RUTHFULLY YOURS

JEFF DUNETZ: A GREAT PIECE ON ENTEBBE…WHEN LEADERS STILL FOUGHT FOR FREEDOM

Remembering Entebbe 35 Years Ago Today: When Leaders Still Fought For Freedom

http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2011/07/remembering-entebbe-35-years-ago-today.html?utm_source=The+Lid+List&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1cb696e944-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN

On America’s two hundredth birthday it was Israel that showed the world the “Spirit of 1776.”

On June 27, 1976, Air France Flight 139, carrying 248 passengers and a crew of twelve, took off from Athens, heading for Paris. Soon after the 12:30 p.m. takeoff, the flight was hijacked by two Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External OperationsGerman “Revolutionary Cells (RZ)” (Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann), who commandeered the flight, diverting it to Benghazi, Libya. The plane left Benghazi, and at 3:15 it arrived at Entebbe Airport in Uganda.

At Entebbe, the four hijackers were joined by three “friends” supported by the pro-Palestinian forces of Uganda’s President, Idi Amin. The hijackers were led by Böse. They demanded the release of 40 Palestinians held in Israel and 13 other detainees imprisoned in Kenya, France, Switzerland, and Germany–and if these demands were not met, they threatened to begin killing hostages on July 1, 1976 that deadline was extended to July 4th.

The hijackers held the passengers hostage in the transit hall of Entebbe Airport and released all the hostages except for Israelis and Jews, whom they threatened to kill if Israel did not comply with their demands. Upon the announcement by the hijackers that the airline crew and non-Israeli/non-Jewish passengers would be released and put on another Air France plane that had been brought to Entebbe for that purpose, Flight 139′s Captain Michel Bacos told the hijackers that all passengers, including the remaining ones, were his responsibility, and that he would not leave them behind. Bacos’ entire crew followed suit. A French nun also refused to leave, insisting that one of the remaining hostages take her place, but she was forced into the awaiting Air France plane by Ugandan soldiers. A total of 83 Israeli and/or Jewish hostages remained, as well as 20 others, most of whom included the crew of the Air France plane.

On July 4th 1976 shortly after midnight Israeli Planes landed at Entebbe and began their now famous rescue. The entire assault lasted less than 30 minutes and all six of the hijackers were killed. Yonatan Netanyahu (Bibi’s older brother) was the only Israeli commando who died during the operation. He was killed near the airport entrance, apparently by a Ugandan sniper who fired at the Israeli commandos from the nearby control tower. At least five other Israeli commandos were wounded. Out of the 103 hostages, three were killed and approximately 10 were wounded. A total of 45 Ugandan soldiers were killed during the raid, and about 11 Ugandan Army Air Force MiG-17 grounded fighter planes at Entebbe Airport were destroyed. The rescued hostages were flown out to Israel via Nairobi shortly after the fighting.

The government of Uganda later convened a session of the United Nations Security Council to seek official condemnation of the Israeli raid, as a violation of Ugandan sovereignty. The Security Council ultimately declined to pass any resolution on the matter. In his address to the Council, the Israeli ambassador Chaim Herzog said:

We come with a simple message to the Council: we are proud of what we have done because we have demonstrated to the world that a small country, in Israel’s circumstances, with which the members of this Council are by now all too familiar, the dignity of man, human life and human freedom constitute the highest values. We are proud not only because we have saved the lives of over a hundred innocent people—men, women and children—but because of the significance of our act for the cause of human freedom.

For refusing to depart when given leave to do so by the hijackers, Captain Bacos was reprimanded by his superiors at Air France (gotta love the French) and suspended from duty for a period.

I LIKE AND ADMIRE DAVID WILDER….I LIKE HIS SMILE, I LIKE HIS CHEERFULNESS EVEN IN THE FACE OF DANGER AND TERROR, AND MOST OF ALL I LIKE TO THINK OF HIM WALKING FREELY IN HEBRON, THE CRADLE OF THE JEWISH FAITH. HE IS A LINK IN A CHAIN OF JEWISH EXISTENCE THAT HAS NOT BEEN BROKEN IN SPITE OF MILLENNIA OF PERSECUTION, DISPLACEMENT, GENOCIDE AND TERROR….AND HE LIVES WHERE IT ALL BEGAN. BLESS HIM AND THE BRAVE AND DETERMINED PEOPLE OF HEBRON, ISRAEL….RSK
My statement to the media at a press conference yesterday at Yeshivat Shavei Hevron, here in Hebron.
We sat here almost a month ago following the abduction, in hope and prayer that we might meet the press here again at a big celebration and unfortunately that’s not the case. In Hebrew we say,’ sur m’ra v’aseh tov’ – first do away with the evil and then do good and that’s the path that the State of Israel must follow today. We lost three men, three boys, three heroes who didn’t know anything about evil. Their only crime was that they were Jews living in Eretz Yisrael, studying in Hebron, studying in Gush Etzion, who wanted to do good. That was their purpose in life, those were their values, and the evil of the evil, the worst of the evil took their lives, but that spirit can never be taken. The side that the State of Israel must follow today, sur m’ra, to destroy evil, to eradicate evil, all of the terror, anyone who associates with the terror, anybody who gives any kind of support whatsoever for terror, has to be eradicated, has to be eliminated, has to be done away with. At the big rally in Tel Aviv, where we found all of the different sides of the Israeli people coming together, left, right, anything, everyone was there. One of the things that was said by the chairman of the student’s union, was that their cannot be any justification whatsoever, in any way, shape or form, for the abduction, and he would add to that today, murder, of three young people. There’s no justification, there’s nothing that can be said, no excuses that can be given.

It goes without saying that Hamas, the Jihad, the Salafists who are starting to infiltrate, associated with Al-Queida, they all have to be wiped out, in any way that is necessary. The Israeli security forces know how to do that. I include in that group, Abu Mazen and the palestinian authority, who made a unity pact with Hamas. People who make unity pacts with terrorists are terrorists. Their goals are the same. Enough of the handshaking, the hugging, the kissing, the ‘let’s be friends.’ It’s all a show. And it has to come to an end. The state of Israel has to make that clear, because if it’s not made clear, then we’ll sit here again together, and if it’s not here in Hebron, then it will be, G-d Forbid, in Elon Moreh, or in Yerushalayim, or in Sderot, because that’s their goal. And if we don’t destroy them, then they will continue to murder Jews.

For years, ever since I was hospitalized in Haifa, I’ve been waiting for a headline quite like this: “Surgeon Says He’s Tired of Treating Palestinians.”

The article, written by Hezki Ezra and Gil Ronen, appeared above the fold on Arutz Sheva, June 26, which is to say that it was written and published at the height of Israel’s anguish over the three Yeshiva kids who’d been abducted — and murdered — by Palestinian Arabs.

We hear an Israeli heart surgeon, Dr. David Mishali, lament that he is tired of being merciful to the wicked. More from this article at the conclusion.

I said Haifa…

Something snapped during a rescue at sea. I tried to take a step and the answer was quick. My bad knee had locked at the kneecap. Shlomo somehow got me over to the medical center next door, Rambam Hospital, famed as the most advanced hospital anywhere in the world – which I did not know at the time.

It was a hospital, period. Not so. In Israel nothing is so simple. In ER, Shlomo explained that I was an American volunteer, a wink to suggest that he would appreciate some extra attention for his buddy. I was quickly wheeled to a room and there I sat waiting with a dozen other patients.

Most of the language was Arabic. A doctor came. I asked how many of his patients were Arabs in this Jewish hospital.

“More than a few,” he said casually.

He said he’d be back with some medication for the swelling. Meantime he tended to the others. I was special. But so was everybody else.

Reprinted from TruthRevolt.org.

As many in the Western world grieve and attempt to comprehend the brutal murder of three Israeli teenagers — including one American — emotions abound. Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel, three yeshiva students from central Israel, were kidnapped and murdered by Arab terrorists while on their way home from school. Their crime was simply that they were Jews daring to live in Israel. Although disturbing, when viewed in the context of Palestinian culture, this crime is not shocking. One cannot be surprised that a society governed by a regime that indoctrinates its children to hate Jews would actually produce individuals who act on that impulse and murder them.

Viewed in the context of global Jew hatred, this heinous crime is not an aberration. There has been a disturbing rise in anti-Semitism around the world and responses have ranged from disinterest in the slaughter of Jews to sympathy with the “freedom fighters” seeking to “kill” them.

Consider the current state of European anti-Semitism. In May, two men and one woman were murdered in cold blood at a Jewish museum in Brussels. In France, leaders in the Jewish community report that they are experiencing “the worst climate of anti-Semitism in decades.” In June alone, there have been several attacks on Jews — including an assault on Jewish students by a mob of 20 who stabbed and beat them, an attack on a Jewish woman and her baby at a bus station in Paris, and the beating of a Jewish man who had his nose broken and a swastika drawn on his chest. In Belgium, three Jews were killed at the Jewish museum in May. As a result, security was tightened across the country at multiple Jewish sights.

Anti-Semitism is also rampant in the Arab world. Jews have long been maligned as the source of all evil and Israel is constantly demonized as a “Nazi” or “apartheid” state. Children’s television shows routinely feature anti-Semitic diatribes and encourage kids to commit suicide in the name of Jihad.

Thus the kidnapping of Eyal, Gilad, and Naftali by Arab terrorists must be viewed within the context of global anti-Semitism that is sweeping across the world at an alarming rate.

Moreover, many would have us believe that the terrorists who murdered them should be “understood” in the greater context of their “struggle” to see Arab supremacism come into fruition. Some on the extreme left suggest that when the terrorists decided to shoot the boys, burn their bodies, and bury them, they were justified in doing so because they believed so fervently in the righteousness of their racist cause to murder Jews. They say that we should refrain from rushing to judgment, and instead view the terrorists as revolutionaries in pursuit of a moral good — which could only have been obtained by piling up heaps of dead Jews.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/a-report-card-on-a-radical-in-chief-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by conservative entrepreneur and walking encyclopedia Monty Morton, who came on the show to provide A Report Card on a Radical-in-Chief, outlining how Obama’s domestic and foreign policy is crippling America:

No matter what terrorist atrocity was committed against Israel yesterday, the call goes out for a return to the peace process today. For two long decades of terror that has never changed.

Diplomacy is a strange twisted business of lies, deceit and badly mixed drinks served at hotel bars that are a year away from being blown up. The motives are so twisted that everyone often ends up doing the opposite of what they set out to do. But even by the standards of international diplomacy where mixed motives and terrible ideas stew in a solid gold pot for years before they explode, the peace process between Israel and the PLO terrorists is in a horrible class of its own.

The one thing that everyone involved in the process, from the PLO terrorists to the Israelis to the international diplomats who arrive with a Bluetooth in one ear and a talking point in the other, can agree on is that it will never work. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not in a million years.

But that doesn’t mean that they’re about to stop.

Israel realized it wasn’t working a few years in after buses began blowing up more often than they were arriving on time. And the PLO can’t reach a final agreement because it’s not an independent actor. From its earliest days, before the Six Day War, it was a puppet of other countries. It’s still a projection of state power by Muslim countries in the region who want to perpetuate a conflict with Israel without spending too much money on bombs and guns.

A peace process that never works involving a terrorist state funded by the US and the EU is the second best thing to happen to Saudi Arabia since those infidel geologists found all that oil.

Even if the Saudis didn’t take their Koran seriously, and except when it comes to their taste for booze, women and young boys they do, they have every reason to go on undermining Israel. Israel was their only real regional diplomatic rival in the West. Now Israel is permanently on the defensive and the Saudis got away with funding a Sunni-Shiite war while telling international diplomats that the region’s problems could only be solved with an Israeli-PLO peace deal.

The PLO isn’t interested in the peace process, but it can’t opt out of it without losing American money. And it can’t follow through on the peace process. Not if it doesn’t want the Saudis sending some local flavor of ISIS its way.

So the PLO has to sabotage peace negotiations each time while blaming Israel.

THE POEM INSCRIBED ON THE STATUE OF LIBERTY IS BY EMMA LAZARUS

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless,
Tempest-tossed to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning,
And her name, Mother of Exiles.
From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome;
Her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbor
That twin cities frame.
“Keep, Ancient Lands, your storied pomp!”
Cries she with silent lips.

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi first pitched his design for a statue of a woman in a flowing robe with a crown and torch in the 1860s—to the khedive of Egypt.

Just in time for Independence Day comes “Liberty’s Torch,” Elizabeth Mitchell’s history of the construction of the most recognizable symbol of American freedom, the Statue of Liberty.

The book’s subtitle is “The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty.” The word “adventure” is a stretch, but “Liberty’s Torch” is an entertaining enough story, and Ms. Mitchell, a journalist and editor, tells it well. Her narrative skills are on display as she weaves a tale that takes us to Paris, Cairo and New York and features a large cast of characters who include such bold-faced names as Victor Hugo, Gustave Eiffel, Ulysses S. Grant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The leading player is the statue’s creator, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a French sculptor, artist, entrepreneur and—Ms. Mitchell doesn’t mince words—huckster. Bartholdi liked to think big, literally. He first conceived the notion of an enormous statue of a woman when he was in his 20s, taking his inspiration from the antiquities he observed on a trip to Egypt. As he wrote at the time: “We are filled with profound emotion in the presence of these colossal witnesses, centuries old, of a past that to us is almost infinite, at whose feet so many generations, so many million existences, so many human glories, have rolled in the dust.”

In the 1860s, with a French company building the Suez Canal, Bartholdi proposed to the ruler of Egypt, the khedive, that he be allowed to create a gigantic statue to be positioned at the mouth of the canal. Bartholdi’s statue would depict a woman draped in a flowing robe, wearing a crown and carrying a torch in her upraised right hand. Sound like someone you know? When the khedive declined to commission his Egyptian lady with a lamp, Bartholdi carried the concept across the Atlantic to New York City. He arrived in the U.S. in 1871.

Hooray! The War on Women Is Back The Supreme Court unleashes a wave of liberal misinformation.

Do Democrats seem livelier than usual this week—more spring in their step, maybe, their cheeks rosier, extra gleam in the eye? Verily, the Supreme Court has liberated them to unleash their gender and other identity-politics grievances in an election year.

Democrats claim to be distraught over the Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, but really they can barely suppress their glee. Allowing some religious objectors in business to opt out of the contraception mandate lends them a campaign theme that isn’t the economy, the Middle East in flames or incompetent governance. No agenda, no problem. Patriarchs and Republicans—if that’s not redundant—are coming for your womb, ladies.
Here’s White House press secretary Josh Earnest : “President Obama believes that women should make personal health-care decisions for themselves rather than their bosses deciding for them. . . . The constitutional lawyer in the Oval Office disagrees with that conclusion.” This appeal to diploma is weird, because Hobby Lobby turned on the straightforward application of a federal statute. The First Amendment’s free-exercise clause wasn’t reached.

There’s another ex-lawyer who should also know better, given that her husband signed the relevant law “to protect perhaps the most precious of all American liberties,” as Bill Clinton put it in 1993. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) sailed through the House unanimously and the Senate 97-3.

Yet today Hillary Clinton thinks the Clinton family’s RFRA legacy is nearly Iranian. Its protections belong to “a disturbing trend that you see in a lot of societies that are very unstable, anti-democratic and frankly prone to extremism,” which is “women and girls being deprived of their rights,” including “control over their bodies,” she said this week.

America’s mullahs are also after Democratic Party chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who warned on MSNBC that “Republicans want to do everything they can to have the long hand of government, and now the long hand of business, reach into a woman’s body and make health-care decisions for her.” Democrats made Hobby Lobby-based fundraising pitches over the weekend, before the decision was even handed down.

One of them featured Sandra Fluke, the middle-aged Georgetown Law coed now enjoying a 16th minute of fame after demanding that Congress give her free birth control in 2012. She worries that “the current reproductive rights environment” even endangers “a woman’s ability to pay for her own coverage.” What she means is the taxpayer ability to subsidize somebody else’s abortion. The Affordable Care Act itself bars the federal exchanges from financing such services, and the bill wouldn’t have passed otherwise.

Harry Reid added with his usual subtlety that “it’s time that five men on the Supreme Court stop deciding what happens to women.” Perhaps the Senate Majority Leader’s 1993 vote in favor of RFRA can be retroactively disqualified because he gender self-identifies as a man.

Tyranny of the Majority Leader Harry Reid is ignoring centuries of Senate precedent in his rush to serve Obama.

Patience and reliability are the defining characteristics of successful leadership in the Senate. Good Senate majority leaders work through the rules of the Senate, which protect minority rights, to find a way to please a majority (or possibly a supermajority) of senators and move legislation and nominations to passage. They keep their commitments to open debate, even when their partisan colleagues would prefer to use simple majority power to crush the minority and avoid tough votes or compromises.

The Senate once prided itself on being “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” That it no longer is. According to the Congressional Research Service, Senator Harry Reid (D., Nev.) has obstructed the amendment process for his colleagues 85 times — more than double the total of his six predecessors combined. Neither Republican nor Democratic senators can offer amendments. This negates every senator’s right to debate and amend legislation and thus fully represent his or her constituents.

This was especially evident in May, when Senator Reid killed three bipartisan pieces of legislation in as many weeks. First, he refused to allow even a limited number of amendments to bipartisan energy legislation. The following week, he blocked amendments to a bipartisan tax-extenders bill. Finally, he reached into the Senate Judiciary Committee to torpedo a bipartisan patent bill the committee was poised to mark up. These are the types of bills that passed routinely when the regular order of open debate and amendments was followed in the Senate.

The atmosphere in the Senate has soured due to Senator Reid’s stranglehold on the legislative process. It has been made worse by his failure to keep his repeated — and very specific — promise to follow the Senate’s rules. At the beginning of the 112th Congress, he acknowledged on the Senate floor that “the proper way to change Senate rules is through the procedures established in those rules,” and he committed to “oppose any effort in this Congress or the next to change the Senate’s rules other than through the regular order.”

Despite this very clear commitment, Senator Reid threatened to break the Senate’s rules at the beginning of this Congress. After Republicans agreed to procedural changes that gave the Democratic majority powers greater than those of any previous majority in the history of the Senate, Reid again unequivocally committed to follow the rules of the Senate.

Will Bobby Jindal Have to Fight Common Core in Court?

State education officials threaten to sue over executive orders he issued against the program.

A legal battle over the fate of Common Core, the national education standards developed by a coalition of governors and educators and adopted by the vast majority of states, may be brewing in Louisiana.

The state’s top education board voted on Tuesday to retain legal counsel, a sign it is gearing up for a lawsuit against Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal after he issued a series of executive orders in an attempt to withdraw the state from the Common Core.

Jindal’s decision has sparked an internecine war among Republicans in Louisiana, putting him at odds with his handpicked superintendent of education, John White, and his Republican-dominated legislature. White has said the governor doesn’t have the right to unilaterally prevent the state from adopting the standards and that the move is less about the nature and quality of the education Louisiana children receive and more about “presidential politics.”

The great lengths to which Jindal has gone to pull Louisiana out of Common Core are one indication of the standards’ toxicity among conservative Republicans. His executive orders overrode not only the decisions of the state board of education but also the legislature. That GOP-controlled body rejected several bills that would have removed the state from Common Core and, in fact, passed a bill sponsored by a Democratic legislator in mid June — Jindal vetoed it — that endorsed the standards.

Like the government shutdown, immigration reform, and the midterm elections themselves, the Common Core has pitted the tea-party wing of the GOP against business interests and more moderate, establishment forces. The Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have for months been running ads in favor of Common Core. The target: skeptical Republicans.

The issue has divided the prospective 2016 candidates along the same lines and has obvious implications for Jindal’s presidential prospects, especially if Louisiana Republicans are forced into a legal showdown.

Several of the GOP’s potential 2016 candidates have sought to distance themselves from the standards. In fact, of the twelve Republican governors who have denounced the program, four are talked about as potential presidential contenders: Texas governor Rick Perry, who has signed a bill banning Common Core from his state; Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, whose staff drafted a bill to replace the standards, though it went nowhere in the state legislature; Indiana governor Mike Pence, who withdrew his state from the Common Core and in recent months proposed alternative standards, which have themselves come under fire from the Tea Party for looking too much like Common Core; and Jindal.

Meanwhile, former Florida governor Jeb Bush is perhaps the most outspoken proponent of the Common Core, and he has denounced fellow Republicans for their pivot on the issue. “I just don’t feel compelled to run for cover when I think this is the right thing to do for our country,” Bush told Fox News in April. “And others have — others that supported the standards all of a sudden are opposed to it.”

New Jersey governor Chris Christie is the only potential top-tier candidate besides Bush who remains a staunch supporter. The Obama administration has praised the standards, and secretary of education Arne Duncan inflamed tea-party Republicans last November when he denounced the opposition as “white suburban moms” who’d discovered “their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were.” Christie has said that some opposition is a “knee-jerk” response to the president’s support and that he agrees with Obama on the issue. “We’re doing Common Core in New Jersey and we’re going to continue,” he said last August. Ohio governor John Kasich, another potential Republican presidential contender, also remains a supporter.