RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=4765

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie gave an order for all flags on government and office buildings in his state to be flown at half mast on Monday. This was Christie’s tribute to actor James Gandolfini, who died of a heart attack last week in Rome. Gandolfini, known across the globe as the star of the hit HBO drama series “The Sopranos,” was a native son of New Jersey, where the bulk of the show was filmed.

In response to this grandiose gesture, some critics argued that, as wonderful as he was in his role as mob boss Tony Soprano, Gandolfini was merely a TV star. He was not a military hero; he did not invent a cure for cancer; and, though tragic for his family and friends, his death did not warrant gubernatorial attention.

This is a valid claim. But Americans’ attitudes toward Hollywood are similar to those of the British to the royal family. In fact, the cover stories of supermarket tabloids in both the United States and the United Kingdom this week dealt with the recent birth of Kim Kardashian’s baby and the imminent birth of Kate Middleton’s.

It is not surprising, then, that the news of Gandolfini’s death caused more of a stir in many circles than the terrorist murder of four Americans in Benghazi last September.

What is surprising, however, is the apparent lack of awareness on the part of Gandolfini fans about the nature of their grieving in this particular case. Indeed, with all the carry-on about the greatness of both Gandolfini and the character he played, little has been written about the real root of our attraction to him.

Because it is not self-evident that an overweight, philandering, sociopathic, narcissistic, ruthless criminal could cause audiences to become enamored with and addicted to his machinations, explanations for the success of “The Sopranos” have abounded since the show first aired in 1999. The show’s final episode, in June 2007, generated more discussion and debate at water coolers and on the Internet than a presidential election.

It is true that “The Sopranos” is a work of genius, with a cast to match. It is compelling, riveting, suspenseful and witty. It provides something for everyone, from chase scenes to love scenes, mafia family dynamics and suburban family life. It deals with drugs, sex and violence, alongside conventional marital and parental problems.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/56119 Do you remember when Al Gore first brought his “man-made global warming” circus to Capitol Hill? At that time folks could almost feel his glow of self-satisfaction contributing markedly to the very warming trend he so smugly warned the world against. His movie, “An inconvenient truth,” became the required film de jour for all […]

America’s sons are helping the enemy that wants to kill us, take over the West and institute medieval shariah law! Maybe Nidal Hassan can help with a motivational seminar while he’s preparing for his trial for killing 14 people at Fort Hood in a jihadi rage!
BTW, where was this very same “riot control” unit when Fort Hood was under fire from devout Muslim Hassan? Unarmed, that’s where.

Janet Levy,Los Angeles
http://news.investors.com/ibdeditorials.aspx

Foreign Policy: In the latest twist in our upside-down war on terror, President Obama withdraws troops fighting terrorists in Afghanistan and sends others to Egypt to protect a regime that supports terrorists.

According to reports, the commander-in-chief is deploying a riot-control unit from Fort Hood to Egypt to help the Islamofascist regime there repel its own citizens protesting increasing human-rights violations.

More than 400 Army soldiers from the Texas base will soon man posts throughout Egypt as part of a nine-month “peacekeeping mission.” They’ve been trained to respond to threats, including protests and riots.

“Soldiers encountered Molotov cocktails and other dangerous items in the training,” according to the local TV news station that broke the story out of Killeen, Texas.

The assignment comes ahead of a planned June 30 showdown between Islamists led by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and secularists opposed to his Islamofascist crackdown.

As more and more Egyptians have called for toppling the regime on its first anniversary in power, U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson has appealed for calm. “We oppose chaos,” she pleaded with protesters. “Chaos is a breeding ground for instability.”

Yes, better to protect radical strongmen like Morsi, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader whom the Obama administration helped bring to power. As we warned, Morsi has stacked Egypt’s courts with mullahs and unleashed religious police enforcing austere Shariah law.

Under his burgeoning theocracy, the media and the arts have been censored, churches have been burned and women have been bullied into covering their heads and bodies with Islamic garb, a la Afghanistan.

Millions have signed petitions demanding Morsi step down over the growing human rights violations. Yet Morsi and his thugs are digging in their heels and now they’ll have, of all things, American reinforcements.

This is the same regime that includes other Muslim Brotherhood leaders who have called the U.S. “the enemy” and called for jihad against American troops. This is the same Muslim Brotherhood that’s the granddaddy of all major terrorist groups — including Hamas and al-Qaida, our sworn enemy.

Morsi has forged ties with Hamas and Hezbollah. Recently, he named as governor of Luxor a member of an Islamist group whose terrorists massacred 58 foreign tourists in the resort town in 1997.
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http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/green-power-and-precautionary-double-standards?f=puball Jessica Marszelek, federal politics reporter for Australia’s News Limited Network, recently posted an article titled, “Australia: Wind power ‘terrorising’ rural communities.” Some 150 people turned up for a three-hour rally at Canberra’s Parliament House, she reported, to express their concern about the health effects of wind turbines. The residents from small towns around the […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/one-nation-under-allah-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by Nonie Darwish, author of “The Devil We Don’t Know,” Michael Chandler, an American Patriot, and Dwight Schultz, a Hollywood actor (dwightschultzfansite.nl).

This week our Gang members gathered to discuss Do Americans Want Obama To Think For Them? The discussion focused on how much the utopian virus has infected the U.S.A.

The Gang also shed a disturbing light on One Nation Under Allah, wondering why our children in a Colorado public school are saying the Pledge of Allegiance to Islam’s Allah in Arabic. The guests also discussed The Brotherhood Game, focusing on how Islamists play the “moderate” charade that we desperately embrace.

And much, much more. . . .

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

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/can-muslim-activism-be-done-right/ In an interesting and presumably comforting article recently posted on this site, titled Muslim Activism Done Right, Michael Volpe draws our attention to a new Canadian advocacy group, Progressive Muslims Institute Canada (PMIC). Anti-extremist, amenable to secular values and politically communal, PMIC seeks to counter the theological summons to jihad and the spirit of […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/the-senate-immigration-bill-another-legislative-disaster/

The “comprehensive immigration reform” bill cooked up by the Senate has a decided Obamacare stink to it. Like that disaster, the immigration bill is rushing to solve a whole host of complex problems with a massive, muddled bill few Senators will have the time or inclination to read in its entirety, with the same plethora of unforeseen expensive consequences, all perfumed with the same dubious CBO estimates of money saved and revenue increased. No more encouraging is the similar political bum’s rush being given to anybody––i.e. House Republicans––who dares to suggest some due diligence and prudence might be in order.

This unseemly haste should raise our suspicions. So too should be the deceiving rhetoric and incoherence lacing the arguments from supporters. Most egregious is the outrageous failure to discriminate between legal and illegal immigration. These are separate issues, but the Gang of Eight amnestistas collapse them together for tactical reasons. They can evoke all the sentimental, Emma Lazarus “nation of immigrants” rhetoric to sell their legislation, hiding the social dysfunctions and massive expenses caused by illegal immigration behind feel-good stories of plucky legal immigrants creating new industries and enriching American identity. Anyone who brings up those costs of illegal immigration will then be demonized as “anti-immigrant,” “xenophobes,” “nativists,” or “racists,” all question-begging epithets designed to avoid the current legislation’s failure to address any of those costs.

Then there is the bathetic rhetoric about illegal aliens that also deflects our attention from those costs. John McCain waxed hysterical in the Senate not long ago as he decried the fact that illegals had to “live in the shadows.” What can he possibly mean by that? That they can’t work, attend school, run businesses, obtain EBT cards, shop at malls, visit hospital emergency rooms, be protected by the police, or buy cars and flat-screen televisions? They do all these things and more, so how dark can those “shadows” be? Indeed, in states like California––home to the largest number of illegal aliens, 2.5 million––state law has invited them to live as openly as anybody else. A few years ago, the student body president of Fresno State was an illegal alien who flaunted his status at various “Dream Act” rallies. Not even wrecking a car while driving under the influence cast him into the “shadows.”

McCain went on to decry how illegal aliens are “exploited.” Let’s see, they risk their lives crossing scorching deserts, at the tender mercies of the criminals transporting them, so they can be “exploited”? That’s some exploitation that allows you freedom, access to government services, free emergency-room health care, and enough economic opportunity to allow illegal Mexican immigrants to send about $10 billion back to Mexico every year. They left Mexico in the first place to avoid the real exploitation caused by a corrupt government, endemic violence, and a culture of stratified social hierarchies that make economic and social advancement difficult.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/06/hizballahs-disneyland/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=bc70099987-Mosaic_2013_6_24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-bc70099987-41165129
Hezbollah now has a theme park.

The Tourist Landmark of the Resistance promises a fun-filled day for the entire family celebrating the holy Islamic “resistance” against the perfidious Zionist Entity. The Syrian- and Iranian-backed Party of God built it on top of a mountain overlooking South Lebanon and the Israeli border area, and they bus in school kids from all over the country to look at it.

Anti-American propagandist Noam Chomsky attended the inauguration.

It’s open to visitors from everywhere in the world except Israel, so I had to see it. My friend and occasional traveling companion Sean LaFreniere joined me, and we set out in a rental car from Beirut.

Getting there was a bit tricky. The museum-park was built on an old Hezbollah combat base that sits 3,400 feet above the rolling hills of South Lebanon. The nearby village of Mleeta is nowhere near a main road, nor is it on any maps, not even the huge and otherwise comprehensive map I bought for twelve dollars. But Google Earth knows where it is, and I could see online that it’s just four miles south of the Christian town of Jezzine at the southern tip of the Mount Lebanon range.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324577904578557193071973074.html?mod=WSJUK_hpp_sections_opinion

The war in Syria has been a catastrophe for the Syrian people. But as the composition of the military opponents has become clearer—al Qaeda-linked Islamists dominating one side, Bashar Assad’s forces and Hezbollah the other—it has become obvious that the window of opportunity for outside intervention is closed. We must now have in mind Henry Kissinger’s famous remark during the Iran-Iraq war: It’s too bad they both can’t lose.

Western governments no longer have the will, capability or patience to act in such a forum. And to dabble without wishing to get more deeply involved is a pathetic option.

So when the British prime minister and foreign secretary talk of arming a “moderate opposition” to Assad, they are talking of a diminishing and soon-to-be extinct force. If there was ever a chance of helping such moderates into power, it has passed. What moderates existed have been replaced by extremists, and the West must have no part in assisting them.

It is not Assad propaganda but the simple flood of news that now confirms this. What Vladimir Putin alluded to at the opening of the G-8 summit last week was true: that a young Syrian opposition fighter called Abu Sakkar was captured on video last month cutting out and biting into the lung of an opponent. Similar atrocities include those of “opposition” forces who recently tortured and executed, in front of his parents, a 15-year-old coffee seller in Aleppo. Mohammad Qataa’s “crime” was an overheard comment alleged by these judges, jurors, torturers and executioners to be blasphemous.

Other “rebels” include the killers of Andrei Arbashe, a 38-year-old Christian taxi driver who was recently beheaded and his body fed to dogs near the Turkish border, all because his brother was allegedly overheard referring to the opposition as bandits.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/24/white-house-launches-website-part-obamacare/

The Obama administration launched its promotion of the new health care law in earnest Monday, revealing that it has asked the National Football League to advertise insurance options as it rolls out a glossy new website and a 24-hour call center to clear up confusion about the law.

President Obama and his political allies are furiously touting the Affordable Care Act less than 100 days until Oct. 1, when state-by-state health “exchanges” will start to enroll Americans without employer-based health insurance. Qualified customers will be able to buy health plans through the help of government subsidies so they are covered as of Jan. 1.

“For the first time in the history of the private insurance market, consumers will be able to go to one place to check out their coverage options, get accurate information in easy-to-understand language and make apples-to-apples comparisons of plans before they make their decision,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday.

Until recently, the administration felt it had no product to push. But with open enrollment roughly three months away, pressure has mounted on the administration to deliver on its mission to help millions of Americans gain health insurance.