RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2013/01/29/the-cfrs-steven-cook-misrepresents-me/

Steven Cook, the Council on Foreign Relations’ main expert on Egypt, posted an inaccurate and unprincipled attack on me today at the CNN “Global Public Square” blog.

“An objective observer,” Dr. Cook writes of Egypt’s present crisis, “might come to the reasonable conclusion that Egypt needs help and that the international community should do what it can to help pull Egyptians back from the brink. That is certainly the view of most analysts from across the political spectrum, yet in one corner of the commentariat [namely mine], they are actually hoping for Egypt to fail.”

On the contrary: I believe that the foreign policy establishment (including Dr. Cook) is engaged in a hapless and counterproductive effort to save the unsalvageable. That is my assessment as a specialist in country risk with thirty years’ experience, including a stint as Bank of America’s global head of bond research. I never wrote that an Egyptian collapse was desirable, only that it was inevitable. I might be wrong, but this week’s events in Egypt surely do not make me look wrong.

Dr. Cook refers specifically to my Jan. 22 essay, “Denial still is a river in Egypt,” in which I argue that Egypt’s economic collapse has made the largest Arab state ungovernable. He denounces as “a-historic revisionism” my “claim that economic collapse was the reason for the uprising.” Revisionism? I have been arguing since February 2011 that the global spike in food prices undermined Egypt, which imports half its food. I wrote back then:

Even Islamists have to eat. It is unclear whether President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt will survive, or whether his nationalist regime will be replaced by an Islamist, democratic, or authoritarian state. What is certain is that it will be a failed state. Amid the speculation about the shape of Arab politics to come, a handful of observers, for example economist Nourel Roubini, have pointed to the obvious: Wheat prices have almost doubled in the past year.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/164708

A key figure in Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi’s government has called the Holocaust a hoax cooked up by U.S. intelligence operatives, and claimed the six million Jews who were killed by Nazis simply moved to the U.S., Fox News reports.

The claims made by Fathi Shihab-Eddim, a senior figure close to President Morsi who is now responsible for appointing the editors of all state-run Egyptian newspapers, came as the world marked Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27.

“The myth of the Holocaust is an industry that America invented,” Shihab-Eddim said, according to Fox News.

“U.S. intelligence agencies in cooperation with their counterparts in allied nations during World War II created it [the Holocaust] to destroy the image of their opponents in Germany, and to justify war and massive destruction against military and civilian facilities of the Axis powers, and especially to hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the atomic bomb,” Shihab-Eddim added.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center in New York, said Shihab-Eddin’s comments were as troubling as they were ridiculous.

“Fathi goes on to claim that the six million Jews all really moved to the United States during the war (and oddly no one noticed) and that the number of Jews killed in the war was about the number who died in traffic accidents,” Greenfield wrote in Frontpagemag.com.

Efraim Zuroff, Israel Director of the Jerusalem-based Simon Weisenthal Center told Fox News the remarks show a dangerous, but common, mindset.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3559/obama-eu-britain These reactions are indicative of the contempt the political elites have for the concept of democratic accountability. In a high-stakes gamble, British Prime Minister David Cameron said last week, in his long anticipated speech about the European Union, that he would like the EU to be an open, internal market based on nation states […]

http://EconWarfare.org
If your offer is high enough, you could purchase U.S. technological secrets. Rest assured, the Obama Administration will not block the sale.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Fox News (not the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal, or CNN) revealed today that “the U.S. government has approved the sale of bankrupt, stimulus-fund recipient A123 Systems, Inc., to China’s Wanxiang Group Corp., with a North American business based in Elgin, Ill.

Apparently Wanxiang bid was $5 million higher that that of the Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls. “The Chinese company created “a new independent trust to buy A123’s civilian unit. The civilian arm makes up the bulk of the company’s operations. The idea would then be for Wanxiang to buy the business from the trust.”

A123 makes advanced lithium batteries and has developed technologies that have key U.S. military applications. Among its clients was U.S. subsidized electric carmaker Fisker, for which it has provided batteries. The batteries’ defects forced Fisker to shut down production for a while, and led to A123’s bankruptcy. Although Wanxiang didn’t buy A123’s military unit (which was sold to a U.S. firm), the technologies Wanxiang acquires are similar to those used in the military unit.

Wanxiang is an auto-parts company headed by Lu Guangiu,who in 2011, was reportedly was “the third richest man in the National People’s Congress,” who’s close ties with China’s new government, “worries some lawmakers.”

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2013/01/29/senator-rubios-immigration-enforcement-fantasy/?print=1 The silly season is upon us again, which is to say: Washington finds itself in yet another debate over “comprehensive immigration reform.” The core silliness could be heard in the arguments of Marco Rubio, one of four Republicans in the Senate “Gang of Eight” urging a deal that purports to ensure real immigration enforcement […]

As a political junkie, I’ve had Zero Dark Thirty on my must-see list since I first watched previews of it. When I finally had the chance to see it, at a Sunday matinee showing, the theater was packed. And any doubts that Kathryn Bigelow’s directing was less than stellar were immediately put to rest. The […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/339062 In Zero Dark Thirty, CIA characters warn of congressmen coming after them for running the agency’s interrogation program. As it happens, they could have said the same thing about making a movie about the agency’s interrogation program. Washington is aghast at Kathryn Bigelow’s fantastically compelling new film. Zero Dark Thirty isn’t really about interrogation, […]

http://melaniephillips.com/britains-infernal-cocktail-of-hate With the row then still raging over the Lib Dem MP David Ward’s attack upon Jews for not learning the lessons of the Holocaust and oppressing the Palestinians, the Sunday Times published last weekend a cartoon by Gerald Scarfe depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a demonic builder walling up Palestinians with cement […]

The New York Times recently discovered antisemitic statements from President Morsi—but why were they surprising?

ISLAM….YES ISLAM….IS ANTI SEMITIC SINCE THE ADVENT OF MOHAMMED….TAKE OFF THOSE ROSE COLORED GLASSES…..AS THE LIBEL OF THE DEICIDE ENCOURAGED CHRISTIAN ANTI-SEMITISM…THUS THE KORAN HAS DONE SO SINCE ITS WRITING. THE DIFFERENCE IS THAT TRULY “MODERATE” CHRISTIANS DENOUNCED IT…INCLUDING POPE BENEDICT IN HIS RECENT BOOK…..AND THE SO CALLED “MODERATE” MUSLIMS JUST GIVE DOCTRINAL JEW HATRED A PASS…..RSK
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/01/29/the-muslim-brotherhood-has-been-antisemitic-since-its-founding/

The New York Times’ January 14 report on the Middle East Media Research Institute’s (MEMRI) videos of Egyptian Mohamed Morsi’s 2010 anti-Semitic statements inexplicably omitted the larger story of the Muslim Brotherhood’s decades-long intrinsic anti-Semitism.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism has uncovered comments going back to 2004 showing a pattern of pure anti-Semitic comments made by Morsi and other Muslim Brotherhood leaders.

MEMRI has routinely covered these sorts of bigoted and hate-filled statements from throughout the Islamic world that most media outlets such as the Times have refused to cover since the late 1990s.

Morsi’s comments reflect the Muslim Brotherhood’s intrinsic anti-Semitism that is easily obtainable dating back to its founding in 1928.

The MEMRI videos cited by the New York Times earlier this month show Morsi referring to Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs” and saying that Muslims should “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews…”

The IPT found additional comments by Morsi on the Muslim Brotherhood’s website from November 2004 in which he described the Jews as “descendants of apes and pigs.”

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

When professional writers get together what they talk about are not the great ideas that some of their readers imagine, but mostly the mundane business of their work; the good and bad reviews, the writers, agents and editors they hate and those they like, and the relationships in their incestuous industry.
Joseph Acton, Salman Rushdie’s memoir of his years in hiding, is such a collection of industry talk, full of the good and bad reviews he received, the famous people he attended parties with and his opinion of every writer, lover and editor he came in contact with. There are plenty of meditations on his years in hiding and his relationship with his service branch protectors, but Rushdie is a creature of the publishing industry and the literary circles that made him famous and kept him influential, and the book is more about that world than it is about the reasons he went into hiding and stayed in hiding.

All biography is at its heart fiction and Joseph Acton is a triumphant work of fiction as its author labors to make Rushdie’s numerous marriages and infidelities seem like the natural outcome of a stressful situation and the neurosis of his many wives. Any writer who crosses Rushdie or whom he crosses receives that same treatment. How much of it is true, is impossible to know.

Joseph Acton is Rushdie’s way of settling scores, some probably justified, some probably not, with countless reviewers, writers, politicians and wives. Throughout it all he manages to maintain the persona of an affable man wronged by unfair attacks and allegations, though toward the end when discussing his breakup with Padma Lakshmi, he begins ranting incoherently about Scrooge McDuck.

What Joseph Acton isn’t about, is Islamism or even freedom of expression. Rushdie does his best to make his ability to write and live freely as the acid test of freedom of expression, and he has a case considering that silencing him was the first major move to enforce Islamic law in the West. But it’s less a case of a courageous reformer speaking out, than a mildly famous left-wing writer discovering that circumstances had placed him on the firing line.

Rushdie occasionally delivers stirring defenses of freedom of expression and at one point even holds all of Islam, as it is practiced today, responsible, he appears to learn very little from the experience. At one point, he is introduced to an elderly Enoch Powell, who warned against immigration, and remembers wanting to punch him on an earlier occasion. It never occurs to him to overlay his experience on the Rivers of Blood that Powell warned about.