching tonight is in my opinion a first ballot Hall of Fame quality pitcher he is vulnerable to the long ball and the Nationals certainly have the bats to exploit it.

Of course Houston is no slouch in the pitching department and has an even better offense than Washington. The Yankees would have been a better matchup for the Nats but as I said it’s not over yet. Interesting fact, if the Nats pull it off it will be the 1st seven game World Series in baseball where the home team didn’t win a single game.

It takes little bravery to boo Donald Trump and apparently too much for anyone in the NBA other than Shaq to boo China but unlike Trump there are actual great reasons to boo China, Here is another one:

Having hepatitis C may very well have saved Jennifer Zeng’s life.
In February 2000, she was arrested for being a Falun Gong practitioner and interrogated intensely about her medical history at a Labor Camp in China’s Da Xing County, she said. Zeng’s blood was drawn and she told them she had hepatitis C before she took up the spiritual practice.

“Twelve days later, my (cellmate) died as a result of forced feeding,” Zeng told Fox News. “Having hepatitis C might have unqualified me as an organ donor.”
It’s the stuff of nightmares. And it has been buried from public view, hard to prove, and shrouded beneath the cloak of silence for almost two decades.
But anecdotes and evidence are slowly bubbling to the surface that the organs of members of marginalized groups detained in Chinese prisons and labor camps are unwillingly harvested. Most affected is a spiritual minority, the Falun Gong, who have been persecuted for adhering to a Buddhist-centric religious philosophy grounded in meditation and compassion.

This is what people who are actually Hitler do, but to point this out would shatter too many narratives.

Finally there was something that took place last week which was narrative shattering that I meant to write about but didn’t get a chance. It concerned the narrative of Israel as an oppressive state whose neighbors only want to live in peace with the Jews. Well not really with…

The President of the Jordanian Bar Association, Mazen Irshaidat, confirmed that there is no land registered in the Land Department with the names of Jews in the areas of Baqoura and Ghamir.

These are the areas on the border with Israel that Jordan leased out to Israel for 25 years in the peace treaty. There have apparently been rumors that Jews had bought lands in those areas.

Irshaidat told the Jordan 24 site that it is unacceptable to have lands owned by the Zionists or Jews in that area, and he confirmed that he could not find any Jewish names in the list of landowners in those areas.

Remember Jordan is a state that is not only considered moderate but has made peace with Israel. yet they felt the need to assure their citizens that no Jew owns land there. Why it’s almost as if the narratives like the Palestinian desire for a two state solution…

Two states, he says, was merely a concession to the international community, but it is not a Palestinian desire. The entire land is solely theirs, and Jews have no rights there.

This is not usually said in English. Usually in English the Palestinians claim they want to live in peace with Israel. But now they are officially admitting that they never even wanted that; their real desire (as polls have shown) is to have a single Arab state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, and the two state idea was merely a stage towards that end.

…is just a myth.

Does anyone note the irony that this statement made in English at a public forum by the PLO’s UN rep was made in the city of Berlin?

Will this be the ultimate Arthur/Carter Moment?

Posted: January 29, 2011 by datechguy in arthur vs carter, middle east
Tags: , , , ,

We haven’t had the Arthur Carter Watch for quite a while but this is the ultimate Arthur Carter Moment.

You might recall Jimmy Carter and the transformation of Iran from a stable US ally to an Islamic state that has been the source trouble worldwide for decades.

Now in Egypt we have lets face it a Dictator albeit a friendly one to the US, that has repressed free speech to a degree, and played both ends against the middle.

If there was ever a test of this president, if he is going to be Jimmy Carter or Chester Arthur it is now.

If the Islamic Brotherhood ends up taking over it would be the final irony of Barack Obama the replacement of an American Ally with an Islamic state. It would be the ultimate Jimmy Carter moment. Some in government are already worrying along these lines.

Pam Geller notices one other oddity:

Interesting, too, how everyone, even Obama, is talking about Egypt’s uprising. And yet Iran experienced an even greater people’s movement and Ahmadinejad and the mullahs crushed it with a violence incomprensible to the West. And yet nobody was talking about it. Nobody. There are tens of thousands in the street of Egypt, there were millions in the streets of Iran and they were raped, tortured, publicly hanged, slaughtered because they marched for freedom.

Obama pretended it wasn’t happening. Media too.

Well after all Iran is on the other side and a revolt there affirms what GWB said for years. A revolt in Egypt doesn’t so a revolt is a good thing to the left. And by an odd coincidence there are now protests in Jordan too. What do these two countries have in common? Peace with Israel.

If you see protesters in the US supporting change in Egypt, change in Jordan, but no word about Lebanon where Iran and Hezbollah are calling the shot that will tell you everything about what is going on, it’s also noteworthy to note this via the Lonely Conservative:

Iranian leaders and their state-run media love instability in the Middle East as long as it’s not happening in Iran. They’re gleeful over the unrest in Egypt, according to CNS News.

The Tehran Times, Iran Daily and Resalat newspapers were among those that led their Thursday editions with the Egypt story, using headlines like “Spirit of Tunisia comes to Egypt,” “Egyptians demand end to Mubarak rule” and “Intensification of public protests against Mubarak regime.”

The Tehran Times describes itself as the mouthpiece of the Islamic revolution, Iran Daily is affiliated with the official state IRNA news agency, and Resalat is a conservative daily supportive of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

If Iran is backing revolution in Egypt that adds up to big trouble for the rest of us.

Of course the ideal is a democratic Egypt that is allied to the US and friendly to Israel. The odds of that are slim to impossible.

The disaster result is an Islamic state, run by the Muslim Brotherhood and ready to go to war with Israel. That is disaster and will mean more trouble than anyone can imagine.

Looking at the reaction of the protesters and their reactions, it appears that the military is a more respected than the police. Mubarek is in his 80’s he doesn’t have much more time in charge anyway, and yet you also don’t want to see a repressive government that abuses the Egyptian people. Threading the needle is to give a government that represent Egyptians without an unfriendly power.

For an experienced and strong leader with a discreet diplomatic corps and wise advisers it would be a tough spot requiring a delicate touch.

Unfortunately we have the Obama administration. I don’t envy them this problem. I would suggest a public statement opposing violence and the aspirations of the Egyptian people while privately doing working a deal to:

  1. Keep Iran and China out
  2. Keep Islamists down and out.
  3. Guarantee basic rights for Egyptians
  4. Maintain Peace with Israel
  5. Protect open access to the Suez canal

Remember its not the name of the guy or guys in charge that matters in Egypt, it’s the goals.

If there was ever a time for this president to be Arthur instead of Carter this is it. I wish the administration luck, they’ll need it.

 

Update:  Stacy makes his case for targeted batons, I’m not buying that but I do buy the update:

A former adviser to the Obama administration argues that the Muslim Brotherhood “should not be seen as inevitably our enemy” — which is what you’d expect an Obama adviser to say, I suppose — but Thomas Joscelyn isn’t buying it:

Hosni Mubarak’s regime is no friend of freedom, even though it is certainly an ally against al Qaeda.
In all likelihood, an Egypt dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood (if that is how the turmoil plays out) would be neither.