Ben Weingarten

Reader. Writer. Thinker. Commentator. Truth Seeker.

Month: October 2015

Obama’s Jihad Empowering Foreign Policy and America’s National Interest in Syria

On Friday 10/31, I sat in as a guest again on Newsmax TV’s “The Daily Wrap.”

During the episode, we had the chance to discuss a variety of issues including Obama’s deployment of a limited number of American Special Forces members to Syria to help Syrian “rebels” (read: “good” jihadists) in the fight against ISIS, reaction to the CNBC GOP Debate and proposals for improving future ones, Hillary Clinton’s crude politicization of the VA, and more!

You can watch the show in full, along with some particularly pertinent clips below.

Full Episode

Obama’s Foreign Policy, Syria and ISIS

GOP Anger with the CNBC Debate

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My Interview with National Review Publisher Jack Fowler on William F. Buckley’s ‘The Unmaking of a Mayor’

Check out my interview for Encounter Books with National Review publisher and friend Jack Fowler on William F. Buckley’s timeless and very much timely The Unmaking of a Mayor, which Encounter has just released for the 50th anniversary of Buckley’s epic 1965 New York Mayoral campaign:

Featured Image Source: Encounter Books.

PJ Media: Israel, the Media’s Hard Bigotry of ‘High’ Expectations and the Obama Intifada

The notion that a video caused a jihadist attack, or that jihadism more broadly is tolerable or understandable given socioeconomics, “climate disruption” or anything else evinces a soft bigotry of low expectations.

Conversely, the notion that Israel’s defensive action in response to jihadism is always and everywhere “disproportionate” – that unless Israel acts in a self-righteously suicidal manner it is in the wrong – evinces a hard bigotry of “high” expectations.

I explore this outrageous double standard in context of the Third Intifada — in which the media is effectively complicit — in a new article for PJ Media titled Israel, the Media’s Hard Bigotry of ‘High’ Expectations and the Obama Intifada.

Here’s a taste:

As the Lutheran pastor and courageous Nazi resistor Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Not to speak is to speak.” Today he might say of Israeli-Arab coverage, “Not to judge is to judge.” That is, in trying to appear “even-handed,” the media actually explicitly judges when it comes to Arab jihadists versus Jews in Israel.

In drawing moral equivalence between two morally unequivalent sides, the media downgrades Israelis while upgrading jihadists, and worse judges the Israeli as the oppressor and the Arab as the oppressed. The media judges jihadist savagery as tolerable, but Jewish defensive action as unacceptable. The media judges the Arab right to a state (for a Palestinian people that has never existed) as inviolable, but Israel’s right to exist as unconscionable.

Read the whole thing here.

Featured Image Source: MEMRI.

The Massive Tower that Donald Trump is Building in Jeb Bush’s Head

On Monday 10/26, I sat in as a guest again on Newsmax TV’s “The Daily Wrap.”

During the episode, we had the chance to discuss a variety of issues including the travesty that is the IRS scandal and the lack of recourse for its victims, staggering new numbers about the perilous state of our economy as reflected in the percentage of Americans making under $30,000 per year, Donald Trump’s recent attack on Ben Carson, and Trump’s persistent needling of Jeb Bush and the massive Trump tower he is currently constructing in Bush’s head.

You can watch the show in full, along with some particularly pertinent clips below.

Full Episode

The Massive Trump Tower that “The Donald” is Constructing in Jeb Bush’s Head

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National Review: The Rise and Fall of the New York Mets, and America

I was honored and privileged that National Review invited me to write an article about my beloved pennant-winning New York Mets for my debut in that seminal publication.

Below is a representative sample from my paean to the Amazin’ Metropolitans:

The fates of the Mets and of America were joined, embodied in the Mets’ new ballpark, Citi Field, which opened in 2009. This characterless McMansion of a stadium — largely devoid of defining Mets-ness, save for a steroid-injected apple — was so titled thanks to a naming-rights deal effectively underwritten by the taxpayer. Like much of America’s housing stock, the Mets’ home, Citi Field would remain largely uninhabited during miserable years to come. The edifice literally rusted before it even saw its first game.

As the American economy slogged along, so too did the Mets, who found creative ways to fail en route to six straight losing seasons. Supposedly minor injuries festered and led to lost years. Management claimed it had funds to acquire talent, while continuously cutting back. The Mets’ debt ballooned as it serviced existing debt.

Early in 2015, the team’s imprudent and miserly majority owner was named the head of Major League Baseball’s Finance Committee. Was “failing upward,” as in politics, a new rule in MLB?

Then, just in time for Opening Day, Steve Kettmann’s book Baseball Maverick: How Sandy Alderson Revolutionized Baseball and Revived the Mets was published. How could anyone have the temerity to argue that the Mets’ general manager, who had not overseen a single winning Mets team, had revived the Metropolitans?

Demoralized, some Mets fans even put up billboards above the chop shops near Citi Field, urging the Mets’ owners to sell the team.

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My Appearance on Newsmax TV’s ‘The Daily Wrap’: Democratic Knives Come Out for Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and More!

On Friday 10/19 I again sat in as a guest on Newsmax TV’s “The Daily Wrap.”

During the episode, I had the chance to discuss President Obama’s comments regarding the national security implications of the Hillary Clinton email scandal and the FBI’s reportedly angered reaction to said comments, the Dems’ disparaging of Debbie Wasserman Schultz over her DNC “dictatorship” and alleged favoritism towards Hillary, RNC Chair Reince Priebus’ comments about the Republican Party being “cooked” if the GOP loses the presidency in 2016, Ben Carson, Donald Trump and more.

You can watch some particularly pertinent clips below:

Dems With Knives Out for Debbie

Reince Priebus on the GOP Potentially Being “Cooked”

Trump and Carson

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My Interview With Jay Cost on ‘What’s So Bad About Cronyism?’

Check out my interview for Encounter Books with Jay Cost of The Weekly Standard on his new broadside What’s So Bad About Cronyism?:

 

Featured Image Source: Thomas Nast (1840-1902). Two Great Questions. 1871. Museum of the City of New York. x2011.5.533.

My Appearance on Newsmax TV’s ‘The Daily Wrap’: Trump and ‘El Chapo,’ Hillary Emailgate, Obama’s Convict Release and More

On Wednesday 10/7 I again sat in as a guest on Newsmax TV’s “The Daily Wrap.” During the episode I had the chance to discuss Trump’s “counter-punches” and the rumored bounty placed on his head by “El Chapo,” the rolling Hillary email scandal, President Obama’s decision to release 6,000 convicts and much more.

You can watch the show in full, along with some particularly pertinent clips below.

Full Episode

Trump and “El Chapo”

Hillary’s Rolling Email Scandal

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My Appearance on Newsmax TV’s ‘The Daily Wrap’: Guns, Biden, Racism, Trump and More

I had the pleasure of sitting in as a guest on Newsmax TV’s “The Daily Wrap,” discussing President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s recent rhetoric (and in the case of the former, potential impending action) on guns in the wake of the Oregon shooting, Joe Biden’s alleged politicization of his son’s death, a potentially illegal affirmative action policy at U.C.-Berkeley, whether Donald Trump will stay in the Republican race for the long haul, and much more.

You can watch the show in full, along with some particularly pertinent clips below.

And be sure to tune in tonight (10/7) as I will be a guest for the full hour on the program again, from 6-7PM ET. You can watch live here.

Full Episode

Guns

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Allah and Man at Yale

Here’s a taste of my latest at The Federalist, in which I question why Yale University is taking $10 million from a jihadi-tied Saudi billionaire to build an Islamic (read: Sharia) Law center that propagates an ideology under which Yale itself could not exist:

While America remains financially and militarily the mightiest nation on Earth, it is losing the war Islamic supremacism is waging against her because it is chiefly an ideological one. We have the strength to defend ourselves, but we lack the knowledge and the will to defeat our enemies. We are morally relativistic and therefore unable to acknowledge that different peoples are different and that not all ideologies are equal or seek the same ends.

But people like Saleh Kamal surely understand us. In the conquest ideology inherent to Sharia—Islam compels Muslims to extend the Islamic sphere, the ummah, over all the world—America has found an enemy able to best take advantage of our deeply held freedoms. Sharia explicitly calls for the use of the very tactics against which America is most vulnerable.

As a consequence of our willful blindness (contrasted with Islamic supremacists’ comparable clarity), we are constructing Islamic law centers, inviting Muslims to immigrate by the hundreds of thousands without recognition that Hijra is a form of jihad, and, 14 years after 9/11, our top military minds are arguing that we back al-Qaeda against ISIS—that is, the newly “good jihadists” against the “bad jihadists.” For the coup de grace, we are actively aiding, abetting, and enabling Iran’s Twelver jihadist regime in its quest for nuclear domination of the Middle East and beyond.

Read the whole thing here.

Featured Image Source: YouTube Screengrab/Firing Line.

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