Category Archives: Judaism & Jews

Updated: The Law Of Medina (Debra)

Classical Liberalism, Constitution, Elections, Founding Fathers, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Liberty

She bears the name of another extraordinary woman, the Prophet Deborah, who was judge and leader of Israel in antiquity. Debra Medina is in the race against the incumbent, Rick Perry, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison to “capture the government of the second biggest state in America,” Texas.

They, the far-gone establishment, have branded candidates like her “extreme candidates.” JD Hayworth, who is poised to whip McMussolini, is receiving the same treatment.

The Guardian:

Medina is no Sarah Palin. She has no need to write on her hand to remember her talking points. Instead her speech was a complex walk through her extreme anti-government philosophy, citing sources as varied as the Austrian school of economics, St Augustine and modern French philosophers. She said she wanted to get rid of property taxes and allow Texans to do whatever they wanted with anything they owned, whether that was dig for oil or build an extension. There was, she said, no constitutional basis for a federal Department of Education or an Environmental Protection Agency or the Federal Reserve. Texas should assert its rights almost as a nation-state, controlling over its own National Guard units. The disdain for government was visceral. The American way, she said, was simple. “There are two rights essential to freedom: private property and gun ownership.”

What I’d like to know is this: Why would Glenn Beck try to trip up this terrific candidate with a question about her supposed “Truther” proclivities?

Only once has Medina slipped up – in an interview she gave to the conservative radio host Glenn Beck. On his show Medina was asked if she thought the US government might have had a role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She replied: “I don’t.” She then went on to expand disastrously upon that answer. “I don’t have all the evidence there… I think some very good questions have been raised in that regard. There are some very good arguments and I think the American people have not seen all the evidence there, so I have not taken a position on that,” she said.

I heard Beck proudly re-run the interview; he seemed flabbergasted that the woman had dared to doubt the integrity of the American state.

Not being a conspiracy theorist myself, it is my view that such a bent far from disqualifies a candidate. In the context of Medina, a hardcore, life-long advocate for natural liberty—a proclivity for conspiracy simply signifies a deep distrust of the Federal Frankenstein.

And that is a good thing.

Incidentally, in a previous post I alerted you to the theft of Jewish history. I see that the looting of the Hebrew language is proceeding apace too. The word Medina has a Hebrew root. Yet the freedictionary.com gives the word an Arabic origin. False.

The root of Aramaic-Hebrew medina is din, ‘law,‘ and medina in both languages denotes a place in which a given body of law or legal system is applied, i.e., an area of political jurisdiction.”

In any event, here are 50 facts about Debra Medina. (“She was a high-level volunteer for Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. She describes her relationship with Paul as “good,” but frames it more as the typical interaction a constituent might have with a congressman.”)

Update (March 3): “Republican Gov. Rick Perry and Democratic former Houston Mayor Bill White clinched their parties’ nominations for governor Tuesday. … Medina declined to concede. Her campaign claimed that if Perry fell below 50 percent in the final vote count that she would be in a runoff with him because Hutchison had conceded. … ” [Houston Chronicle]

The reporting is so shoddy that, other than in Dan’s comment, I have not found a vote count for Medina. If it is 17 percent, Medina did terrifically. I’ve said it before: The fight for liberty is slow. Since the economy will not be getting better, inflated as it is by paper, Medina will win the next elections.

Update III: Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values (Senegal Does It Right)

America, Celebrity, Christianity, Ethics, Foreign Aid, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Media, Morality, Political Economy, The West, UN

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM column: “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values”:

“… in all its self-serving displays, humanitarianism is, overwhelmingly, a Western affair; a Judeo-Christian thing. It’s as simple as all that. Liberals like Angelina Jolie will trace Western generosity to the founding of the United Nations, to the League of Nations, or to some other supra-national structure.

I suspect that what is at play in Haiti, and in countless locales around the undeveloped world, began with the revolutionary, universal, elaborate moral and legal injunctions encoded first in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus – and, thereafter, throughout the Hebrew Bible – to protect and do justice by the poor, the weak, the defenseless, the widow and the stranger. The people of Israel were enjoined to practice what Christians later perfected.

That stuff stuck.

A different set of beliefs animates Haitian society, and helps explain its helplessness and hopelessness. ‘Haiti is not a Catholic country, Haiti is a Voodoo country,’ Erol Josue told National Public Radio. Josue is a Voodoo priest in a country whose former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, officially recognized Voodoo as a state religion.” …

The complete column is “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update I (Jan. 22): Martin’s comment hereunder reminded me what I clean forgot: the Obamas’ very public giving. I’m also grateful to Martin for bringing to our attention the DIRECT injunction in the New Testament against showy charity. Martin quotes the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.” How has this country forgotten something as foundational as that?

Self-righteousness has replaced righteousness and self-aggrandizement has supplanted simple goodness.

Update II (Jan. 23): CHILD SLAVERY still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.” Children are kept in grinding poverty and worked to the bone. In the West this would be considered perverse in the extreme; in Haiti owning a Restavek is a status symbol. CNN has done stories on Restavec children, but has never connected the dots, as the favorite phrase goes. The angle is, invariably one of, “Look how good I am [Dr. Gupta here]; I’m crying.” Coupled with, “This happens in the US too.

No it doesn’t. When a slave is discovered, usually in the home of immigrants who imported their bad habit, American society shames and punishes the offenders.

Update III (Jan. 24): SENEGAL DOES IT RIGHT. Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade has offered Haitian refugees a “parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,’ he said.”

Wade “insisted that if a region is handed over it should be in a fertile area – not in the country’s parched deserts.”

Wade’s got the right idea, or at least the righteous one. He is offering Haitians a most generous chance at self-sufficiency; at working the land.

“Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and codifier of Jewish law, holds that the most praiseworthy and effective means of fulfilling the commandment of Tzedakah [charity] is through offering an impoverished person a business partnership, a business loan or a job. … the Prime Minister and [former Finance Minister] of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently understood this well. Speaking on the benefits of workfare reform in Israel, Netanyahu was once quoted in the press as saying that it is not enough to be a Thatcherite, a Jew should go even further and become a Maimonidite. [Excerpted from the monograph titled Judaism, Markets, and Capitalism: Separating Myth from Reality, by Corinne and Robert Sauer of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, with which I am affiliated.]

[SNIP]

Will Haitians be tempted by a chance at an honest living when hand-outs abound?

Updated: The Golem* Goldstone Goes To Gaza

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Judaism & Jews, Just War, Law, Palestinian Authority, South-Africa, UN

From my new WND column, “The Golem Goldstone Goes To Gaza”:

“When introducing Judge Goldstone, Fareed Zakaria described the judge as having made his name, among other acts of greatness, in pursuing an end to the political violence that came with apartheid in his home country of South Africa.

Ostracized for his convictions, this writer’s father – Rabbi Ben Isaacson – was a leading anti-apartheid activist. Goldstone had no such history of protest, father assures me. The roaming judge attached himself like a limpet mine to the anti-apartheid cause only once it became fashionable, safe and professionally expedient.

Goldstone’s Wiki biography corroborates father’s recollection. The judge joined the cause du jour in ‘the latter years of apartheid in South Africa.’ Goldstone’s “courageous” judicial decisions in the cause of freedom, moreover, comported with what South Africa’s Western system of Dutch-Roman law provided – a system currently being replaced, by the African National Congress, with a blend of tribal and totalitarian laws.

To this expatriate South African, the most anodyne assertion Goldstone made to zombie Zakaria was this one…”

Read the complete column, “The Golem Goldstone Goes To Gaza.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update (Jan. 9): A few readers, some via my WND mail box, have told me I’ve erred as far as the meaning of Golem goes. I’m relatively confident that my commonplace use of the term is accurate (if perhaps not true to the original meaning), so I’ve left it. Usually, I hurry to correct blatant errors.

So why am I comfortable with the column’s usage?

I’m an ex-Israeli. My first language is Hebrew. Although I once spoke and wrote a sharp Hebrew (much like my English), slang has since (as in the US and the UK) changed older, popular usage. As old-timers like myself are in the habit of saying, no one speaks Yerushalmic Hebrew on the news any longer as the wonderful Haim Yavin used to. Yavin was the most elegant anchorman in looks and language.

Back to the topic. “Golem” in popular, modern usage is a derogatory term. Call an Israeli of my age group (still way younger than Yavin, of course) a Golem, and, while you’ve not wounded him mortally, you have, in good humor, berated him.

‘Have You No Shame?!’

Anti-Semitism, Canada, Iran, Israel, Judaism & Jews, UN

Bibi Netanyahu’s excoriating address to the UN is being described as “Churchillian.” I doubt Bibi matched the master, but the address was factual, solemn, dignified and to the point (excerpted and YouTubed below).

So too is Canada to be commended. Foreign minister Lawrence Cannon walked out while A-Jad, the Iranian Majnun, delivered his rant. (A-Jad is short for Ahmadinejad. First name: Mahmoud. Residence: Iran. Occupation: dictator.) The Canada of Prime Minister Stephen Harper has a good record with respect to Israel.

Said Canada’s Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon: “The prime minister of Canada indicated earlier today that the outrageous statements by Iran’s president, denying, of course, a holocaust, casting terrible aspersions against the state of Israel, the complete violation for human rights … as we’ve seen Iran over the course of the last several years, complete disregard for United Nations Security Council resolutions, prompted us quite clearly to not be in the same room with the Iranians while the president was making his speech.”

Details are sketchy, but the US seems to have lingered a little too long in the assembly. I can’t find information on who stayed tuned to the fulminating A-Jad and who left. [Any one?]

Over to Bibi: “Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.

But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?

A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state.

What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations!”… [A mockery of the Charter, perhaps, but true to the record of the institution.]

The full text.

Part I of the address: