RUTHFULLY YOURS

After the infamous Oslo Agreement brokered, or should I say bullied, by President Clinton, three participants- Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House Lawn. The deal that eventually won the three stooges Nobel Prizes “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East” gave the PLO every single line item demand in exchange for their recognition of Israel’s right to exist and their revocation of their covenant which called for the destruction of Israel. Smiles all around.

As the ink dried on the articles of surrender by Israel, the PLO embarked on the longest, the most brutal, heinous and indescribable spree of atrocities claiming babies in strollers, elders in wheelchairs, soldiers, teenagers, shoppers- all civilians making their diurnal rounds and enjoying themselves in Haifa, in Netanya, in Tel-Aviv. in Jerusalem, in markets, cafes, bus stops.

Which were the four worst years for terror fatalities since 1967? In order: 1996, 1994, 1993 and 1995. Each of the years after the accords was worse than any of the years before them.

Flush with international good will Israel’s Prime Minister called these victims ” casualties of peace” in the most perverse use of language. Furthermore, if the attacks occurred in the West Bank, his response was spineless and callow. When the teenage son of one of the settlement leaders was trapped, tortured and killed while on a hike, Rabin said”he was in the wrong place at the wrong time” and when settlers complained of his policies he said ” let them spin in the wind.”

Terror from the PLO has never let up..it has intensified in the West Bank- soldiers lynched,a whole family killed in their beds- including a swaddled infant, stonings, threats, vandalism….culminating with the recent murder of three teenagers.

This is the legacy of appeasement, of releasing terrorists from jails, of showing any inclination to continue the political charade of negotiations, of inciting the enemy whose own children celebrate horror and terror. And, most egregious, of endangering a people’s life and sovereignty for recognition of “the right to exist” of a civilized and humane democracy by barbarians and their enablers.

It chills the heart. rsk

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-continues-his-attack-on-us-energy?f=puball

IN FSM’S COMPREHENSIVE ELECTION COVERAGE FOR 2014 WE LIST, WHENEVER AVAILABLE THE CANDIDATES’- BOTH REPUBLICAN AND DEMOCRAT -VOTES ON THE KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE ….RSK

The delay of the Keystone XL pipeline is a perfect example of the way President Obama and his administration has engaged in, not just a war on coal, but on all forms of energy the nation has and needs. Even his State Department admits there is no reason to refuse its construction and, as turmoil affects the Middle East, there is an increased need to tap our own oil and welcome Canada’s.

The latest news, however, is that Canada has just approved the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, a major pipeline to ship Canadian oil-to Asia.

The pure evil of the delay is compounded by the loss of the many jobs the pipeline-that will not require taxpayer funding-represents to help reduce the nation’s obscene rate of unemployment and to generate new revenue for the nation. That’s what oil, coal, and natural gas does.

Less visible has been the out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency that has, since Obama took office on January 20, 2009, issued 2,827 new final regulations totally 24,915,000 words to fill 24,915 pages of the Federal Register. As a CNSnews article reported, “The Obama EPA regulations have 22 times as many words as the entire Harry Potter series which includes seven books with 1,084,170 words.” Every one of the EPA regulations affects some aspect of life in America, crushing economic development in every conceivable way.

The worst part of the EPA regulation orgy is the fact that virtually all of it is based on a hoax. As reported by James Delingpole, a British journalist, “19 million jobs lost plus $4,335 trillion spent equals a global mean temperature of 0.018 degrees Celsius. Yes, horrible but true. These are the costs to the U.S. economy, by 2100, of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory war on carbon dioxide, whereby all states must reduce emissions from coal-fired electricity generating plants by 30% before 2005 levels.”

Citing a study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Delingpole reported that the new regulations will cost the economy another $51 billion annually, result in the 224,000 more lost jobs every year, and cost every American household $3,400 per year in higher prices for energy, food, and other necessities.”

In his celebrated new book, Ari Shavit claims that “Zionism” committed a massacre in July 1948. Can the claim withstand scrutiny? By Martin Kramer

“In 30 minutes, at high noon, more than 200 civilians are killed. Zionism carries out a massacre in the city of Lydda.”— Ari Shavit, My Promised Land

Perhaps no book by an Israeli has ever been promoted as massively in America as My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, by the Ha’aretz columnist and editorial-board member Ari Shavit. The pre-publication blitz began in May 2013, when the author received the first-ever Natan Fund book award, which included an earmark of $35,000 to promote and publicize the book. The prize committee was co-chaired by the columnist Jeffrey Goldberg and Franklin Foer, editor of the New Republic; among its members was the New York Times columnist David Brooks. Not only was the choice of Shavit “unanimous and enthusiastic,” but Goldberg and Foer also supplied florid blurbs for the book jacket. Goldberg: “a beautiful, mesmerizing, morally serious, and vexing book,” for which “I’ve been waiting most of my adult life.” Foer: “epic history . . . beautifully written, dramatically rendered, full of moral complexity . . . mind-blowing, trustworthy insights.”

Upon publication last November, the book proceeded to receive no fewer than three glowing encomia in the Times from the columnist Thomas Friedman (“must-read”), the paper’s literary critic Dwight Garner (“reads like a love story and thriller at once”), and the New Republic‘s literary editor Leon Wieseltier (“important and powerful . . . the least tendentious book about Israel I have ever read”). From there it jumped to the Times’s “100 Notable Books of 2013” and to the non-fiction bestseller list, where it spent a total of six weeks.

The Times was hardly alone. The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, who is credited by Shavit with inspiring the book and curating its journey into print, hosted a launch party at his home and appeared with Shavit in promotional events at New York’s 92nd Street Y, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, and the Charlie Rose Show. Jeffrey Goldberg likewise surfaced alongside Shavit both on Charlie Rose and at campus whistle stops.

“What happened during the first week of my book’s publication went beyond anyone’s expectation, beyond my dreams,” marveled Shavit in an interview. In January, he collected a National Jewish Book Award. In short order, he became a must-have speaker for national Jewish organizations from AIPAC to Hadassah, and a feted guest at the Beverly Hills homes of media mogul Haim Saban and the producer-director Tony Krantz. “If you want to see what prophecy looks like among Jews in the early part of the 21st century,” wrote an attendee at one of these soirées, “follow Ari Shavit around Los Angeles.”

Beyond Shavit’s powerful writing style and engaging personal manner, what inspired this outpouring? “My book,” he says, “is a painful love story,” the love in question being his professed “total commitment to Israel, and my admiration for the Zionist project,” tempered by his conspicuously agonized conscience over the misdeeds of that state and that project. It was, undoubtedly, this dual theme that gave the book its poignant appeal to many American Jewish readers eager to revive a passion for Israel at a time when Israel is defined by much of liberal opinion as an “occupier.” To achieve his artfully mixed effect, Shavit adopted a particular strategy: confessing Israel’s sins in order to demonstrate the tragic profundity of his love.

And the sins in question? The obvious one in the book is the sin of post-1967 “occupation.” But many readers were especially taken aback to learn of an earlier and even more hauntingly painful sin. This one, detailed in a 30-page chapter titled “Lydda, 1948,” concerns an alleged massacre of Palestinian Arabs that preceded an act of forcible expulsion. Shavit’s revelation: Lydda is “our black box.” In its story lies the dark secret not only of the birth of Israel but indeed of the entire Jewish national movement—of Zionism.

The Lydda chapter gained resonance early on because Shavit’s friends at the New Yorker decided to abridge and publish it in the magazine. There, it ran under an expanded title: “Lydda, 1948: A City, a Massacre, and the Middle East Today.” The meaningful addition is obviously the word “massacre.” An informed reader might have heard of another 1948 “massacre,” the one in April at the Arab village of Deir Yassin. But at Lydda? Who did it? Under what circumstances? How many died? Was it covered up?

Last month, President Barack Obama chose to support and fund a Palestinian Authority (PA) government that includes Hamas, a U.S. and EU-designated terrorist group that calls in its charter for the destruction of Israel (Article 15) and the murder of Jews (Article 7). Also last month, Obama freed five senior Taliban terrorist commanders in exchange for an American serviceman who may have been a deserter.

Obama could have cut funding to the PA, which would have made sense strategically, and could have supported a close, long-standing American ally, Israel. He could have refused any exchange of senior Taliban leaders. Why didn’t he?

Because he supports engagement with radical Islam – not merely moderate Muslims, Arab liberals, or secular reformers. Al-Qaeda notwithstanding, Obama believes radical Muslims are potential allies and friends. This is confirmed by his decisions at every important point in his presidency.

Thus, when Obama addressed the Muslim world in Cairo in June 2009, he insisted on inviting members of the parliamentary bloc of the (then-banned) radical Muslim Brotherhood over the objections of U.S. ally, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak – though the Obama administration later denied that it did so. (A furious Mubarak refused to attend.)

It was no secret that numerous surveys had shown before 2011 that large majorities of Egyptians favor discriminatory sharia, the death penalty for apostates and so on – meaning that it was almost certain that radical Muslims would triumph in elections. Yet, when a groundswell of opposition to Mubarak’s rule arose in February 2011, Obama called for Mubarak to step down “now” while his spokesman called for early elections involving “non-secular actors.”

When the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi was, unsurprisingly, elected president, Obama did not discontinue arming the regime, even though its future policies were as yet entirely unknown. Yet, when in July 2013, Morsi was ousted by the Egyptian military under Field Marshal Abdul el-Sisi, Obama suspended military aid.

The Iranian regime is one whose leaders have called for the destruction of both America and Israel. Tehran has been developing a nuclear weapons capacity that would give it the means to act on these designs. Yet, Obama has not sought to undermine or replace the regime. In 2009, when Iranians were brutalized on Tehran’s streets for protesting the rigged re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama did not call for Ahmadinejad to step down – he pointedly refused to get involved, saying “it’s not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling.”

The Jew-Hating Obama Administration Posted By Ben Shapiro

On Monday, three Jewish boys were found dead, murdered by the terrorist group Hamas: Eyal Yifrach, 19; Gilad Shaar, 16; and Naftali Frenkel, 16. Frenkel was an American citizen. The three were kidnapped while hitchhiking some three weeks ago. In the interim, President Barack Obama said nothing about them publicly. His wife issued no hashtags. His State Department maintained that $400 million in American taxpayer cash would continue to the Palestinian unity government, which includes Hamas.

Presumably Frenkel did not look enough like Barack Obama’s imaginary son for him to give a damn. Or perhaps Frenkel hadn’t deserted his duty in the American military, and therefore his parents didn’t deserve a White House press conference. Maybe Michelle Obama was too busy worrying about children’s fat thighs to spend a moment tweeting out a selfie to raise awareness.

Or maybe, just maybe, the Obama administration didn’t care about Frenkel because he was a Jew.

Jewish blood is cheap to this administration. That seems to be true in every administration, given the American government’s stated predilection for forcing Israel into concessions to an implacable and Jew-hating enemy. But it’s particularly true for an administration that has now cut a deal with Iran that legitimizes its government, weakens sanctions, and forestalls Israeli action against its nuclear program. It’s especially true for an administration that forced the Israeli government to apologize to the Turkish government for stopping a terrorist flotilla aimed at supplying Hamas. And it’s undoubtedly true for an administration that has undercut Israeli security at every turn, deposing Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, fostering chaos in Syria and by extension destabilizing Jordan and Lebanon, and leaking Israeli national security information no less than four times.

Now the corpse of a 16-year-old Jewish American is found in Hebron.

The Obama administration’s first response: to call on the Israeli government for restraint. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on June 2, “Based on what we know now, we intend to work with this government.” Now, just a month later, that government has murdered an American kid. And now she says that the Obama administration hopes “that the Israelis and the Palestinians continue to work with one another on that, and we certainly would continue to urge that … in spite of, obviously, the tragedy and the enormous pain on the ground.”

To which the proper Israeli response should be: go perform anatomically impossible acts upon yourself.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has argued cases before the United States Supreme Court, successfully. President Barack Obama has not. He has never argued a case at the Supreme Court at all. That didn’t stop his spokesmen from playing the constitutional lawyer credential card when reacting to the Hobby Lobby defeat on Monday.

Sen. Cruz is also an excellent troll, very much a match for Obama on that score. Obama treats matters of law as opportunities to troll — see both his handling of the border and his Obamacare abortifacient mandate. Obama is trolling everyone on one thing or another.

Cruz is trolling Obama on his record of getting his backside handed to him by SCOTUS. The president has lost 20 cases by unanimous decision since January 2009 according to Sen. Cruz. In some of those cases, the president’s administration argued for some sweeping, disturbing powers.

Attach GPSs to a citizen’s vehicle to monitor his movements, without having any cause to believe that a person has committed a crime (United States v. Jones);
Deprive landowners of the right to challenge potential government fines as high as
$75,000 per day and take away their ability have a hearing to challenge those fines (Sackett v. EPA);
Interfere with a church’s selection of its own ministers (Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC);
Override state law through the Presidential fiat (Arizona v. United States);
Dramatically extend statutes of limitations to impose penalties for acts committed decades ago (Gabelli v. SEC);
Destroy private property without paying just compensation (Arkansas Fish & Game Commission v. United States);
Impose double income taxation (PPL Corp. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue);
Limit property owner’s constitutional defenses (Horne v. USDA); and
Drastically expand federal criminal law (Sekhar v. United States).

Odds Favor a Hillary Clinton Candidacy Posted By Rich Baehr

It is easier, at this point, to address the issue like this: “Will Hillary be nominated if she runs? If that’s true, then will she run.”

This is not because I think there is much doubt about whether she will run. I expect Clinton to run, and her activities since her defeat in 2008 in the nominating contest against Barack Obama suggest a long, meticulously planned road to get back to where and what she thinks she deserves. But, as Tom Bevan has noted [1] at Real Clear Politics, there are reasons she might choose not to go for it. Bevan provides five possible outs: Hillary is not that good at campaigning, she may lack the fire in the belly, winning is not guaranteed, Obama is leaving a mess, and the country wants real change.

I think any doubt about the fire in the belly misses the Clinton family dynamic — Hillary needs to be running and serving the family to stay relevant. Politics is their industry. Would the Clinton Global Initiative, whatever exactly this is, get the attention and pampering it does from well-heeled people, corporations, and foreign governments if it were perceived that Hillary was done with politics? If daughter Chelsea is being groomed for a future political role, isn’t a Hillary run essential to breaking the ceiling first and keeping the family industry operating?

Bill and Hillary are a perfectly matched couple in that each of them seems to have had ambitions for the highest office from their teenage years. This is not a normal level of ambition or narcissism to sustain for five decades, even among the excessively ambitious political class.

Hillary thought 2008 would be a cakewalk, but was tripped up by a younger, more exciting, and more agile candidate who appealed to Democrats as a true believer rather than the establishment liberal offered up by a Clinton. Hillary and Bill will not find such a threat for the nomination within the Democratic Party this time around. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren may be the closest to setting leftist hearts aflutter with her fake populism and anger at Wall Street, but it is far more likely that Warren will only backtrack on her publicly expressed lack of interest in running if Hillary surprises and chooses not to run.

The near-glide path to the nomination is what makes a Clinton run so much more likely. Yes, her book launch has shown she is not a natural in front of the camera like Bill — or even Obama — when scripted. But if her only potential opponents in the primaries are former Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, Joe Biden, and Vermont socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, then she has nothing to fear. Even the Clinton machine’s history of prodigious and wasteful campaign spending will still leave lots of money for more of a general election campaign during the nominating period than is normally the case.

Note to Obama and Kerry: There was no restraint involved in the terrorist triple murder of those Israeli teenagers.

Three Israeli teenagers are kidnapped and murdered. Their bodies are found in a rock pile near the West Bank city of Hebron. It is horrible. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says “Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay.”

And from the wood-paneled office suites and limousine back seats of the diplomatic sphere — from Washington, the European Union and the United Nations — comes the usual chorus, urging that all parties show “restraint.”

That call for restraint is prefaced, of course, by expressions of sympathy and condemnations of the murders. But there is always that culminating line — the call for restraint — which undercuts all the rest. There was no restraint involved in the terrorist triple murder of those teenagers. But the hollow diplomatic default is to demand that the Israelis refrain from striking the terrorist leaders who spawn these attacks. That’s a brand of “restraint” that translates into an invitation for more terrorism.

From Secretary of State John Kerry, we hear that the news [1] of murder is “simply devastating…a horrific loss…. We condemn this despicable terrorist act in the strongest possible terms” and “the perpetrators must be brought to justice.” But then there’s the thud of that closing line: “This is a time for all to work towards that goal without destabilizing the situation.”

From the EU comes a statement [2] expressing “profound sorrow.” The EU condemns the killing of the three Israeli youths, sends condolences to their their families and friends, and professes to “share their grief.” The EU further trusts that “the perpetrators of this barbaric act will swiftly be brought to justice.” But then comes that inevitable disclaimer to round it off: “We call for restraint of all parties concerned in order not to further aggravate the fragile situation on the ground.”

From a spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon comes word [3]that Ban believes “there can be no justification for the deliberate killing of civilians.” Ban hopes the perpetrators will be swiftly brought to justice, etc., etc., but then comes the ritual kicker: Ban “calls on all parties to abide by their obligations under international law and to refrain from any actions that could further escalate this highly tense situation.”

Todd Starnes reports that “Brown Shirts” who have been hired by the federal government are actively silencing medical personnel who are dealing with the flood of illegal aliens on the Texas-Mexico border. Medical personnel are under threat of arrest if they talk, but some are talking anyway.

“There were several of us who wanted to talk about the camps, but the agents made it clear we would be arrested,” a psychiatric counselor told me. “We were under orders not to say anything.”

The sources said workers were guarded by a security force from the Baptist Family & Children’s Services, which the Department of Health and Human Services hired to run the Lackland Camp.

The sources say security forces called themselves the “Brown Shirts.”

“It was a very submissive atmosphere,” the counselor said. “Once you stepped onto the grounds, you abided by their laws – the Brown Shirt laws.”

Let’s unpack some of that. The Baptist Family & Children’s Services has a branch in San Antonio, Texas, so the “Brown Shirts” are likely coming from that group. The government has contracted with BFCS’ Emergency Management Division. Here’s how they dress on duty, in this stock photo from the group’s website.

As for those brown shirts, the BFCS said they are “incident management team personnel” – who happen to wear tan shirts.

The San Antonio branch is hiring…

Their website confirms that they are working on the border crisis.

On Monday evening the bodies of Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shear, and Eyal Ifrach, the three Israeli teenage boys kidnapped on their way home from school on June 12, were found by Israeli forces and volunteers in a field northwest of the West Bank town of Hebron, very close to where they were kidnapped.

Trying to hitch a ride home on the evening of the 12th, they were shot dead, it turns out, very soon after entering the car of the Hamas kidnappers—either because one of the three boys, Gilad, managed briefly to phone the police or because that was the terrorists’ intention in any case. If it was not their intention, then they likely aimed to sequester Naftali, Gilad, and Eyal somewhere and try to extort a prisoner swap from Israel.

That detail is still not known because the two Hamas operatives the Israeli authorities have fingered as the kidnappers, Hebron residents Marwan Kawasmeh and Amar Abu-Isa, are still at large. Meanwhile, on Tuesday afternoon, the three Israeli boys were buried together in the Israeli town of Modi’in even though they lived in separate communities. The joint funeral was attended by tens of thousands, with eulogies by, among others, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres.

So ended 19 days of tension and hope, marked by an upsurge of the extraordinary solidarity that lies at the deepest stratum of Israeli Jewish society, despite often bitter fractiousness. They were also 19 days of intensive activity by the Israeli security forces, who, in addition to searching for Naftali, Gilad, and Eyal, arrested hundreds of Hamas operatives, confiscating the terror organization’s funds and closing its institutions and media outlets.