RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1981/From-the-Vault-Looking-Back-on-Iraq.aspx

Writing a weekly column is much like keeping a journal. It preserves thoughts and events of the day that would otherwise slip or blur in memory. Now that US forces have withdrawn from Iraq, I decided to look back on some of my many weekly entries on the topic to see if any of them might be of use in taking stock of what happened — and what didn’t happen.

Here, from the vault, is a column published almost exactly 5 years ago to the day on something that had just been newly announced in Washington: the “surge.”

12.23.06: “The pitfalls of `victory’ in Iraq”

http://nationalconferenceonjewishaffairs.org/

CONFERENCE OF JEWISH LEADERS REAFFIRMS ITS RESPECT FOR CONGRESSMAN ALLEN WEST

For Immediate Release

Contact: Beth Gilinsky (212) 726-1124 natlconference@gmail.com

December 21, 2011 — At this time, the National Conference on Jewish Affairs (NCJA) would like to reaffirm the great support that Congressman Allen West has shown the Jewish People and the State of Israel.

In matters of life, actions are the greatest barometer of personal sentiment. Thus, those detractors accusing Congressman West of being insensitive to Holocaust victims are exploiting the situation to their own political benefit. Congressman West, as he explained, used the term Goebbels-like, as is the norm today, as a reference to incessant propaganda to demonize an opponent. We understand that is the context in which the Congressman used the phrase when speaking about how the mainstream media and some extremists in the Democrat Party have propagandized against Republican colleagues.

All politics and heated rhetoric aside, Congressman Allen West remains one of the greatest friends of the worldwide Jewish community and retains our confidence in his leadership and friendship.

—

The National Conference on Jewish Affairs is a pro-Israel, pro-America umbrella organization of Jewish leaders from across the nation.

http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2011/12/21/no_on_mitt_romney/print

“He was, is and always will be a politician of convenience. If Iowans don’t recognize that threat, they’ll be undercutting their own case to lead off the primary season and buying into conventional wisdom instead of standing up for themselves. They’d no longer be Iowa stubborn — they’d be Iowa pushovers.”

In the Meredith Wilson musical “The Music Man,” a small Iowan town faces the sinister wiles of a big city con man, Harold Hill. In introducing themselves, they sing, “We could stand touchin’ noses / For a week at a time / And never see eye-to-eye. But what the heck, you’re welcome, / Join us at the picnic. You can eat your fill / Of all the food you bring yourself.”

By the end of Act Two, Hill has suckered these poor rubes into buying into his scheme. He’s done it by pretending to be one of them, by warning them of the evils of big city ways and by speaking on behalf of their innocent children.

These days, Harold Hill goes by a different name: Mitt Romney.

Throughout the Republican debates, Romney has somehow suckered much of the conservative world into believing that he is a solid fiscal, social and foreign policy conservative. He says many of the right things — though he looks supremely uncomfortable saying them — and this has been enough to send the GOP establishment, which loves a blue state Republican, into spasms of ecstasy.

http://www.translatingjihad.com/2011/12/muslim-brotherhood-leaders-quote.html
Muslim Brotherhood leaders quote Prophet Muhammad at al-Azhar conference: “O Muslim, this is a Jew behind me, come and kill him”
While the much of the West was still congratulating themselves for their role in supporting the so-called ‘Arab Spring,’ Muslim Brotherhood members (the soon-to-be rulers of “the new Egypt”) were at al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo on 25 November calling for genocide against Jews. The call came in the form of a recitation of an authentic hadith from the Prophet Muhammad, in which he declared that Muslims should fight against the Jews “until the rocks and the trees will say, ‘O slave of Allah, o Muslim, this is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” The occasion was the commemoration of what the International Union of Muslim Scholars named “Save al-Aqsa Friday” (for previous reporting on this day, see here).

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2683/energy-politics

American energy policy has always been messed up. It was most messy when the main source of energy was animal muscle and the streets were full of animal by-products. When fossil fuels gradually replaced animal-based energy and the streets got cleaner, public health improved. For the hundred years or so when coal was king, the price in ruined lives and environmental degradation was heavy, but on balance, the changeover to fossil fuels was not a bad thing.

Over the last century and a half, the average standard of living of people throughout the Western world has improved immensely. Even in places such as Asia and Africa, the trickle-down effects, in terms of less hunger and better overall health, were considerable. In some parts of Asia, such as South Korea and Japan, the fossil fuel revolution has given the vast majority of people a lifestyle indistinguishable from that of Western countries.

Today, however, America’s vulnerability to the international oil market is playing havoc with both its foreign policy and its balance of trade. President Barack Obama’s decision to delay the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would deliver oil derived from the tar sands of Canada’s Province of Alberta to US refineries, is seen as a blow to the North American energy industry. It is hard to understand why the President, apart from appeasing a small group of public union workers who he is hoping will vote for him in next year’s election, wants the US to import more oil from the Middle East or other unfriendly places and less from Canada.

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2671/betraying-ben-gurion

It is ironic that Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel’s only university bearing the name of the Jewish state’s founding father, and established in the ancient desert he dreamt of reviving, has become a hotbed of anti-Israel propaganda at the expense of proper scholarly endeavor.

So much so that an international committee of scholars, appointed by Israel’s Council for Higher Education to evaluate political science and international relations programs in Israeli universities, recently recommended that BGU “consider closing the Department of Politics and Government” unless it abandoned its “strong emphasis on political activism,” improved its research performance, and redressed the endemic weakness “in its core discipline of political science.” In other words, they asked that the Department return to accurate scholarship rather than indoctrinate the students with libel.

http://www.hudson- ny.org/2692/islamic-television-spain Two radical Islamic television stations will begin 24-hour broadcasting to Spanish-speaking audiences in Spain and Latin America from new studios in Madrid. The first channel, sponsored by the government of Iran, will focus on spreading Shiite Islam, the dominant religion in Iran. It began broadcasting on December 21. The second channel, sponsored by […]

http://send.hadavars.com/index.php?action=message&l=2096&c=5657&m=4307&s=a317a26441993bdd8f740ee9a6c71bce Apple Corporation Highlights Israel Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought” Straight from the Jerusalem Boardroom #158 December 21, 2011 1.  Apple made its first Israeli acquisition, Anobit, for $400MN (Globes business daily, December 21, 2011).  Apple will establish, in Israel, its first R&D outside the USA (Globes, Dec. 15). 2.  The American CHS consortium […]

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2011/12/21/main-feature/1/the-first-war-of-national-liberation/e

This is the 2,179th anniversary of the world’s first war of national liberation. There have been many since. To a surprising extent, such wars have followed the pattern first established by the Maccabees. They, like later heads of independence movements, were leaders of a people conquered and occupied by a great empire. They fought to claim the right of national self-determination.
Resentment of foreign rule may simmer for a long time, but war is often remembered as beginning in a dramatic incident. In Switzerland, this memory belongs to William Tell. He was the national hero who in 1307 refused to bow to a hat belonging to the Hapsburg governor, which was set on a tall pole in the center of Altdorf for the sole purpose of forcing Swiss freemen to genuflect to it. Tell’s defiance sparked the fight for Swiss independence.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/ML22Dj01.html

Angels and inquisitors
A Point in Time by David Horowitz Reviewed by David Goldman

One popular comedian argues that it must be dreadful to spend eternity in heaven. No matter how wonderful it might be at first, eventually you’re bound to get used to it and end up bored to death. By the same reasoning, one would shrug off the torments of hell over time, and the experience would be the same as heaven. Truth told, Dante’s account of the saints contemplating the Godhead in the “Paradiso” section of Dante’s Divine Comedy always bored me, without having to wait for too much of eternity to tick by.

This paradox came to mind reading David Horowitz’s new book, A Point In Time. For a quarter of a century, Horowitz has told unpleasant truths about the political left where he spent the firsthalf of his career before turning conservative some 30 years ago. Horowitz surpasses himself in this new essay, though, by telling unpleasant truths about the human condition. What begins as a personal meditation on mortality on the model of Marcus Aurelius shifts into a rough-and-tumble confrontation with faith.

Horowitz has been wrestling with human adversaries all his life, and now, like Jacob, he has wrestled with angels. Jacob bested the divine being (Esau’s guardian angel, in rabbinic commentary) but got a dislocated hip for his trouble. Horowitz does not quite pin the matter down, but he does give Fyodor Dostoevsky’s guardian angel a black eye.

This undertaking took courage, for the Russian novelist’s “Grand Inquisitor” parable is a favorite of good people who agree with Horowitz on most of the practical issues. Dostoevsky’s discursion at the end of The Brothers Karamazov is everywhere cited as an exemplary defense of faith against materialism, by reduction ad absurdum. (I count more than 100 references over the years to this parable in articles published in the religious monthly First Things.) The Inquisitor famously denounces the returning Christ for refusing Satan’s dare to make bread from stones, admonishing him that the religion of bread – communism – will displace the religion of eternal life.