RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/nicky-larkin-israel-is-a-refuge-but-a-refuge-under-siege-3046227.html
Nicky Larkin: Israel is a refuge, but a refuge under siege Through making a film about the Israeli-Arab conflict, artist Nicky Larkin found his allegiances swaying.
Nicky Larkin: Israel is a refuge, but a refuge under siege

I used to hate Israel. I used to think the Left was always right. Not any more. Now I loathe Palestinian terrorists. Now I see why Israel has to be hard. Now I see the Left can be Right — as in right-wing. So why did I change my mind so completely?

Strangely, it began with my anger at Israel’s incursion into Gaza in December 2008 which left over 1,200 Palestinians dead, compared to only 13 Israelis. I was so angered by this massacre I posed in the striped scarf of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation for an art show catalogue.

Shortly after posing in that PLO scarf, I applied for funding from the Irish Arts Council to make a film in Israel and Palestine. I wanted to talk to these soldiers, to challenge their actions — and challenge the Israeli citizens who supported them.

I spent seven weeks in the area, dividing my time evenly between Israel and the West Bank. I started in Israel. The locals were suspicious. We were Irish — from a country which is one of Israel’s chief critics — and we were filmmakers. We were the enemy.

Then I crossed over into the West Bank. Suddenly, being Irish wasn’t a problem. Provo graffiti adorned The Wall. Bethlehem was Las Vegas for Jesus-freaks — neon crucifixes punctuated by posters of martyrs.

These martyrs followed us throughout the West Bank. They watched from lamp-posts and walls wherever we went. Like Jesus in the old Sacred Heart pictures.

But the more I felt the martyrs watching me, the more confused I became. After all, the Palestinian mantra was one of “non-violent resistance”. It was their motto, repeated over and over like responses at a Catholic mass.

Yet when I interviewed Hind Khoury, a former Palestinian government member, she sat forward angrily in her chair as she refused to condemn the actions of the suicide bombers. She was all aggression.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/the_necessity_of_anti-sharia_laws.html
The Necessity of Anti-Sharia LawsBy Robert Spencer

Louisiana, Arizona ,and Tennessee have already passed legislation restricting the use of foreign law in state courtrooms, and twenty-one other states are considering similar laws. These statutes are designed to halt the use of Islamic law, sharia, by American judges — a measure that many see as necessary, since sharia has already been involved in cases in twenty-three states. Many see this as an alarming encroachment upon First Amendment protection of religion; however, anti-sharia laws do not actually infringe upon religious freedom at all, and they become more urgently needed by the day.

In the March issue of First Things, law professor Robert K. Vischer equates anti-sharia laws with recent intrusions upon the religious freedom of Christians, such as laws that now require “pro-life pharmacists to dispense the morning-after pill” and “Christian adoption agencies to place children with same-sex couples, and religious entities to pay for their employees’ contraceptives.” He asserts that “[t]he recent spate of ‘anti-Sharia’ initiatives is just the most politically popular example of such threats” to religious freedom.

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/215379-specter-says-obama-ditched-him-after-he-provided-60th-vote-to-pass-health-law
Specter says Obama ditched him after he provided 60th vote to pass health reform
By Alexander Bolton – 03/12/12 05:30 AM ET

Former Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.) writes in a new book that President Obama ditched him in the 2010 election after he helped Obama win the biggest legislative victory of his term by passing healthcare reform.

Specter also claims that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) did not uphold his promise to grant him seniority accrued over 28 years of service in the Senate as a Republican.

Specter, who rocked Washington’s political establishment and made headlines around the country when he left the Republican Party to join Democrats in April of 2009, has kept quiet about these slights until now.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/free-speech-vs-islamists-worldwide-west-is-losing/?singlepage=true

Recently, Salman Rushdie did not attend a literature festival in India after Indian authorities warned him he was a potential target of assassins, and after numerous protests by various Islamist groups. This is not the first time that Mr. Rushdie found himself at odds with Islamists over his free speech. In 1988, he published his book The Satanic Verses, whose “blasphemous writings” first resulted in death threats to Mr. Rushdie from Islamists — including a fatwa against him by Ayatollah Khomeini — and first alerted the world to the problems Islamists had with free speech concerning Islam-related topics.

After initially trying to apologize to appease his Islamist censors, Rushdie was forced to go underground under protective detail. In 2012, almost a quarter of a century from when he first found himself enmeshed in the struggle for free speech, Mr. Rushdie faced a similar threat and once again was forced to back down.

Unfortunately, the Rushdie example is all too representative of how things are going in the Western struggle to protect speech from Islamist thugs. In other words, not well. Things are probably getting worse.

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/03/12/derrick-bells-love-for-new-black-panther-party-founder-and-white-house-counsel/?singlepage=true

Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell praised the anti-Semitic founder of the New Black Panther Party. Another strong supporter of Bell was eventually Obama White House counsel Cassandra Butts, the White House lawyer when the New Black Panther voter intimidation case was dismissed.

Powerline has the story of Derrick Bell praising the venomous anti-Semite Khalid Muhammad, former head of the New Black Panther Party. The dots that Powerline connected are the dots between Derrick Bell, Khalid Muhammad and the New Black Panther Party. But White House counsel Cassandra Butts was also involved in the now-famous Harvard Law School rally for Bell. Butts helped organize the rally supporting Bell and escorted him to be introduced.

Butts, nearly 20 years later, may have played a role in the dismissal of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case according to multiple reports.
As a member of the DOJ team that brought the case against the New Black Panther Party, it staggers the imagination that Barack Obama’s beloved law professor Derrick Bell had anything positive to say about this radical racist anti-Semite. This is simply disheartening. You would think “esteemed” Harvard Law professors wouldn’t say nice things about a man who called for the murder of white women and children:

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The alleged attack on Afghans by an American soldier in Kandahar, where 91 soldiers have been murdered last year alone, is already receiving the full outrage treatment. Any outrage over the deaths of those 91 soldiers in the province will be completely absent.

There will be no mention of how many of them died because the Obama Administration decided that the lives of Afghan civilians counted for more than the lives of soldiers. No talk of what it is like to walk past houses with gunmen dressed in civilian clothing inside and if you are fired at from those houses, your orders are to retreat.

Air strikes are for days gone by. The American soldier in the ISAF is expected to patrol and retreat, to smile and reach out to Afghans while they shoot him in the back. After risking his life to hold back the Taliban, he is expected to take it calmly when his government announces that it is trying to cut a deal with the Taliban. As he waits out the final months until withdrawal, seeing his friends lose their limbs and their lives, knowing that the enemy has won, that he has been betrayed and is being kept senselessly on the front line for no objective except the diplomatic position of a government that hates him, that is taking away his health care, his equipment and his job; how does he feel?

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/03/13/MJ%20Rosenbergs%20Flimsy%20Apology

There is good news and bad news. First, the good news: on his Media Matters blog MJ Rosenberg has promised he will no longer use the antisemitic term “Israel firster” to describe Americans who support Israel.The bad news is that he defended his use of the term and launched into his usual hateful prose directed toward Israel and Jewish Americans:

But I will do so without using the term “Israel Firster.” The term was coined in 1960 by the late Abram Leon Sachar, founding President of Brandeis University, and a renowned Jewish historian (his son Howard Morley Sachar remains the greatest historian of contemporary Jewry) and was first used by the elder Sachar in a speech he delivered that year to a Zionist organization.

This is a typical MJ Rosenberg half-truth. He is correct when he says Sachar used the term “Israel firster,” but he didn’t use it the same way MJ and his MMfA buddies throw it around. For Sacher the term represented the tension between the American Jewish Community and Israeli Jewish Community in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Sacher’s “Israel firsters” were mostly Israeli Jews who felt the Jewish people could never have a fulfilling life outside of Israel. It was never used by Sacher to impugn Jewish Americans as being some how less than loyal to America.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11590/pub_detail.asp
Every day EcoWatch.org sends me an email that features links to several articles on issues they regard as urgent and important. If I had no knowledge of science or much else, I would be spending my days in a state of panic and that would be just fine with the EcoWatch folks.

In late February, one of the articles to which one could link was “Top Earth Scientists Warn of Global Ecological Emergency” that was the epitome of everything that is wrong with the environmental movement in general and the machinery of the United Nations whose goal is to be the single global government with which to rule the Earth. Towards this end, the UN has an Environmental Program whose most recent gift to humanity has been three decades of lies about “global warming.”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11585/pub_detail.asp

It Was Only a Matter of Time Before One of Our Men Broke Down
“That staff sergeant murdered sixteen Afghans. Our own leaders have murdered thousands and maimed tens of thousands of our own troops out of vanity, ambition and inertia. Who deserves our sympathy?
In war, soldiers die. But they shouldn’t die for bullshit.”

On Sunday, just before dawn, an American staff sergeant walked away from his post in the badlands of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, went into a nearby village, and methodically murdered sixteen civilians, including women and children. This didn’t happen in the confusion of a firefight amidst the “fog of war.” It was the brutal act of a veteran who cracked. The deed cannot be excused. But I believe it can be explained.

For a final analysis we’ll have to wait until all of the facts come in, but it appears that a soldier who had served honorably during multiple tours in Iraq broke down and went mad in Afghanistan. We should not be surprised that this happened. We should be surprised that it hasn’t happened sooner and more often: The shock of this incident after a decade of hopeless, meandering efforts that have thrown away the lives and limbs of our troops while ambitious generals lie about progress, seek promotion, and engage in military masturbation is actually a tribute to our men and women in uniform out on the front lines (to the extent that “front lines” exist).

That staff sergeant—who turned himself in after the killings—is guilty of murder in a degree yet to be determined, but the amazing thing is how disciplined, patient and tenacious our troops have been. Given the outrageous stresses of serving repeated tours in an environment a brand-new private could recognize as hopeless (while his generals fly back and forth congratulating themselves), it’s remarkable that we have not seen more and even uglier incidents. The problem in Afghanistan isn’t our troops—although craven generals routinely insist that everything is the fault of “disrespectful” soldiers—it’s a leadership in and out of uniform that is bankrupt of ideas, bankrupt of ethics, bankrupt of moral courage—and rich only in self-interest and ambition.

If there’s a “battle cry” in Afghanistan, it’s “Blame the troops!” Generals out of touch with the ugly, brute reality on the ground down in the Taliban-sympathizing villages respond to every seeming crisis in Afghan-American relations by telling our troops to “respect Afghan culture.”

http://yeshaviews.blogspot.com/2012/03/credit-where-it-is-due.html

WHO IS MY E-PAL MARC PROWISOR? IN HIS WORDS:

“I served as the Chief Army Security Coordinator for the Shilo Region in Israel from 1996 through 2006. This biblically significant area between Ramallah and Nablus (Shechem) was a hotbed of terrorism, plagued by acts of violence against Jews during my tenure. I was personally involved in defending against numerous terror attacks in this region. I continue to work in the Security field in hopes of continuing to defend and protect others from acts of terrorism.My views are based on my experiences as a Security Officer involved “ground level” against terrorism.

Israel is under fire not only from relentless attacks from Arab terrorists, but also from the court of world opinion, which is essentially calling for Israel to stop, defending itself and to give up its heartland in Judea and Samaria.”
Credit, where it is due

This March marks tens years since one of the most horrid attacks and massacres that occurred during the Intifada or the War of 2000. This “uprising” or more accurately war, as some like to call it has actually yet to end. It is a war of ups and downs. The particular incident I am referring to is the attack at Wadi Haramiya, ” the Valley of the Thieves”. This particular attack occurred approximately 22 miles north of Jerusalem on road 60, known to us as the Way of the Patriarchs, between the communities of Ofra and Shilo. This attack claimed the lives of ten people, twelve were badly wounded, and many others scared for life.

It has become infamous, and is used today as an example for both the good and bad.

Where as this attack showed how dangerous our roads could be, it also showed how well our forces, both civilian and military could cooperate and work together to not only fight our enemies, but to provide first response, both tactical and medical.

It also showed the value that Jews from around the world play in the safety and protection of our people in Israel.