RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/291404/first-ahmadi-then-everybody-else-andrew-c-mccarthy

Their crime? These Muslims have the temerity to suggest that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, an Indian who died in 1908, was the promised Mahdi — the redeemer of Islam — and not one of the false prophets about whom Mohammed had warned. They compound their offense with condemnations of violent jihad, maintaining that man’s inhumanity to man is ultimately conquered by love and kindness. So, of course, the Ahmadi Muslims have to die.

They are killed in Muslim Pakistan. They are killed in Muslim Bangladesh. They are killed in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Islamic country and, putatively, its most moderate. It was there, in a village in West Java last year, that hundreds of Muslims wielding machetes, sharpened sticks, and stones set upon on an Ahmadi home, brutally murdering three men and maiming several others. True to form, Islamic clerics raced to the fore to rationalize the savagery as being provoked by Ahmadi heresy. The ringleaders were sentenced to less than six months’ imprisonment, with the country’s minister of religious affairs callously explaining that religious freedom was certainly not freedom to “modify” Islamic beliefs — and equating Ahmadi preaching, which is banned, with flag-burning.

The barbaric treatment of religious minorities in Islamic countries, and its roots in Islamic law, is undeniable . . . unless we choose not to see it. So, true to form, we are choosing not to see it.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/291383/contraception-misdirection-mark-steyn
Contraception Misdirection
A universal birth-control mandate is a curious priority for a dying republic.

Have you seen the official White House version of what the New York Times headline writers call “A Responsible Budget”? My favorite bit is Chart 5-1 on page 58 of their 500-page appendix on “Analytical Perspectives.” This is entitled “Publicly Held Debt Under 2013 Budget Policy Projections.” It’s a straight lin e going straight up before disappearing off the top right-hand corner of the graph in the year 2084 and continuing northeast straight through your eye socket, out the back of your skull, and zooming up to rendezvous with Newt’s space colony on the moon circa 2100. Just to emphasize, this isn’t the doom-laden dystopian fancy of a right-wing apocalyptic loon like me; it’s the official Oval Office version of where America’s headed. In the New York Times–approved “responsible budget” there is no attempt even to pretend to bend the debt curve into something approaching reentry with reality.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

WASTED PRIMARIES

Ideally the primaries should have built momentum for the emergence of a winning candidate to represent the Republican Party, instead they have dampened enthusiasm and made everyone involved look worse for just being involved. The best hope for winning a national election is the hope that few non-Republicans were paying attention or will remember what went on.

Much of the blame goes to Romney and the Republican establishment which was determined to win at any cost and went negative hard and fast. The rest is history. Obama’s standing is improving and he’s tipped to win the election. The game will change once the primaries are over and the party has a nominee, but it’s clear that the acrimony and pettiness has alienated a lot of people.

Instead of competing on a vision for the country, the candidates, with media help, spent months hurling smears at each other. Among the candidates, Romney benefited the most from that type of campaign, but Obama is the one who really scores. The media successfully painted Republicans as being hateful and divisive and the material for that smear job came from within.

The Not-Romneyites are often criticized for focusing more on beating Romney than defeating Obama, and while that is occasionally true, it is truer to say that the establishment cares more about making sure that Romney is the nominee than about defeating Obama. For the Not-Romneyites it’s about principles, for the Romneyites it’s about power.

The Romney establishment has acted with the same elitist arrogance and insufferable disdain that has characterized the Obama Administration, dismissing popular dislike for their approach by pushing forward and waiting for the peasants to fall in line. But the peasants aren’t falling into line. Romney is still flailing. The entire election has been a survey of candidates that most voters prefer to Romney and the last few months have shown that they prefer just about anyone to him. That isn’t good news, but the establishment doesn’t care. And that’s scary. For people who claim to want to win the election, they aren’t taking the situation too seriously. If we do end up with a brokered convention, it will be their obtuse unwillingness to pay attention to their own electorate that will be the cause.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=258202

Into the Fray: The GOP should focus on deterring – and if need be, deposing – dictators, rather than promoting democracy.
A period out of power has given conservatives and Republicans a golden opportunity to reassess their approach toward American foreign policy. Such periods in opposition are often fruitful for political parties, which can reformulate creative and winning ideas…. It is time to rethink the Republican Party’s foreign policy approach, keep that which was admirable about Bush, and reject that which was not.

– Prof. Colin Dueck “Regaining a Realistic Foreign Policy” – Policy Review, August 2010

The is the second of a two-part essay on foreign policy for the US Republican Party, assessing its rationale and implementation, and exploring paradigms for the future.

A brief reminder

Over the better part of the past decade the intellectual underpinning of Republican foreign policy was one of the most widely accepted tenets of international relations – the Democratic Peace Theorem (DPT) which holds that genuine democracies do go to war against each other.

http://www.jewishledger.com/2012/02/hadassah-at-100-one-womans-vision-realized/

THOSE AMAZING WOMEN WENT TO PALESTINE IN 1909 AND BUILT NURSING SCHOOLS AND HOSPITALS. AFTER ISRAEL’S LIBERATION IN 1948 THEIR WORK WAS INDISPENSABLE IN THE “INGATHERING”…THAT EPIC RESCUE OF JEWS WHO SURVIVED THE HOLOCAUST AND THE DISPERSION FROM ARAB LANDS….THEY PROVIDED COUNSELING, JOB TRAINING, HOMES, EDUCATION. WHAT A RECORD WHICH DWARFS THE WHINING OF THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF WOMEN. TOO BAD THAT IN LATER YEARS THEY JOINED NOW IN LOBBYING FOR ABORTION RIGHTS AND SO MANY OTHER ISSUES…..BUT IN THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL THEY ARE WONDERFUL…..RSK

Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, was founded by Henrietta Szold on Feb. 24, 1912. Like others of her generation, Szold’s existence was shaped — and framed — by war. Born in 1860, she entered the world on the eve of the Civil War. Eighty-five years later, in February of 1945, in the waning days of World War II, she died.

In 1909, Szold and her mother took a trip to pre-state Israel. There they witnessed the starvation and disease that afflicted the people of the region. She returned to the U.S. and soon thereafter founded Hadassah, a volunteer women’s organization whose first mission was to send two nurses to Palestine to provide pasteurized milk to infants and new mothers, and to eradicate trachoma, an easily cured eye disease, that was robbing thousands of sight.
By 1918, Hadassah had sent an entire medical unit, composed of 45 doctors, nurses, dentists and sanitary workers, to bring American-style medical care to serve all, regardless of race, creed, or ethnicity.
By the mid-1930s, it had become clear that Jewish children needed to be saved from a Europe that was rapidly darkening. Joining with a German colleague, Szold helped organize the rescue of thousands of such children, bringing them to safety in Palestine.
Today at 100 years old, with 300,000 members, Hadassah is the largest Jewish organization in America, and one of the largest women’s volunteer organizations in the world. Since its inception, Hadassah has been taken advocacy positions on public health, support of Israel, stem cell research, and a vast array of social concerns.

SAUDI BRIBERY PAYS OFF IN HARVARD SEE THIS FROM 2005

Islamic Studies Gets $20M Gift in 2005
Mayor Giuliani once spurned Saudi prince’s altruism, but Harvard embraces billionaire
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/12/13/islamic-studies-gets-20m-gift-the/

http://www.jewishledger.com/2012/02/harvard-plans-one-state-solution-conference/

Harvard plans “One State Solution” conference By Steven Slotsky / JointNews Media Service

BOSTON, Mass. — On March 3-4, Harvard University will host a two-day conference on the “One State Solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Guests include veteran anti-Israel academics, the founder of Electronic Intifada and an ex-Palestinian official. No one sympathetic to Israel is identifiable.
Mar. 3-4 event dominated by anti-Israel academics

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/justice-for-the-founder-of-portugal-s-jewish-community-1.413459

In the 1920s, Captain Artur Barros Basto, a Portuguese war hero, helped found his country’s first Jewish community in 400 years, but was later stripped of his ranks and forced into near penury due to his religion. Now this historical wrong may be set right.

It is a secret that has accompanied me for as long as I can remember: the secret of the Portuguese Dreyfus. But who even dreamed that this secret would now be the subject of a political disagreement in the Lisbon parliament, after 75 years and three generations of campaigns to clear his name.

I was born and raised in Porto, northern Portugal. One of the most significant places in the lives of the local Jews was the neighborhood synagogue, impressive and grand, but nearly empty. This is the Makor Haim Synagogue, one of the most beautiful in Europe. It was built in the 1930s by a man whose name was always mentioned in a lowered voice, to make sure nobody heard. This was Captain Artur Carlos de Barros Basto, also known by his Hebrew name Abraham Israel Ben-Rosh, who had always aroused my curiosity.

Barros Basta

Whenever I would ask about him, I would be told only that he was a man of vision, that he was born in 1887, and that he was descended from Marranos (Jews who were forcibly converted to Christianity as a result of the Inquisition, but often secretly maintained Jewish traditions ). Barros Basto was a World War I hero who fought in Belgium. Before that he had belonged to the group that toppled the monarchy in Portugal and founded the republic in 1910, when he himself raised the flag of the new government. The republic was critical of the Church and carefully guarded religious freedom.

In the 1920s Barros Basto learned from his grandfather that he had Jewish roots. In the light of the new religious freedom in Portugal, he decided to return to his forefathers’ faith, and went to Tangier, Morocco, to convert. The rabbis at the local rabbinical court were surprised to learn that there were Marranos living in Portugal, and due to their objection to conversion, they tried to put Barros Basto to the test by suggesting he convert in Algeria. The officer replied that he would not leave without completing the process, which he believed was merely a technicality since he felt like a Jew; indeed, he was eventually converted in Tangier.

When he got back to his homeland he set about establishing a Jewish congregation for the first time in 400 years – the first since the expulsion of Jews from Portugal. He built and founded a yeshiva, a community newspaper called Halapid, and our synagogue, Makor Haim.

Discovery in the basement

In 1972, when I was preparing for my bar mitzvah, I asked for more information about Barros Basto. When all anyone agreed to tell me was that “he met a bitter end and was defamed,” I decided to descend into the basement of the synagogue that he built, where I found piles of old issues of Halapid.

Thus I learned about the community of Marranos who, nearly a century ago, had heard about Barros Basto – nicknamed “the prophet officer” – and began streaming to the place. “We too are Jews, even though our family converted to Christianity following the expulsion from Portugal in 1497,” they told him. Hundreds of people told him how for many years they had practiced their Judaism clandestinely.

http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=47498a2e1ad97dd3d09ae19c5&id=161ef01540&e=ce445aaf82
For years now I have been visiting the US regularly, and usually make my way to Washington DC, where I have had many opportunities to meet with journalists, politicians, lobbyists and other experts who are paying attention to the course Islam in the US. These conversations, and a whole host of reports from a wide variety of sources, including White House official statements, have made it obvious to me that there is increasing trend for US government agencies to align with and empower radical Muslim agendas. At the same time, American elites are being cowed into silence. If anything, they seem less capable of critiquing radical Islam than they were a decade ago. An Orwellian veil of silence through control of public discourse is being pulled over eyes of many in the Land of the Free.

To put it bluntly, the government of the United States has become an ally of the radical Islamic Movement, under the careful guidance of Muslim Brotherhood agents in the US. The first victims of this alliance are secular and liberal activists all across the Middle East, whose bodies are being broken and voices silenced because of official American engagement with and support for the cause of radical Islam.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11445/pub_detail.asp
The cold snap in Europe, which began in late January, has killed hundreds and brought deep snow where it hasn’t been seen in decades,” says this article in the Seattle Times.
This should be front page news. Instead, the article doesn’t appear until page eight. And the title, “At least 3 killed in avalanche in Kosovo,” belies the seriousness of the situation. (The print version carries a different headline: “Cold snap, snow lock down Europe.”)

How about a headline that tells it like it is?

140,000 trapped by snow – Death toll rises past 550.

That headline would give readers a glimpse of what’s really happening in Europe, where snow drifts reaching above the rooftops have kept tens of thousands of villagers prisoners in their own homes.