RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Choosing Life in Israel Reviewed by Ruth King

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/choosing-life-in-israel-reviewed-by-ruth-king.html

David Hornik moved to Israel in 1984. In the preface to Choosing Life In Israel he states: “This book is both about my own choice to live in Israel and Israel’s choice to live and thrive in the face of challenges.”

Hornik’s book is a compendium of personal and political essays he has written since he became one of Israel’s most incisive journalists. Arranged in chronological order, they revisit in eloquent prose a besieged nation’s triumphs and tragedies, its ancient stones and its modern cities, its beauty, its warts, the incalculable harm of mindless appeasement, and its holiness.

Hornik’s heart is in Israel’s history and the vision of Zionists restored to an ancient land, but his mind is also focused on politics and the hypocrisy of those whose aim is to tarnish and delegitimize the Jewish state.

In the internet age many excellent columns rapidly fade from memory, so this print anthology is a welcome reminder of events that shaped Israel’s destiny and the contemporaneous reaction of a clear eyed observer.

The euphoria that accompanied President Obama’s visit to Israel is reminiscent of the great optimism engendered by the Oslo Accords.

In “Intifada” written in 2003 and again in “Washington-Bibi is In. Peace is Dead” written in 2009, Hornik speaks sarcastically of the extent to which commentators and journalists disregarded the spree of terrorism that followed Oslo: “Many Israelis –if their charred bodies weren’t long ago interred–have such pleasant memories of those years (following the infamous handshake between Rabin and Arafat) in which 200 Israelis died in terror attacks, a total far beyond any previous comparable period in Israeli history.” He chides those architects and point men of Oslo who ignored the butchery and “…never stood up and said that perhaps this process should be stopped and the Israeli army should retake the areas from which Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Arafat’s PLO terrorists were now staging repeat attacks.”

In 2005 in “The Wages of Appeasement” Hornik wrote: ”…treating the likes of Hitler or Arafat or Stalin or Kim Il Sung, as benign, rational individuals….who just want to improve situations, is a very basic lapse of adult functioning.“ And, he presciently noted, well before Israelis focused on the threat of radical Islam: “The test is whether today’s democracies can stand up to the jihadist assault with its unprecedented dangers.”

In “The West’s Denial of Evil” (2006) He reminds us that the West continues to fail the test: “Almost five years after 9/11, after Madrid, London, the terror war against Israel, and so on, the cowardice–the lunging to pin blame on one’s own side, the eager abandonment of logic and fairness while rushing to embrace moral inversion and idiocy–all this is so strong as to suggest that the West’s survival is anything but certain.”

I recently asked one of Israel’s top journalists, an American who, like Hornik, moved there many years ago, why the foreign press, including Jews, echo the complaints and outright libels of Arabs in writing of Israel. The answer: “All the foreign journalists — and diplomats, for that matter, whose sport is bashing Israel — love being stationed here even while they are trashing us in their columns. They stay in nice places in trendy neighborhoods because they get a lot of bang for their buck. They have fun, because there’s always lots to cover and lots to do in their free time. There are great bars and restaurants and lots of beautiful women and men who fawn all over them. Israelis speak English, which makes it easy for foreign correspondents to talk to them. The Government Press Office which spoon feeds them translations and arranges trips and interviews, unlike the Arab countries they cover, does not penalize or threaten or ban them for any harsh criticism of Israel. “

I will be out of the country and unable to post or send or receive e-mails. I wish you all happy holidays.

It appears the rumors of Assad’s demise are wrong….But it also appears that Anthony Lewis is really dead. He was a veteran Israel “calumnist.” The mantle of nastiest journalist now sits firmly on Thomas Friedman’s shoulders.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/a-bad-apple-doesnt-fall-far-from-the-tree/print/

A month before the election that would make Obama the first Democratic Socialists of America member in the White House, another prominent DSA’er wrote a cheerful article about the 160th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the daughter of a Gillette executive, had gone mainstream by writing about poverty in America, but her politics never strayed far from her own roots in a more prosaic Marxism. It wasn’t poverty that Ehrenreich objected to. It was capitalism.

After September 11, Ehrenreich complained that applying the word “evil” to Islamic terrorists made her “nervous.” “The real challenge,” she said, “is to look at terrible acts and try to work our way towards an understanding of how a human being might undertake them.”

But there is one country that the morally ambiguous Barbara Ehrenreich has no difficulty branding as “evil” or refusing to understand. On the list of endorsers for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel, Barbara Ehrenreich’s name appears next to that of her son, Ben.

As the son of John and Barbara Ehrenreich, leftist politics of the worst kind were in Ben Ehrenreich’s DNA, and both mother and son found their calling as pseudo-journalists who exploited other people’s suffering while managing to make the story all about them.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/a-tribute-to-americas-heroes-robert-spencer-and-pamela-geller-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by James Patrick Riley, the CEO & Founder of Colony Bay Entertainment, Morgan Brittany, a TV and Movie star (“Katherine Wentworth” in “Dallas”) and Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv.

The Gang members gathered to discuss: German Philosophy, Sex and Hollywood. The dialogue occurred in Part II at the 8:30 mark, where the panel discussed Andrew Klavan’s argument about why Conservatives should have faith in the Arts. The segment began with a focus on Islamic Blasphemy Laws in the U.S. and ended with an analysis of Obama’s Abbas Romance on His Visit to Israel.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/borek-volarik/i-lived-through-the-real-obamacare/print/

It was bad in the Czech Socialist Republic — but it wasn’t as bad as in Cuba, where patients have to bring their own sheets to the hospital.!!

In the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic all health care was free for everybody! Oh, what a paradise….well, until you actually experienced the “worker’s paradise,” as the communists proudly called it, in real life.

First, everybody contributed to the cost of the health care, but in a hidden way – through the income tax. There were no tax returns to be filed at the end of year. All taxes were automatically deducted from the gross pay. There were no write offs. The only difference was in marital status and number of children. The young, single people, paid a so-called “ox tax.” That was a bit alleviated by marriage and then every newborn child lowered the tax and generated so called “child bonuses.” The state used the money from the taxes to cover all the state’s spending — health care being one of them.

Well, you get what you pay for, right? Right!

What do you expect from a dentist on a salary set by the state’s pay scales? How about a really ugly crown and no anesthetics (Novocain was in short supply, distributed by the state to dentists by a system of rations on monthly a basis); well, a small envelope with big money…casually left at the receptionist’s desk, would make miracles.

What do you expect from a doctor on a state’s salary? Don’t you worry, you always got your aspirin!

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/an-american-christians-letter-from-an-iranian-prison/ Thanks to a letter received by his family last week, new details have emerged about Pastor Saeed Abedini, an American citizen and Christian convert from Islam, who has been held in Iran’s brutal Evin Prison since September of last year and was sentenced in January to eight years in prison for “evangelizing and threatening […]

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/03/20/an-islamic-crossword-puzzle-for-the-aspiring-jihadist/?singlepage=true Click here to print. An Islamic Crossword Puzzle for the Aspiring Jihadist Posted By Bruce Bawer On March 20, 2013 @ 7:00 am In Death,Humor,Islam,Religion,Satire,Suicide | 1 Comment Freelance writing is a financially precarious career – you’ve always got to be on the lookout for new opportunities, or you’re screwed. So when I found […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/largest-u-s-muslim-group-features-terror-in-flagship-publication/ The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) is the largest Muslim organization in the United States and Canada. It encompasses youth movements — including the largest Islamic collegiate group, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) — as well as hundreds of mosques throughout North America. ISNA issues a bi-monthly publication titled Islamic Horizons. At face […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/is-the-climate-the-biggest-threat?f=puball

The commander of American forces in the Pacific, Admiral Samuel Locklear, told a Boston Globe reporter last week that the most serious long-term security threat to the Asia-Pacific region is climate change.

Locklear said in the interview that instability stemming from a warming planet “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen . . . that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.”

Apparently having faced some raised eyebrows in previous conversations on the matter, the admiral admitted that “People are surprised sometimes” to hear him say climate change is the biggest threat to peace in the Pacific.

He’s right on this account: Many would be surprised-or even shocked-to hear our senior warfighter in the Pacific say that.

It’s likely that his listeners would expect him to talk about nuclear North Korea or China’s military build-up, cyber or space warfare or even the ongoing sovereignty disputes in the East and South China Seas, which involves some of our allies and friends.

In fairness to the admiral, there are a lot of possible reasons for his views. First, Locklear could be convinced of what he says or was being cautious with his words so as to not exacerbate existing tensions with the likes of North Korea, whose rhetoric of late has been anything but friendly.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/jonathan-pollard-the-case-for-commutation-of-sentence THIS ONE ON POLLARD IS ABSOLUTELY RIGHT….RSK During the course of President Obama’s recent interview with Israel’s Channel 2 on March 21st, in response to whether he would consider commuting the life sentence of former civilian American naval intelligence analyst and convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, he remarked: “As president, my first obligation is […]