RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s not clear when (or whether) the Obama White House will conclude a final agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. The extended deadline for the interim deal known as the Joint Plan of Action is set to expire November 24. And the president very much wants a deal that would cement his foreign policy legacy. On the other hand, there are still gaps on key issues, like how many centrifuges Iran gets to keep.
How long till Iran’s missiles deliver nukes?

How long till Iran’s missiles deliver nukes?

But here’s the heart of the matter: The White House has caved on so much already that whether or not a final agreement is reached at the end of the month, American interests have already been damaged by the administration’s pliant dealings with a state sponsor of terror. Its record on Iran—not only during nuclear negotiations, but also in its larger regional policy—is nothing but a chronicle of concessions to the Islamic Republic.

It’s instructive to recall that very early in his presidency Obama promised that the military option was still on the table, if all else failed to stop the Iranians from building a bomb. The concern, as White House officials warned back then, was that strikes—American or Israeli—on Iranian nuclear facilities might cause Tehran to retaliate against American -targets in the region, especially U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Never mind that the Iranian regime was already responsible for thousands of American deaths, and tens of thousands of wounded, in those two theaters. What’s telling is that the White House saw the U.S. military not as the guardian of American interests, the best friend of American allies, and the dread enemy of American adversaries, but as potential hostages.

In other words, Obama was keen to forfeit his advantages from the outset of his dealings with Iran. In due course, he would trade away American leverage and get nothing in return.
Last year in Geneva the administration agreed to ease sanctions, which, with the credible threat of military force already eroded, was the most powerful instrument the White House had left at its disposal. Prior to the de-escalation of new sanctions and the provision of sanctions relief as part of the Joint Plan of Action, explains Mark -Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “the Iranian economy was on its back. Inflation was officially at 40 percent, and unofficially above 80 percent, and [there was] a severe recession. The JPOA triggered a change in expectations and psychology.” The Iranian economy “was helped to its knees,” says Dubowitz. “A final deal will stand it up again.”

What did the Obama administration get in exchange for rescuing the Iranian economy and thereby saving the clerical regime from domestic turmoil that might have toppled it? Nothing.

Instead, the interim deal acknowledged Iran’s right to enrich uranium. It ignored Iran’s ballistic missile program (the most obvious delivery mechanism for a bomb), despite a U.N. Security Council resolution (1929) as well as several pieces of congressional legislation requiring Iran to cease such -activities. It allowed Iran to continue building its heavy-water plutonium facility at Arak. The deal sought to limit Iran to research and development work on advanced centrifuges, but Tehran exploited that allowance and reportedly built up to 5,000 advanced centrifuges in the last year.

As a Peshmerga fighter, she had an advantage: The enemy fears being killed by a woman.

If you get to know someone in a war, they might well die much sooner than you’d prefer. As a foreign correspondent, I’ve buried many people over the years. True, it’s not really me who buries them. More likely, I am sipping a beer in Cairo or Budapest when I get the news.

My latest such loss was Rengin Yusuf. She was, like me, in her 30s. She was a mother. I met her among other Kurds this summer in a military training camp in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, where she served in a women’s regiment in the fight against the radical Islamists of ISIS. I interviewed her and her fellow officers over tea and then took their pictures. They asked me not to call them “women Peshmergas” because, they said, there is no such thing. A Peshmerga is a Peshmerga, or, in Kurdish, “someone who confronts death.”

The regiment’s youngest woman, Rengin Yusuf was strikingly attractive, with long black hair and a furtive smile. Our conversation didn’t extend beyond what was expected of us. I was the foreign correspondent; she, the Peshmerga. She and the others had been ordered to speak to me to demonstrate that the Kurdish “army” is free of sexism.

As I write these lines, it has been a month since Rengin Yusuf died. The Kurdish PUK Party representative who had been my host notified me via Facebook . “Do you remember this woman?” he asked. “You spoke to her.” “I remember,” I replied. “They killed her,” he wrote, and then asked, “How are you?” I filled him in on how things are back in Europe, and then I paid some bills.

OH PULEEZ!!! THERE CAN NEVER BE A “SELF GOVERNING” STATE….AND THIS WELL MEANING ARTICLE STILL TOUTS THE NOTION…..RSK

To understand why peace in Palestine is years if not decades away, consider the Palestinian celebrations after Tuesday’s murder in a Jerusalem synagogue of five Israelis, including three with joint U.S. citizenship. Two Palestinian cousins armed with meat cleavers and a gun attacked worshipers during morning prayers, and the response was jubilation in the streets.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility, while Hamas praised the murders as a “response to continued Israeli crimes.” The main obstacle to peace isn’t Jewish settlements in the multireligious city of Jerusalem. The barrier is the culture of hatred against Jews that is nurtured by Palestinian leaders.

Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas condemned the killings, but not without calling for Israel to halt what he called “invasions” of the holy Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Mr. Abbas has previously said the Temple Mount was being “contaminated” by Jews, despite assurances by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque are for Muslim worship only. The Memri news service reports that the Oct. 29 issue of the Palestinian daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida was full of false accusations that Israel is damaging Jerusalem’s holy sites.

The murders are the worst in a recent spate of Palestinian attacks, which some are calling a third spontaneous “intifada,” or uprising, against Israel. But there are few spontaneous events in a society dominated by armed military factions. The last intifada, after the failure of Bill Clinton ’s peace talks in 2000, was also said to be spontaneous until it became clear that Yasser Arafat was running it.

The goal of this new jihad is to frighten Israelis into agreeing to a divided Jerusalem, a chief Palestinian demand in the peace talks that recently collapsed. Yet it is only under Israeli rule that all religions have been respected in Jerusalem. On the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world should not be dividing cities.

President Obama has responded to today’s terrorist attack on a synagogue in Jerusalem in which four Israeli Jews attending morning prayers condemning the attack, and stating that “the majority of Palestinians” want peace.

In a statement delivered to the White House press pool, President Obama responded to the attack by declaring that “too many Palestinians have died,” as well as Israelis, in the struggle between the state of Israel and the terrorist group Hamas and its affiliates, including the internationally active Muslim Brotherhood. “At this difficult time,” the President told reports, “I think it’s important for both Palestinians and Israelis to try to work together to lower tensions and reject violence.”

“We have to remind ourselves that the majority of Palestinians and Israelis overwhelmingly want peace,” the statement concludes, before the President begins remarks on the Ebola crisis in West Africa. The President did not take questions.

The President’s remarks follow Secretary of State John Kerry’s response to the terrorist attack, in which he called “on Palestinian leadership at every single level to condemn this in the most powerful terms.” Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, on his end, nominally condemned the attack while “stressing the need to end the causes of such attacks like tensions over what Jews call the Temple Mount and Palestinians call al-Aqsa Mosque.” Such a dismissal of the increasingly out-of-control terrorist activity by Palestinian extremists received the typical benefit of the doubt from mainstream media.

As previously mentioned, four were killed during the attack– three, the New York Post reports, were American citizens. Photos released by the IDF office show significant bloodshed, indicating that the axes were used in killing those praying in the synagogue. Those congregated there had assembled for morning prayers; the assailants were armed with both guns and axes. Both assailants were Arab Palestinians, and both were killed on sight.

This attack is the latest in a string in Jerusalem in recent months. Two such attacks perpetrated on Israeli Jewish residents of Jerusalem were done so using a car. In one incident, a Palestinian assailant drove his car into a group of Jewish Israelis, killing a three-month-old Chaya Zissel, a US citizen. In the aftermath of that attack, a senior Palestinian Authority aide called the killer a “heroic martyr,” and both Hamas and Fatah applauded the attack.

Why would an American president oppose something that would improve Americans’ lives?

Speaking from Burma November 14, President Obama explained why he is inclined to veto the Keystone-pipeline bill: “My government believes that we should judge this pipeline based on whether or not it accelerates climate change or whether it helps the American people with their energy costs and their gas prices,” he said. “And I have to constantly push back against this idea that somehow the Keystone pipeline is either this massive jobs bill for the United States, or is somehow lowering gas prices.”

The president’s comments were truly remarkable. The Keystone pipeline is a real, and huge, infrastructure project that would pay for itself, without taxpayer funding. Furthermore, its purpose is to allow oil from Canada and North Dakota to reach the world market more economically. Therefore it would facilitate U.S. economic growth in several ways:

1. It would help the development of oil production in North Dakota directly. This would produce jobs and income in North Dakota, increase tax revenue, and improve America’s balance of payments and energy security.

2. It would help the development of Canadian oil production directly, and therefore increase income in Canada. The Canadian economy is really a subset of the North American economy, as there is direct division of labor on the production of many goods across the border, and the vast majority of Canadian imports are bought from the United States. Canadian oil also helps improve American energy security, as it is not vulnerable to being cut off by the vagaries of radical Muslim politics or even world war.

3. Helping oil from Canada and North Dakota reach the world market serves to lower the global price of oil. The U.S. produces 7 million barrels of oil per day at present, but uses 18 million barrels per day. We are thus the largest net importer of oil in the world, and anything that serves to lower the price of oil benefits the United States. Thus, as a general rule we should want oil production from every country in the world to find an easy path to the world market. If Tajikistan needs assistance getting its oil to the market, we should see what we can do to help out.

I am sympathetic to the desire of Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) to invalidate President Obama’s promised executive order conferring amnesty on millions of illegal aliens. And, like most of his fellow Republicans, and maybe even some Democrats, Senator Paul wants to believe Congress has the power to stop the president short of impeaching him. Nevertheless, his suggestion that lawmakers have the power to void presidential action simply by directing the president not to take that action is wrong.

Senator Paul floated this idea in an interview with Sean Hannity on Monday. He purported to base it on the Supreme Court’s famous steel-seizure case, Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer (1952), which he construes as holding that “the president cannot expressly do something that Congress is telling them [sic] not to do.”

In Youngstown, the justices invalidated President Truman’s executive order directing government agents to seize (and the Commerce Department to operate) American steel mills when a labor dispute threatened to disrupt supply during the Korean War. With due respect to Senator Paul — and recognizing that the time constraints of a short TV interview can make it very hard to outline a legal theory — Youngstown does not say what he seems to think it says.

First of all, Congress did not direct the president to do or refrain from doing anything in the steel-seizure case. Instead, Truman issued an executive order, the aggrieved companies sued, and the Court invalidated the order.

It is true that part of the rationale for invalidating the order was the absence of statutory authority for the president’s seizure of the mills. Senator Paul is obviously equating this statutory silence with an express congressional denial of seizure authority. That is a dubious proposition, to say the least. As illustrated by the various Youngstown opinions (including Justice Robert Jackson’s concurrence, which is better known than the majority opinion), it is often unclear what silence means: Sometimes it’s a green light, sometimes a red light, and sometimes . . . it is just silence.

Runaway crime has been replaced by rogue executive power.

Whether your metric is the use of the executive branch’s awesome investigative and prosecutorial powers to punish the administration critics, the stonewalling and misleading of congressional investigations, or the racially discriminatory enforcement of civil rights laws in violation of the Constitution’s equal-protection principles, the Obama Justice Department is the most politicized in the nation’s history.

But the conversion of the rule of law from a foundation of ordered liberty to a political weapon may have at least one silver lining. Growing public alarm over the abuse of executive power spotlights some wayward prosecutorial practices that have been building for decades. Among them is civil forfeiture. It has devolved from a useful tool for defunding major criminal enterprises to a dangerous gutting of due process for ordinary Americans.

Like many government initiatives that grow harmful owing to inevitable mission creep, forfeiture seemed like a fine idea at the start. That was the early 1970s, when the nation faced a record crime wave driven by organized crime and narcotics-trafficking gangs. These enterprises can be very difficult to prosecute: Key leaders are insulated, witnesses are afraid to come forward and lavish profits enable mobsters and kingpins to hire top-flight lawyers and corrupt judicial processes.

Civil forfeiture was one clever way of attacking the problem. Rather than targeting the thugs through criminal prosecution, the civil approach targeted the instrumentalities that facilitated crime and the assets that were its proceeds — either cash or the things that money can buy. Although government prosecutors brought the cases, they were civil in nature, not criminal. That meant the “defendant” was the asset itself (e.g., a car, a bank account, a trove of jewelry), not the person whose suspected criminal activity generated these assets.

This was a coup for prosecutors because the burden of proof in civil cases is significantly lower: The case if proved by a “preponderance of the evidence” (basically, prosecutors must show merely that guilt is more likely than not), rather than the daunting “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard applicable for criminal conviction. Moreover, there was great risk for the owner of ill-gotten gains subject to criminal forfeiture: By challenging the seizure of his property, he could end up providing investigators with valuable information about himself that could help build a criminal case.

The current halachic prohibition against ascending the Temple Mount originates in the Ottoman period.

For millennia, the site of the First and Second Temples has been the subject of a halachic (Jewish law) question: where are Jews permitted to walk on the Temple Mount? Rabbis agree that because of the sanctity of the Temple, Jews must not enter the area where the Temples stood. They differ, however, about where the Temples were located, and whether the prohibition applies to the specific site of the Temples, or to the entire Temple Mount.

The First and Second Temples were small buildings, about 50 meters square, which contained an inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, into which the High Priest entered once a year, on Yom Kippur. The Temple Mount is nearly 1,500 square meters, and entering the golden Dome of the Rock, a Muslim shrine, and its surrounding area – around 200 sq.m. – is forbidden.

It is recorded that Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides/Rambam, 1135-1204) prayed on the Temple Mount at a synagogue that had remained from an earlier (pre-Crusader) period. Rabbi Moses ben Nachman (Ramban) wrote that he prayed on the Temple Mount when he arrived in Jerusalem in 1267.

The current halachic prohibition against ascending the Temple Mount originates in the Ottoman period and was restated during the Mandate period by chief rabbis Avraham Ha-Cohen Kook and Isaac Herzog, and halachic authorities like R’ Yisrael Meir Kagan (author of “Hafetz Hayim”). Their position was consistent with the Ottoman and British governments’ and Wakf (Islamic Authority) policy of excluding Jews from the Temple Mount and restricting access to and use of the Western Wall.

There is a hagiography ” The Theory of Everything” starring wonderful and talented Eddie Redmayne on the life, the loves and the tragedy of dear Professor Hawking. Here is an essay that says it all by David Solway. Also check out Marilyn Penn’s review http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2014/11/16/the-theory-of-everything-big-holes-in-hawkings-life/
Stephen Hawking’s Moral Black Hole Posted By David Solway

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2013/05/20/stephen-hawkings-moral-black-hole-posted-by-david-solway/

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/stephen-hawkings-moral-black-hole/print/

There has been considerable fallout of late regarding world-renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s refusal to attend Israel’s Fifth Presidential Conference this coming June, on the grounds of Israeli malfeasance toward the Palestinians. Whatever one’s view of the Jewish state, there should be little doubt that the physicist’s decision to boycott the event is both intellectually indefensible and morally suspect, and raises the question of how mental agility and moral folly can co-exist in the same person.

As several commentators have indicated, his position is intellectually indefensible since Hawking evinces no knowledge of the history of the Middle East, ludicrously compares Israel to apartheid South Africa, and seems wholly unaware of the provably fraudulent nature of the Palestinian narrative. Palestinian revisionism has falsified the historical record in practically every conceivable respect. The data are readily accessible and no genuine scholar or thinking person can deny them and still retain a modicum of integrity. At the same time, his attitude is morally suspect owing to the fact that Hawking, who suffers from motor neuron disease, would have been rendered mute without the advances and advantages of Israeli medical breakthroughs. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of Shurat HaDin–Israel Law Center, called Hawking’s boycott hypocritical. “His whole computer-based communication system runs on a chip designed by Israel’s Intel team. I suggest that if he truly wants to pull out of Israel, he should also pull out his Intel Core i7 from his tablet.”

Paving the way for Islamic State in Israel

During morning prayers at a Jerusalem synagogue on Tuesday, two Arabs with massacre on their minds entered the premises armed with guns and axes. They managed to kill four worshippers and wound several others before being shot down by police.

Immediately this was reported in the media as a revenge attack for the death of an Arab bus driver (employed by the Israeli company, Egged) on Sunday night. A forensic examination, conducted on Monday in the presence of an Arab coroner, showed that the deceased had hanged himself. But his parents insisted he was murdered by Jews. Riots ensued.

But then, mass protests against perceived Israeli crimes have been going on for months. Each is given a specific label, but they are all part of what I would call the “Temple Mount Intifada.”

This latest war of attrition against Israel was ostensibly caused by a movement of Jews who wish to alter the status quo and be allowed to pray at the Temple Mount. But Muslims, who have free rein to worship at the Al-Aqsa mosque, consider this an assault.

They rationalize their rejection of religious coexistence by denying a Jewish connection to the site.

“Temple denial” is a term coined by Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs head Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. and current foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In his 2007 book, “The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City,” Gold called the attempt on the part of Palestinian Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat to delegitimize Israel by rejecting Jewish claims to the holy city.

Since then, Gold has shown how Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has picked up where Arafat left off, continuing the campaign to cast aspersions on Israel’s connection to Jerusalem in general and to the Temple Mount in particular. Indeed, Abbas and other PA figures have taken many opportunities to assert that if there was a Jewish Temple 2,000 years ago, it was located in Nablus.