The Middle East Media Sampler 2/14/2013: Obama And The Decline of the Western World

From +David Gerstman:

1) Decline and its consequences

In October, 2009, Charles Krauthammer wrote, Decline is a choice:

The president then denounced the idea of elevating any group of nations above others--which takes care, I suppose, of the Security Council, the G-20, and the Western alliance. And just to make the point unmistakable, he denounced "alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War" as making "no sense in an interconnected world." What does that say about NATO? Of our alliances with Japan and South Korea? Or even of the European Union? 

This is nonsense. But it is not harmless nonsense.

The Middle East Media Sampler 8/20/2012: Europe Gives Hezbollah Terrorists Free Hand

From DG:

1) Nice continent you have there ... shame if anything happened to it

The New York Times reports Despite Alarm by U.S., Europe Lets Hezbollah Operate Openly. There's a lot of material in this article: some of it good and some of it disappointing spin. Notable though is the illustrative photograph of a crowd (apparently in Lebanon) giving full fisted salutes to Sheikh Nasrallah.

Washington and Jerusalem insist that Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed terrorist organization with bloody hands, and that it is working closely with Tehran to train, arm and finance the Syrian military’s lethal repression of the uprising there. Yet, the European Union continues to treat it foremost as a Lebanese political and social movement.