RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3971

Britain is gearing up for Baroness Margaret Thatcher’s funeral on Wednesday at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. As is customary in the United Kingdom, protocol is as crucial as pomp and circumstance. It was therefore par for the course that one of the issues surrounding the major event was the very carefully determined guest list.

Conspicuously absent from this list of dignitaries from countries with which the U.K. has diplomatic relations was Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. In her stead, Argentinian Ambassador to Britain Alicia Castro will be invited, because Thatcher’s children said that “good manners” require it.

So far, however, the ambassador hasn’t had the “good manners” to RSVP.

Etiquette aside, it is with good reason that Kirchner is not welcome. This is not merely because her presidency has been marked by hostility toward Western allies and friendliness with the regimes of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro — though this should suffice for her to be shunned.

No, the rationale behind snubbing Argentina’s first female president (the only thing she had in common with Thatcher) has to do with her current campaign to claim her country’s sovereignty over the Falkland Islands. And it is precisely Thatcher’s leadership during the Falklands War that is going to be the theme of her funeral, with hundreds of members of the royal armed forces taking part in the ceremonies.

The Falklands War, which lasted from April 2 to June 14, 1982, broke out when Argentinian troops invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands, an archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean that has been administered by Britain since 1833.

In 1945, Argentina appealed to the newly formed United Nations in an attempt to re-establish its sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, which it had obtained in 1816 after gaining independence from Spain. Argentina claimed that the British had “illegally occupied” the islands in 1833.

In 1964, the U.N. passed a resolution calling on Britain and Argentina to resolve this dispute. When word got out that Britain was negotiating with Argentina over sovereignty, the Falkland Islanders were furious. They liked being British and wanted to keep it that way. As a result, the U.K. tried to get Argentina on board with furthering their self-determination. Argentina wasn’t interested. This stalemate lasted for nearly two decades, until Argentina launched the surprise military invasion.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/am-i-a-dangerous-extremist-are-you?f=puball If you should suddenly cease to find my commentaries, I will either have passed away or have been detained by agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or the Defense Department and taken to an undisclosed location for the crime of having been an “extremist” and a danger to the nation. In April […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/shadowing-europe-with-the-islamophobia-canard On March 21, 2013, the United Nation’s observed its annual International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, commemorating the anniversary of the 1960 apartheid massacre in Sharpeville, South Africa.  Attempting to draw a parallel with the massacre, the Non-Governmental-Organization (NGO) grouping European Network Against Racism (ENAR) issued its Racism in Europe:  ENAR Shadow […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/the-cultural-intifada-and-temple-denial-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by Lela Gilbert, author of Saturday People, Sunday People, actor Dwight Schultz (DwightSchultzFansite.tv) and Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv.

The Gang members gathered to discuss The Cultural Intifada and Temple Denial. The dialogue occurred in Part I and focused on Islamists’ gambit to de-Judaize the Jewish state. The discussion was part of the Gang’s reflection on Lela Gilbert’s book, Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner. Ms. Gilbert shares what brought her to Israel, the Israelis’ warm reception of her, and why, as Dr. Gabriel Barkay shared with her, “Temple Denial is more dangerous and serious than Holocaust Denial.”

Part II dealt mostly with Saturday People, Sunday People, focusing on the dire lessons of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, the trauma that Israeli citizens, including children, have suffered from the barrage of Palestinian terror, Jimmy Carter’s Jew-Hate, and the world’s blind spot: the forgotten exodus of 900,000 Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim countries.

The segment ended on a reflection on Margaret Thatcher and on the powerful way in which she shaped her era.

To watch both parts of the two-part series, see below:

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-lefts-war-on-science/print/

“We did not come to ask for mercy from nature,” Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, the Lysenko of Soviet agriculture, once declared. “We must wrest it from her.”

Communist science was guided not by the journey from hypothesis to fact but by the dusty proclamations of Marxist theorists. Soviet scientists were expected to reject capitalist science and formulate a science that matched the Communist worldview.

The Communist worldview insisted that every living creature could be completely transformed into anything. It rejected natural selection as having a competitive capitalist bent that suspiciously resembled a biological version of free market competition. And pseudo-scientists like Lysenko and Michurin matched bad science to bad ideology laying out an official dogma in which transforming the environment could transform any creature and in which intraspecies struggle did not lead to evolution.

The USSR’s politicization of biology crippled its agriculture. Its leaders rejected free market competition on the human level and in the plant and animal kingdoms. They insisted that nature had to follow Marxist dialectical materialism and locked up and murdered the scientists who disagreed. By the time the USSR fell, a land which had once exported wheat to the world had gone deep into debt to buy wheat from the United States.

But bad ideology driving bad science didn’t die with Lysenko and Michurin. The new Lysenkos are Warmunists like Michael Mann and James Hansen. The environmentalists, like the Communists, believe that human beings have total control over the environment and that the environment determines all.

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/04/11/margaret-thatcher-rip/?singlepage=true I have been out of town in a semi-secure, undisclosed location and have not had occasion to weigh in on the death of Margaret Thatcher.  I happened to be with some close friends of hers when the news came, so I’ve been kept abreast of the currents of opinion.  Much of the commentary, as […]

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2013/04/11/goodbye-to-blighty/?print=1

It’s revolting to watch the outpouring of morbid glee at the death of Baroness Thatcher from the British left–not from Occupy Wall Street fringe elements, but from trade union leaders and senior Labor MPs. London’s Daily Mail today reports:

Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB union, said: ‘Mrs Thatcher will be remembered by many for the destructive and divisive policies she reigned over which in the end, even in the Tory Party, proved to be her downfall. Her legacy involves the destruction of communities, the elevation of personal greed over social values and legitimising the exploitation of the weak by the strong.’

Labour shadow pensions minister Gregg McClymont came under fire for ‘condoning’ an inflammatory tweet about the former Conservative prime minister. He was accused of being ‘extremely foolish’ when he described a university student’s political views as ‘spot-on’ following a reference to Lady Thatcher a ‘f***** witch’.

Dancing on the grave of one’s political opponents is unthinkable in American terms. In part this is because any American president bears the dignity of the office of head of state, while a British prime minister is a servant of the sovereign. But that does not explain the eruption of hatred against a dignified, intelligent, and principled woman who led her country longer than any 20th-century prime minister–almost as long as Franklin Roosevelt led the United States. This eruption of hatred is inexcusable. But it is not entirely inexplicable.

The victory of the West in the Cold War would have been impossible without her. The book to read is The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister, by her close adviser and friend John O’Sullivan (I reviewed it when it first appeared in 2007).

Baroness Thatcher was a great woman, one of the few political leaders to change a country’s direction for the better. During the 11 years of her ministry the compound annual growth rate of per capita real national income was 2.5%, compared to just 1.9% during the preceding 11 years of (mainly) Labour governments. She believed in free markets and unleashed a wave of creative destruction that reshaped much of England.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/345338 Analysts agree that “the erosion of the Syrian regime’s capabilities is accelerating,” that it continues to retreat step-by-step, making a rebel breakthrough and an Islamist victory increasingly likely. In response, I am changing my policy recommendation from neutrality to something that causes me, as a humanitarian and decades-long foe of the Assad dynasty, to […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/345373 America’s tax code is a 74,000-page unintentional comedy. As the Monday, April 15, tax-filing deadline mercilessly approaches, millions of Americans will cry as they calculate what they owe Washington and then fork it over. But amid those tears there will be plenty of laughs. The U.S. Tax Code is so tangled and twisted that […]

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

“Why does the Church of England hold Jews in contempt?” asked the prominent Anglican blogger Archbishop Cranmer last year, following the General Synod of the Church of England’s endorsement of the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), which he powerfully characterised as

“nothing but an insidious front for a pro-Palestinian campaign to propagate the partisan lie that, while Israel is besieged by child killers, infiltrated by suicide bombers, surrounded by Islamist propagandists and endures almost daily missiles launched at civilian areas, she is the aggressor, the terroriser, the occupying force.

The declared vision of the EAPPI is to bring ‘internationals to the West Bank to experience life under occupation’. Its mission is to ‘accompany Palestinians and Israelis in their non-violent actions and to carry out concerted advocacy efforts to end the occupation’. They ‘support acts of non-violent resistance’ in order to achieve this and, since Israel is the ‘occupying force’, it stands to reason that the EAPPI’s raison d’être is to criticise and delegitimise Israel, a country which contends daily with concerted efforts to wipe its people off the face of the earth.

The EAPPI creed is very simple: Palestinians are victims; Israelis are aggressors; Zionists are evil; the IDF are terrorists. It was spawned by the World Council of Churches which, over the years, has passed motions calling for ‘an international boycott of goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories’; lauded Yassir Arafat as a hero for ‘bringing the Palestinian people together’; and called for ‘the right of return of Palestinian refugees’, despite this posing an existential threat to the Jewish homeland. The WCC unashamedly declares: ‘The EAPPI is a central element of the Ecumenical Campaign to End the Illegal Occupation of Palestine.’