RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Death of Art Posted By Ben Shapiro

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/01/the-death-of-art/

Over the weekend, I was reading Stephen Sondheim’s fantastic semi-autobiography – really, a commentary on his lyrics over the years – Finishing the Hat. Sondheim’s brilliant, of course, and his use of language is exact – the rhymes and rhythmic schemes in Sweeney Todd are simply spectacular. Sondheim asks the question, though, whether such linguistic playfulness is worthwhile. He does so by quoting an anonymous pop composer, X – some have suggested it’s Pete Townshend of The Who – dismissing rhyme as unimportant in lyrics: “I hate all true rhymes [i.e. red and bed, as opposed to false rhymes, like home and alone]. I think they only allow you a certain limited range …. I’m not a great believer in perfect rhymes. I’m just a believer in feelings that come across. If the craft gets in the way of the feelings then I’ll take the feelings any day.”

Sondheim caustically observes, “Claiming that true rhyme is the enemy of substance is the sustaining excuse of lyricists who are unable to rhyme well with any consistency … The point which X overlooks is that the craft is supposed to serve the feeling. A good lyric should not only have something to say but a way of saying it as clearly and forcefully as possible – and that involves rhyming cleanly. A perfect rhyme can make a mediocre line bright and a good one brilliant. A near rhyme only dampens the impact.”

Why Jews Need Israel Posted By David Solway

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/01/why-jews-need-israel/

In a speech given to the Domestic Affairs Committee of the German Bundestag in June 2008 on the subject of a renascent antisemitism, journalist Henryk Broder distinguished between a prejudice and a resentment: “a prejudice concerns a person’s behavior; a resentment concerns that person’s very existence. Anti-semitism is a resentment. The anti-Semite does not begrudge the Jew how he is or what he does, but that he is at all. The anti-Semite takes offense as much at the Jew’s attempts to assimilate as at his self-marginalization. Rich Jews are exploiters; poor Jews are freeloaders….The anti-Semite blames Jews for everything and its opposite.”

Of course, this is a story as old as the Judean hills. If there is anything “new” about it in the current historical moment, it resides in the form this ancient “resentment” happens to take. Its racist, religious and class manifestations persist, but a fourth ingredient has been added to this toxic soup of roiling hatreds, namely, a national element that goes under the rubric of anti-Zionism. The “historical strain of anti-Semitism continues,” writes Phyllis Chesler in The New Anti-Semitism, “but in the last fifty years it has also metamorphosed into the most violent anti-Zionism.”

Taliban: New and Improved? Posted By Robert Spencer

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/01/taliban-new-and-improved/

Apparently the Taliban are softening, even allowing girls to get an education. Clearly this heralds an opening to the West, a heady indication that their most repressive days are past them, and that soon they will take their place among the free people of the earth. Soon they will be following the teachings of Naomi Wolf and Thomas Paine.

Yaroslav Trofimov, in a piece that ran Sunday in the Wall Street Journal, noted that Maulvi Qalamuddin, who headed the Committee to Protect Virtue and Prevent Vice back when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, has completely changed his tune regarding the education of girls. Where once he oversaw the shutting-down, sometimes violently, of girls’ schools, now he says: “Education for women is just as necessary as education for men. In Islam, men and women have the same duty to pray, to fast—and to seek learning.”

Anyone who believes this, or believes that Maulvi Qalamuddin believes it, should contact me, as I have a lovely bridge to sell you. “War is deceit,” said Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, according to a famous hadith, and the Taliban are listening. But the Taliban are to be forgiven for thinking that this sort of thing would play well in Washington, for it very likely will. After all, Joe Biden is still the Vice President – the amiable dunce who recently said: “Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests. If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us.”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11339/pub_detail.asp
According to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), there is a grave threat to America that must be suppressed at all costs. The threat is that Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin might be allowed to exercise his constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.

This proposition is bizarre on multiple levels. For one, General Boykin, who is a friend and greatly admired colleague of mine, is one of the United States’ most accomplished and decorated military heroes. He served in and led our most elite special forces units for decades, including in many of our most dangerous recent combat operations. He also held a number of senior positions in the intelligence community, including as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

For another, Jerry Boykin is also an ordained minister. And the sorts of events CAIR has lately insisted he must not address include prayer sessions convened by the mayor of Ocean City, Maryland and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9SK83100&show_article=1 By ANNE GEARAN and KIMBERLY DOZIER
WASHINGTON (AP) – U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged Tuesday that the United States may release several Afghan Taliban prisoners from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as an incentive to bring the Taliban to peace talks.Meanwhile, Afghan officials told The Associated Press that a plan to give Afghanistana form of legal custody over the men if they are released satisfied their earlier objection to sending the prisoners to a third country.

Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper told Congress Tuesday that no decision had been made on whether to trade the five Taliban prisoners, now held at Guantanamo Bay as part of nascent peace talks with the Taliban. He and CIA Director David Petraeus did not dispute that the Obama administration is considering transferring the five to a third country.

U.S. officials and others had previously spoken only vaguely, and usually anonymously, about the proposal to send the prisoners to Qatar, a Persian Gulf country that has asserted a central role in framing talks that might end the 10-year war in Afghanistan. The lead U.S. negotiator trying to coax the Taliban into talks had also publicly acknowledged the possibility of a release, but said there was no final decision.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

As anyone who has ever made a formal complaint to the BBC knows, internal investigations into allegations of bias, if they proceed at all, tend to be dismissed and Al Beeb thus vindicates itself, amid its characteristic self-puffery.

Until there is a complaints procedure that is independent of the broadcaster itself, conducted by an external body which is genuinely free of Al Beeb’s influence, this will always remain so.

Internal investigations tend, in all likelihood, to favour an organisation put on the defensive and eager to extricate itself from blame, especially when political bias is so ingrained in the culture of that organisation that it fails to recognise bias as such.

Since SBS has a long track record of bias against Israel, it doesn’t really surprise me to learn via J-Wire that an internal investigation by the Australian multicultural channel SBS into a complaint made by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) regarding the four-part series The Promise, broadcast late last year, maintains that

“the series does not, demonise Jews either individually or as a collective, nor deny their individual and collective right to self determination and therefore does not vilify Jews or Israelis.”

The SBS.s decision has been described by ECAJ Executive Director Peter Wertheim as “disappointing and unsatisfactory”.

J-Wire continues:

‘In dismissing the complaints, the SBS Complaints Committee found that the series did not violate the SBS Codes of Practice and that “the ordinary reasonable viewer fully appreciated that The Promise was a fictional drama and nothing more than that”. It also noted that “accuracy per se is not a Code requirement in respect of a drama such as The Promise.”

Rep. Allen West Is Conservative Slam Dunk For Veep

http://news.investors.com/Article/599548/201201311827/congressman-west-is-best-gop-veep-choice.htm

THIS IS REALLY SOMETHING FOR THE GRANDEES WHO HAVE ANOINTED ROMNEY TO THINK ABOUT…..WEST COULD EVEN OUT- DEBATE GINGRICH….RSK

There is no doubt that as important as the state of Florida is for the GOP candidates running for the right to oppose Barack Obama, it will be even more critical in the general election.

Since he was first elected to the Senate, we have heard Marco Rubio’s name floated time and again as a potential running mate for the Republican nominee. To be sure, Sen. Rubio would be an outstanding candidate and would bring many built-in advantages to the ticket.

That said, I believe he has a fellow Floridian in Congress might be a more promising pick: Congressman Allen West from the state’s 22nd District.

As Gov. Romney and his supporters embarrass themselves and cheapen the process with their deliberately inaccurate and escalating attacks against Newt Gingrich — with Gingrich childishly flinging the same mud back at Romney — it’s clear to all Americans who cherish our rapidly fading traditional values that the GOP would be dramatically better served if statesmen like West or Rubio were at the top of the ticket instead of the current crop of candidates. Sadly, they are not.

That said, we can still insert both men and other true conservatives into the process.

For West, the fastest and best way would be for the GOP nominee to pick him as his running mate. Period.

No matter if that nominee is Romney or Gingrich, selecting West might be the only way they would make themselves remotely competitive with Obama, his surrogates in the mainstream media and the billion dollars Obama is salivating to dump on the Republicans’ standard-bearer.

More than that, imagine the mileage the Republican ticket would get if they continually volunteered to have West debate Obama instead of the Republican nominee.

To compare West’s heroic service to our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan during his 22-year military career to Obama’s community organizer days, to his years nodding his head to the vile and dangerous pronouncements of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and to his days learning at the feet of ultraviolent Weather Underground radicals Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Imagine the reaction if West brought his college transcripts and challenged Obama to produce his. Imagine if others wished to compare West’s Bronze Star, three Meritorious Service medals and three Army Commendation medals with the drug paraphernalia from Obama’s experimental days.

Pure and simple, West is a proud conservative and a patriot. As he himself has said, “I have traded in my camouflage uniform for a suit, but the commitment to protect the people of the United States is still my mission.”

READ IT ALL AT SITE

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/31/obamas-deadly-secret/

Now that it’s in full campaign mode, the Obama administration can’t stop talking about things once regarded as secret. President Obama has been bragging about the once-shadowy SEAL Team 6 so much you’d think he was going to tap it to be his running mate. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta caused a flap with Pakistan on Sunday when he told “60 Minutes” he “believed” that “somebody must have had some sense” that Osama bin Laden was hiding out in Abbottabad, though he had no proof. President Obama piled on during his “historic” Google Plus video chat on Monday, in which he tore the fig leaf from U.S. covert drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Netanyahu wins Likud party leadership
The Jerusalem Post
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
News

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu declared victory Tuesday night after polls closed. Read more…

Read more at: http://times247.com/

Newt, defiant, adopts slogan ’46 states to go’
AP
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
News

Trounced in Florida, presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Tuesday used the defeat to declare that he alone is the conservative alternative to GOP front-runner Mitt Romney. Read more…

Read more at: http://times247.com/

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2803/hizb-ut-tahrir-sharia

Last week the government of Bangladesh announced that it had foiled a potential military coup led by the radical Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir [“Party of Liberation”]. Brigadier General Muhammed Masud Razzaq told a press conference in the capital, Dhaka, that 16 members of the Bangladeshi Army – including retired and active Officers – had conspired to dismiss the government of Sheikha Hasina after she made the country’s constitution more secular. He described those involved as “fanatics… with extreme religious beliefs.” Two retired officers, Lt. Col. Ehsan Yusuf and Major Zakir, have been arrested, although the main perpetrators are believed to be operating from abroad.

Hizb-ut-Tahrir is an Islamist party whose members seek to revive an Islamic state, or Caliphate. They are deeply opposed to democracy, and believes in adopting violent jihad as the cornerstone of their foreign policy – with the aim of subjugating the entire world to Islam. Founded in 1953 in Jerusalem, the movement now operates around the world, with an international leadership in Lebanon directing its activities.