RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/passover-message-from-family-security-matters?f=puball

On Monday evening on the 14th day of April Jews will gather with friends and family to celebrate Passover. We will recount the hardships of slavery in Egypt and the harsh oppression by the Pharaoh. We will rejoice in the rescue by Moses who demanded freedom for our people. We will recite the ten plagues that were unleashed on the Egyptians when the Pharaohs refused to free the Jews .The Pharaoh finally relented but when the Jews were leaving he sent an army to capture them and return them to enslavement. We will cheer when we retell how the waters of the Red Sea miraculously parted giving the Jews an escape, and the waters returned drowning the pursuing army.

Then, we will have a moment of silent prayer in memory of the martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto who courageously rebelled on Passover in April of 1943 and held off the well-armed Nazis for over a month.

Finally, we will recount another miracle- the return of the Jews to Israel in 1948 when the seas again parted- this time for the steel hulls of vessels bringing besieged and beleaguered and traumatized survivors of the Genocide of World War 2 to safety and succor in the Jewish state of Israel.

Then we will eat, drink and be merry.

But, the story of Passover continues with great consequences:

The book of Exodus says that after crossing the Red Sea, Moses led the Jews into the Sinai, where they spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness. After travelling through the desert for nearly three months, they camped before Mount Sinai and it was there that God made a covenant with Moses and revealed the Ten Commandments on two stone tablets that codified the mandate to create a just and humane society and govern the lives of Jews and all decent people and nations. There are actually 613 commandments which cover every aspect of life-even hygiene and diet, but the Decalogue- the Ten Commandments are the most famous.

Think about that. At a time and place of local mores that sanctioned and celebrated murder and pillage and tyranny, these laws set forth principles of morality which have lasted for millennia.

Until 2005 The Ten Commandments were prominently displayed in courts, schools, churches and public grounds. In 2005 rulings on the presentation of religious symbols and sacred text on Texas public property, the US Supreme Court justified displays like the Ten Commandments but with the caveat that such displays must be clearly secular and not cross the line into proselytizing.

However, in a ruling on the display of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky courthouses, the justices ruled 5 to 4 that public officials were not motivated by a secular purpose in ordering the courthouse display but sought to advance religion in violation of the separation of church and state.

The debate continues with the ACLU pitted against all public displays of the Ten Commandments and determined citizens of all religions who fight to uphold their rights to display them. There are prominent jurists and scholars who continue to argue on that subject. In spite of these controversies, The Ten Commandments continue to inspire all the world’s religions and all decent societies- religious as well as secular.

Here, in this great nation we live in freedom from intimidation, oppression and harassment because those founding fathers who sought to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” were religious Christians who were informed and guided by the Bible and the Ten Commandments which were revealed more than 3,000 years ago to Moses and the Jewish people on their way to their homeland in Israel.

All of us at Family Security Matters wish all our readers and supporters a sweet and happy Passover and a joyous and peaceful Easter.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Socialist Muslim Politician: “Women who are Raped should be Hanged”
Mulayam Singh Yadav defended rapists saying sometimes boys make mistakes.
In a bid to woo the Muslim voters, Mulayam said: “It is not that I am with the Third Front for some post in the government. In fact, I am with them for the Muslims. If the Third Front comes to power, I would expect from them to solve the problems of the Muslims within a year.”
DOWN, DOWN, DOWN

While Google Chrome has been struggling with market share, Firefox has been in a steady decline down to 17% market share in March from 20% in May of last year.

Firefox fell below 18% this year so that it no longer even claimed a fifth of internet users.

Mozilla Firefox Falls to 3rd Place, Hits Lowest User Level Ever

RAINED OUT

The Noah drop is worse than Russell Crowe’s previously unpopular Robin Hood which only fell 48% on its second weekend. At the rate that Noah is falling, it will likely not make back its production budget domestically, let alone its promotional budget.

Cinemascore still rates Noah at C indicating that audiences hate it more than any other movie in current release.

Noah Falls 61.1% in Second Weekend
TWO HOBOS FIGHTING OVER AN OLD POTATO

With all the publicity that Letterman’s retirement is getting, you would think that anyone was still watching the Late Show with David Letterman.

And you would be wrong.

By 2011, Nightline was beating both Letterman and Leno among young viewers.

America to Not Watch Colbert, Just Like It’s Not Watching Letterman
TRAGEDY

In one of his essays, Oz wrote, “Israel could have become an exemplary state… a small scale laboratory for democratic socialism.”

“Why didn’t Israel develop as the most egalitarian and creative social democratic society in the world? I would say that one of the major factors was the mass immigration of Holocaust survivors, Middle Eastern Jews and non-socialist and even anti-socialist Zionists.”

“Then there were the masses of Orthodox Jews… to whom socialism meant blasphemy and atheism.”

Brandeis Gives Honorary Degree to Critic of Judaism, Refuses to Give One to Critic of Islam

http://pjmedia.com/blog/tea-party-challenges-stumbling/?print=1
CONSERVATIVES- NOT NECESSARILY TEA PARTY ARE INJECTING SERIOUS DEBATE INTO THE PRIMARIES….MORE SO IN THE HOUSE RATHER THAN IN THE SENATE….STAY TUNED AND CHECK OUT THE ELECTION SERIES AT FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS TO SEE WHERE INCUMBENTS AND CHALLENGERS STAND IN ALL THE STATES….RSK

WASHINGTON – Lawmakers with strong ties to the Tea Party movement have gained a toehold in the U.S. Senate but it appears they might have difficulty expanding their numbers this year.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are among those associated with the conservative, grassroots drive that has proved influential within Republican Party politics in a relatively short period of time. But a review of upcoming Senate contests reveals that more establishmentarian Senate candidates maintain an edge – at least to this point – heading into the primary season.

Conservative disaffection for the manner in which mainstream Republicans are confronting President Obama and his policies, coupled with ongoing spending issues, have resulted in a higher than usual number of challenges to GOP incumbents.

Yet, in the first showdown of the primary season, establishment Republicans won hands down, with Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn, of Texas, blasting Rep. Steven Stockman (R-Texas) by more than 40 points. Cornyn is overwhelmingly favored to win a third term in the fall.

“I think we are going to crush them everywhere,” said Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who faces his own Tea Party challenge this year from Louisville businessman Matt Bevin. “I don’t think they are going to have a single nominee anywhere in the country.”

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2014/04/10/brandeis-goes-dhimmi-a-proposal-for-passover/?print=1

“Hamas, Hamas… Jews to the gas. [1]”

I am starting this piece with that incindiary chant, intoned all too frequently at European demonstrations recently (not to mention soccer matches!), to remind readers just how far things have gone and who is behind them.

The folks at Brandeis University, their administration, may not be aware of it. I hope they’re not, though I suspect they are – aware that CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) has been linked closely and legally [2] with the religious fanatic terrorist organization Hamas whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and many other things not associated with Mother Teresa.

CAIR calls itself a “Muslim NAACP.” The NAACP may have lost some (or a lot) of its original mojo, but to compare CAIR to the NAACP is like comparing Josef Mengele to Ben Carson. Say it ain’t so.

But it is so to the administration of Brandeis University, which has descended into a dhimmitude [3] (a term extrapolated from dhimmis — non-Muslim citizens of Islamic states — by the brilliant Bat Ye’or [4]) worse than the last Jews in Damascus or Baghdad by rescinding, at the behest of CAIR and the Muslim Students Association, their invitation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali to receive an honorary degree at this year’s Brandeis commencement.

Hirsi Ali, whom I have had the honor of meeting while CEO of PJ Media, is one of the most impressive and courageous human beings on this planet. President Lawrence of Brandeis would be honored to kiss her feet. Now he has banned her — shredding the Bill of Rights, one of the greatest documents in human history, in the process, including, of course, freedom of speech.

Obamacare in pictures
Thomas Lifson
http://americanthinker.com/blog/2014/04/obamacare_in_pictures.html

The Heritage Foundation has published a series of 15 charts that it aptly titles, “The Charts Obama Doesn’t Want You to See,” telling the story of Obamacare in at-a-glance style. Here are two samples.

http://americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/how_the_us_went_wrong_and_why.html

It is tempting to simply list all the ways the Obama administration — particularly Secretaries Kerry and Hagel — has been wrong on foreign and defense policy. After all, Russia/Ukraine, Syria, Iran, China, and Israel/Palestinians are nothing to sneeze at. But finding a common thread among the mistakes might be the beginning of a corrective policy — if not by this administration, then perhaps by Congress or the next administration.

The common thread is hubris, the supreme confidence that what you think is what everyone thinks — they’re just waiting for you to show up. Hubris is the natural state of affairs in the faculty lounges of major universities and, most likely, in the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body,” in which the president, Hagel, Biden, Clinton, and Kerry all served. A subdivision of hubris is the conceit that words equal action; that what is said is what is done. It is a subdivision because if you think there is no political or economic or social disagreement, then everyone must just be waiting for you to perorate.

Secretary of State Kerry called Vladimir Putin’s restoration of Crimea to the status of Russian territory, “19th Century thinking in the 21st century,” while Putin pocketed Crimea and considers cutting off the gas flow through Ukraine to Europe. He is, apparently, unoffended by a reference to the Tsars he considers Russian patriots.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel tried empathy, authorizing release of the details of U.S. cyber warfare doctrine to China in a bid to win similar cooperation from Beijing. So far, China has not reciprocated. Bill Gertz wrote in the Washington Times, “Instead of pressing the Chinese to curb cyberattacks, the defense secretary said the Pentagon has sought to ‘be more open about our cyber capabilities, including our approach of restraint’…for the first time ever, the Pentagon provided Chinese officials with a briefing on U.S. doctrine on cyber capabilities. Lt. Col. Damien Pickart said, ‘The purpose of this briefing was to increase transparency of one another’s military cyber activities and intentions.’”

Transparency appears to have been the policy of only one side.

Empathy didn’t work with Iran, either.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/a-crimean-travelogue-part-i

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/a-crimean-travelogue-part-ii
Friday, March 14 – The afternoon Aeroflot flight from Belgrade to Moscow takes a surprising route: due north over Hungary, Slovakia and eastern Poland, then turning east-northeast over Belarus, and into the Russian air space just east of Smolensk. In more normal times the flight path would have taken us across Romania, Moldova and Ukraine, shorter by some 250 miles. The attendant tells me that the decision to divert flights to bypass Ukraine had only been made the previous day. Interestingly, I learn later that Air Serbia’s flights from Belgrade to Moscow still follow the old route.
The names of the towns 35,000 feet below – Brest, Minsk, Mogilev, Smolensk, Borodino, Mozhaisk – fit almost exactly the line of advance of Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812, and that of Hitler’s Army Group Center in 1941. Observing those immense spaces makes one wonder about that strange, self-destructive impulse that makes the lure of western Eurasia so hard to resist. OK, John McCain is ignorant of history as well as insane, ditto the neocons, but Zbigniew Brzezinski is not. Those endless forests and rivers remind me of my plea – often repeated in the pages of Chronicles over the years – for a paradigm shift in the West that would pave the way for a Northern Alliance of Russia, Europe, and North America. All three face similar existential threats, demographic and cultural, in the decades ahead. Their renewed disputes caused by old geopolitical ambitions can only regale the hearts of that false prophet’s followers everywhere.
The late-evening flight from Moscow to Simferopol is almost full. Overhead bins of the Soviet-era IL-96-300 are huge, so some two-dozen Western and Asian media crews are able to place their cameras, tripods and other equipment out of the harm’s way. A Russian policewoman checks our passports at Sheremetyevo’s Terminal D: the SU1826 is evidently still treated as an international flight. We are 45 minutes late departing Moscow, but arrive almost on time two and a half hours later.
No alcohol is served on board, to the loud chagrin of three British journalists seated in front of me. (They surreptitiously dig into their duty-free supplies instead.) A Dutch businessman to my left mentions some unspecified “opportunities” in the Crimea, as the Russians are “certain to invest billions soon” into the peninsula’s downgraded infrastructure. Some of the passengers are Crimean Russians resident abroad who are making the trip in order to vote in the referendum. My friend and fellow monitor Alessandro Musolino, a member of the Provincial Parliament of Veneto, has shared his flight from Venice with seven young women from the Crimea who work in Italy as nurses and who had taken a week off to come home for the occasion.

http://danielgordis.org/2014/04/11/tracks-speak/

A friend of mine is making aliyah. He’s one of those smart, thoughtful, sensitive and deeply committed people whose addition to Israeli society bodes well for all of us who live here. So we took a walk on the relatively new train-tracks-converted-into-apathway a couple of weeks ago, when he was in Jerusalem, to chat about his family’s choice of neighborhoods, schools for his kids, and in essence, the immensity of the move. It was going to be great, I told him – for Israel, and for them.

“I hope so,” he said, but he actually didn’t sound very convinced. So I pushed a bit. After all, he was choosing to come, so how could he not be sure this was going to be great? Hard at times, of course. But not great? How could it not be wonderful?

“I just hope that we’re not doing wrong by our kids,” he clarified. “Deep down, I just wonder about the future of this place. These peace negotiations are going nowhere. The Palestinians don’t want a deal, the Israelis announce new settlement construction just to stick their thumb in the Palestinians’ eye, Bibi’s afraid to say anything because he believes in preserving his coalition more than he believes in anything else, and little by little, the creeping growth of housing over the Green Line is going to make a deal impossible.

“Then what will we be left with? A one-state solution? Occupation forever? I can’t see any way that this is actually going to work out. Do you see a solution? Do you not think we’re running the risk of destroying everything that’s been built here?”

For a moment, I was silent. I found myself remembering what life was like here 15 years ago, when we made aliyah.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/04/11/cut-the-clitoral-relativism-islam-sharia-and-female-genital-mutilationcircumcision/

Despite their ongoing antagonisms—played out, prominently, on Fox News—a bizarre, shared apologetic has emerged which denies the irrefragable sanctioning of female genital mutilation/“circumcision” (FGM/C) by canonical Islamic tradition (“hadith”), and over 1100 years of authoritative, mainstream Islamic jurisprudence. The strange bedfellow antagonists engaged in these overlapping apologetics about FGM/C are the Clarion Foundation and its film “Honor Diaries,” allied with the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation (Ms. Ali is also listed as the film’s executive producer), “versus” the Hamas-linked cultural jihadist organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Fox News has served as overseer of this “conflict” cum consensus, while also reinforcing the fallacy that FGM/C is simply a tragic manifestation of misogynistic patriarchal trends that are generic, and have “no basis” in Islam and the Sharia, Islamic law.

Ibrahim Hooper of CAIR issued the following statement (which Fox News host Megyn Kelly aired on her broadcast), that melds Islamic negationism (in bold, below), with vitriol against the Clarion Foundation-produced film:

American Muslims join people of conscience of all faiths in condemning female genital mutilation, forced marriages, “honor killings” and any other form of domestic violence or gender inequality as violations of Islamic beliefs. If anyone mistreats women, they should not seek refuge in Islam. The real concern in this case is that the producers of the film, who have a track record of promoting anti-Muslim bigotry, are hijacking a legitimate issue to push their hate-filled agenda.

Notwithstanding the obsessive focus on Hooper/CAIR’s predictably gratuitous attack against the producers of “Honor Diaries,” what has been deliberately obfuscated by conservative supporters of the film are mirror image statements denying the centrality of Islamic doctrine such as this blatantly false Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation website pronouncement:

FGM has no foundation in Islamic scripture or law.

Quanta Ahmed, a protagonist in “Honor Diaries,” appearing in one of Megyn Kelly’s Fox News segments on the “CAIR vs. bold filmmakers controversy,” made a Goebbel’s-like inversion of morality. Ahmed not only denied Islam’s sanctioning of FGM in “Honor Diaries,” claiming, falsely, “Female genital mutilation is not advocated in Islam in any way shape or form,” during her March 31, 2014 interview with Megyn Kelly she compounded her mendacity with the morally perverse observation that,

the most Islamic act is to expose this injustice

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blogs/srdja-trifkovic/

RT: Ukraine’s economy is in a shambles and its people are suffering. Is it morally justified to turn the taps off?

Srdja Trifkovic: Talking about “moral justification,” let’s remember the first OPEC oil crisis in the winter of 1973-74, after the Yom Kippur War. It would have been rather funny for the Western countries which imported Arab oil to say, “We don’t recognize your prices. We are going to pay the old ones.”

Moral justification doesn’t come into it. What we are looking at is business like any other. If the Western countries are so terribly concerned about Ukraine’s economy and about the suffering of Ukrainian consumers, then of course they are more than welcome to re-export Russian gas, which is coming regularly through the North Stream pipeline to Germany, and I don’t think the Russians would mind. If they want to sell that gas to Ukraine on discounted prices, they are more than welcome to do so. But at the same time to say “it’s that horrible Russian bear using the gas weapon,” because the Russians are simply charging normal market prices, is ridiculous.

RT: President Putin has warned that supplies to Europe could be affected. If they are, what sort of further backlash we’ll see against Russia? We are seeing what’s happening in PACE [Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, where Russia’s voting rights are suspended].

ST: Forget about PACE. It’s an utterly useless talking shop, and Russia is better without it. I don’t think Putin meant to say that Russia would play with supplies to Europe via Ukraine, but that it is possible that the Ukrainians themselves will start playing games. After all, they did so with the ‘Orange’ regime in 2006, and even more seriously in 2009. So what Ukraine would need to do, in order to reassure both Russia and Europe, is to stop saying ridiculous things like “We don’t recognize the new pricing regime, we want to buy gas at discounted prices,” because that sounds like a veiled threat. Yes, they do have a weapon in the ability to turn off the pipeline, but at the same time it would be up to the Europeans to make their judgment on whom to blame.

Let’s face it: the Ukrainians can’t have it both ways, or three ways. It reminds one of one of the old Pushkin story about the goldfish and the ever-escalating demands. “We want a European Ukraine, we want Ukraine with the association agreement, Ukraine and NATO, Orange Ukraine, West Ukrainian Ukraine and in the end we want also a gas discount.” Come on…

RT: What about money? $16.6 billion are to be paid to Moscow. If Ukraine can’t even pay for discounted gas, how is it going to pay now when it’s virtually bankrupt?