RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/08/26/loveint-in-the-air NSA continues to play footsie with the law — but most alarmingly as conveyed in Footnote 14. Will Congress respond? What do Hillary Clinton, Anthony Weiner, and the NSA have in common? More than you probably think. The issue at bar is “LOVEINT,” the practice of some NSA employees of gathering intelligence information on […]

http://harvardnsj.org/2013/08/striking-hezbollah-bound-weapons-in-syria-israels-actions-under-international-law/ Hezbollah, the Shiite terror organization based in Lebanon, has repeatedly sought to justify its armed pro-regime intervention in Syria. Most insistently, it has been arguing that Israel and the United States initially instigated the rebellion against Bashar al-Assad. To be sure, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is factually incorrect in this particular allegation. More importantly, […]

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/obama-acts-like-muslim-godfather-with-his-approach-to-muslim-brotherhood-in-egypt/

Much of the debate surrounding current U.S. policy in Egypt revolves around vague notions of America’s interests in the region. On one side lies the principle that the U.S. must live by its rules — to cease aid following a coup — to demonstrate to Egyptians the morality of a free society and the rule of law.

Similarly, the U.S. must not risk being held in contempt by Egyptians for its association with actions of the military, which many deem to be ruthless and authoritarian.
Image showing some Egyptians consider Obama as supporter of Muslim Brotherhood

A picture taken July 29, 2013 shows posters on a street in Cairo of Egypt’s army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and U.S. President Barack Obama with a beard and bearing a slogan referring to the belief by some Egyptians that the U.S. supports the Muslim Brotherhood. (Photo credit: FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images).

The better case for supporting the Egyptian military and current leader Gen. Abdel al-Sisi, references keeping the Suez Canal open, ensuring that the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel continue to be upheld, maintaining continued good relations with pro-Western neighbors, and keeping the Sinai Peninsula free from terrorist control.

These arguments demonstrate great concern for what’s happening “over there” but fail to identify America’s primary interest — the Muslim Brotherhood is a serious and immediate threat here. The simple reality is that the Brotherhood has declared itself America’s enemy, and all that is happening over there is intimately connected with an effort here to take down the West in general and our nation specifically. [The problem, however, is that such a threat is generally too severe for the American mind to accept, much less process and act upon. Instead, the American mind tends to rely on what this author has called the Control Factor — that active and continuous process to distort our perceptions so as to make us believe we are in control of something that we very much are not.]

http://www.jpost.com/National-News/George-Lichter-A-pioneer-in-the-pantheon-of-the-IAF-323101

Already a US veteran of WWII, when six Arab armies attacked Israel on May 15, 1948, Lichter threw in his lot with his fellow Jews and the nascent IAF.

World Machal pays its last salute to Machalnik George Lichter, an outstanding fighter pilot, a superb flying instructor, and an accomplished test pilot.

Lichter passed away in Boulder, Colorado, after a short illness on August 2, and he most certainly earned a well-deserved place in the pantheon of the Israel Air Force.

Born in Brooklyn in 1921, Lichter signed up for the US Army Air Force pilot training course on the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

He finished his training with distinction, and as a pilot in the 361 Fighter Group he flew P-51 Mustangs and P-47 Thunderbolts in 88 combat missions over Germany and occupied Europe.

Lichter returned home at the end of 1944 as a decorated war hero.

When six Arab armies attacked Israel on May 15, 1948, Lichter threw in his lot with his fellow Jews. He volunteered to fly in the nascent IAF. In the first stage in the process, he landed up in Czechoslovakia with a group of other volunteer ex-World War II pilots, mainly from the US, South Africa, Britain and Canada.

Israel had just acquired its very first combat aircraft – 25 Czech-built Avia S-199s (known as the “Czech Messerschmitts”).

These aircraft were modeled on the famous German ME-109 fighter aircraft, but had been cobbled together with ill-fitting German aerial engines, air frames, landing gears etc., which resulted in a devilishly dangerous aircraft to fly.

Even the Czech instructors who had undertaken to train the IAF pilots had the utmost difficulty in flying these planes, but the one pilot who mastered the art of flying this dangerous and awkward aircraft was George Lichter.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/author/michael-rubin/

And let us not forget the puff piece in Vogue about Assad’s wife…”Rose of the Desert” http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/the-only-remaining-online-copy-of-vogues-asma-al-assad-profile/250753…..And now the fashionista publisher of Vogue Anna Wintour is all giddy about Hillary for President. She probably thinks Assad’s use of chemical weapons is the fashion equivalent of chemical peels for wrinkles and sun spots…..rsk

Bashar al-Assad is in the running for the most dangerous man in the world. There are not too many world leaders who would acquire such reserves of chemical weapons and then seek to use them against anyone, let alone civilians. While the U.S. military conducts lessons-learned exercises all the time in order to learn from their mistakes and make themselves a more effective force, I am not aware of a single time in which the State Department or senior U.S. government officials have acknowledged error and conducted a similar lessons-learned exercise to identify where they went wrong.

Let’s hope that, if they ever start, they consider how the Syrian regime pulled the wool over their eyes. Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad may have spent some time in the West, but just because Islamists and autocrats spend time in the West does not mean that they acquire Western values; instead, they learn only how to speak to Westerners and cultivate useful idiots.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3951/german-elections-eu-islam German voters already know that whichever party wins September’s election will only bring more of the same: more restriction of German sovereignty. It is therefore no surprise that, at least for indigenous Germans, the turnout is expected to be low. The Islamic immigrants, however, hope that by turning out massively, they will be able […]

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/08/oslo-twenty-years-on/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=f1eb931452-Mosaic_2013_8_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-f1eb931452-41165129

Next month the world will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the most famous handshake in modern history, that legendary moment when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat stood face to face on the White House lawn and acknowledged each other’s existence. The fact that Oslo’s anniversary comes just as John Kerry revives Israeli-Palestinian peace talks gives special urgency to that favorite question of Middle East pundits—why did the peace process fail?

If history is any guide, most analysts will invoke the same hackneyed narrative of Palestinians who had unequal bargaining power at Oslo and Israelis who, backed by imperial America, cleverly “co-opted” the PLO in order to obstruct any possibility of a viable Palestinian state.

The problem with this narrative isn’t necessarily the allegation of PLO inequality, it’s the failure to recognize this inequality—if it in fact existed—as both natural and downright just. More problematic, however, is that the Oslo Accords actually seem to have been slanted far more in the other direction.

Let’s assume for a moment that the critical account is correct and that the Palestinians had unequal power at Oslo. Should anyone be surprised? When Rabin and Arafat shook hands in 1993, Rabin ran a sovereign state with a recognized territory, a democratic population, and a representative government. Arafat, on the other hand, ran a muddled and murderous revolutionary movement based in Tunisia. The PLO was no nascent state; it was a loose coalition of terrorist factions, a nominal bureaucracy, and a loud-mouthed press office. It held no land, no democratic mandate, and no presence in the territories it claimed to represent.

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001384.html

CONTENTS

1. The west’s record of appeasement in dealing with evil
2. Israel: Chemical weapons were fired by Assad’s brother’s unit
3. Syrian child refugees now number over one million, with 2 m. more inside Syria
4. A map of the 23 places the U.S. may bomb if there’s a Syria no-fly zone
5. Report: 31 Palestinians killed in Syrian chemical strike
6. Extremists slit throats of 44 in Northeast Nigeria
7. Washington Post staff trapped as Egyptian-Americans denounce them
8. The Middle East explained in a letter to The Financial Times (last Friday)
9. British MP on Iranian TV blames Israel for Assad’s chemical attack
10. Letters to God cleared from Western Wall as Jewish New Year approaches

Rockets Hit Israel from Lebanon – UN tells Israel to Maximize Restraint
At the United Nations, self-defense for Israel has long been a theoretical right. Every time it is actually used, it’s a problem. Last Thursday, four rockets from Lebanese territory targeted northern Israel, one of them falling close to a home occupied by Holocaust survivors. Israel responded the following day by specifically targeting and bombing a terrorist base in Lebanon. So what did the UN do? Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued a statement in which he said, on the one hand, “the firing of rockets” – no name, no perpetrator, no use of the word terrorist – was a violation of Security Council resolution 1701. And, on the other hand, Israel’s “retaliatory strikes” drew this: “The Secretary-General…condemns any and all violations of resolution 1701… He urges all concerned to exercise maximum restraint and cooperate with UNIFIL, in order to prevent an escalation. The parties must fully adhere to resolution 1701 (2006) and respect the cessation of hostilities agreement.”

There should have been no other hand. There should have been “thank you Israel for responding quickly to the attempt by terrorists to broaden the Syrian conflict, divert attention from recent horrors there, and for demonstrating to real enemies that democracies are not all feckless weaklings cowering from the responsibility of defending freedom.”
OMG. President Obama May Decide to Act on Syria Without the UN
U.N. chemical weapons experts are now in Syria to investigate three purported chemical attacks that took place months ago. Allowing the investigators into the country took months of negotiations between the U.N. and the Assad government. And even then, their mandate “is limited to those three sites…and it is only charged with determining whether chemical weapons were used, not who used them.” So after the most recent alleged chemical weapons attack, will President Obama wait for UN inspectors to gain access to one more site? Will he depend on the UN to find whether chemical weapons were used, but not who used them? And where would the rudderless White House go from there? After all, the UN is Obama’s go-to authority – as he pounded should have been the case on Iraq. So if the UN gang can’t get in, or won’t say whodunnit, the man just might have to make a decision for himself.

UN In Full Spin Mode Over Camp Jihad
UNRWA-backed summer camps for Palestinian children are indoctrination centers for antisemitism and the promotion of violence. Watch the disturbing spectacle of how children are taught intolerance, a thirst for blood, envy and greed.
Camp Jihad

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Drawing pictures of all of Israel as Palestine, and chanting ‘from the river to the sea,’ this summer another batch of Palestinian youth has been programmed to make war and to murder their Jewish neighbors. Where are all the phony UN human rights experts and delegations and investigators and high commissioners and councils and commissions and reporters? The enablers are nowhere to be seen. Now imagine if the teachers and campers were Israeli.

Under fire after the video’s release, UNRWA issued a statement denying wrongdoing by saying in part that some of the video was “a third party’s activities inside what is indeed an UNRWA installation.” This is the UN’s standard response to all of its intense anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activities conducted on a global scale: it is merely a shell with no responsibility for what transpires inside the belly of the beast. But if any Jewish organization committed to combating antisemitism were to try to book the same UNRWA facility – in an effort to detoxify Palestinian children – it would be unavailable. There is no chance that every single UNRWA employee was blissfully ignorant about what was going on in their facilities. And obviously, UNRWA’s installations are built and maintained with UNRWA funds. This isn’t guilt by association. It’s just plain guilt.

For additional responses see here.

Ban Ki-moon backtracks on Israel comments
Ban Ki-moon Backtracks On Bias Against Israel Claim
Only last week, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon admitted to Israeli students while in Jerusalem – in response to a question – that there was bias against Israel at the UN. Apparently, such an admission didn’t sit too well with his UN handlers and the anti-Israel majority that drives the bias at the General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Commission on the Status of Women, the International Labor Organization, the World Health Organization…etc etc So on Monday, Ban added a “not” after reporters asked him to explain the statement. Ban said: “No, I don’t think there is discrimination against Israel at the United Nations.” There isn’t any other way to say it. The Secretary-General of the United Nations is a liar.

The brainwashing of Palestinian kids
Camp Jihad Teaches Palestinian Kids to Hate Israel
The UN is supporting summer camps for Palestinian children that teach them how to jump rope, paint watercolors, and hate Jews. A chilling documentary entitled “Camp Jihad” is now exposing the antisemitism that runs through the fabric of today’s UN. UNRWA-backed camps not only teach Palestinian children to hate, but to turn that hate into a thirst for violence. As one of the teachers in the film states: “(w)ith God’s help and our own strength we will wage war. And with education and Jihad we will return to our homes!” The camp’s indoctrination of these children is simple but effective: 1) concoct a fairy tale image of Palestine before the Jews – one of beaches, cars, boats, and villas, 2) describe the story of the creation of the state of Israel as a “Nabka” – or catastrophe – in which they were robbed of their homes in Israel, and 3) inspire them to yearn to return by Jihad to their “ancestral” villages. The director of the camp, Amina Hinawi, is profuse in her thanks specifically for the support of UNRWA in making this camp possible.

Unfortunately, thanks should also go to the United States and the American taxpayer – the largest single donor to UNRWA. The excuses for funding the next generation of Palestinians who hate Israel and want war have to stop.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/carbon-dioxide-the-gas-of-life?f=puball It’s amazing that minuscule bacteria can cause life-threatening diseases and infections – and miraculous that tiny doses of vaccines and antibiotics can safeguard us against these deadly scourges. It is equally incredible that, at the planetary level, carbon dioxide is a miracle molecule for plants – and the “gas of life” for most living […]