RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/if-the-bds-wins-the-jews-are-next/

If the BDS movement achieves its goal of normalising a blanket boycott of Israel, its next target will be the Jews. That, if nothing else, is why Jews in the Diaspora must get a grip and battle the demonisation of Israel before it endangers their own wellbeing.

The odious BDS aims for the “euthanasia” of the Jewish state, in the words of founder Omar Barghouti. But it also directly threatens Jews worldwide who refuse to jump aboard the anti-Israel bandwagon: not just Zionists, but those who refuse to convert to anti-Zionism. Jews who believe they can afford to let a boycott of Israel become the norm, while still freely retaining personal ties to Israel, are embracing an illusion. It could soon be rudely shattered.

Norms do not develop at a steady, gradual pace: they build up, and if they don’t lose steam, eventually reach a tipping-point – and are universalised rather suddenly. At some point, social disapproval becomes strong enough to forge a new consensus: once a critical mass of people conforms to a certain behaviour or adopts certain attitudes, this outlook becomes not only normal but socially required. The flip-side is that non-conformity with the norm becomes taboo. The boycott, therefore, will hit suddenly if it becomes mainstream; it is already gaining serious traction in Western cultural establishments.

There are three distinct reasons why the boycott of Israel threatens all Jews directly if they refuse to throw in their lot with the boycotters.

First, Jews risk becoming demonised for retaining ties to Israel after cutting off ties becomes the norm.

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2014/02/federal-fly-swatters-pit-bulls-vs.html
It may come as a surprise to many, but the Library of Congress has its own SWAT team, 85 bodies strong. Learning this elicited a chuckle from me and a recollection of a classic Seinfeld shtick: the Library Cop. It otherwise isn’t a laughing matter. A Library of Congress SWAT force showing up outside your door, to paraphrase Mr. Bookman’s closing line, would be worse than a pit bull sicced on a poodle.

That’s because the federal government regards all non-federal employees as poodles to harass, throw down to the floor, cuff, arrest, and cart off to an unknown future or even fate. And if you resist, you will be shot. If you successfully resist by shooting, in legitimate retaliation against the initiation of force against you, one or more members of a federal SWAT force, and survive the ensuing fusillade, you will be charged with assault or murder. Your home or office will be ransacked. Your computer and private papers will be confiscated, likely never returned, and if returned, then damaged. Damages to your property will not be compensated. No one on the SWAT team will be charged with anything, except perhaps poor marksmanship or maybe using foul language. More likely promotions in grade and pay will be in line.

If you’re lucky, and the authorities admit a mistaken identity, or find no evidence of what they were searching for – with or without a search or arrest warrant – you may sue, and incur the costs and stress of fighting a government that has unlimited financial resources to fight back in court.

This is the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) at work. Not for you. But against you. You’re paying for it.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4193/islamophobia-agenda

Islamists have been successful in building the Islamophobia industry: it diverts attention from activities they would probably prefer not be noticed, such as promoting sharia law in the West, stealth jihad, and a push to implement a global Islamic caliphate, among many others.

What is ironic and hypocritical about the Islamophobia hype from members of the OIC is their double-standards when it comes to minorities in their own lands. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Mauritania, Nigeria, Sudan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, the Palestinian Authority and Iran are among OIC members that have appalling human rights violations against minorities.

Islamophobia has almost become a fad for a certain group of academics and Muslims across North America. 2013 was a bumper year for Islamophobia conferences in America and abroad.

“Islam, Political Islam, and Islamophobia: an International Conference” was held at Indiana University, Bloomington on March 29-30, 2013.
“Islam, Politics and Islamophobia,” an international conference of the Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies Chair, took place at the Indiana Memorial Union Faculty.

The European Commission asked France to avoid new tax hikes, and repeated that France had to bring its public deficit down. Soon France will have to do what needs to be done — cut taxes and spending; reform the job market and the welfare system, and give entrepreneurs breathing space — or the consequences could be worse than the strikes and scenes of insurrection.

French President François Hollande was all smiles during his three-day state visit in the United States. Now he is back home, and he does not smile anymore. He cannot escape the reality that France is in extremely bad shape.

On January 26, thousands of people marched through Paris, chanting “Jews, France does not belong to you.” Some demonstrators were members of the extreme right. Most of them belonged to the so-called “black white Arab France”: young Muslims coming from suburban slums, leftist students and urban professionals imbued with politically correct ideas. Anti-Semitism in France has become so commonplace that it is now a part of the cultural landscape. The event was called “Day of Wrath,” a truism, considering that wrath now runs rampant through French society.

Police charge a crowd of rioters at the January 26 “Day of Wrath” protests. (Image source: YouTube “Jour de Colère” screenshot)

On February 2, another protest took place. It brought together a different group of people: Catholic conservatives wanting to defend the traditional family and reaffirm their opposition to gay marriage.

A few weeks earlier, a rebellion against taxes on trucks using French roads mobilized crowds in Brittany’s main cities : the rebels wore red caps, the symbol of revolts in the region since an anti-tax uprising in 1675. Some of them were workers furious at factory closures, others were Breton separatists. Several toll booths and cameras designed to monitor the trucks were destroyed. Manure was dumped at official buildings.

Although no large-scale riot has occurred since last fall, every weekend, dozens of cars are burned throughout the country, and violent attacks take place daily.

In October, a report prepared by the Ministry of the Interior spoke of a “widespread and multidimensional frustration” that had not yet crystallized, but could “ignite” anytime soon and lead to “sudden eruptions of fury” or even to a “full scale uprising.”

Surveys conducted by the government were recently published in the magazine Valeurs actuelles. They ​show that “frustration” is reaching an unprecedented level, and directed at a multitude of targets such as “European construction,” “globalization,” “capitalism,” “finance,” politics in general, and even democracy, which is rejected by more than 50% of the French. They report a sense of national decline (76% of the French think the country is “terminally ill”), and a growing xenophobic hatred against Muslims, as well as against Jews. They also report a strong desire to see a “strong person” emerge who would restore “order.” Twelve percent of respondents explicitly say they want a military dictatorship.

Various economists describe France as the “new sick man of Europe,” and they have good reasons to say so. In 2013, 62,000 businesses have closed their doors, and their employees have virtually no hope of finding a new job. Growth has been close to zero for almost a decade. The number of poor now exceeds 9,000,000, more than 15% of the population. The official unemployment rate is higher than 10%, and does not include 2,200,000 beneficiaries of the guaranteed minimum income (RSA) that any adult over twenty-five has the right to collect. Public spending accounts for 57% of GDP, an absolute record in the developed world. Compulsory levies are up to 46% of GDP and are the highest in Europe. Foreign investments fell 77% in 2013. The country’s debt is growing at an ever faster pace, and nothing for the moment seems able to stop a movement resembling a free fall.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/new-ad-shows-more-examples-of-anti-semitic-lessons-in-newton-high-schools?f=puball

Lessons whitewash Hamas, promote the destruction of the Jewish state as a legitimate solution to the Arab-Israel conflict.

Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) has placed a two-page ad in the Jewish Advocate rebuking Boston’s Jewish leaders for assuring parents and tax-payers that there is no problem with anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias in the Newton high school curriculum. To see the full sized ad, click here or see attached.

The first page of the ad rebuts a controversial undated report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) intended to exonerate the Newton school system from allowing bias against Israel into the classrooms. In the ad, APT charges ADL with making factually false statements and calls on ADL’s donors to demand that they use the organization’s resources to fight anti-Semitism instead of ignoring it.

The second ad described two clearly biased anti-Israel lessons used in Newton classrooms. In one case, Newton students are given what they are told is the text of the Hamas founding charter. Yet the text they receive is a whitewashed edit of the Hamas charter, with the parts expressing the terror group’s religiously motivated genocidal hatred of Jews edited out. The Newton version of the Hamas Charter replaces the word “Jews,” whom Hamas identifies as its sworn enemies, with “Zionism.” A Newton teacher’s class notes obtained by APT shed light on why the schools might be using the censored Hamas Charter.

The teacher writes: “I would assert this is not inherently a religious conflict. This is a conflict over land.”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/global-citizenship

When President Obama visited Berlin a couple of years ago he raised the prospect of an idea that circulated throughout the twentieth century: world citizenship. Eminentos such as H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell contended that unless humanity embraced this notion, it is doomed.

Whether this idea has veracity or not is beside the point since the president believes that trans-national progressivism, a form of world government, is the impetus for his foreign policy positions. It explains in part why he has channeled key foreign policy matters through the United Nations and why he maintains the U.S. is neither more nor less exceptional than any other nation.

Universities have climbed aboard this ideological bandwagon arguing that the world’s great challenges demand a global perspective (read: world citizenship). What these programs do not answer is the obvious question: As a global citizen, to whom do I pledge allegiance? Moreover, as a global citizen what entity protects my rights? From whom do I obtain a passport? And on whose laws should I depend?

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamas-war-on-america-killing-coal-to-kill-us-electrical-power?f=puball

President Obama, supported by the Environmental Protection Agency, is seeking to deprive America of the use of its enormous reserves of coal in coal-fired plants that produce the electricity on which the economy and all life in America depends.

This isn’t just a “war on coal”, it is a war on America and one free market think tank, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) has been joined by six major unions to ensure that the EPA’s proposed energy proposal, Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule does not become a regulation that they call “nothing less than industrial sabotage by regulatory means.”

The EPA’s current regulations have resulted in the shut down over more than 150 coal-fired plants over the course of Obama’s first term and his second represents a threat to everyone living in America. We are living through one of the harshest winters in recent years and the 17-year-old cooling cycle which the entire Earth is experiencing promises to last decades.

Commenting on the proposed carbon pollution standards for new power plants, Bonner R.Cohen, PhD, a CFACT Senior Policy Analyst laid out the reasons why MATS has no basis whatever in science.

Any regulation seeking to limit the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere deliberately and deceptively ignores facts that anyone can understand. Bonner spelled out the basic scientific facts, but it is essential to keep in mind that CO2 is essential to all life on Earth, providing the “food” that all vegetation depends.

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/amb-power-puts-huge-foot-in-mouth-with-cycle-of-violence-comment/2014/02/24/ Amb. Power Puts Huge Foot in Mouth with ‘Cycle of Violence’ Comment Posted by Samantha Power on Twitter:   Samantha Power @AmbassadorPower   Daniel Pearl’s story is reminder that individual accountability & reconciliation are required to break cycles of violence. @DanielPearlFNDN   Last night, the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, the Daniel Pearl […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-coming-collapse-of-the-welfare-state/print/

In 1935, the year that FDR signed the Social Security Act into law, the birth rate was 18.7 per 1,000. In 1940, when the first monthly check was issued, it had gone up to 19.4. By 1954, when Disability had been added, the birth rate at the heart of the Baby Boom stood at 25.3.

In a nation of 163 million people, 4 million babies were being born each year.

By 1965, when Medicare was plugged in, the birth rate had fallen back to 19.4. For the first time in ten years fewer than 4 million babies had been born in a country of 195 million. Medicare had been added in the same year that saw the single biggest drop in birth rates since the Great Depression.

There could not have been a worse time for Medicare than the end of the Baby Boom.

Today in a nation of 317 million, 4.1 million babies are being born each year for a birth rate of 13.0 per 1,000. 40.7% of those births are to unmarried mothers so that it will be a long time, if ever, before they pay back into the system, and most will never put back in as much as they are taking out.

Liberals and libertarians both act as if the crisis facing us can be fixed if we take more from the “wealthy elderly” or give them less. The crisis is born of demographics. It can’t be fixed by targeting the elderly because they haven’t been the problem in some time.

It’s the same crisis being faced by countries as diverse as Russia and Japan. The difference is that Russia is autocratic and has little concern for its people while Japan shuns immigration and has a political system dominated by the elderly.

The United States however takes in a million immigrants a year. In his 2013 State of the Union address, Barack Obama praised Desiline Victor, a 102-year-old Haitian woman who moved to the United States at the age of 79 and never learned to speak English, but did spend hours waiting in line in Florida to vote for Obama.

Between 1990 and 2010, the number of immigrants over 65 doubled from 2.7 million to 5 million. Twenty-five percent of these senior immigrants were over 80. Elderly immigrants are also much more likely to become citizens, in part because the requirements for them are lower. Many, like Desiline Victor, don’t even have to learn English to be able to stand in line and vote.

15 percent of senior immigrants come from Mexico largely as a result of family unification programs. If amnesty for illegal aliens goes through, before long the country will be on the hook not just for twelve million illegal aliens, but also for their grandparents.

The welfare state has been spending more money with an unsustainable demographic imbalance. There are fewer working families supporting more elderly, immigrants and broken families. The Russians invest money into increasing the native birth rate. Instead we fund Planned Parenthood because liberal economic eugenics dictates that we should extract “full value” from working women as a tax base to subsidize the welfare state while discarding the next generation.

The “modern” system that we have adopted with its low birth rates, high social spending and retirement benefits is at odds with itself. We can have low birth rates, deficit spending or Social Security; but there is no possible way that we can have all three.

And yet we have all three.

In the European model that we have adopted, men and women are supposed to spend their twenties being educated and their thirties having two children. These Johns and Julias will work in some appropriately “modern” field building apps, designing environmentally sustainable cribs for the few children being born or teaching new immigrants to speak enough English to vote. Then they plan to retire on money that doesn’t actually exist because they are still paying off their student loans.

John and Julia began marriage with tens of thousands in debts, only one of them will work full time, while the other balances part time work, and they will do all this while being expected to support social services for new immigrants and a native working class displaced by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, not to mention the elderly and the entire bureaucracy that has grown around them. If John and Julia are lucky, they will find work in a technology field that is still growing, or, more likely they will pry their way into the social services bureaucracy which will keep on paying them and cover their benefits until the national bankruptcy finally arrives.

In this post-work and post-poverty economy, those most likely to have children are also least likely to work or to be able to afford to have those children.

Birth rates for women on welfare are three times higher than for those who are not on welfare. Within a single year, the census survey found that unmarried women had twice as high a birth rate as married women. These demographics help perpetuate poverty and feed a welfare death spiral in which more money has to be spent on social services for a less productive tax base.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/truth-revolt-enters-the-battle-on-the-glazov-gangx/

This week’s special editon of The Glazov Gang was joined by Jeremy Boreing, a writer and filmmaker who is Executive Director of Friends of Abe and the Managing Editor of TruthRevolt.org, the new conservative media watchdog group started by Ben Shapiro with David Horowitz at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Jeremy’s recent film, The Arroyo, is a modern western that follows one man’s struggle against the lawlessness on America’s southern border.

Jeremy sat down with Jamie Glazov to discuss Mutually Assured Destruction in the Culture War, focusing on TruthRevolt.org’s tactic to confront the Left in our media, Hollywood and society at large.

Jeremy also illuminated the importance of story telling and the vital role it plays in political and cultural battle. In this context, he discussed his film, The Arroyo — a modern western that follows one man’s struggle against the lawlessness on America’s southern border.

Watch the two-part series below: