Bookworm Room

Tweet The only problem I have with this video is the narrator’s voice.  It grates on me.  Otherwise, I think the video says things that need to be said, and I hope it gets lots of air play: And while we’re on the subject, the Washington Examiner, in its sterling multipart series about the Obama [...]

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Tweet First of all, it appears that the suspicions I voiced yesterday about the film that started it all are, if not true, at least headed in the right direction.  Poynter has a post detailing all the peculiarities about the film — the lies, the misdirection, and the purpose behind it (to incite violence).  It [...]

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Tweet “Honor” cultures are incredibly hierarchical.  You’re either up or you’re down.  And you’re always down if you let your honor go unavenged.  Worse than that, if you’re down, you deserve all the abuse and violence that can be heaped upon you.  Honor cultures value people higher in the food chain, but have little to [...]

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Tweet Israel Matzav found a post in which two Arab-American women explain how horribly Israel treated them, when it questioned them at Ben Gurion and then deported them from Israel.  Interestingly, although the young women complain mightily about their treatment at Israel’s hands, they never do state explicitly that they harbor no ill-will towards that [...]

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Tweet You realize this means war! When I was growing up, we socialized with a lot of Arabs — from Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, etc.  I don’t know why that was possible back then — if we were anomalies or if, back in the 1970s, the hatreds of the Middle East hadn’t yet made it [...]

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Tweet Years ago, I read in an Efraim Karsh book something to the effect that the Arab honor culture is actually a shame culture.  That is, in America, honor is a personal standard, one by which we measure ourselves.  Arab honor, however, is a public face one presents to the world.  If something goes wrong, [...]

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Tweet Wouldn’t you like to have lunch with this guy?

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Tweet Bill Whittle narrates this clear summation of 20th and 21st century relations between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.  It does not reflect well on the Arabs:

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Tweet My daughter is taking a required class at high school:  “world cultures.”  My first instinct was to scoff, since I prefer a more classical curriculum, but as I thought about it, I decided it is a very good idea.  That is, of course, assuming it’s taught correctly.  I’m inclined to doubt that it will [...]

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Tweet My husband and I discussed the concept of stereotypes with the kids.  What we were trying to get through to them is that it’s wrong to take ideas about a group, even if those ideas are complimentary or accurate, and to assume that they apply to an individual.  The mere fact that Jews tend [...]

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Tweet Actually, it’s not a new face at all — it goes back to Mohammed himself, and his paranoid, resentful rants when the Jews refused to accept him as a prophet.  What makes it new is that, thanks to the modern age and the Leftist media, these messages, which used to be confined to backward [...]

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Tweet Many, myself included, found it heartening that the Wikileaks cables showed that Saudi Arabia, and other Arab countries, were talking tough to American diplomats when it came to Iran.  That proved, we said, that, no matter what the leaders said on the streets, behind the scenes they were sensibly aware of their common cause [...]

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Tweet Once again, Israel is apparently blathering on about its willingness to agree to a two state solution.  This so irritates me.  There is already a two state solution.  It’s called Jordan, and has been Jordan since the 1920s.  What the loopy-loo wackos on the Left (and, increasingly, in the middle) don’t understand, is that [...]

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Tweet The head of the UN General Assembly just called Israel an “apartheid” state.  In other words, Israel is emblematic of evil in the world.  I’ve finally realized what the problem is:  Israel has a mixed population. Think about it:  Iraq expelled her Jews and hounded her Christians into obscurity.  Saudi Arabia makes it illegal [...]

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Tweet Ymarsakar brought to my attention a post I wrote over three years ago.  I’m reprinting a slightly edited version here, not just because I think it describes well the Arab psyche that drives so much of current international politics (and fears) today, but also because I think it does a good job of describing [...]

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Tweet American feminists, who have done quite a number on Palin, are remarkably silent about the mind-boggling restrictions placed upon, and indignities visited upon, their sisters in Saudi Arabia: A new prohibition may be added to the long list of those placed on women in Saudi Arabia: A new sentence according to Islamic law (fatwa) [...]

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Tweet I don’t have much time to write now, but I read a trio of stories at the Jerusalem Post that remind us why moral relativism regarding Israel is wrong.  Israel, for all her flaws, is a better, more moral country that the surrounding Arab nations, and that’s regardless of any of their virtues: Another [...]

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Tweet In my post yesterday about the corpse/prisoner swap in which Israel exchanged, I noted that an inviolate body is a very important part of Jewish religious law, going back to the ancient Jewish revulsion against pagan sacrifice and the subsequent desecration of corpses. (I also noted that I didn’t think that was a sufficient [...]

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Tweet David Suissa has created a series of ads to remind people of all the marvelous contributions Israel has made to the world during its short time as a country (and, impressively, a country perpetually under siege). I think it’s time to create some ads for the Muslim and Arab world too (click on thumbnails [...]

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Tweet Hamas never enters into truces with an eye to peace.  It enters into truces with an eye to getting its troops rested and rearmed before the next offensive.  Israel, equipped with knowledge of both core Islamic doctrine (hudna) and Hamas’ own past behavior, nevertheless keeps giving its opponent a breather, rather than keeping the [...]

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Tweet One of the things that has infuriated me for years in the roiling battle between Israel and her neighbors is Israel’s utter ineptitude at courting the media.  For decades, after ever single “event,” the Palestinians offered dozens of sympathetic people up for interviews with the MSM, while the Israelis offered terse, uninformative commentaries from [...]

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Tweet Obama adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has accused American Jews of McCarthyism for being critical of Israel’s critics. He’s not the first and he won’t be the last. The pattern, repeated over and over as we learn more about Obama’s advisers, is that one of them speaks fondly of the Palestinians or harshly of Israel, Jews [...]

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Tweet I’m beginning to think that incrementalism is one of the most dangerous things out there, whether it’s the way Obama leaks out the truth about his big lies or the way in which the jihadists keep asking for little things from us — no pigs, no dogs, no occupied territories.  As to that latter [...]

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Tweet The British press was rocked for a few minutes a couple of weeks ago by the story of an Iraqi girl whose father murdered her quite brutally because she’d fallen in love with a British soldier. (There was no hint, by the way, that she’d done anything about the love; it was an infatuation [...]

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Tweet We received in yesterday’s mail a warning (a very nice warning) that my 5th grader is struggling with geometry. As a former geometry struggler myself, I’m all sympathy. We did not get mad at her. What is infuriating, though, is her absolutely unwillingness to learn geometry. After 1.5 years in public schools, she believes [...]

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