And yet, gays still support Queers for Palestine: Israel, the only country in the Middle East that protects gays’ civil rights, rescued a gay Israeli Arab from his family after they kidnapped and beat him. Oh, and they arrested his family on kidnapping charges. But sure, go protest against Israel. Because the Ramallah Gay Pride Parade is going to happen any century now.
Nukes for the whole Middle East! On the heels of the Iranian Bushehr reactor going online, we have Hassan Nasrallah calling for Lebanon to get a nuclear power plant, and Egypt finalizing the site of its first nuclear power plant. All right, Obama! Your strategy is working just fine, if your strategy was to bash Israel over nukes while turning a blind eye to the rest of the Middle East getting nukes. No way this ends well.
Is she dumb, stupid, or all three? Catherine Ashton is defending the organizer of the weekly Bilin protests against the separation fence as a “human rights defender.” The richest part of the statement? Ashton says the imprisonment is “intended to prevent him and other Palestinians from exercising their legitimate right to protest against the existence of the separation barriers in a non-violent manner.” Non-violent? Puh-leeze. Google “If it’s Friday, this must be Bilin” on my site and see how many hits you get. Let’s see. Broken leg. Stoning. Defending terrorists (and stoning). Riots. More stonings. And that’s just a cursory search. Say, Cath—“nonviolent”? I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
Iran isn’t even pretending that Hezbollah acts on its own anymore: Iran is readying itself to complete the takeover of Lebanon. It has publicly announced it’s ready to sell arms to the Lebanese army. If the world does nothing, it will. So the big question is: Will the UN ignore the public Iranian funding of Hezbollah? (I’m betting yes.)
Completely off topic, but you may want to check out this story at Z street
> STREET, a pro-Israel non-profit corporation, filed a lawsuit in federal court today charging that the IRS violated the organization’s First Amendment rights. The suit was filed after Z STREET was told by an IRS official that its application for tax-exempt status has been delayed because an IRS policy requires consideration of whether a group’s views on Israel differ from those of the current Administration. <
More at
http://www.zstreet.org/
First saw the story at Solomonia today.
Kesiva v'chasima tovah.
I don’t buy that story at all. My BS detector is maxed out. If there’s a drop of truth to it, I’m betting you’ll find that it’s a moron working for the IRS, not official policy.
Meryl, the big question of course is whether an IRS representative said what Z Street’s attorney claims was said.
What sounds strange to me is not that such a policy exists but that anyone at the IRS would be dumb enough to admit it.
Anyone with the price of a filing fee can walk into court and file a lawsuit, but an attorney who signs a complaint without good ground to support it is subject to sanctions, including payment of the other side’s legal fees. And an attorney who signs a false affidavit can be disbarred and even imprisoned, so it is not something that many attorneys would do lightly. I guess we’ll learn more as the case progresses. As dumb as the IRS rep would have to be to make the alleged statement, Z Street and its lawyers would have to be even dumber to make something like this up.
By the way, if you feel a serious need to vomit, take a look at the comments on this story at Ben Smith’s site on Politico.com.
Well, I read the comments over on Smith’s piece, and I’ve seen far worse in many other places. In fact, there are a lot of pro-Israel commenters.
I still think that if Z Street was told that, it was by an idiot who thinks that she or he makes policy for the IRS, when in fact, that person is paid to do a job. I think we’re going to find out that it was a lone moron, not the IRS, trying to examine a pro-Israel lobbying group that way.
Have you ever had any dealings with the IRS? They’re not staffed with the brightest bulbs on the tree. Many of them are low-paid staffers who give terrible advice, and woe to the person on the other end of the phone who listens to them. I am speaking from personal experience, as well as from the experience of my father, who worked for the Newark IRS office for some time.
Tempest in a teapot. The IRS will be shown to have no such policy.