RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304388004577533092169060420.html?KEYWORDS=HAVA+NAGILA
At Some Happy Events, ‘Hava Nagila’ Isn’t Invited Standard Tune at Jewish Celebrations Faces a Backlash; Like a Knish?

WHEN I WAS A KID, MY PRANKSTER BROTHER TOLD ME IT WAS A SONG ABOUT CUBA…..RSK

CEDARHURST, N.Y.—When newlyweds Bryan Salamon and Rachel Itzkowitz entered the ballroom of Temple Beth El earlier this month, the band struck up a raucous rendition of the hora, a traditional Jewish folk dance.
‘Hava Nagila’ is a favorite at Jewish weddings, engagement parties, bar mitzvahs and any special occasion where there is dancing and music. But you don’t have to be Jewish to celebrate with the song — in fact it’s one of the most popular party tunes in recorded history. WSJ’s Lucette Lagnado reports.

For 45 minutes, the Neshoma Orchestra—whose slogan is “Your Soul Source for Jewish Music”—performed 15 Hebrew dance hits as hundreds of guests surrounded the couple, hoisting the bride high on a chair and dancing around the two in ecstatic circles.

Noticeably absent from the gleeful medley? The best known Jewish wedding song of them all: “Hava Nagila.”

“‘Hava Nagila’ at a wedding is like pouring sour milk on cereal,” said Naomi Salamon, the groom’s mother. “You won’t hear it in the next set or the set after that,” vowed her husband, Michael.

“Hava Nagila,” Hebrew for “Let Us Rejoice,” has been a staple of Jewish—and some non-Jewish—celebrations for decades. The song often accompanies the hora, a traditional dance-in-the-round that is performed at weddings, bar mitzvahs, engagement parties and other joyful occasions.

As American Jews assimilated, “Hava Nagila,” with its dizzying tune that incorporates major and minor modes, became one of the last cultural touchstones of the past. Even the most secular Jews craved it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444860104577558810814674928.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

IN A NUTSHELL: “Obama is nostalgic for the Jewish state’s socialist past. Romney admires its capitalist future.”

“Mr. Romney’s attitude toward Israel seems to come from a different place. He admires the country as much for where it’s going as for where it has come from. And he’s not prepared to give Palestinians an automatic pass for their failure to do something with the political and economic opportunities they’ve been given. Israeli success, in his mind, is earned—and so is Palestinian failure.”

Mitt Romney infuriated Palestinians during his visit to Israel on the weekend by calling Jerusalem “the capital of Israel.” He then added insult to injury by noting—in the context of a discussion of “culture”—the “dramatically stark difference in economic vitality” between Israelis and Palestinians. A Palestinian official called the remark “racist.”

I’m beginning to warm to Mitt.

We live in a time when being pro-Israel has become a key test of a candidate’s presidential fitness, and rightly so. George W. Bush passed that test on a helicopter ride over Israel with Ariel Sharon in 1999. Barack Obama tried to do the same when he paid homage to the besieged Israeli town of Sderot in 2008.

By contrast, Jimmy Carter thinks Israel is a virtual apartheid state, which is just the sort of thought that makes Carter Carter. To be anti-Israel doesn’t absolutely, positively, make you an anti-Semite. But it does mark you out as something between a moron and a crank.

President Obama has yet to do anything toward Israel that would put him in the Carter league—quite. But give him a second term. Perhaps his performance so far has been only an overture.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444405804577559442776203150.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

GONE WITH THE WIND

Mitt Romney isn’t famous for taking political risks, so it was notable and welcome on Monday when he came out against subsidies for wind power. If that doesn’t sound like stop-the-presses news, remember that Republicans aren’t really as implacably opposed to energy handouts as both Democrats and Republicans want the public to believe.

So from the top: The wind industry more or less exists at the pleasure of politics, specifically because of a federal subsidy known as the production tax credit that provides developers with a 2.2-cent writeoff for every kilowatt hour of electricity they produce. In effect, the credit means that wind’s energy competitors are taxed at a higher rate. This annual $1.6 billion special advantage has hung around for a decade but lapses at the end of the year, and Washington is now debating an extension.

Holding fast on this deadline ought to be an easy call for Republicans, who say they want to make the tax code fairer and get the government out of picking energy winners and losers in particular. But a sizeable cheering section within the GOP wants to maintain the status quo.

Why isn’t imprisoned Iranian pastor Youcef Nadarkhani known to activists, politicians and citizens in the West?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304388004577531031387938506.html?KEYWORDS=CHRISTIANS+IGNORE+PLIGHT+OF+CHRISTIANS+IN++COUNTRIES

This month the Christian pastor Youcef Nadarkhani marked his 1,000th day of incarceration in Lakan, a notorious prison in northern Iran. Charged with the crime of apostasy, Mr. Nadarkhani faces a death sentence for refusing to recant the Christian faith he embraced as a child. He embodies piety and represents millions more suffering from repression—but his story is barely known.

Mr. Nadarkhani’s courage and the tenacity of his supporters, many of them ordinary churchgoers who have crowded Twitter and other social media to alert the world to his plight, bring to mind the great human-rights campaigns of recent years: the fight against apartheid in South Africa, or the movement to assist Soviet Jews seeking to emigrate from behind the Iron Curtain. As Nelson Mandela represented the opposition to South African racism, and Anatoly Sharansky exemplified the just demands of Soviet Jews, so Mr. Nadarkhani symbolizes the emergency that church leaders say is facing 100 million Christians around the world.

Yet Mr. Nadarkhani has almost none of the name recognition that Messrs. Mandela and Sharansky had. Despite the increasing ferocity with which Christians are targeted—church bombings in Nigeria, discrimination in Egypt (where Christians have been imprisoned for building or repairing churches), beheadings in Somalia—Americans remain largely unaware of how bad the situation has become, particularly in the Islamic world and in communist countries like China and North Korea.

http://www.romirowsky.com/12055/unrwa-the-right-of-return

THE HENRY JACKSON SOCIETY

Chair: Good evening everyone. I am Louise Ellman MP, and on behalf of the Henry Jackson Society, I would like to welcome you to this meeting here in the House of Commons. I would like to extend a particular welcome to our guest speaker this evening, Asaf Romirowsky, an adjunct scholar of the Foundation for Defence of Democracies and the Middle East Forum. The topic of our discussion this evening is UNRWA and the Palestinian refugees; a look at the role of UNRWA in relations to the refugees and its role in trying to attain progress towards peace for both Israelis and Palestinians. Asaf, I hand it over to you. And I hope that once you finish speaking to us you will be able to answer some questions.

Asaf: Good evening, it is a pleasure to be here. I would like to thank the MP and the Henry Jackson Society for inviting me and giving me this opportunity to speak to you. UNRWA has been the focus of my research for over the past 15 years, and I have worked on these topics in Washington and in Jerusalem. I have come to certain research conclusions about UNRWA at large and about what it is that UNRWA actually does. If you look at the history of refugees around the world, since World War 2, there have been about 165 million refugees worldwide. All have been assimilated with the exception of one nationality; that is the Palestinians. In 1949 two organisations were created. One of them was UNRWA, which stands for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and the other a few months later is an organisation called the UNHCR which is UN High Commissioner for Refugees. UNRWA was created as an organisation that was solely devoted to the Palestinian refugees and it was defined by nature as a temporary organisation because the belief was that the Palestinian refugee situation was a temporary situation that would be resolved within a few months -years’ time as a result of how the Palestinian refugees came about.

The topic of how the refugees came about is not something that I will go into in great detail tonight, but if people want to talk about how they came about and the actual numbers, we can talk about that.

What is important to understand vis-à-vis the definition of a refugee is that it is unique to the category of Palestinian refugees. UNRWA actually defines a Palestinian refugee as anybody who was in the mandatory area of Palestine between 1946 and 1948 and his descendants. The hereditary aspect of Palestinian refugees is unique to the Palestinian cause. In comparison, in the UNHCR you can only be a refugee for one generation after which time you do not have the refugee status anymore. If you take that into consideration, the main difference between the two entities over the past 64 years is that in UNHCR you can see a decline of refugees (the idea that the people would be assimilated and the numbers would go down), whereas in UNRWA there is actually an inflation of numbers, which is why we have today (the numbers are fluctuating) between 5-6 million refugees worldwide. I have also in my research seen numbers extending to 11-12 million refugees worldwide. Up until now, UNRWA defined the hereditary status only according to the father but now there has been a move to include the mother as well.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/07/no_buyers_remorse_for_dershowitz_over_obama.html

AT THE RISK OF PERSEVERATING….DERSHOWITZ IS REMORSELESS….HE BEGINS ALMOST EVERY SPEECH BY DECLARING THAT HE STILL BELIEVES IN THE TWO STATE (DIS)SOLUTION OF ISRAEL….AND THEN CONTINUES WITH HIS USUAL PIETIES AND PREENING…RSK

What happened to Alan Dershowitz? He has changed hius tune about President Obama. Dershowitz who was a key supporter of Obama in 2008 recently has written that, in almost four years in office, Obama has turned out to be a:

pragmatic, centrist liberal who has managed…to bring us the first important healthcare legislation in recent history, appointed excellent justices to the Supreme Court, supported women’s rights, eliminated the ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ policy, maintained the wall of separation between church and state, kept up an effective war against terrorism and generally made [Dershowitz] proud to be an American who cast [a] vote for [Obama].

This is in stark contrast to his comments in February of 2012 during a Newsmax interview, when Dershowitz stated he hope[s] Obama is not remembered in history as the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st century, the person who didn’t see the greatest evil, didn’t recognize the greatest evil of the 20th century, as Chamberlain did not.” During this interview, Dershowitz maintained that “[t]he true test of Obama’s support for Israel will come over Iran” which poses an “existential threat, not only to Israel’s existence, but to America’s safety.” Additionally, Obama’s ties with the left-wing website, George Soros-backed Media Matters were problematic for Dershowitz who denounced Media Matters as a “vicious organization.” Yet, Dershowitz was “not sure how much Obama [knew] about the website’s views.”

On May 8, 2012, Jack Gillum of the Huffington Post stated that “the growing list of financial supporters now includes George Soros, who has pledged $2 million to political groups supporting President Barack Obama’s re-election[.]”

On April 17, 2012 Cliff Kincaid of Canada Free Press highlighted “[n]ewly recently released tax documents” that “reveal how billionaire…George Soros expanded his U.S. based empire by using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the Obama stimulus. Soros and Obama worked hand-in-glove through the stimulus.”

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4147 The Democrats have a Jewish problem, and his name is Barack Obama. Reluctantly, many Jews, loyal Democrats by birth and tradition, have concluded that he’s not The One they thought he was. With even greater reluctance, the White House has concluded that their Jewish problem is real, growing, and they better do something about […]

Escape From Sharia — on The Glazov Gang
by Frontpagemag.com
Amani Mustafa, Anni Cyrus and Nonie Darwish testify how they broke free from the chains of Islam.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/how-islam-ruined-my-life-on-the-glazov-gang-2-1-1/

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3223/the-call-for-july-30-2012-why-all-players-are David Samuels, Pepe Escobar and David Goldman Key takeaways No-one will win in Syria because none of the external actors wants any side to win – except for the Obama administration, which is ineffectual. There is only one leader who really supports the Muslim Brotherhood, and that’s Barack Obama. The Saudis, Turks, and others […]

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/07/30/romneys-road-trip

At some point, every presidential candidate is bound to take a trip abroad to advertise his foreign policy credentials. Because most candidates don’t want to be accused of criticizing his opponent’s foreign policy abroad, the trips are usually little more than carefully staged photo ops.

Four years ago, during his “foreign policy” trip, Barack Obama donned a skullcap and pushed a written prayer into a nook in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. He hasn’t been back to Israel since, and his enmity toward our only Middle Eastern ally has been demonstrated so often, there is no room here to rehash the evidence.

Mitt Romney’s trip this week was supposed to follow the normal script. Off to London first for the opening of the Olympics, then to Israel and last to Poland, the trip was planned to hit the headlines and Obama’s vulnerabilities. The U.K. is a strong ally, Israel is another (and of greater domestic political importance), and Poland is another that — until Obama came along — held a special regard for us. Poland practically worships Ronald Reagan for his role in winning the Cold War and embracing Poland’s struggle against Soviet oppression. And many Polish-Americans — who may comprise the swing vote in several states — are worried about Obama’s disregard of Poland’s defense.

Britain, as one wag wrote a few days ago, is an easy date for American pols. All a guy has to do is say something nice about the Queen or Churchill, josh them about the lousy weather and say something warm and serious about the “special relationship.” At that point, the Brits conclude that the American candidate is perhaps too unlettered or too much of a cowboy, but all in all a good chap. Then everyone smiles as the candidate climbs back on the aircraft to go to the next stop.