RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2013/11/may-it-please-kangaroo-courtchristian.html

Infamously, as is well-known, the pro-BDS Methodist Church in Britain (a dying church hijacked by leftists) posted some weeks ago a survey regarding BDS that has caused considerable controversy. (See a summary and the link on our old pro-Boycott pal Richard Hall’s blog here.)
Among those who took the opportunity to respond was pro-Israel Nick Gray of the UK-based Christian Middle East Watch (see here).
Now, in an absolute corker of an “open letter” to the Methodist Church’s Peter Tidey, American Christian scholar and pro-Israel advocate Dexter Van Zile characterises the survey’s fourteen questions as the products of a “kangaroo court” since

‘A quick perusal of the questions indicates that the church has already concluded that Israel is solely responsible for the continued existence of the Mideast conflict, and that the Palestinians (and their Arab supporters) bear no responsibility.’

Van Zile goes on:

“Despite my misgivings, I decided to respond to your survey.

…. I am responding as a Christian who has grown disgusted with the monomaniacal focus of so-called peace and human rights activists in the West, who have hijacked church bureaucracies in their campaign to demonize Israel.

Below are my responses to your church’s interrogatories.

Question One: What do you understand to be the motivation/inspiration behind the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions in relation to Israel?

The BDS campaign has, as intended by its organizers, proven to be a powerful vehicle in the effort to enlist people to the demonization and de-legitimization of the Jewish State, which represents the gold standard for human rights in the Middle East.

Israel treats its enemies, dissidents, minorities, and its own citizens with far greater humanity and respect than any other country, regime, or political movement in the region and yet it is the country that is being targeted by BDS activists both inside and outside the Methodist Church in England. Anti-semitism is clearly part of the equation in the BDS movement.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/
In Britain, Lobbyists Demonise “The” Lobby
The graphic below, boasting of the growing economic clout of Muslims in Britain, comes from this recent press release by the Muslim Council of Britain.

But it is not only in the economic field that Islamic influence is gaining ground.

Far outnumbering the Jewish community, and accordingly wielding a much greater number of votes at election time, Muslims in Britain also have a growing political influence that inevitably threatens to have a deleterious impact upon UK government policy towards Israel.

We glimpse this growing political clout in the publication of a new report, to be launched at the House of Commons this evening by a Lib Dem MP, Sir Bob Russell, who, as glimpsed here, has a history of denigrating Israel.

To quote from the website of its sponsors, the report in question (entitled “Giving Peace A Chance”)

“looks at how BICOM [the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre]has worked within the Zionist community in the UK to support Israel’s interests. The report looks at how the organisation has worked to ferment support for Israel within British political and media circles, from providing briefings to taking delegations to the region. The report explores how serious the pro-Israel lobby is about seeking peace in the region, particularly in the post-Oslo context.”

The report was funded by Middle East Monitor (MEMO), whose director, Caribbean-born Dr Daud Abdullah, is a longtime senior researcher at the Palestinian Return Centre in London and editor of its journal. From 2003-6 he was assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/363328/print With a rueful eye on the local mayoral election, my colleague Charles C. W. Cooke noted: “I’m moving out of New York City in three weeks. Good timing.” I had had similar thoughts myself, remembering my time commuting in to Buckley Towers in Manhattan from nearby Connecticut. (You know who most misses the much-lamented […]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/two-sides-of-islam-in-indonesian-politics-a-931935-druck.html
Indonesia’s Tolerant Take on Islam

By Erich Follath

The Southeast Asian island nation of Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population, which practices an open-minded, gentle version of Islam in urban areas. But elsewhere Islamists are beginning to encroach.

Joko Widodo is a strange character, a superstar in his country and a figure of growing importance in Asian politics. He is also a mixture of many things that don’t ordinarily mix.

Sometimes he behaves like the legendary Kalif Harun al-Rashid, who used to sneak out of his palace in Baghdad at night to mingle, in disguise, with ordinary people and learn what they were thinking. Sometimes he emulates Nelson Mandela, who has charmed people with his optimism and eloquence throughout his life. And sometimes he comes across as a Mick Jagger type, charismatic and assertive, but perhaps a little too self-absorbed.

For his fellow Indonesians, this is apparently an irresistible blend of character traits. Widodo, 52, widely known as “Jokowi,” is a pop star and an inspirational tribune of the people. He is the governor of the regional district of Jakarta, a megalopolis of about 23 million people on a strip of land along the coast, which is constantly threatened by flooding. In fact, scientists believe that most of Jakarta will be underwater by 2050.

Greater Jakarta is one of the most chaotic collections of people in the world, a seemingly ungovernable Moloch. But according to opinion polls, Governor Jokowi is doing such a good job in Jakarta that Indonesians say they would elect him president in next year’s national elections. This would also make him one of the leaders of the G-20 group of 20 major economies.

Indonesia, an enormous nation consisting of more than 17,500 islands, stretches from Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra to Borneo, Java, Bali, the Maluku Islands and New Guinea. It encompasses more than 5,000 kilometers (3,107 miles) from west to east, or about the distance from Lisbon to well past Moscow. It is a country with vast, virtually uninhabited regions and some of the world’s most crowded places. It also holds volcanoes and tropical rainforests, the home of giant, 60-meter (200-foot) trees, along with mangroves and coral reefs, orangutans and Komodo dragons.

Indonesia’s manmade wonders are as impressive as its natural features. Magnificent Buddhist temples like Borobudur and impressive Hindu sites like Tanah Lot are UNESCO World Heritage sites. And Jakarta, Surabaya and Medan boast some of the world’s largest and most beautiful mosques.

World’s Largest Muslim Population

Despite the current economic setbacks, including last week’s strikes, Indonesia is still considered one of the up-and-coming Tiger Cub economies. It has sufficient oil and natural gas reserves, is the world’s largest exporter of palm oil and has good relations with Washington, Beijing and Berlin. Germany’s Federal Security Council has approved the export of Leopard 2 tanks to Jakarta, notwithstanding the Indonesian military’s brutal treatment of Papuan rebels. After her visit this summer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel enthusiastically referred to Indonesia as a dynamic and future-oriented economy, with the world’s fourth-largest population after China, India and the United States.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/6/biden-wasserman-schultz-congratulate-wrong-marty-w/

Vice President Joe Biden, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz all made calls to congratulate Marty Walsh for his win in Boston. Only problem? They got the wrong Marty.

State Rep. Marty Walsh won the first open mayoral race in 20 years Tuesday night to become the next mayor of Boston, but the three called political consultant and former Edward Kennedy staffer Marty Walsh instead, the Cape Cod Times first reported.

“We’ve had this for the past 20 years happening back and forth. Marty tells a funny story from 2006 when Kennedy thanked me from the stage and his mother thought it was for him,” said non-mayor-elect Walsh, joking that sharing the mayor’s name could have its perks.

“If you need a reservation in the city of Boston, I can probably get you any reservation you want,” he told the Cape Cod Times.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/6/inside-the-ring-north-korean-missiles-deemed-a-ser/

The commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific said this week that North Korea’s KN-08 missile — a new road-mobile, intercontinental-range weapon — is a serious threat with the potential to hit the United States with a nuclear warhead.

The comments by Navy Adm. Samuel Locklear to foreign reporters on Tuesday were made as a report provided new details on the six KN-08 missiles — initially thought in 2012 to be mock-ups — that now appear to be hard-to-locate and easy-to-fire mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

“From a military planning perspective, when I see KN-08 road-mobile missiles that appear in a North Korean military parade, I am bound to take that serious, both for not only the peninsula, but also the region, as well as my own homeland, should we speculate that those missiles potentially have the technology to reach out,” Adm. Locklear said.

North Korea wants the United States to believe it has strategic missiles, and the strategic threat cannot be ignored, he said.

The regime in Pyongyang has conducted three underground nuclear tests and several long-range missile tests. But U.S. intelligence has not confirmed that North Korea is able to miniaturize a nuclear device that can be fired atop long-range missiles. North Korea is believed to have small warhead designs that were purchased in the mid-2000s through the covert Pakistani nuclear suppliers group headed by A.Q. Khan.

“Whether [the mobile missiles] are real or not, or whether they have that capability or not, the North Korea regime wants us to think they do, and so we plan for that,” the four-star admiral said.

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/nobel-physicist-thorium-trumps-all-fuels-as-energy-source/33365

GENEVA – It’s high time for the nuclear industry to overhaul its conventional technology and shift to radically different reactor designs based on thorium fuel, a Nobel Prize winning physicist said.

Carlo Rubbia, a former director of the CERN laboratory who shared the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics, described thorium as having “absolute pre-eminence” over all other fuels including fossil fuels and uranium, the metallic element that has driven reactors since nuclear first started powering public grids in 1956.

“In order to be vigorously continued, nuclear power must be profoundly modified,” Rubbia said at the Thorium Energy Conference 2013, held on the CERN campus here last week.

Rubbia pointed out that thorium leaves less long-lived waste than uranium, is far more plentiful and is resistant to weapons proliferation, as I reported on my Weinberg blog. He also noted that thorium is effective at safely breeding more fuel, and that it has a much higher energy content than uranium or fossil fuels (see chart below), a characteristic that he said gives it “absolute pre-eminence…as a source of energy.”

Proponents of thorium disagree over the reactor technology that is best suited to optimize its characteristics. Unlike uranium, thorium is not “fissile,” so it needs to be coaxed into a reaction.

Rubbia, a particle physicist, favors a method that would bombard thorium with neutrons freed from a source hit by protons from a particle accelerator. Advocates of that approach claim it is highly safe because the thorium would not sustain a chain reaction and operators could stop the reactions by simply switching off the accelerator. Operators could also vary a reactors’ energy output by modifying the particle beam.

Critics say that the accelerator method – Rubbia invented one called the “energy amplifier” – is too unwieldy and unreliable.

http://www.realclearenergy.org/charticles/2013/11/04/is_israeli_gas_field_a_game_changer_107323.html

Motley Fool is waxing enthusiastic about the offshore finds in natural gas that Noble Energy has recently made for Israel. “In 2010, Noble Energy and its partners found something in Israel’s offshore region that the country had been looking for since the oil embargoes of the 1970’s; its own hydrocarbons. . . . The Tamar and Leviathan fields are estimated to have as much as 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, which is enough gas to supply Israel for decades even if it were to convert all of its energy consumption from coal and oil to natural gas — with enough left over to export. Noble Energy estimates that this gas field and the planned export projects could net the country more than $130 billion in energy savings and government revenue from gas royalties.” The U.S. Geological Survey also estimates there are 600 million barrels of recoverable oil in the field. Cyprus is also sharing this bounty. Not only will the field turn Israel from an importer to an exporter of hydrocarbons, the find also has the potential of supplying Europe, freeing it from dependence on Russia and Qatar. The potential for political realignment are enormous.

  http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4047/global-peace-and-unity-conference-uk Speakers at the upcoming Global Peace and Unity conference can be categorized as follows: 65% are anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic and pro-terror preachers, 20% are public servants offering political legitimacy and moral credibility to the other speakers, while the remaining 15% could perhaps claim to be part of the conference’s “project dedicated to creating […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/majid-rafizadeh/the-iranian-hostage-crisis-34-years-later/print/ As the Obama administration stays determined to push for domestic and foreign policies that would prevent further pressure on the Islamic Republic of Iran, attempting to diplomatically and pleasantly reach out to the Islamists in Iran, just this week Islamist Iranian leaders responded to Obama’s outreach and foreign policies with a robust reaffirmation of […]