RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/10/27/a-model-of-interfaith-dialogue-a-southern-baptist-at-brigham-young-university/?print=1
“I do not believe that we are going to heaven together, but I do believe we may go to jail together.”

These days, interfaith dialogue is often reduced to a slogan — a Coexist bumper sticker, perhaps, or a vow to embrace diversity. The words “brutal honesty” are perhaps not the first that come to mind when we think of interfaith dialogue because our culture has trained us to avoid offending people at all costs. Disagreeing with others or speaking too forthrightly — particularly about religion — is not considered to be virtuous. Americans in the 21st century are so sensitive and so fragile that they must be shielded from uncomfortable truths, we are told.

And then there is Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who demonstrates how intellectual and spiritual honesty can be noble and even preferable to false unity.

Dr. Mohler recently gave an address at Brigham Young University, showing how we can share an interfaith dialogue that is both respectful and honest. Oftentimes those with substantive theological differences will seek to find common ground while truth is sacrificed in the process. Mohler managed to accomplish both in his address to almost 400 students and faculty at the nearly packed auditorium at BYU.

Mohler expressed that he respected his audience enough to acknowledge their differences:

I come as a Christian theologian to speak explicitly and respectfully as a Christian—a Christian who defines Christianity only within the historic creeds and confessions of the Christian church and who comes as one committed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to the ancient and eternal Trinitarian faith of the Christian church. I have not come as less, and you know whom you have invited. I come knowing who you are—to an institution that stands as the most powerful intellectual center of the Latter-Day Saints, the most visible academic institution of Mormonism. You know who I am and what I believe. I know who you are and what you believe.

In a world where conflict and disagreement are often seen as the enemies of the common good, Mohler walked to the podium and gave truth its rightful place of honor in his dialogue with those in attendance. While it might have been tempting in that situation to exude a more conciliatory tone, emphasizing only areas of agreement, Mohler made it clear from the start that he recognized the differences and wanted to begin a dialogue coming from a place of truth.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/to-crush-a-swastika-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by John Duffy, a Film Producer from the South Bronx, Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv, and Orestes Matacena, a Filmmaker whose latest project is SwastikaTheMovie.com, dedicated to the memory of the Jewish resistance in the streets of Warsaw in WWII.

The Gang gathered this week to discuss Breaking Ranks With The Left. The discussion occurred in Part II and focused on each guest’s brush with the totalitarian inferno. The segment ended with the Gang members’ analysis of Obama’s War on America and how Americans can best safeguard their freedoms:

Part II:

In Part I, the Gang focused on Orestes Matacena’s new film project, SwastikaTheMovie.com. The dialogue focused on Matacena’s goal to pay tribute to all those who fought in the resistance against the Nazi occupation in Europe, the Middle East and Africa during WWII.

The Gang discussed why the lessons of that resistance are so crucial for our generation to grasp — as the West confronts IslamoFascism and the Obama administration’s destructive agenda.

The segment ended with a focus on ObamaCare’s Website Disaster:

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arlene-kushner/restoring-israels-rights-the-levy-report/print/

The Jewish people’s considerable rights to the land of Israel are founded upon several bases:

Jews have been on the land for close to 4,000 years, most notably within eastern Jerusalem (where the Old City and the Temple Mount are located), and Judea and Samaria – all places where ancient Israelite heritage is marked. Jews, in fact, are the indigenous people of Israel, present not only historically, but with continuity over the centuries.

In modern times there are legal precedents for establishing the Jewish claim to Israel: This is with reference to the San Remo Conference, the Mandate for a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, confirmed in international law, and more.

These Jewish rights have certainly not diminished over the years. Yet there is a prevailing perception that this is the case – that there has been a rethinking of what properly accrues to the Jewish State of Israel. A revisionist perception, we might say.

This perception has been fueled by Palestinian Arab leader Mahmoud Abbas and his cohorts, who – in insisting ad nauseum that Israel’s proper place is behind the “1967 border” – reveal themselves to be major advocates of the dictum that, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Of course this business of a “1967 border” is a lie: there was no border established to Israel’s east after the War of Independence ended in 1949, only a temporary armistice line. The armistice agreement was not even with a “Palestinian people,” but with Jordan. Nor did Security Council Resolution 242 require Israel to pull back fully from Judea and Samaria, which was secured defensively during the Six-Day War in 1967.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-loses-the-middle-east/print/

There are things that Obama just doesn’t understand. Like math. And health care. And alliances.

Alliances are as vital to foreign policy as a website that works is to online health care enrollment, but Obama has given every sign of not understanding the concept of alliances. When Hillary Clinton came to Moscow bearing her misspelled Reset button, the button was real and reset every alliance to zero.During his two terms, Obama has managed to wreck nearly every alliance the United States had. The only alliances that survived were so low-pressure that even he couldn’t manage to destroy them.Obama’s alliance vandalism pushed aside allies and courted enemies. If a country hated the United States, overtly and openly, then he was there bowing to it as low as he could go. If a country had an existing alliance with us, it was in big trouble.

From Latin America to Eastern Europe to the Middle East, the shock waves of the Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton reset passed leaving behind destroyed relationships and empowered enemies.

Poland learned that Obama cared more about showing Vladimir his flexibility than about defending the nations liberated from the grasp of the red bear. Israel learned that Obama would put Iran first and Egypt and Tunisia found out that Obama only had eyes for the Muslim Brotherhood.

It took a lot for Obama to lose the Saudis, but now even they have turned on him. America’s greatest Middle Eastern frenemy was an enemy who pretended to be our ally. The frenemy game had paid off for Saudi Arabia with American soldiers being sent off to protect the House of Saud, but by Obama’s second term, the Saudis had figured out that they could do better by being our open enemies than by pretending to be our friends.

The Saudis, who had always been noted for being subtle, stopped being subtle when a member of one of their think tanks openly declared, “We are learning from our enemies now how to treat the United States.”

There is no better metric of contempt in a region where everyone wears a false face than honesty like that. The Saudis have decided that we are no longer even worth lying to. They believe that we have become so worthless that they can tell us what they really think of us.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Our technocracy is detached it is from competence. It’s not the technocracy of engineers, but of “thinkers” who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance.

These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn’t fix a toaster.

The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or how it works.

It’s hard to have a functioning technocracy without engineers. A technocracy made in Silicon Valley with its complete disregard for anything outside its own ego zone would be bad enough. But this is a Bloombergian technocracy of billionaires and activists, of people who think that “progress” makes things work, rather than things working leading to progress.

Healthcare.gov showed us that behind all the smoother and shinier designs was the same old clunky government where everything gets done because the right companies hire the right lobbyists and everything costs ten times what it should.

If the government can’t build a health care website, how is it going to actually run health care for an entire country is the obvious question that so many are asking. And the obvious answer is that it will run it the way it ran the website. It will throw wads of money and people at the problem and then look for programs it doesn’t like to squeeze for extra cash.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/10/dialing_1-800-fk-you.html I just had the worst dream. I was standing center stage, eager to unveil my fancy new website. I pressed the button; the website crashed, and 7 billion people started laughing at me. Do you think Obama ever had that dream? Nah, neither do I. Images like that spring from an inborn sense of […]

Europe’s outrage over NSA spying ignores its own history and practice. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303615304579157711264482456?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Maybe the leaders of the European Union should have issued a communique at their summit in Brussels Friday, publicly thanking Edward Snowden for stealing U.S. secrets and thus giving them something to talk about other than their own economies.The euro zone’s unemployment rate […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304069604579158293350301588?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

Alas, Bolivia…..I was born and nurtured there. Thousands of Jews found a haven in Bolivia where they were treated hospitably by the residents and never harassed or oppressed. ….Dictators came and went. They were tin pot tyrants but none as brazen and criminal as Evo Morales, a cretinous Hugo Chavez clone…..rsk

The country is a hub for organized crime and a safe haven for terrorists.

In the years after a brutal 10-year Soviet occupation, Afghanistan became a petri dish in which a culture of organized crime, radical politics and religious fundamentalism festered—and where Osama bin Laden set up operations.

Now something similar may be happening in Bolivia. The government is an advocate for coca growers. The Iranian presence is increasing. And reports from the ground suggest that African extremists are joining the fray.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, who is also the elected president of the coca producers’ confederation, and Vice President Alvaro García Linera, formerly of the Maoist Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army, began building their repressive narco-state when they took office in 2006.

Step one was creating a culture of fear. Scores of intellectuals, technocrats and former government officials were harassed. Many fled.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/prez-clueless-over-mideast-mayhem This week the president plugged the toll-free number for Obamacare, urging citizens to join by calling in rather than logging in if they want a health care policy. My question: Which toll-free number do we call if we’re looking for a foreign policy? The fact is that while we’ve been understandably distracted by domestic […]

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/10/still-bickering-over-balfour/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=96e25acaf1-Mosaic_2013_10_28&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-96e25acaf1-41165129 Still bickering over Balfour Last year, on the 95th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the former Palestinian minister, Nabil Shaath, wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph attacking Britain for issuing its famous statement of support for the establishment in Eretz Yisrael of a national home for the Jewish people. Shaath called the Balfour […]