RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.romirowsky.com/14741/palestinian-refugee-crisis

Perhaps the most insurmountable and explosive issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the so-called “right of return”—the demand that millions of Palestinians must be allowed to “return” to the State of Israel under any peace agreement. While Israel has made clear that it cannot agree to this, since it would effectively destroy Israel as a Jewish state, the Palestinians have steadfastly refused to compromise on the issue. This has made the “right of return” the primary obstacle to any peace agreement.

Despite the latest round of peace talks, there is little sign that the Palestinians are willing to change their stance. Indeed, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has unequivocally stated, “Let me put it simply: the right of return is a personal decision. What does this mean? That neither the PA, nor the state, nor the PLO, nor Abu Mazen [Abbas’ nom de guerre], nor any Palestinian or Arab leader has the right to deprive someone from his right to return.” Abbas is by no means alone in this. In fact, whenever it appears that Abbas might waver, the reaction tends to be swift and ferocious.

At one point, for example, Ali Huwaidi, director of the Palestinian Organization for the Right of Return (“Thabit”) in Beirut, lashed out at Abbas, saying,

Regardless of Abbas’ statements, the right of return is guaranteed, individually and collectively, through UN resolutions. The refugees will not give up their right no matter where they are living today. Abbas is worried about flooding Israel with five million refugees while Israel has brought one million people from the former Soviet Union and no one complained about this. Our refugees will not accept any alternative to their right to return to their homeland and we do not care what Abbas’ position is.

But how many actual refugees are there? Surely over the years, many of those displaced have passed away, and such status does not normally transfer from generation to generation.

The issue is so emotive because, in many ways, Palestinian identity itself is embodied in the collective belief in a “right of return” to “Palestine.” Along with the belief that resistance to Israel is permanent and holy, Palestinian identity is largely based on the idea that the Palestinians are, individually and communally, refugees; that they have been made so by Israel; and that the United Nations should support these refugees until they can return to what is now Israel.

This belief is passionately safeguarded by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The organization was established in 1949 following the failure of the Arab war against Israel’s independence, and its original mandate was to provide services to the approximately 650,000 Arabs displaced by the conflict. Today, it is essentially a massive social welfare system serving millions of Palestinians, primarily in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. At the same time, its activities go well beyond simple humanitarianism. It plays a distinctly political role in Palestinian society, working to further the cause of Palestinian nationalism through politicized education, activism, anti-Israel propaganda, and other activities.

In effect, UNRWA has come to depend on the refugee problem itself. While the refugees benefit from its services, the organization benefits even more from the refugees. They are, of course, the organization’s raison d’être. UNRWA has no incentive whatsoever to resolve the Palestinian refugee problem, since doing so would render it obsolete. As a result, the agency not only perpetuates the refugee problem, but has, in many ways, exacerbated it. In doing so, it has made Israeli-Palestinian peace all but impossible.

UNRWA’s role in perpetuating and even expanding the refugee problem is a complex one; but, more than anything else, it is the result of the agency’s own definition of a Palestinian refugee—which is unique in world history. The standard definition of a refugee, which applies in every case except that of the Palestinians, includes only those actually displaced in any given conflict. UNRWA has defined a Palestinian refugee as anyone whose “normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” But it has also continually expanded this definition, now stating “the children or grandchildren of such refugees are eligible for agency assistance if they are (a) registered with UNRWA, (b) living in the area of UNRWA’s operations, and (c) in need.”

As a result, the number of official Palestinian refugees—according to UNRWA— has expanded almost to the point of absurdity. The best estimates are that perhaps 650,000 Palestinians became refugees in 1948-1949; but UNRWA now defines virtually every Palestinian born since that time as a refugee. That number now reaches well into the millions. This is quite simply unprecedented. In no other case has refugee status been expanded to include subsequent generations over a period of decades.

UNRWA’s involvement in Palestinian society is equally unique. Its role there has expanded from simple refugee relief to one of the most important and influential Palestinian institutions. In particular, the agency now employs nearly 30,000 people, most of whom are Palestinian. This makes UNRWA the single largest employer in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and indispensable to the Palestinian economy. As such, there is a strong economic incentive to keep the prosperous organization afloat.

It cannot be said that the agency is ungenerous to its subjects. When the world hears words like “refugees” and “refugee camps,” it instinctively pictures desperate people living in tents or shantytowns. This generates automatic sympathy and financial support for organizations like UNRWA, which regularly receives monetary contributions amounting to millions of dollars. All this is due to the belief that these funds provide humanitarian aid and help with the assimilation of Palestinian refugees. In many cases, the reality is entirely different. UNRWA-administered refugee camps are often fully-functioning suburbs of Palestinian cities, with water, electricity, and even satellite television.

A new documentary, “The J Street Challenge,” is being shown in a series of cities in North America, including Chicago, where I attended a screening this past weekend. The movie focuses on the left-wing Obama-supporting group that was founded in 2008 by Jeremy Ben-Ami, and that has successfully marketed itself as a pro-Israel, pro-peace organization, or merely pro-peace (when pro-Israel is less readily saleable on some college campuses).

As the film convincingly demonstrates, J Street has been anything but a pro-Israel group, and has been unremittingly hostile to the current government of Israel on pretty much every issue — from opposing sanctions (and even the threat of military action by either the United States or Israel) in dealing with the Iranian nuclear program, to exclusively blaming settlements in Judea and Samaria for the absence of peace, to advancing the Goldstone Report in Congress, to demanding that pressure be applied by the United States on Israel to accept the negotiating demands of the Palestinian Authority.

J Street has attracted a large number of members in its first few years, and has established branches or chapters in many cities and college campuses. It has been heavily funded in its first few years by anti-Zionist hedge fund billionaire George Soros (a fact denied by Ben-Ami for several years, until tax filings revealed his lies), some donors who may be fronting for Soros (including a woman from Hong Kong no one knows who gave close to $1 million), and a leading figure in a front group for the Iranian regime, the National Iranian American Council. It is an unusual collection of people who in any case would never be described as pro-Israel. Jeremy Ben-Ami himself came to J Street after a career in public relations, with firms that have represented the government of Saudi Arabia, among others.

In the case of Soros, he has never been a shrinking violet on the subject of Israel. He has been a consistent critic, and has always wanted the United States to follow the lead of the European nations in distancing itself from Israel. So far, America has resisted this path, though President Barack Obama almost certainly would prefer to follow the European approach — which involves pressuring Israel to make the concessions necessary to achieve a two-state solution, assuming there are any concessions that would ever get the Palestinians to say yes to a deal that would end the conflict (with no more claims) and leave Israel as a Jewish-majority state. Most importantly, J Street has provided a vehicle to begin the work on changing the narrative on Israel within the Jewish community — in synagogues, Jewish federations, and Hillels, and more broadly, in colleges, the media, and Congress.

These politically correct activists are all supposed to be anti-racists and multiculturalists. Yet when artists are banned just because they happened to be born in Israel, it tears apart the very basis of both anti-racism and multiculturalism.

As you doubtless know, many in Europe loathe the United States. Their invective down the years has been an assault on reason and emotional stability, whether directed against the Vietnam war, the response to 9/11 or to the Iraq war. Yet there is no boycott of the United States.

So, despite a hatred for America — and a perverse love of Iran, Hezbollah, and the PLO — we come back to the Israeli exception, to the singling out of just one country. However charitable we may try to be, it is hard not to detect the reek of anti-Semitism. Am I being unfair? To people who marched through the streets of European cities chanting, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas,” (and here and here at Dutch football matches) was that just simple folly — or proof of intention?

The international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement [BDS] against Israel is so determined to hurt Israel abroad, that the boycotters also put pressure on performers who even consider holding concerts in Israel.

The pressure works. An endless stream of artists, mainly musicians, have cancelled concerts or simply turned down invitations to play in Tel Aviv or elsewhere in Israel.

Carlos Santana caved in to pressure from the BDS crowd, as did Elvis Costello, Gil Scott-Heron, Annie Lennox, Stevie Wonder, and writers such as Iain Banks and Alice Walker, a crusader against racism who flies the flag of anti-Semitism as though Jews are suitable victims. Five hundred artists from Montreal, Canada have joined the campaign. Actors such as Vanessa Paradis and her husband Johnny Depp stayed at home in 2011 — under the threat that, if they turned up in Israel, they would face a boycott, too.

Roger Waters, former lead singer and lyricist for the rock band Pink Floyd, is a hardline anti-Israel activist who demands a boycott until Israel ends “the occupation” (presumably on Palestinian terms). He also demands that Israel grants full equality to Israel’s Arabs — notwithstanding that Israel’s Arabs already have full equality both in law and in practice. Waters would also give all Palestinians the “right of return” — a condition that guarantees the end of Israel should millions of Muslim non-refugees overrun it.

http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=87b74a936c723115dfa298cf3&id=24258af1fa&e=552053f981

The United States 2014 “National Climate Assessment” is out and it is a blemish on the honor of science.It appears President Obama is trying to pivot national attention to global warming to distract the public from Obamacare, his rickety foreign policy and other controversial failures.This shoddy unscientific report pretends that facts, data and history don’t exist, and goes all in on a pure global warming scare fantasy.This all out global warming push by the Obama administration places American freedom, independence and prosperity all in jeopardy.

The media needs to fact check this bogus report and end blind support of the global warming campaign.They should ask the inconvenient questions. What does data show to be the best estimate of actual global temperature? How does measured temperature compare to computer model predictions? How does today’s weather compare to historical weather?

Fact checking does not mean quoting some global warming researcher. It means rolling up your sleeves, delving into the real-world data, and comparing what warming advocates say to reality.

This is serious.

Obama’s EPA and the rest of the bureaucracy are under executive order to bypass Congress and make war on America’s energy supply. John Kerry’s State Department is working to bring the U.S. under the United Nation’s climate regime at next year’s Paris climate summit.CFACT’s Marc Morano summed it up powerfully in a just-released statement: You should take a look.
‘This report is a misdirection.
Obama has entered his second term lame duck status and with climate executive orders he does not need Congress to ‘do something’ about global warming.
This report is contrary to peer-reviewed studies and observations. By every measure, so called extreme weather is showing no trend or declining trends on 50-100 year timescales. Droughts, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes are not increasing due to man-made global warming.
Why does the report now call ‘global warming’ a new name, so-called ‘climate disruption’? Simple answer: Due to earth’s failure to warm — no global warming for nearly 18 years – another name was necessary to attempt to gin up fear. Now every storm is offered up as some sort of ‘proof’ of global warming.
This report is pre-determined science. They chose scientists and activists who agreed with their climate narrative and they endorsed scary predictions of the future.’

Hello Everyone,

You’ll be mortified to learn that Steven Spielberg, determined to uphold the tradition started by the Nobel Prize committee of awarding President Obama prizes for doing nothing, is awarding the Shoah Foundation’s “Ambassador for Humanity Award” to Obama here in L.A. this evening.

I hope you’re sitting down as you read this otherwise you might collapse laughing. Even so you might still fall of our… chair in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. Spielberg says His Fraudulency, Obama, has been awarded this honor due to 1) ” global efforts to protect human rights ( Say what?!! Tell that to all the Coptic Christians who have been killed and had their churches burned in Egypt since he championed the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascent to power under Morsi, the 4000 Iranians who fled into Syria after he failed to support the Green revolution in Iran in 2009 not to mention the 150 Iranians who were subsequently executed by Ahmadinejad or his failure to pressure Hamas to stop the unprovoked rocket attacks on Israel’s civilian townships), 2) his commitment to education ( Tell that to the charter schools in Washington DC) and 3) expanding educational technology ( aided by the NSA no doubt!) and 4) his work advancing opportunities for all people” ( Surely he’s joking….like the extra 25 million people who are now on food stamps since he became president, the 100 million people who are either unemployed or who have left the work-force and the crushing debt that our great grandchildren won’t even be able to come close to paying off. If he isn’t actually a fool then Spielberg is being played for one. Seldom has there been such servility}.

Olympic athletes need not worry about being deprived of their gold medals just in case Obama ever decided to compete. At the Olympics you really have to be seen running in the race and actually winning it before you are presented with the award.

Best regards,Paul Schnee

For over a month, the U.N.’s top human rights body has been struggling with a major dilemma. How much prior Israel-bashing experience is necessary to be appointed U.N. “independent expert” on Israel?

On Wednesday we found out. Indonesian Makarim Wibisono has just the right mix of confirmed anti-Israel bias and diplomatic cover to replace outgoing U.N. “expert” Richard Falk.

Falk was a notorious anti-Semite, infamous 9/11 conspiracy theorist, and Boston Marathon apologist. But at the U.N., a six-year time limit forced his retirement — and not a matter of principle.

Former Indonesian U.N. ambassador Wibisono is from a country that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. He served as the president of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in its last year of operation in 2005 – a body that even U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said “cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole.”

In a 2006 statement to the new Human Rights Council, Wibisono, described Israel as showing “ruthless contempt for the lives of the innocent,” and perpetrating “callous attacks against terrorized and defenseless civilians.”

A biography says that until January 2014 (and his application for the job) he was “active in the private sector as an advisor to the Third World Network.”

That NGO spews out hysterical anti-Semitic vitriol – such as Israel is guilty of “bestiality, barbarity,” AIPAC pays “cash and other perks” for “towing the Zionist line,” and “the US plays the role of God in modern times” holding “back the sun to enable Israel…to finish the job” against its Arab victims.

And there’s more. Wibisono’s appointment was part of larger deal, because the U.N. Human Rights Council had 19 openings for the job of U.N. human rights expert or “special rapporteur” on a variety of subjects.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/maryland-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand
FSM’S LISTING IS UNBIASED AND NON PARTISAN…..RSK

MY CHOICES ARE UNDERLINED AND IN RED….AND I INCLUDE THEIR RANKINGS WHEREVER RELEVANT BY THE ARAB AMERICAN INSTITUTE
Filing is complete for major parties
Primary: June 24, 2014
To see the actual voting records of all incumbents on other issues such as Foreign Policy, Second Amendment Issues, Homeland Security, and other issues as well as their rankings by special interest groups please use the links followed by two stars (**).

U.S. SENATE

Barbara Mikulski (D) Next election is in 2016
Ben Cardin (D) Next election in 2018
________________________________________
U.S. CONGRESS
District 1

Andy Harris M.D.(R) Incumbent ****
http://www.andyharris.com/
http://www.ontheissues.org/house/Andy_Harris.htm **
Rated -4 by AAI, indicating a anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record. (May 2012)
HOT BUTTON ISSUES

HEALTHCARE
America’s healthcare system was broken before the President’s healthcare law was passed, and sadly that law has only made things worse. Healthcare costs are still rising and some Americans are struggling to have access to the care they need.
The President’s healthcare law claimed to want to tackle those problems, but sadly the law fails to fix the problems. The law puts healthcare decisions in the hands of government bureaucrats and insurance companies rather than doctors and patients. With the Supreme Court decision earlier this year, the health reform law is also one of the biggest tax increases in our nation’s history. The law also cuts Medicare by over 500 billion dollars.
I support replacing the President’s healthcare law with other common sense reform measures, like increasing competition between insurance companies by allowing competition across state lines, tax deductibility of 100% of medical costs, expanding health insurance savings accounts and other measures that allow you to be in control of your health care decisions.
As a health care specialist, I am committed to repealing Obamacare and replacing it with patient-centered, affordable health care reforms. Although not perfect, the United States of America has the best health care in the world. Let’s keep it that way.
ENERGY
Energy independence should be a priority in formulating American energy policy. With the prices at the pump having almost doubled in the last three years, American families are making tough choices every day to make their budgets work. An energy independent United States of America is safer and more secure and cannot be subjected to the whims of Middle Eastern oil brokers.
American energy policy should include exploring and obtaining the vast amounts of natural gas and oil reserves within our own borders in an environmentally safe and conscientious manner. We also need to find new and clean alternative sources of energy.
The United States has plentiful natural resources that are currently off limits to exploration and production. It is time to bring these resources online in an environmentally responsible way to reduce American dependence on foreign sources of energy. In addition to producing more energy within the United States, we need to implement policies that allow us to get energy from our friendly neighbors. That is why I am on record as fully supporting the Keystone pipeline project that will bring good paying jobs to Americans and expand our oil supplies.
IMMIGRATION AND THE DREAM ACT
My parents legally immigrated to the United States after World War II to escape communism which was descending over Eastern Europe. Individuals who have legally immigrated to the United States have helped make America great. While legal immigration helps improve America, illegal immigration is causing widespread issues and an insult to Americans who waited in line and came here legally.
Citizens across the United States are fed up with widespread illegal immigration, and it is no longer an isolated problem for border states. We need to enforce the immigration laws we have and not randomly select what laws the federal government will enforce. I support fully securing our border.
In the Maryland Senate, I voted against the Dream Act, a policy that gives discounted and taxpayer subsidized in-state college tuition rates to students who are not here legally. I will also oppose this measure that has been talked about in Washington DC. Legal residents of Maryland have a hard time affording college in these tough economic times. I do not support giving tuition discounts to students who are not legally present in Maryland or the United States.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/veterans-affairs-officials-purged-15-million-unfinished-medical-orders?f=puball

More than 1.5 million medical orders were canceled by the Department of Veterans Affairs without any guarantee the patients received the treatment or tests they needed, the Washington Examiner has found.

Since May 2013, veterans’ medical centers nationwide have been under pressure to clear out 2 million backlogged orders for patient care or services.

They were given wide latitude to cancel unfilled appointments more than 90 days old. By April 2014, the backlog of what the agency calls “unresolved consults” was down to about 450,000.

What happened to other 1.5 million appointments is something that no one, including top officials at the veterans’ agency, can answer.

A review by the Government Accountability Office of the process VA used to close old consult orders found that poor documentation in patient files and the lack of independent verification made it impossible to know whether patients got care they needed before their medical orders were canceled.

“We found they closed consults but there was no evidence as to why it was closed,” Debra Draper, health care director for the GAO, told the Examiner.

“By not having that independent verification or any other controls, there isn’t any way of knowing whether they were appropriately closed out,” Draper said.

“You don’t know whether people received the care or if they received it in a timely manner. There’s no audit trail. There’s no way to know whether they were appropriately closed,” she said.

The Examiner reported in February that the VA did a mass purge of backlogged medical orders that cleared 40,000 unresolved appointments in Los Angeles beginning in 2009 and 13,000 in Dallas during a one-week period in September 2012.

The Nazis invented the Jewish boycott — and went on from there to the Holocaust.

This is the wrong boycott in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As you doubtless know, there has been, and continues to be, an international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the Jewish state. This BDS campaign against Israel is dishonest — it tells less than half of a complex story, borrowing Palestinian lies and fables to bewitch unthinking Westerners whose only formula for peace lies in the destruction of the only national home for the Jews, possibly as well as the post-Nazi destruction of the Jews themselves.

Most interesting are remarks made in 2012 by Norman Finkelstein, an American academic who has made it his business to pursue hatred for Israel. He has expressed solidarity with Hezbollah and Hamas, and approved their policies of targeting Israeli civilians. In 2012, however, he declared that the BDS movement a “hypocritical, dishonest cult like the Munchkin cult in Oz” that tries to pose as human rights activists while in reality their goal is to destroy Israel. “I’m getting a little bit exasperated,” he said, “with what I think is a whole lot of nonsense. I’m not going to tolerate silliness, childishness and a lot of leftist posturing. I loathe the disingenuousness. We will never hear the solidarity movement [back a] two-state solution.” He also declared that the BDS movement has enjoyed few successes, and that, as in a cult, the leaders pretend they are hugely successful even though the general public rejects their extreme views.

Obamacare: A Famous VictoryObamacare’s supporters are lauding its dramatic turnaround. The facts give them the lie.

In the month since the formal end of Obamacare’s enrollment period (actual enrollment limped on through mid-April), the Obama administration and its supporters have been on something of a victory tour.

“Obamacare has won,” announced Ezra Klein. “The Affordable Care Act is one of the great comeback stories of public policy,” declared Paul Krugman. “It is working,” the president himself told reporters.

Given the debacles of healthcare.gov and the initial rollout of the health-care exchanges, the fact that slightly more than 8 million Americans have signed up for exchange-based plans is a significant accomplishment. In addition, a few million more Americans have enrolled in Medicaid, and some more young people were able to remain on their parents’ insurance policies. Certainly, things could have been worse.

But if this is victory, I’d hate to see defeat.

Let’s start with that 8 million figure.

Republicans were a bit premature last week when they jumped on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s report stating that more than a third of enrollees had not paid their first month’s premium. That number was skewed by the surge of late enrollees, many of whom had not even received their first bill and so obviously hadn’t paid. However, the administration can’t be let entirely off the hook, since it has steadfastly refused to provide any information on actual payment rates. Its insistence that insurance companies won’t provide it with those data is risible. On the basis of earlier numbers, it seems likely that 15 to 20 percent of those signing up will never pay, and perhaps 3 to 5 percent will ultimately stop paying and drop their coverage.

Moreover, we still don’t know how many of those signing up through the exchanges were previously uninsured, as opposed to people voluntarily or involuntarily switching plans. We do know that as many as 6 million Americans lost their coverage because it was not compliant with Obamacare’s many mandates, and that perhaps 1 million of those remain uninsured. How many of the rest bought new coverage through an exchange remains murky, though some estimates suggest that the majority of these people found new insurance through the exchanges or Medicaid, or from an employer.

Enrollment also varies significantly from state to state. There is no doubt that some states were very successful in getting people to sign up. Nearly 48 percent of Obamacare enrollees come from just five states: Florida, Texas, New York, California, and North Carolina. On the other side of the coin, Massachusetts has reached only 12.7 percent of its initial enrollment goal, Oregon 29 percent, and Maryland 45 percent.

Putting it all together, and including those on Medicaid and those remaining on their parents’ policies, the administration may have succeeded in covering 20 percent of the 48 million uninsured Americans. That’s not much to cheer about.

In addition, the Congressional Budget Office projects that for Obamacare to reach its intended targets, exchange enrollment will have to more than triple by 2016. This seems like a pretty tall order. And even this would cover only about half the uninsured.

It’s not just the raw number of enrollees that is cause for concern, but who is signing up. Since Obamacare depends on overcharging the young and healthy to subsidize the older and sicker, it needs roughly 40 percent of enrollees to be in the 18-to-34 age group. We don’t yet know the health status of those signing up, although evidence from pharmaceutical-purchase patterns analyzed by Express Scripts suggests that enrollees are less healthy than the population at large. Preliminary surveys of self-reported health status seem to corroborate these findings. For example, a Gallup survey found that just 37 percent of exchange enrollees reported they were in excellent or very good health, compared to 50 percent of the population at large.