RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/23/pussy-riot-members-say-they-have-no-regrets/

“Asked whether she wants to say something to Putin, she answered bluntly: “No, honestly speaking, for me he doesn’t exist. He is just a blank spot for me.”

MOSCOW (AP) – The imprisoned members of the Pussy Riot feminist punk band say they feel no regrets about the irreverent “punk prayer” against President Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral that landed them behind bars for two years.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina offered a vivid, but stoic, description of their harsh prison conditions in interviews published Wednesday in the independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper. They said they don’t expect clemency from authorities.

Tolokonnikova, who works at a sewing machine like most female prisoners in Russia’s prison colonies, was quoted by the paper as saying she has had her fingers punctured by the needle but has picked up speed and experience and can now meet her quota of making lining for 320 jackets a day.

Like other prisoners, she bathes once a week and uses cold water to wash the rest of the week.

“I am not paying much attention to living conditions,” she said in an interview filmed last month. “I’m ascetic, and living conditions matter little for me.”

Tolokonnikova said she meditates to prevent her spirit from being dulled by the monotonous labor. She added that the main thing she misses at her prison colony is the ability to read freely; prison conditions leave little room for reading the Bible and philosophy books.

Three members of Pussy Riot were found guilty of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred in August after they raucously prayed to the Virgin Mary for the deliverance from Putin at Christ the Savior Cathedral. One of them, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was later released on appeal, but Tolokonnikova and Alekhina were sent to prison colonies last fall.

Tolokonnikova argued that their protest wasn’t aimed at religion. “It was an ironic, cheerful and bold act, a political outcry, so to speak,” she said, adding that the Russian state media interpretation of it as a blasphemous action was deliberately wrong.

She said she wants to go to a prison church to talk to its priest and attend the service, although she added she has no intention of being baptized just yet.

She said that she had been warned about likely harassment by other prisoners who felt insulted by the band’s act, but there was nothing like that at her prison colony in Mordovia, a province in western Russia about 350 kilometers (217 miles) southeast of Moscow.

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/now-some-serious-trading

“ISRAEL- I WOULDN’T TRADE IT FOR THE WORLD” Michael Ordman

The Israeli elections are over and we are now into the period of horse-trading that inevitably is required to build a new coalition for governing the country. Excluding the politicians, however, most Israelis are going about their regular business. The country’s many forward-thinking entrepreneurs continue building new enterprises or expanding their current ones, which will undoubtedly bring huge benefits to the world.

Those living in, or traveling to, far-off locations will definitely appreciate the innovations from first two Israeli companies featured. Starting on dry land, Israel’s Alvarion is deploying its fast wireless broadband service for the benefit of the 7500 residents and workers on the North Slope of Alaska – one of the remotest and harshest places on earth. We then cast off to hear about Station 711 – part of Israel’s RRsat Global Communications Network – which has just launched the latest version of its mobile communications for ships. Its Fleetbroadband gives crews a commercial, operational and personal link to the rest of the world while at sea.
We need to keep moving in order to appreciate Israel’s number one position in the market for Gesture Technology – the latest feature that lets you communicate with your personal computer by waving your hands in front of the built-in camera. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Israeli companies PointGrab and eyeSight revealed their latest deals; PointGrap’s with Samsung’s smart TVs and eyeSight’s with AMD’s new graphics chip. We now increase the speed in order to catch up with the new Chevy Corvette C7 Stingray sports car. The new model is much lighter and stronger than similar vehicles, thanks to the very same dense plastic composite material that protects US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. The material is manufactured by Plasan Sasa, which is based at Kibbutz Sasa in Northern Israel.

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/01/23/exclusive_morsy_implies_jews_control_the_american_media
Exclusive: Morsy implies Jews control the American media
Posted By Josh Rogin

Last week in Cairo, seven U.S. senators had a highly contentious meeting with Egyptian PresidentMohamed Morsy during which the Muslim Brotherhood leader implied that he was the victim of an American media run by the Jews.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) led a delegation last week to Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Afghanistan that included Sens. Chris Coons(D-DE), Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Kirsten Gilibrand (D-NY). Their stop in Cairo included a 90-minute meeting with Morsy that devolved into an uncomfortable set of exchanges as the senators pressed the Egyptian president to explain his 2010 comments describing Jews as “bloodsuckers who attack Palestinians” as well as “the descendants of apes and pigs.”

After the meeting, McCain issued a statement saying that the senators “voiced our strong disapproval of the statement” and that the senators and Morsy “had a constructive discussion on this subject.” Morsy’s spokesman issued a statement after the meeting saying that Morsy believed in religious freedom and “the need to distinguish between the Jewish religion, and those who belong to it, and violent actions against defenseless Palestinians.”

But inside the meeting, the discussion over Morsy’s 2010 remarks was much more heated than either side publicly acknowledged afterwards, according to Coons. Addressing the comments was the first item on the senators’ agenda, and the discussion did not go well, he told The Cable in an interview.

“We tried to give President Morsy an opportunity, now that he is the president, to put his comments in a different context because he was claiming that he was taken out of context. On their face they seemed to be very offensive and inappropriate,” Coons said. “It was a difficult conversation.”

Hilllary on Libya: ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ Breitbart http://www.breitbart.com/Columnists/John-Nolte After being pressed today by Republican Senator Ron Johnson to explain how it was that over the course of weeks, the Obama Administration stood by an absurd story claiming that four Americans were murdered in Libya due to a spontaneous protest gone bad, outgoing Secretary […]

http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/01/24/obama%E2%80%99s-call-for-%E2%80%9Cpeace-in-our-time%E2%80%9D-some-aids-to-reflection/

In the context of his usual call for “engagement” (rather than war) with nations who harbor “suspicion and fear” of America, President Obama in his inaugural speech of January 21 called for “peace in our time.”

Since it is hard to believe that any literate person, with or without Ivy League degrees, can fail to recognize the irony that has surrounded these words ever since Neville Chamberlain uttered them in September 1938 after signing the Munich Agreement with Hitler, just what did the president intend by them? Is it possible, even in these dark times, that neither the president nor anybody around him in his large cadre of speech writers and advisers, reviewing the speech before its delivery on such an occasion, took notice of them? With the single exception of Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post, no prominent representative of the chattering classes noticed them either. Not even the normally astute Charles Krauthammer, who is not only a relentless critic of the president but a certified psychiatrist conversant with and presumably on the lookout for, “Freudian slips,” thought to ask whether Obama had here committed a grievous error in speech and memory because of some unconscious, subdued wish or train of thought.

Let me venture a few possible interpretations, if only as aids to further reflection. They are a distillation of conversations I’ve had with several of my fellow septuagenarians, every one of whom, I should perhaps add, was jolted by hearing Obama’s call for “peace in our time.”

http://www.cis.org/Upholding-the-Value-of-Our-Citizenship-Threats-Should-Be-Denaturalized?utm_source=E-mail+Updates&utm_campaign=7b6648072e-Value_of_Citizenship1_23_2013&utm_medium=email

WASHINGTON, D.C. (January 24, 2013) – In light of the discussions of a “path to citizenship” for illegal immigrants, it’s important to note that in extraordinary cases, the path to citizenship can be run in reverse. Naturalized citizens who acquire their citizenship through fraud, especially those involved in terrorism or espionage, can and should be subject to denaturalization.

The Center for Immigration Studies today released a new report, “Upholding the Value of our Citizenship: National Security Threats Should Be Denaturalized”, that discusses the danger of allowing naturalized U.S. citizens who have been charged with serious national security-related offenses to retain their citizenship. Even immigrants who fraudulently conceal material facts in order to be granted citizenship remain citizens and receive all the benefits, including sponsorship of family members for immigration and traveling abroad using a U.S. passport. The report also reveals that the Department of Homeland Security has no method in place for reviewing such cases, which ensures there will not be any future improvement of the vetting process.

W.D. Reasoner (a pseudonym) is a retired government employee with many years of experience in immigration administration, law enforcement, and national security matters.

This paper examines the surprising number of naturalized citizens who have been charged and convicted of serious national security crimes — including terrorism, espionage, and theft of sensitive information and technology — in the last several years. It compares the relative ease with which aliens naturalize with the extreme difficulty in stripping them of citizenship, even when they prove to be national security threats who have gamed the system.

It also discusses the fact that the federal government, and the Department of Homeland Security in particular, have no systematic method of examining such cases to establish a baseline of “lessons learned” to attempt to weed out future threats, nor make any significant effort to denaturalize individuals even after they have committed serious national security offenses of the type described. It recommends that if the government will not or cannot take better care to prevent the admission of individuals who are serious threats to our safety, then it must move more aggressively to reverse its mistakes and strip citizenship from those who commit national security crimes against our nation.

Key findings include:

In the past decade, dozens of naturalized U.S. citizens have been arrested and charged with a variety of serious national security-related offenses involving terrorism, spying, and theft of sensitive information and technology.

The federal government almost never revokes the citizenship of these naturalized citizens, even when it is clear that they concealed material facts regarding their extreme ideas or associations with terrorist groups or foreign intelligence organizations at the time they naturalized.

There is no central government repository of information about naturalized citizens who engage in serious national-security offenses.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has no systematic method for collecting the information nor efforts in place to review such cases, either for the purpose of instituting denaturalization or in order to discern whether there are steps it can and should take to better vet applicants during the naturalization process.

Administrative naturalization continues unabated with hundreds of thousands being granted citizenship each year (over 6.5 million in the last decade).

The consequence of these actions is to place all Americans at greater risk, as shown by the kinds of crimes for which many naturalized citizens have already been arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced.

The now-defunct INS, a predecessor agency to DHS’s U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), had created a parallel regulatory structure to administratively denaturalize individuals when facts came to light revealing that an applicant had been ineligible at the time of naturalization.

In July 2000, the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the regulation exceeded the INS’s authority and issued an injunction against its use.

As a result of the Ninth Circuit decision, presently the only way naturalized citizens can be stripped of citizenship is through criminal prosecution or civil suits in the already overburdened federal district courts.

Congress has within its power the ability to pass legislation re-instituting the capability to administratively denaturalize individuals granted citizenship in error or as a result of misrepresentations, concealment of materials facts, or other forms of fraud. Doing so would help protect the American people and enable the government to better ensure the integrity of the administrative naturalization process.

An appendix at the end of this document lists dozens of recent examples of naturalized citizens who have been charged with serious national security offenses.

I don’t opine on the election itself because I don’t live there, I am not (yet) subject to the terrorism and jihad of the entire Arab world, and I don’t vote there. I have enough problems with legislators here in America who undervalue Israel and its contributions to the world in every way; who are swayed by the faux narrative of the Arabs; who don’t see the threat of Jihad to the entire culture and security of the Western world; and who put our security below their utopian delusions and policies.

The Prime Minister of Israel has the toughest job in the world. When he is subject to the hallucination of peace and appeases the Arabs, the latter only ratchet up their demands. When Israel responds to murder and terrorism, the entire world and its “calumnists” shriek that the response is “disproportionate.” If he tells world leaders that Israel’s security and how to achieve it is Israel’s concern, he is called rude and aggressive and a hard-liner and inflexible and those words come from supposed friends. Who would want that job and that responsibility?

Benjamin Netanyahu does and so does Naftali Bennet. I wish them well.

For the best take on Israel’s politics I go to my e-pals David Hornik and Yoram Ettinger and Steve Plaut and Caroline Glick. They live there and they vote there. God bless them.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/in-context-muhammad-morsis-islamically-correct-jew-hatred/

Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi doth protest [1] too much.

During a sermon which aired on Egyptian Channel 1 on October 19, 2012 and delivered in Morsi’s presence by Futouh Abd Al-Nabi Mansour, Head of Religious Endowment, Matrouh governorate, the good cleric pronounced these words [2]:

Oh Allah, absolve us of our sins, strengthen us, and grant us victory over the infidels. Oh Allah, deal with the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, disperse them, rend them asunder. Oh Allah, demonstrate Your might and greatness upon them.

As reported shortly afterward by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) with accompanying video evidence [3], Morsi appears to responsively mouth the word “Amen” after each of the cleric’s pronouncements [2].

Some three months later, MEMRI produced irrefragably direct and damning evidence of Morsi’s Jew-hatred (and jihadism), this time in his own words [4]. MEMRI simply translated and reproduced excerpts from archival interviews [5] Morsi had given in March and September of 2010 making plain the implacable Islamic Jew-hatred [6] animating his annihilationist jihadism [7].

Morsi called [4] unabashedly for the destruction of Israel within its rump state 1949 armistice borders [8] — “By no means do we recognize their Green Line. The land of Palestine belongs to the Palestinians, not to the Zionists” — via all forms of “resistance,” i.e., jihad war [7] (see, for example, Article 7 of the Hamas Covenant [9]), uniting the global Muslim umma in this genocidal endeavor:

There should be military resistance within the land of Palestine against those criminal Zionists, who attack Palestine and the Palestinians. There should also be political resistance and economic resistance through a boycott, as well as by supporting the resistance fighters. This should be the practice of the Muslims and the Arabs outside Palestine.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The disastrous results in Israel’s election are yet another example of the right cannibalizing itself. It’s not the first time this happened in Israeli political history or American political history or European political history. It’s an ongoing theme whose motto is still, “No enemies to the left.”

What the “mainstream” conservatives fear most of all is a drift to the right. Some of this is the whimper of whipped dogs. Every party to the right of Stalin has had to spend decades fending off accusations that it was the second coming of the Third Reich, the KKK and Genghis Khan. The Pavlovian training has taken hold and every conservative echelon is expert at going into damage control mode when it senses that its own right might do something that would give the left fuel for their accusations.

But there’s another factor at work here. It’s cultural. Mainstream conservatives have become another arm of the urban technocracy. They want many of the same things that liberals do, but with less regulations and more tax shelters. They aren’t interested in major changes, only the minor ones that will keep the system going. Even when they are dedicated reformers, their vision extends no further than a bunch of high tech cities full of immigrants going to universities and then inventing things.

They are competent, rather than imaginative. The left repeatedly outmaneuvers them because the left is always pushing to the left, while they are content to put a chair against the door and wait for those crazy hippies to get off the LSD, cut their hair and give up. But to their surprise the left never does.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/hollywood-blames-guns-americans-blame-hollywood/print/

Ever since the horrific shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, liberals have been on the warpath against so-called “assault weapons.” Never mind that the semi-automatic rifles they have on their hit list are used in fewer murders than hammers and clubs; never mind that handguns are used in the vast majority of killings in this country. Never mind, either, that the state with the lowest rate of gun murder is New Hampshire, which has virtually no gun laws, and the municipality with the highest rate of gun murder is Chicago, which has a bevy of them. Forget all this and remember the party line: guns are the problem, not people.

But the American public disagrees, and does so strongly. Unlike liberal Hollywood, Americans largely blame individuals for their actions. A new poll from NBC/Wall Street Journal, for example, shows that Americans blame the following problems in American life more than the presence of guns with regard to shootings:

“Parents not paying enough attention to what is going on in their children’s lives” (83%);
“Lack of effective treatment for mental illness” (82%);
“The amount of media coverage of mass shootings” (67%);
“Movies, television programs, and video games that portray violence and violent behavior” (62%).

“Assault and military-style firearms being legal to purchase … the availability of high capacity ammunition clips” clocked in at 59%.

In other words, Hollywood’s concept of human nature is directly at odds with that of the American public. They don’t see people as mechanistic tools in the hands of instruments of war. They see them as individual actors shaped by their environment, their personal choices, and their biology. Which is accurate.