RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://carolineglick.com/the-israeli-solution-3/
In its annual survey of American Jewry published last October, the American Jewish Committee found that 75 percent of American Jews agree with the statement, “The goal of the Arabs is not a peaceful two-state agreement with Israel, but rather the destruction of Israel.”

And yet, American Jews supported the establishment of a Palestinian state 50% to 47%.

Next week over 10,000 predominantly Jewish American supporters of Israel will gather in Washington at AIPAC’s annual policy conference. Given their high commitment to Israel, probably most of those gathered belong to the 47% of American Jews who opposed Palestinian statehood.

Yet at the conference they will embrace the two-state formula. And on March 4 they will go up to Capitol Hill and tell their representatives that they support it.

They will do so not because they are addled. They will do so because for the past 20 years all they have heard is that Israel has no alternative to the two-state plan.

Careful what you wish for in Ukraine By Spengler  Western governments are jubilant over the fall of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, a Russian ally. They may be underestimating Vladimir Putin: Russia has the option to hasten Ukraine’s slide into chaos and wait until the hapless European Union acquiesces to – if not begs for – […]

http://spectator.org/articles/57901/obama%E2%80%99s-assault-first-amendment

The First Amendment provides that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press. That, in the view of President Obama, is no limitation on his ability to make such laws, even indirectly, through executive branch rules and regulations.

Throughout the 2012 presidential campaign, the IRS discriminated against conservative groups in investigating, delaying and denying the tax-exempt status many had applied for in order to do what similar organizations do on the left side of the political equation. It was enough for Obama’s operatives in the IRS to detect the use of words such as “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in a group’s name for it to be subjected to this discrimination.

When IRS official Lois Lerner was called to testify about this practice before a House committee, she took the Fifth. And during the Super Bowl halftime show, Obama told Bill O’Reilly there wasn’t a trace of corruption in the IRS’s conduct.

Last November, the IRS proposed a change to the tax regulations that would institutionalize this discrimination.

This all, of course, was in pursuit of the liberals’ goal of overturning the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which held that both labor unions and corporations had a free speech right to use their general funds for independent expenditures of a political nature. It said, among other things, that the First Amendment “has its fullest and most urgent applications to speech uttered during a campaign for political office.”

And that, in liberal thinking, opened a floodgate of corporate action where only union action had been permitted before. When the IRS got into the act, it quickly determined the obvious: that Dave Bossie’s outfit, Citizens United, is a nonprofit corporation. The best way to block spending by such nonprofits is to block them from becoming nonprofits, which has the effect of blocking most contributions to them. If you block their funding, they can’t spend anything on independent campaign ads for conservative candidates or against liberal ones. That’s what the IRS did in 2012, is doing today, and will continue to do when the new rules take effect.

http://www.meforum.org/3762/palestinian-right-of-return US-backed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are entering a critical period. With reports suggesting Israeli acceptance of the 1967 lines and land swaps, what about Palestinian concessions? Two issues are paramount: the ‘right of return’ and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently stated, “Let me […]

The revolution in Kiev was televised. Will it now be squandered?

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304610404579402952527651122

How hard can it be to change $60 into a foreign currency? On a visit to Ukraine last fall I found out.

This was in Yalta, the Black Sea resort where Churchill, Stalin and FDR met in 1945 to sort out the future of Europe. The two ATMs I tried, both with the familiar Cirrus logo, wouldn’t dispense cash. So I walked into a bank and went to the teller, who was reading.

Izvinite, excuse me, I said in my phrase-book Russian, since Yalta is a Russian-speaking town. He kept reading. Vybachte I offered in Ukrainian, no doubt badly pronounced. He ignored me. Excuse me, this time in English. Apparently I didn’t exist. I left.

A few blocks away I spotted an old building with a currency-exchange sign. Inside, about a dozen women sat at their desks behind inch-thick windows. I was the only customer. I went to the first window, took three $20 bills from my wallet, and showed them to the woman behind the glass. Wordlessly, she pointed at the woman at the next desk. That woman pointed at another.

Book Review: ‘A Child of Christian Blood,’ by Edmund Levin
There was no evidence against a Jewish clerk tried for ritually murdering a Christian boy in Kiev in 1911. But that wasn’t the point.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304675504579391332960690344?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

The body was discovered on a March afternoon in 1911 by two boys exploring one of Kiev’s many caves in search of treasure. It was that of a boy just about their age, dressed in only a shirt and underwear, his hands tied behind his back, slumped over next to his school books. Little Andrei Yushchinsky had met a terrible end, stabbed as many as 50 times by an awl.

In a violent city like Kiev, there was no reason to expect that the murder would give birth to one of the most notorious legal cases in the early 20th century, an international cause célèbre that would attract world-wide attention, exposing the cynicism and moral bankruptcy of czarist Russia. Today, in the wake of the Holocaust and other genocidal bloodlettings, the Beilis Case, as the scandal came to be known, is all but forgotten. But Edmund Levin’s “A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia” reminds us that, in its day, the murder rivaled France’s Dreyfus Affair as the ugliest expression of modern anti-Semitism. His is the most thorough, reliable and readable book on the subject to date.

Debo Adegbile’s disturbing support for Mumia Abu-Jamal should disqualify him.

Mr. Toomey, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. Mr. Williams is the district attorney of Philadelphia.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304610404579401483616494254?mod=Opinion_newsreel_2

In the coming weeks, the Senate will consider the nomination of Debo Adegbile to be assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil-rights division. There are those who object to the nominee on various grounds, and others who defend him. We raise concerns here about only one issue: Mr. Adegbile’s support for convicted Philadelphia cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Let there be no mistake. Our concern is not based on the fact that Mr. Adegbile acted as an attorney for a criminal defendant. The right to counsel is a fundamental part of America’s criminal justice system, and no lawyer should be faulted for the crimes of his clients.

But it is one thing to provide legal representation and quite another to seize on a case and turn it into a political platform from which to launch an extreme attack on the justice system. When a lawyer chooses that course, it is appropriate to ask whether he should be singled out for a high-level national position in, of all things, law enforcement.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303704304579382983945174994?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

The media have remained quiet about the IRS targeting of conservative nonprofit groups and even quieter about the proposed IRS rule to restrict their political speech. Maybe our colleagues will snap out of their slumber now that the objections are coming from liberals.

The comment period for the new IRS political-speech rule is open until Feb. 27, but already there have been more than 69,000 comments, the majority negative. That’s far more than the normal reaction to a new regulation—only 7,353 comments on the Keystone XL pipeline, according to Regulations.gov—and it shows how much anger and concern the rule has generated across the political spectrum.