RUTHFULLY YOURS

Despite the conviction in Israel that its military actions against Hamas in Gaza are justified, the notion that this third Gaza war in the past six years has been a consequence of the failure to conclude a peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority is widely accepted across the globe.

For Palestinians, the argument continues, there is no choice but resistance and confrontation since diplomacy and non-violence have not ended the occupation. For that reason, many Palestinians claim that Hamas is fighting not simply to lift the blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip but also to give them their freedom.

The claim resonates broadly with the international community. Even as they recognize Israel’s right to defend its citizens, many political heads of state also emphasize that the Jewish state must adopt policies that offer Palestinians hope for the future.

Let us stipulate that the Oslo peace process has failed to fulfill the expectations of the Palestinians for a state with Jerusalem as its capital and recognition of what has been adopted as the nation’s sacred right of return. But has the peace process been totally without positive consequences for Palestinians who live on the West Bank?

Palestinian institutions operate in cities; schools, colleges, and universities provide education for the population, security forces guarantee some measure of stability widening the ambit for economic growth.

All of this is less than ideal, but is it not better than the alternative circumstances in Gaza where the population has been held hostage to the political Islamist agenda of Hamas and its promise of liberation through perpetual war against Israel?

For the question is not whether resistance hurts Israel – it does – or whether constant confrontation reminds the world of what is widely regarded as an illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, but rather whether negotiations, in the context of a commitment to peaceful co-existence can produce more benefits for more Palestinians than war, always presented as the only alternative.

“Just this past year, J Street leadership cried foul when they were not voted into the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. After reading the most recent statements made by J Street during Operation Protective Edge, it has been made very clear to me that once you blame the Jews for anti-Semitism, you have really simply gone beyond the pale.So I ask: Really J Street? Why do you really supposedly support the existence of a State of Israel? What’s the point?”

Ok, its official, my mind has been blown.

If you’ve read my other essays, it will not be a shock to you that I’ve never agreed with J Street’s supposed “Pro-Israel and Pro-Peace” mission. However, one point made by J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami in his most recent “Word on the Street: Difficult Questions and Hard Truths” has taken me over the edge.

In making his main points, Ben-Ami states “Failure to solve this conflict is eating away at support for Israel around the world, damaging the country’s legitimacy and, in some cases, fanning growing flames of anti-Semitism.”

Wait, what?

Did he just insinuate that the horrible, quickly increasing anti-Semitism all over the world, INCLUDING now the United States, is due to Israel’s inability to “solve the conflict?” Only a week ago, Rabbi Joseph Raksin (Z’L) was brutally murdered on his way to Shabbat morning services. While at the moment this is not being investigated as a hate crime, with violent anti-Semitism swiftly increasing around the world and specifically anti-Semitic incidents occurring in this neighborhood in Miami, it’s difficult not to see the connection. News reports from this past Shabbat in Miami show a community in a state of terror, with police escorts supervising observant Jews walking to the synagogue and Jewish parents scared to let their children play outside. It’s hard to believe that this is really happening in the United States in the year 2014.

In the subsequently published J Street position paper “Aim for Conflict Resolution, Not Just a Ceasefire” there is NO mention made of concern for the increase of global anti-Semitism. There is, however, significant concern and attention given to the “rise in intolerance and racism among the Jewish community” as it states “From the revenge killing of Muhammed Abu Khdeir to the very public anti-Arab pronouncements by members of the Knesset and by ordinary citizens, voices of hatred and racism have emerged and actions have occurred that run counter to the most basic of Jewish values…The growing lack of tolerance for political dissent and for opposing viewpoints should be of grave concern to Jewish leaders in the United States and in Israel. Racism and intolerance should have no place in our community.”

THE GOOD ENGLISH RABBI HAS BEEN “KNIGHTED” OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT AND IS CALLED “RABBI LORD JONATHAN SACKS”….A TITLE THAT I FIND ANNOYING….RSK
As antisemitism rises, leaders of the great faiths must unite against
the ruthless pursuit of power masquerading as religion

The novelist Rebecca West once said that Jews, having suffered so
much, had an “unsurprisable soul”, In 2000 our daughter, then a
university student, attended an anti-globalisation rally in London
that turned into a tirade against America, then Israel and finally
Jews. “Dad, they hate us,” she said through her tears. Hearing those
words in Britain in the 21st century showed me that I had a
surprisable soul.

Jews in Europe have been shaken these past few weeks by the virulence
of the demonstrations about the war in Gaza that also turned into
something older and darker. More than a century after the Dreyfus
trial the cry of “death to the Jews” has been heard again in the
streets of Paris. Seventy years after the Holocaust, “gas the Jews”
has been heard again in Germany. In Britain last month antisemitic
incidents were at almost their highest level in 30 years. These are
danger signals not just for Jews but for Europe.

After our daughter’s experience I saw events move rapidly. In August
2001 at the UN international conference against racism in Durban,
Israel was accused by NGOs of the five cardinal sins against human
rights: racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, attempted genocide and
crimes against humanity. A new blood libel was born. Days later came
9/11, and almost immediately an opinion poll found that 40 per cent of
Pakistanis believed it was carried out by Mossad, Israel’s secret
service.

In a strange world of blatant hypocrisy and distorted equivalences, the United States — with the help of an all too cooperative media — is turning to victimization as the definition and explanation of most human relationships.

The tragedy of the death of an 18-year-old during an altercation with the police is not to be vouchsafed. Nor can the long and brutal history of U.S, race relations – particularly with African-Americans as victims – be denied or forgotten.

But the instantaneous assumption that the police were at fault [still to be attenuated] and in the innocence of the victim [tarnished by surveillance video of a strong-arm robber] – is symptomatic of a larger social evil. It is the instantaneous and unsubtle attribution of victimhood to individuals caught up in life dramas whatever their real character.

Not many of us sail through life without suffering what we deem injustice. Those may, objectively, be larger or smaller afflictions. But for the individual concerned, they are monumental and cannot be wished away. But to celebrate those kinds of miscarriages of life – especially before they are analyzed – is to create a false atmosphere of overwhelming injustice and persecution which imperils society.

The phenomenon is so widespread that sometimes it not only trivializes real misbehavior, but becomes a joke. A New York mother complains about an aggrieved innocent holding a young thief in a bearhug, capturing him for the police after he and a companion had stolen her telephone. The mother excuses her own obvious parental neglect by yammering about her son having fallen among thieving companions. But she insists, and that is where it turns ridiculous, but an all too common phenomenon, that he is a victim rather than a child who obviously is launched on a criminal career, a menace to society.

All this is compounded, of course, by the 24-hour media news cycle with its appetite for new revelations whether vetted or not and commentary by anchors who rarely know the background of these complicated issues much less having a professionalism about their trade. One of the strangest phenomenon of our times is that these “newsmen” reporting on current history have little knowledge or apparent interest in past history itself.

When sarcasm is mixed with fury, there is nothing like Yiddish to hit the mark. For those unfamiliar with the gems in this article , there is a glossary at the end
So now I’m reading there’s a campaign in the works to unseat a grubber na’ar named William Schabas from the Commission…the UN tribunal that is set to try Bibi for war crimes connected to the conflict in Gaza. Bibi’s on trial, Israel is on trial, all Jews around the world are on trial.
Just another day at the UN, no?
The funny part is that this shmendrick is openly hateful against us. Always has been. Always will be. Look it up.
Schabas was picked to head this inquisition…and he’s Canadian. This is so annoying. Canada? When did Canada ever hurt anybody?
Oh sure. There was that time years ago when the MacKenzie King government was asked how many Jewish refugees it would accept from the Holocaust. “None is too many,” came the (still famous) response. But let’s forget about that, bygones be bygones as we say at the club.
Normally, Canada has never been famous for putting Jews on trial. For that we’ll always have Europe.
Actually 5,000 of us were finally let in and all of us moved to St, Urban Street in Montreal and prayed for Maurice “Rocket” Richard to score us another goal. (Who is Wayne Gretsky?) So from the land of Maurice Richard comes William Schabas. Nu, how the mighty have fallen, aye?
This trial has already been decided and I don’t have to read the papers. I read Kafka, where somewhere he writes something like this:
“First the hanging…then the testimony.”

Dr. Anna Geifman on “Hamas and Terrorists’ Child Sacrifice,” Part II — on The Glazov Gang
The author of “Death Orders” explains why Islamic terrorists — and totalitarians in general — target children.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/dr-anna-geifman-on-hamas-and-terrorists-child-sacrifice-part-ii-on-the-glazov-gang/

Today is the two-year anniversary of President Obama’s first big amnesty edict, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). So far more than half a million illegal immigrants claiming to have arrived here before age 16 have been legalized by the president’s unilateral riff on the Dream Act.

Contrary to the story line put forth by activists, and repeated uncritically by most of the media, the DACA decree was not a matter of simply delaying deportations of illegal aliens judged to be low-priority — the administration did that early on by formally exempting the vast majority of the illegal population from the workings of immigration law through a series of internal memos. Those directives, called the Morton Memos, after the then-director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, represent a nullification of existing immigration law, but not an affirmative grant of status.

DACA, on the other hand, confers work permits, Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, documents allowing foreign travel, eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit and affirmative-action preferences, and more. It’s an actual amnesty, “green-card lite,” if you will. (Even Obama’s most slavish acolytes don’t claim he can confer green-card premium.)

Nor is there anything genuinely temporary about it; the limited period merely requires a pro forma renewal every two years, something that is already underway. Despite the recent House vote to defund expansion of DACA (including renewals), DACA has created facts on the ground, and beneficiaries will never be illegal aliens again — bank on it.

For some weeks now, the White House has been leaking that it plans to use this same end run around the Constitution, but this time to amnesty millions, all of whom came as adults and knew perfectly well what they were doing. The response to such a subversion of the constitutional order was swift: warnings of caesarism, “a leap into the antidemocratic dark” through an act that “has basically nothing to do with our system of government.” Even independent liberals are warning of the dangerous precedent an amnesty decree would set, not to mention the electoral disaster Democrats would reap in November.

Calls to reconquer al-Andalus are becoming more frequent and more strident.

“Clearly Spain forms part of the strategic objectives of global jihad. We are not the only ones but we are in their sights.” — Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz.

Radical Muslims in Spain have launched a social media campaign aimed at generating support for the jihadist group Islamic State [IS].

The campaign involves posters that include images of famous Spanish landmarks and monuments emblazoned with Arabic slogans such as, “We are all the Islamic State” and “Long Live the Islamic State.”

One poster includes an image of the medieval Islamic Aljafería Palace in the Spanish city of Zaragoza and the black flag associated with the IS. Another uses an image of the famous La Concha beach in the Basque city of San Sebastián. Yet another includes an image of the statue of Jesus Christ on Monte Urgull in San Sebastián, with the Arabic words “Al-Andalus Country” instead of “Basque Country.”

A tweeted photo of an Islamic State supporter holding the IS black flag of jihad in front of Aljafería Palace in Zaragoza.
Al-Andalus is the Arabic name given to those parts of Spain, Portugal and France that were occupied by Muslim conquerors (also known as the Moors) from 711 to 1492. As the Basque Country is surrounded by mountains, however, the Moors never succeeded in occupying it.

The poster campaign comes after IS jihadists produced a video in which they vow to liberate al-Andalus from non-Muslims and make it part of their new Islamic Caliphate.

The video shows a jihadist speaking in Spanish with a heavy North African accent. He says:

“I say to the entire world as a warning: We are living under the Islamic flag, the Islamic caliphate. We will die for it until we liberate those occupied lands, from Jakarta to Andalusia. And I declare: Spain is the land of our forefathers and we are going to take it back with the power of Allah.”

In this exclusive exit interview with Breaking Defense contributor James Kitfield, the outgoing chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, talks about metastasizing Islamic terrorism, his struggles to reform intelligence-gathering, and the risk of lurching from crisis to crisis in an Internet-accelerated world. – the editors.

“Disruptive.” That’s how Michael Flynn’s enemies reportedly described him during his time as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a tenure that ends tomorrow – a year early – when the three-star general retires after 33 years in the US Army. Was Flynn forced out? The Pentagon said his departure had been “planned for some time” when it made the announcement in April. But Flynn had challenged the Obama administration narrative that al-Qaeda’s brand of nihilistic extremism had died with Osama bin Laden in 2011. He had bruised egos at the DIA trying to transform the 17,000-person bureaucracy into a more agile and forward-deployed intel operation, one shaped by the lessons he had learned as intelligence chief for Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and Afghanistan, working for the ill-fated iconoclast Gen. Stanley McChrystal. As early as 2010, Flynn made waves with a report, Fixing Intel, that said US intelligence could not answer “fundamental questions” in Afghanistan.

James Kitfield: DIA is tracking global crises from Ukraine to the Mideast to North Korea and the Western Pacific. Have you ever seen so many crises occurring simultaneously?

Flynn: No. I come into this office every morning, and other than a short jog to clear my head, I spend two to three hours reading intelligence reports. I will frankly tell you that what I see each day is the most uncertain, chaotic and confused international environment that I’ve witnessed in my entire career. There were probably more dangerous times such as when the Nazis and [Japanese] Imperialists were trying to dominate the world, but we’re in another very dangerous era. We rightfully talk about the last decade being the longest war in American history, for instance, but when we pull combat troops out of Afghanistan at the end of this year, it’s not going to feel like that war is over. To me, it feels like we’ll be facing a familiar threat and heightened uncertainty for a long time yet.

A sensitively written op-ed by Nicholas Kristoff, in Sunday’s New York Times, had the title: Is a hard life inherited? Mr. Kristoff relates the story of a childhood friend who has had a hard life. His mother died after choking on a bit of bacon. His father left home. This all happened when he was five. With his three siblings, he was raised by a grandmother, growing up in a “ramshackle home in a mire of disadvantage.” Despite having a “first-class” mind, he was suspended for truancy in the 8th grade, drifted through life in a haze of alcohol and drugs, while fathering two illegitimate children.

Mr. Kristoff’s point is that events beyond his friend’s control determined the man he became, and that there are steps society can take to help prevent such personal tragedies. He writes that a good teacher or mentor would have made a difference. Mr. Kristoff rues the loss of union jobs that might have created incentives for prudent behavior. He cites a higher minimum wage and a better education as steps that could be taken, but the starting point, he claims, must be empathy.

Empathy is indeed an endearing quality, but I suspect the problem has as much to do with shifting attitudes of behavior. As a society, we have embraced moral relativism. We have become more permissive. We have become hedonistic. Despite the proliferation of birth control and the general acceptance of abortion, the number of children born out of wedlock has soared. In 1965, less than 10% of all births were to women out of wedlock. Today it is 41%, and the numbers continue to rise. In 1965, the percentage of White children and Black children born to unmarried women were, respectively, 3.1% and 24%. Today, those numbers are 18% and 72%. “Shotgun” weddings have gone the way of the Dodo Bird. Granted, about 58% of single-mother births are to cohabitating couples, many of whom will marry. Nevertheless, a moral sense has been lost.

While Mr. Kristoff’s childhood friend may have suffered from problems impossible to readily treat, the issue Mr. Kristoff raises is one of priorities. He suggests empathy as the first line of defense, an important component, but not sufficient, in my opinion, to address the problem. Keep in mind, changes in the way we live have caused us to become disconnected from our community, as Robert Putnam detailed in his book, Bowling Alone. Suburbs are less personal in nature than villages. More women work than ever before – and both men and women work longer hours – leaving less time to volunteer. In cities, fund raising extravaganzas have replaced the more democratic concept of volunteering one’s time. In national political campaigns, raising money via $30,000-a-plate-dinners – afforded only by the few – has replaced grassroots efforts of door-to-door solicitations. We give of our money, but not of our time. The contagion of computers and hand-held devices has distracted us from the time necessary to participate in our children’s schools. We have become more self-absorbed. We have turned over most of the care for the indigent to public officials, blindfolding the rest of us to our communities’ needs.