RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://townhall.com/columnists/dianawest/2011/12/29/is_russia_covering_up_real_cause_of_plane_crash/print

‘Tis the season for media list-mania, and (true confession) I always am mildly surprised upon viewing Top 10 story lists to find that I’ve forgotten some humdingers. Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011?

In fact, given a tally of my own columns, jihad is the top story of 2011, just as it has been since at least 2001. Not that the media see it that way, of course; they see the spread of Islam’s law and call it “diversity” in the West or “Arab Spring” in the Middle East. They are blind to its implications, they apologize for its depredations and, in general, they commit professional malfeasance by misrepresenting the facts. Then again, at least they cover it.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1685/pub_detail.asp Christian couple and their one-year-old baby are shot dead by Muslims [DAILY MAIL] Iraq surge’s advocates fear gains will be lost Fragile democracy at risk, they warn [WT] The U.S. Fifth Fleet said it would not allow any disruption of traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, after Iran threatened to stop ships moving through […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11129/pub_detail.asp
Did you hear the song Aussie comic Tim Minchin wrote savagely satirising Islam for Channel 4’s Eid special? No, I didn’t either. It didn’t happen and it never would happen: first because no broadcast station in its right mind would ever allow it; second because I don’t believe that Minchin would be stupid enough to write it.

And I’m not calling Minchin out for physical cowardice on this issue. From the Danish cartoons to the Paris bombing, we’ve seen far too many cases of artists testing the right to free speech – only to find that where certain religions are concerned, such matters are strictly verboten. But what I am definitely accusing him of is hypocrisy and moral cowardice, as regards the banned song he wrote for a Jonathan Ross Christmas special likening Jesus to a blood-drinking zombie.

Personally, I’m sorry we didn’t get to hear the song. As one of those typical, laissez-faire, occasional churchgoing C of E types, I have no problem with having my religion being satirised. Also, the points he apparently made in it sound not just funny but also quite astute: yes, there definitely is something very weird about the New Testament story.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“The Arab Spring had dried up a long time ago. There were no palatable regional alternatives to the Islamists, no philosophy with a regional grip that could counter it, and even the left hesitated to be actual alternatives to the Islamists, fully embracing a secular vision for their countries. Everything that happened was inevitable and it will happen again so long as the region is so barren that even when there is the freedom to choose, there is still nothing worth choosing.”

All it takes to understand why the Arab Spring was doomed to turn into an Islamic Winter is that Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa were being asked to choose between a Socialist left and an Islamic right. The left has consistently lost open elections in Europe and America, it lost the battle of ideas in Russia and China, and unsurprisingly it also lost the Arab Spring.

Unfit to Print Posted By Bruce Bawer
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/29/unfit-to-print/print/

The other day I took note here of a recent New York Times feature in which several prominent figures from the worlds of law and religion were invited to answer the question: Is religious freedom in America under threat? I focused on one of the responses, entitled “A Campaign Against Patriotic Muslims,” in which Salam Al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, maintained that when it came to his coreligionists, the answer was a definite yes. Al-Marayati painted a picture of an America awash in “anti-Islam groups” and “Muslim haters” who make life difficult for American Muslims, whom he depicted as overwhelmingly peaceful, freedom-loving, and terrorism-hating. It didn’t seem to matter to the Times that Al-Marayati himself is a longtime associate of and apologist for terrorists.

Another participant in the same Times feature was Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor. Like Al-Marayati, Feldman claimed to be concerned about a plague of Islam-hatred in America. Feldman complained about legislative proposals in Oklahoma and Tennessee that would “ban Islamic law from the courts — a measure that the American separation of church and state makes completely unnecessary.” Feldman concluded: “It would be nice to say these proposed laws are un-American. But they are sadly reminiscent of our history of targeting vulnerable religious minorities out of bigotry and political expediency. We can only look forward to a day when anti-Islamic sentiment seems as archaic as these other old hatreds do today.”

It’s interesting to note that while the New York Times was giving Al-Marayati and Feldman a platform from which to preach about the supposed persecution of Muslims in America, a woman named Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was actually being persecuted, and prosecuted, in Austria – not for being an adherent of Islam but for speaking the truth about it. Most readers of Front Page will know about Sabaditsch-Wolff, whose whole saga has been covered here, from her frank, fact-based statements about Islam at a 1997 seminar to her conviction last February on the charge of “denigration of the religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion” to her appeal to a higher court, which last week affirmed the February verdict and ordered her to pay a €480 fine or spend two months in jail. Sabaditsch-Wolff, who refuses to pay the fine, quite rightly called it “a black day for Austria.”

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com

Rep. Ron Paul is now in first place in the Iowa caucus polls, second in New Hampshire and third nationally. This has prompted a former close aide of his, Eric Dondero, to speak out about the anti-Israeli views he expressed to him in private. The Paul campaign is ridiculing Dondero as a “disgruntled former staffer” and another aide, an Israeli, is defending Paul. A close examination of Paul’s books, newsletters and statements give credence to Dondero.

Dondero worked closely with Paul from 1987 to 2003. After he left, he nearly ran against Ron Paul but instead supported another candidate. Dondero claims that the presidential candidate is not anti-Semitic but “wishes the Israeli state did not exist at all.” Dr. Leon Hadar, a dual American-Israeli citizen who served as a foreign policy advisor to Paul during his 2008 presidential campaign, has risen to Paul’s defense. He says that Paul does not want to see Israel eliminated as a state, yet Paul praises an anti-Zionist group that envisions just that.

On page 317 of his book, “Liberty Defined,” Paul laments the influence of the Israeli government on America and the “apartheid conditions that Palestinians are subjected to.” He says that “Even newspapers in Israel are willing to discuss this issue openly, but it is essentially never permitted in the United States.” He praises J-Street for challenging “AIPAC’s monopoly control of the discussion” and Peace Now. He expresses his pleasure that an anti-Zionist group called the American Council for Judaism has growing support.

The Army We Need
A Pentagon New Year’s resolution: to give us the Army we really need
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/286748
Last week, former Army chief of staff Gen. Gordon Sullivan editorialized that the Army is repeating the mistakes of the post-Vietnam era, when it turned away from a decade’s experience fighting a counterinsurgency war, in favor of building a more capable conventional force. This, according to General Sullivan, forced the Army to improvise its way through conflicts in Panama, Somalia, and the Balkans. General Sullivan went on to say that, despite these three experiences, we still possessed the wrong Army when we invaded Iraq in 2003.
One wonders how an Army optimized to fight insurgents would have dealt with the six armored Republican Guard divisions that ringed Baghdad. General Sullivan does not address this question. What he does say is that the Army was well on its way to defeat in Iraq until, after three years of muddling through, it adopted a new counterinsurgency doctrine. Now General Sullivan fears that the Army, in its rush to put Iraq and Afghanistan behind it, will once again put its counterinsurgency skills on the shelf, as it once again turns its attention to preparing for conventional warfare.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/286736 Newt and the Courts . . . AgainA response to Stephen W. Fitschen Newt Gingrich issued a bold proposal on reining in the federal judiciary that is about 90 percent terrific and 10 percent . . . not so much. In the latter category is the idea of having Congress issue subpoenas to federal judges who hand down […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/763/gingrich_was_wrong_about_palestinian_identity_but_right_that_it_is_at_the_core_of_the_conflict_

I HATE TO DISAGREE WITH A STAUNCH SUPPORTER LIKE ROBIN SHEPHERD BUT THIS CLAIM IS OUTRAGEOUS…

“But that, I think is as far as we can go with him, because so what if Palestinian national identity is invented and relatively recent? There are dozens of nationalisms that could be said to have been invented relatively recently not least Zionism itself.”

TO DRAW EQUIVALENCE BETEEEN SPURIOUS CLAIMS BY LOCAL ARABS AND ZIONISM? INVENTED RECENTLY? ZIONISM…THE DESIRE TO RETURN TO ANCIENT AND BIBLICAL HOMELAND IS FAR FROM “RECENT” AND DATES FOR MILLENIA ….DOES A NATION FORFEIT ITS HISTORIC LEGITIMACY JUST TO MAKE PEACE WITH PEOPLE BENT ON ITS DESTRUCTION? AND, THE NOTION THAT ISRAEL MUST DO THIS FOR SOME SPECIOUS PROMISES OF TEMPORARY GOOD BEHAVIOR BY MOSLEM/ARABS IS A JOKE… EVEN INTELLIGENT AND THOUGHTFUL PEOPLE LIKE ROBIN SHEPHERD FALL FOR IT…..RSK

Gingrich was wrong about Palestinian identity but right that it is at the core of the conflict

It’s not so much that the Palestinians don’t want a peace deal as that they cannot continue to see themselves as Palestinian should they ever fully accept the legitimacy of Israel

There’s a very important piece in Wednesday’s Jerusalem Post by Zalman Shoval, former Israeli ambassador to the United States, on Newt Gingrich’s controversial remarks about Palestinian nationalism.

A few weeks back Gingrich, running for the Republican nomination for next year’s presidential elections, had rather too casually said of the Palestinians,“These people are terrorists”. If he’d said that a disgracefully large proportion of the Palestinian population support terrorism his comments would have had the rock solid backing of all the available evidence. As it was, he left himself open to the charge that he was smearing an entire people.

But it was his remarks appearing to dismiss Palestinian nationalism itself that really generated all the heat.

Israel’s top 20 greatest inventions of all time By ABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAN
http://www.jpost.com/Dash/Entertainment/Article.aspx?id=251079

An end-of-the-year exhibit pays tribute to Israeli innovation.

A major Israeli source of pride is the enormous number of inventions and innovations that have taken root on its soil over 63 years, despite challenges of geography, size and diplomacy. The ever-churning Israeli mind has brought us drip irrigation, the cherry tomato, the electric car grid and much more.

Throughout December at the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem, indispensable Israeli inventions are being displayed and demonstrated. Curator Varda Gur Ben-Sheetrit said that hundreds of ingenious inventions were considered for the exhibition Inventions, Inc., which offers visitors a chance to learn more and try their own hand at coming up with something new.

She emphasized that many other Israeli inventions are deserving of inclusion. “We were, of course, constrained by space limitations. Also, not every company we invited to exhibit responded,” she noted.
Another feature of the exhibition is the Transparent Studio, where graduates of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design conduct a course on innovation in the area of light and lighting design. Visitors can observe their work-in-progress and share their ideas and suggestions with the designers.

Here’s a list of Israel’s top 20 inventions highlighted at the exhibition, in no particular order.