Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Family Security Matters Briefings - Week of 7/14/08

Sudan: The Beginning of the End
By J. Peter Pham, Ph.D.

On Monday the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno-Ocampo, presented evidence to a panel of judges asking for the issuance of an arrest warrant against Sudanese President Umar Hassan al-Bashir on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes for his role in the conflict in Darfur. While it is highly unlikely that a legal indictment from a tribunal sitting at The Hague will have much immediate effect on what the United Nations has termed "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world" - if anything, as some critics of the move have already argued, it might worsen the situation, at least in the short-term - the proceedings initiated signal the beginning of the end, not only for Bashir and his Arab-dominated Islamist regime, but for the geopolitical monstrosity that has been Sudan. [more...]

Jews, Persians at Swords' Points
By Clare M. Lopez

Iranian missile tests sent shock waves across the Middle East this past week, with the clerical regime's spokesmen leaving no doubt the demonstration was aimed squarely at Israel. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's representative to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Ali Shirazi, threatened to "burn" Tel Aviv while IRGC Commander Mohammed Ali-Jafari's comments took aim directly at Israel's nuclear facilities at Dimona. Iran's Great Prophet III military exercises were touted as a reaction to Israel's own war games of June, during which over 100 Israeli Defense Force F-15's and F-16's, supported by aerial refueling tankers, demonstrated their ability to cover the distance between Israel and Iran's key uranium enrichment center at Natanz. [more...]

'Ya Doesn't Hafta Call Me Hussein'
By Dr. Harvey Kushner

Back in the 1970s, comedian Bill Saluga made it big with a zoot-suited character named Raymond J. Johnson Jr. If called Johnson, Saluga erupted, "Ahh, ya doesn't has to call me Johnson! You can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay, or you can call me Johnny or you can call me Sonny, or you can call me RayJay, or you can call me RJ... but ya doesn't hafta call me Johnson." Who would have thought that Saluga's tirade would characterize reaction to the mention of the middle name of the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Barack Hussein Obama? Dropping the "H" bomb when referring to him gets more than a comical rant - it gets you labeled racist. Why should this surprise anyone? The terminology Gestapo activated itself less than a week after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when the President stated that we would be waging a crusade against a new kind of evil. [more...]

Jesse Helms: The Indispensable Man Who Made President Reagan Possible
By Joel Himelfarb

Aside from Ronald Reagan, no one did more than Sen. Jesse Helms to advance the cause of freedom in the world in the past 30 years. President Reagan's contributions - staving off a communist takeover in Central America, denying trade credits and technology to the Communist Bloc, and overseeing a military buildup that ultimately won the Cold War - are well known. But the indispensable role played by the North Carolina Republican, who died July 4th at age 86, may as well be ancient history to many Americans, especially to members of the under-30 You Tube generation, many of whom were not even born when Helms began his Senate career in 1973. It's time for that to change. Helms was a giant in late 20th century American politics, and aside from Ronald Reagan, the most important figure in the modern American conservative movement. You cannot understand American politics today - particularly the sorry state of the Senate - without understanding the contributions of Jesse Helms and the enormous vacuum created by his retirement five and a half years ago. [more...]

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