Bookworm Room

We can expect tomorrow night’s State of the Union address to be an action-packed hour (or so) of vitriol and self-pity.  Obama will cherry-pick a few numbers about the 1% and then whine about how he’s been trying really hard to destroy that same 1%, but that a vast array of insurmountable obstacles — Congress, [...]

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As you already know, I’m sure, the Ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem are fighting hard to segregate men and women in public spaces in Jerusalem.  I posted about the fact that Mr. Bookworm analogized this small group, which is fighting against a democratic, egalitarian government, to the sharia law that exists across large segments of the Muslim [...]

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Please, please, please tell me the Rabbi was writing with tongue fixed firmly in cheek: I’ve got a Tim Tebow problem. I want to root for the guy, but I’m afraid of what will happen if the hulky Denver Bronco quarterback continues to pull off what is fast becoming the Greatest Gridiron Story Ever Told. [...]

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I didn’t bother to read the entirety of an endless article about a bad thing happening in Mexico.  No, I’m not talking about drug cartels or about Mexican citizens being slaughtered by guns sent over courtesy of a Democrat Department of Justice attempting to prove that guns hurt people.  I’m talking about plants that process [...]

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

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Do you remember Johnny Carson’s droll “I did not know that”?  I do.  And that’s precisely what popped into my head when JKB sent me a link to a post discussing the fact that 161 years ago, the U.S. Navy outlawed flogging.  It’s a wonderful little story, especially because it combines three things I find [...]

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Obama is having a bad week when it comes to Joo . . . janitors.  After his mispronunciation faux pas (which was probably the innocent act of a mental stumble bum, but which sounded appalling coming from Obama, who has proven hostile to Israel and the Jews), he’s now issued a Rosh Hashanah message that’s [...]

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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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A few days ago, I mentioned Robin of Berkeley’s American Thinker piece about the two different types of Jews in America:  the kind who are reflexively liberal and reflexively pro-Israel, and the kind who are reflexively Leftist and reflexively hostile to Israel.  Robin’s point was that the former do not understand that they have put [...]

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Robin of Berkeley hits a home run — actually, she hits it right out of the park — in this post explaining the two different types of Jews who support Barack Obama.  One type is the type I used to be, an unthinking liberal, who actually loves America and strongly supports Israel.  The other type [...]

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An antisemitic Jew I know, rather than seeing the Passover ceremony as the celebration of freedom (the world’s first and for a long time only successful slave revolt), and of justice and morality (the Ten Commandments), derides the whole ceremony as the unconscionable and immoral celebration of the genocide of the Egyptian people.  What troubles [...]

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My Manchurian candidate post is getting a lot of readership, and I can’t even figure out what the sources are.  It’s just kind of dribbling around the internet.  That post focused on something very specific about Obama, which is the disconnect between his much trumpeted innate qualities.  We are told that he is brilliant, informed, [...]

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It will be interesting to see how Obama’s talks with Netanyahu go.  Netanyahu is light years ahead of Obama in terms of intelligence and experience.  Obama, however, has dense ideological filaments in his brain that may render him incapable of deviating from his biases.  In other words, I doubt that anything Netanyahu says will deter [...]

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I agree with Jonathan Tobin, who notes the Pope’s missteps and tone-deafness while in Israel, but then goes on to add this important caveat: But to say that Benedict is not John Paul should not be an excuse for Israelis or Jews to spend this week bashing either the Vatican or the Pope. While there [...]

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Sometimes, things just come together.  After shamefully neglecting my facebook, I checked in today and got a letter from a friend, asking why non-Jewish Americans should still support Israel when both American and Israeli Jews have so consistently made bad choices in support of that nation.  It’s a good question, and one that deserves an [...]

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One of the things that was most obvious about the Mumbai massacre was the extraordinary effort the attackers — who were ostensibly upset about the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir — made to kill Jews.  Not only did they seek out Jews in the hotels, they planned carefully and in advance to attack the single Jewish [...]

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Contentions blog has a short post about the Jewish vote for Obama.  I wrote a comment to that post, and share it with you here: American Jews aren’t really Jewish anymore.  With regard to Prop. 8′s success in California (preserving male/female marriage), I told a disappointed Jewish acquaintance, who was blaming “fanatic” Christians, that most [...]

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The title of my post is not true.  But it could be, which is really, really sad: American elementary and high school textbooks contain many “gross misrepresentations” of Judaism, Christianity and Israel, according to a book-length study released this week by the San Francisco-based Institute for Jewish and Community Research. “It is shocking to discover [...]

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I’m sure you won’t be surprised that many Obama supporters are new-fashioned Moonbat, Leftist antisemites. What you may be surprised to learn is that Obama’s official blog (not some sycophantic blog that an Obama groupie sets up on his own initiative) plays host to some of the worst antisemitic canards out there. LGF provides just [...]

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Mona Charen provides ample evidence proving that the 61% of American Jews who claim to support both Israel and Obama are suffering from dangerous cognitive dissonance — and she didn’t even include the mere 24 hours it took for Obama to flip-flop on Jerusalem.

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It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything this sad. It comes from the Church of England’s own newspaper: If recent reports of trends in religious observance prove to be correct, then in some 30 years the mosque will be able to claim that, religiously speaking, the UK is an Islamic nation, and therefore [...]

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Alan J. Lerner said it best:  “Words, words, words!  I’m so sick of words.  I get words all day through, first from him now from you.  Is that all you blighters can do?” When it comes to Jews, Ed Lasky shows just how hollow Obama’s words of love are: Barack Obama has also said that [...]

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I read an interesting pair of articles today — bookends, if you will — that discuss Obama’s increasingly tortured relationship with American Jews. The first, by Sabrina Leigh Schaeffer, notes two things:  first, Obama’s Israel-friendly rhetoric and, second, his numerous associations with people who are openly antisemitic and actively hostile to Israel. What thinking people [...]

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Tom Friedman, man of the New York Times, writes to assure American Jews that Obama is no threat whatsoever to Israel’s security.  His column is a nasty little piece of work, not for what it says, but for what it doesn’t say.  It opens with a series of scare quotations purported from Barack Obama, all [...]

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When I was growing up, my best friend had the most wonderful grandparents. They were an incredibly flamboyant Polish couple who escaped the Holocaust because the woman was so charming she was able to talk the Nazis into letting them leave (with the help of some diamonds as bribes). He was pretty charming too, not [...]

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