What the late singer, Ed Ames, encouraged us to "Try to Remember"

Fifty-days short of his 96th birthday, actor and singer Ed Ames died in Hollywood from Alzheimer's Disease. He passed on the Sunday before Memorial Day weekend, which is significant that such a patriot be remembered close to one of the rare dates that some Americans consider that our freedom might take earning and maintaining.

You may remember Ed Ames for his acting, whether on television as Daniel Boone's sentry Mingo, (whose tomahawk throwing skills astonished Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show) or a solo recording artist, known for "My Cup Runneth Over" or "Try to Remember" from his off-Broadway acting role in "The Fantasticks."

The Tonight Show's co-host, Ed McMahon, in a video interview, considered Ames' and Carson's tomahawk demonstration "the funniest laugh ever in television!"

In the context of the theatrical The Fantasticks, Mr. Ames' "Try to Remember" reminds us to appreciate and learn from our earlier experiences. Don't take our prior life conditions for granted, as circumstances may deteriorate over time. 

(Ed Ames on video singing "Try to Remember" on a PBS show called Over Easy hosted by Hugh Downs 12/31/79). (courtesy PizzaGuy2002)

Less well known is Mr. Ames' socio-political activism. America's epoch of the 1950's included coping with 

Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao

a Communist threat from the newly-atomic Soviet Union. In the mid-60's Mao's Zedong's Communist Chinese Party undertook what they called the Cultural Revolution. This revolution demonstrated the power of propaganda and ideology to manipulate and control people. Mao's Red Guards were able to use these tools to turn ordinary citizens against each other, which led to widespread violence and destruction. Estimates range that the regime persecuted millions of people whom they deemed to be enemies of the state, killing many (estimated between .5 and 2 million people).

Imperialist Islamism, Marxism opposes free states

A native Jewish Bostonian, Mr. Ames witnessed the arrival of Jewish refugee survivors of the Holocaust. The Nazi-influenced, mideast Arab politicians launched military wars attempting a new genocide of the Jews of Israel, beginning at this time of year, in May,1948. This would recur in 1967, 1973, and 1982. To advocate to preserve American support for Israel amidst the newly Islamist Iran, Mr. Ames became active in the Zionist Organization of America, eventually becoming President of its Los Angeles chapter.

Observing Barack Obama's shifting US support away from Israel and towards her avowed Islamist enemies, Mr. Ames became more involved in Republican culture, putting his reputation at risk in Hollywood.

On September 11, 2011, we asked Ed Ames about how well western societies were doing not mollifying society against defeating the global Jihad, 10-years after the Islamist attacks on Washington and New York City.

In this video, he expresses his concerns about the lack of vigilance in various sectors of the American society that could potentially render the country defenseless against the war on terror. He warns against reducing the military spending, which could result in the country admitting defeat, and points out that Israel is the primary democratic country in the Middle East that has to defend itself from Islamism from within and without. Ames emphasizes that Israel is America's bastion in the Middle East, which spends the money given to it by America on American arms, thereby creating American jobs. Ames argues that the Obama administration has downplayed the role of radical Islam in the conflict with America and suggests that Obama has done nothing to help Israel, in fact, has targeted them before the UN Civil Rights Commission while overlooking their democratic and generous nature.

• 00:00:00 In this section, Ed Ames expresses his concerns about the lack of vigilance in the America's government, press, universities, and television, which could make the country defenseless against the war on terror. He states that reducing the government's military spending will hollow out the military and will lead to an admission of defeat, which will be disastrous for the country. He points out that Iraq will become a semi-colony of Iran if the US leaves, Israel will become tools of the Iranian mullahs, and the Taliban will take over Afghanistan if troops fully withdraw. Lastly, he emphasizes that Israel is the only democratic country in the Middle East that is at war with the Muslims, who formally declared war on the US, citing that Israel is the canary in the mine.
  


• 00:05:00 In this section of the video, Ed Ames discusses the relationship between Israel and the United States. He notes that 80% of the money the US gives to Israel is spent back in the US. He also emphasizes that Israel is America's bastion in the Middle East, spending their money on American arms, which helps create American jobs. Ames then addresses the Obama administration's approach to downplaying the role of radical Islam in the conflict with America. He says that Islam is not a pure religion but, instead, a political group looking to conquer and set up a caliphate. He warns that even if Islamists denounce militant jihadism, it doesn't mean that they have given up their goal of a revolution against American democracy.
  
  
• 00:10:00 In this section, the speaker argues that lying in the name of advancing the interests of Islam is justified in order to expand their conquest of the world, which is the opposite of peace. He also discusses the Arab Lobby's attempt to establish hegemony over the United States and how a significant portion of the Muslim population sympathize with the jihadi cause. When discussing Obama's Mideast policies, Ames suggests that his family's background and associations suggest a lack of hostility towards the jihadi cause and a willingness to let Israel fall. The speaker also believes that Obama has done nothing to help Israel and, in fact, has targeted them before the UN Civil Rights Commission while overlooking the democratic and generous nature of Israel.

• 00:15:00 In this section, Ed Ames explains that it is against the law of Islam to kill people arbitrarily. He then goes on to criticize the Obama administration for what he believes to be a lie - bringing Israel and Arizona before the United Nations to be judged, an action that he believes mollifies both America's and Israel's resistance against Islamist conquest.
  

In this excerpt from a TJ Lublinsky PBS special, Mr. Ames performs "Who Will Answer" reflecting his concerns about the decaying conditions in our society.

Netanyahu launches all-out assault on Iran prop at UN (video & transcript); Obama pulls Sec'y Kerry & Amb. Power from General Assembly

"Netanyahu Rebukes U.N. Over Iran Accord" Despite losing political ground to Obama, Israeli prime minister condemns nuclear deal, says Tehran’s threats have been met by ‘utter silence’ at global body.  Wall St. Journal Oct 1 by Carol E. Lee Jay Solomon and Joe Lauria

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday delivered a fiery address here condemning the Iranian nuclear deal, largely unbowed in his opposition despite losing steep political ground to President Barack Obama over the issue this year.

In his speech to the General Assembly, Mr. Netanyahu thundered that Iranian threats to destroy Israel have been met in the world body by “utter silence, deafening silence.” He then stopped speaking for 45 seconds, panning the hall with a furrowed glare.

“Perhaps you can now understand why Israel is not joining you in celebrating this deal,” he said.

"Obama pulled John Kerry and Samantha Power from Netanyahu U.N. Speech" Breitbart by Jordan Schachtel - Oct. 1

Breitbart News has learned that President Obama called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power into a video conference before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday.

“Ambassador Power and Secretary Kerry were unable to attend Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech before the General Assembly because they were called into a meeting with President Obama, which they participated in via video teleconference,” a State Department Official told Breitbart News.

Although they were both in New York for the United Nations General Assembly meetings, the two high-ranking U.S. officials were notably absent for the entirety of the Israeli Prime Minister’s speech.

“The United States was represented at the speech by Ambassador David Pressman, Alternate Representative of the United States to the United Nations for Special Political Affairs, Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro, and Ambassador Richard Erdman, Alternate Representative to the UN General Assembly,” the official added.

During his speech before the United Nations, the Israeli Prime Minister excoriated the international body for not condemning the Iranian regime when it calls for Israel’s destruction.

“70 years after the murder of six-million Jews, Iran’s rulers promised to destroy my country, murder my people, and the response from this body, the response from nearly every one of the governments represented here, has been absolutely nothing. Utter silence. Deafening Silence,” Netanyahu said in his condemnation of the United Nations.

Netanyahu rallied against the Iran deal, an agreement which President Obama helped facilitate between the P5+1 world powers (US, UK, France, China, Russia, Germany) and the regime in Tehran.

In his address, Netanyahu said that Iran’s “plan to destroy Israel will fail. Israel will not permit any force on earth to threaten its future.”

“Israel will not allow Iran to break in, to sneak in, or to walk into the nuclear weapons club,” he pledged.

Below is the full transcript of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks before the United Nations General Assembly on October 1st, 2015.  Algemeiner  Oct 1 "Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you greetings from Jerusalem. The city in which the Jewish People’s hopes and prayers for peace for all of humanity have echoed throughout the ages.

Israeli Amb. Michael Oren "Ally" book tour video - revealing the secrets behind the spin

Former Israeli Amb. to US Michael Oren at Nixon Library July 2, '15

In his revealing auto-biography, "Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide," American-born Michael Oren discusses his experience becoming appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to work with the Obama administration as Israel's ambassador to the U.S. 


Recorded before an audience at L.A.'s Museum of Tolerance, in a speech and conversation with David Suissa of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. July 1, 2015.



Above, Amb. Oren fields a broad range of questions from the audience (in two segments).

David Bernstein in the Washington Post refers to "How Israel Got Taken" a review of the book by Michael Doran in Mosaic Magazine. Doran claims that "Netanyahu undertook, at American insistence, an unprecedented settlement freeze, became the first Likud prime minister to endorse the establishment of a Palestinian state, and refrained from engaging in military action against Iran. He might have added that Netanyahu released hundreds of terrorist murderers to further John Kerry’s misbegotten “peace process.” While Netanyahu hasn’t always behaved well, even when he did the White House’s bidding he was met solely with contempt, more contempt than the Obama Administration has shown for any other foreign leader. That would be okay, if one really trusted Obama on the one issue key to Israeli security (and, in my opinion, key to the security of the entire Middle East and therefore to American security), preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons."

United Against Nuclear Iran group has published this public service political advertisement:

Obama tries Jedi-mind-trick on DC synagogue to swallow his Iran-nuclear & Palestinian initiatives

Rabbi Gil Steinlauf welcomes Obama's address to Cong. Adas Israel in D.C.

In a mind-trick worthy of a Jedi warrior, Pres. Barack Obama gave a speech to molify members of Washington's Congregation Adas Israel on Friday May 22nd, to trust his benevolence (instead of Israeli intelligence and defense leaders) that his shifting US policy towards Iran and a state of Palestine would make Israel safe.  

Ha'aretz has published the full-text of Obama's speech 


"President Barack Obama, wearing a kipah "forcefully" objected to suggestions that policy differences between his administration and the Israeli government signaled his lack of support for the longtime US ally. This raises a question: How do Obama's repeated commitments to Israel’s security square with close US military and intelligence cooperation with an organization whose vow to destroy Israel is backed by 100,000 missiles – all pointed south?" ("US and Hizballah coordinate spy drone flights over Qalamoun, share US combat intelligence," in DebkaFile 5/23/15)

Radio-host, Mark Levin, criticized Obama's ploy, strongly, in this soliloquy:


Radio-host and author, Ben Shapiro presents a good case against trusting Obama on Israel, based on 7-years of history. In A Complete Timeline of Obama's Anti-Israel Hatred in Breitbart.com 3/20/15

... This is the culmination of a longtime Obama policy of destroying the US-Israel relationship; Obama has spent his entire life surrounded by haters of Israel, from former Palestine Liberation Organization spokesman Rashid Khalidi to former Jimmy Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, pro-Hamas negotiator Robert Malley to UN Ambassador Samantha Power (who once suggested using American troops to guard Palestinians from Israelis), Jeremiah Wright (who said “Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me”) to Professor Derrick Bell (“Jewish neoconservative racists…are undermining blacks in every way they can”). Here is a concise timeline, with credit to Dan Senor and the editors of Commentary:

February 2008: Obama says while campaigning, ‘There is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel.” At the time, as Dan Senor pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, Israel was run by the Kadima government run by Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, and Shimon Peres, and was attempting desperately to bring the Palestinians to the table. Instead, the Palestinians launch war, as always.

June 2008: Obama tells the American Israel Public Affairs Conference that Jerusalem ought to remain undivided, attempting to woo Jewish votes. He then walks that back the next day, saying only that the capital shouldn’t be divided by barbed wire.

Bret Stephens: Americans will rue-the-day Obama allowed Iran to build a nuclear bomb in weeks

"In 1938, Chamberlain bought time to rearm. In 2013, Obama gives Iran time to go nuclear. To adapt Churchill : Never in the field of global diplomacy has so much been given away by so many for so little." -Bret Stephens "Worse than Munich" column in the Wall St. Journal

In addressing a Zionist banquet by StandWithUs in Los Angeles on Sunday, 8 December, Mr. Stephens augmented this theory, echoed by other experts. Listen to the speech audio here. Transcript for 2nd half of the speech appears here on JewTube.Info:

"Now, it will come as no surprise to anyone that I want to spend most of my time tonight talking about Iran, but I think that it is also fitting feel that I should begin by speaking about Nelson Mandela and the meaning of his legacy and its meaning for us as Americans- for us as Jews. 



"In the 1980s there was a sharp debate in this country about how the United States ought best to deal with the apartheid regime in South Africa. On one side there were those who argued, this was the Regan administration, that the best way to deal with the apartheid regime was through a process of 'engagement'- critical engagement but engagement. The argument that the administration made was that sanctions will only hurt ordinary people, above all ordinary black people in South Africa, and furthermore that South Africa for all its obvious moral failings, was none the less a critical strategic partner for the United States and so that the were interests beyond morality- that there were interest of "real politik" in maintaining an alliance of sorts with that regime. On the other side of the argument there was a bi-partisan coalition that ranged from Bob Dole to Lowell Weicker, to Ted Kennedy, who thought that the best approach to the apartheid regime was also the most moral one- that is, a punitive regime(n) of economic and diplomatic sanctions that would show South Africa's white rulers that they would not be allowed to profit from their rule and that the only road to redemption was to eliminate their repressive system and let the people, all of the people, rule.

Middle East facts out-reason left-wing, anti-Zionists at American-Israel Policy Conference in D.C.

Original videos filmed around AIPAC Policy Conference reveal competing perceptions, agendas, on US Mid-East policy.  

Anti-Zionist demonstrators slandered Israel and US Mid-East policy outside of AIPAC Policy Conference at the Washington Convention Center in early March.  Their oversimplified platitudes were contradicted by the Conference's reasoned analysis of Mid-East realities and the Obama Administration's Mid-East policies.

Watch hand-filmed excerpts from the event on DemoCast's playlist: 

AIPAC attendees challenge Code-Pink and Occupy AIPAC demonstrators;

Israeli U.S. Ambassador Michael Oren speaks with CNN's Frank Sesno;

U.S. policy advisors Dennis Ross and Elliot Abrams speak with CNN's Frank Sesno;

Mid-east policy roundtable with analysts Robert Satloff, Greg Stephens (of the Wall St. Journal), and Israeli analyst Amos Harel;

U.S. Medal of Honor recipients Lt. Col. Hon. Alfred Rascon and Sgt. Major Ken Stumpf share their experience of the Israel Defense Forces following their recent visit to Israel.


(Advance through playlist with lower center buttons).

Chuck Hagel nomination- Obama's latest volley to vilify counter-Islamists

Is the Obama Administration working to marginalize  Zionistic Americans as "unpatriotic" or "unreasonable?" 

Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post explores Was Chuck Hagel nominated out of spite?  2/15/13

... What is unprecedented is to appoint a high national security official because the president is peeved about someone else.

Politico reports: The president feels personally invested in the nomination of Hagel. The Nebraska Republican is one of the few politicians he’s truly friendly with, and Obama plans to see the fight through, barring some major unforeseen development.

Democrats close to the White House say the typically cool-headed Obama has expressed flashes of real anger at what he sees as a politically motivated GOP fishing expedition that already netted his first choice for secretary of state — U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice.
Obama — ticked off by Rice’s treatment and still emboldened by his convincing victory over Mitt Romney — courted confrontation when he tapped Hagel.  If true, this is outlandish. The president would imperil national security out of spite? 

Mike Lumish's message, "American Jews need to Stand Up" in the Times of Israel's Ops and Blogs Section today augments Ms. Rubin's points:

"Jonathan Tobin has a piece, "Jewish Groups Must End Silence on Hagel" up at Commentary that concludes as follows:

The great irony, of course, is that while Hagel complains about the malicious power of the “Jewish lobby” Jewish organizations, with the notable exception of the Zionist Organization of America, have been almost entirely quiet regarding this toxic nomination of an unqualified bigot for the post of Secretary of Defense.  The western progressive-left tends to think that the “Jewish lobby” or the “Israel lobby” or AIPAC, or perhaps just the Jews as a whole, have a strangle-hold over the United States government.

We don’t.

It is a lie - and when influential people such as former Senator Chuck Hagel promote that lie they are spreading an ideological cancer of the sort that can have exceedingly dangerous consequences.  This is precisely the kind of thing that most American Jewish organizations were created to oppose and, yet, they are silent.  Jewish Democrats today, in the various pro-Israel / pro-Jewish non-profit organizations, seem incapable of mustering the fortitude to stand up to president Barack Obama.  By failing to do so they offer cover to Jewish congressional politicians, such as Chuck Schumer or Dianne Feinstein, who themselves remain supine before this president.

By refusing to accept the Hagel nomination without some further inquiry, the Republican Party has offered Jewish groups a golden opportunity to stand up for the best interests of the Jewish people, not to mention the best interests of the American people, through loudly and strongly and insistently opposing this nomination.

If the state of Israel means anything, it means Jewish people standing up for themselves in their own defense.  It means the resurrection not just of Jewish autonomy on traditionally Jewish land, but the resurrection of the Hebrew language and the creating and nurturing of Jewish culture in the arts and cinema and literature.  What the Israelis have created is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle because they have done something never before seen in the history of the planet.  They resurrected the national life of a people that wandered the earth, lost and desolate for two thousand years.

If Israeli Jews can do that, why cannot American Jews grow a spine and stand up for themselves?  AIPAC knows that Hagel is a potential nightmare, so why must they remain silent?  What good are they if they will not fight the very fights that they were created for to begin with?  I understand that it is counterproductive to fight battles that one is doomed to lose, but we are not doomed to lose this one if we would kindly show a little muscle and a little self-respect.

(Robert Kunst of Shalom Int'l outside the AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, DC)

Hagel is bad news and the world-wide Jewish community knows it, but the world-wide Jewish community has no say in who Congress affirms as the Secretary of Defense of the United States.  But Jewish Americans do have a say and if we fail to make our voices heard in opposition to a clear and present danger than we let down the Jewish people as a whole.

Something like 80 percent of American Jews, including me, voted for Barack Obama during his first election for the presidency in 2008.  Something like 69 percent, without me, voted for Barack Obama during his second election for the presidency last year.  Immediately upon securing his second term in office president Obama turned around and thanked his Jewish supporters with a nice smack in the head with this Hagel nomination.

I say that it is time to stand up… long past time, actually."

Pres. Obama has again turned down Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's offer to meet during his visit to Washington during the first week of March. Obama opts instead to meet with Netanyahu in Jerusalem. LatmaTV parodies Obama's intentions in planning his March trip to the Mid-East.