RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=47498a2e1ad97dd3d09ae19c5&id=6ee8d9fb57&e=ce445aaf82

Dr Mark Durie is a theologian, human rights activist and pastor of an Anglican church. He has published many articles and books on the language and culture of the Acehnese, Christian-Muslim relations and religious freedom. A graduate of the Australian National University and the Australian College of Theology, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Leiden, MIT, UCLA and Stanford, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1992. at the University of Leiden, MIT, UCLA and Stanford, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1992. He also is a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
Response to A GUIDE TO REFUTING JIHADISM – Critiquing radical Islamist claims to theological authenticity

The Henry Jackson Society had just launched a guide to rejecting jihadi theologies in Islam, A Guide to Refuting Jihadism by Rashad Ali and Hannah Stuart. There are also forewords by two Sheikhs, including one from Al-Azhar University, and endorsements from other Muslim leaders.

Although the appearance of this guide as a welcome acknowledgement that jihadi violence is theologically motivated, its use of Islamic sources is flawed and convincing, and there are risks for secular governments in embracing its arguments.

It is good that the theological motivations for jihadi movements are being acknowledged and engaged with by peaceable Muslims.

This is not a new strategy. It is necessary and the strategy has long been used by authorities as a counter to jihadi movements. For example the British empire extracted fatwas from Mecca and Istanbul in the 19th century to declare that British India was not ‘Dar al-Harb’ [House of War], but Dar al-Islam [House of Islam]’, which meant that it was forbidden for Muslims to engage in insurgencies against the British. Muslim leaders have always asked their scholars to produce such rulings to counter violent rebellions. This is also a traditional Islamic technique for controlling the undeniable tendency that Islamic theology has to generate violent rebel movements.

This project is also helpful because it acknowledges what is often denied – that the credibility of radical jihadism relies upon religious, theological claims. It claims Islamic legitimacy and uses this to gain converts. It is true that to counter this religious legitimacy it is necessary to use theological arguments.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/02/05/thomas-friedmans-new-york-times-colleagues-call-him-an-embarrassment/
Many more vehement and shorter words come to mind in describing the porcine Friedman….but I would think he fits right in with the NY Times bias…..rsk

Jewish New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, often criticized for expressing anti-Israel views, was slammed by his own colleagues in an expose published on Tuesday by the New York Observer. The article came as another Friedman-penned Op-Ed in The Times on Wednesday riled the Jewish community.

The Observer said it interviewed some two-dozen current and former NYT staffers about the split between the news team and the editorial pages, run by Andrew Rosenthal, son of former NYT editorial leader AM Rosenthal, who publishes work by Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. The staffers’s concerns, as embodied in The Observer headline, ‘The Tyranny and Lethargy of the Times Editorial Page,’ were that, as one put it, the Op-Eds are “completely reflexively liberal, utterly predictable, usually poorly written and totally ineffectual,” and that the editorial page was frequently trounced by crosstown rival, the Wall Street Journal. Most of The Observer article criticizes Rosenthal’s vision and ability to manage a team that has grown to 14 employees, plus assistants, but staffers reserved plenty of venom for Friedman’s role in destroying The Times editorial page.

The Observer quoted a former Times writer, now working elsewhere, who said, “I think the editorials are viewed by most reporters as largely irrelevant, and there’s not a lot of respect for the editorial page. The editorials are dull, and that’s a cardinal sin. They aren’t getting any less dull. As for the columnists, Friedman is the worst. He hasn’t had an original thought in 20 years; he’s an embarrassment. He’s perceived as an idiot who has been wrong about every major issue for 20 years, from favoring the invasion of Iraq to the notion that green energy is the most important topic in the world even as the financial markets were imploding. Then there’s Maureen Dowd, who has been writing the same column since George H. W. Bush was president.”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/

Victor Sharpe is a prolific freelance writer with many published articles in leading national and international conservative websites and magazines. Born and educated in England, he has been a broadcaster and has authored several books including a collection of short stories under the title The Blue Hour. His three-volume set of in-depth studies on the threats from resurgent Islam to Israel, the West and to Judeo-Christian civilization is titled, Politicide: The Attempted Murder of the Jewish State. www.amazon.com

How can it be that the Jewish people have abandoned their holiest site to their tormentors?

Temple Mount, Har HaBayit, is where Judaism’s holiest site exists, where the two holy Temples of Israel stood, and where some Jewish traditions teach that the creation of the world began. Jews pray at the Kotel (the Western Wall) but not on the Temple Mount. Why is this?

To quote CAMERA, the excellent pro-Israel letter writing organization, which knows its facts: “The Western Wall is the remnant of the outer retaining wall built by Herod to level the ground and expand the area of the compound housing the Second Jewish Temple. Its holiness derives from its proximity to the Temple site. For the last several hundred years, Jews have prayed at the Western Wall because it was the closest accessible place to the holiest site.”

The sight of Jews worshipping in fervent prayer at the Kotel while high above on the Temple Mount, the Holiest of all Jewish sites bar none, Muslim worshippers look down upon the Jews with contempt, sneering and occasionally throwing rocks upon the heads of the Jews, is a shameful, desolating and humiliating spectacle.

How can it be that this epicenter of Judaism, the Mount itself, where the Biblical Isaac was brought for sacrifice, where the Holy of Holies and Ark of the Covenant housing the Ten Commandments once stood, and where the Temple was rebuilt before being destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, now is occupied by the Jew-hating Muslim Waqf?

How is it that these Islamists, aided and abetted by an Israeli police force, are in virtual control?

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4162/iran-mohammad-reza-pourshajari The authorities are refusing the transfer of Mr. Pourshajari to a medical facility and are depriving him of all his medications, in the hope that he will soon die. “To [the prison authorities], the doctors’ opinions are of no importance; they completely ignore them…. All Iranians are forced to obey and do whatever pleases […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4164/iran-silent-executions “It is the other prisoners who should be upset that they are housed with your father.” — Iranian judge, speaking of political prisoner Pourshajari. Right then and there, right in front of me, he sentenced some people to death. Sadly manyw ho call themselves human rights advocates, who should be defending every innocent person, […]

http://carolineglick.com/irans-bomb-in-the-basement/

It is happening in slow motion, to be sure.But we are witnessing how a nuclear armed Iran is changing the face of the Middle East.

For years, US leaders, including President Barack Obama, warned that a nuclear armed Iran would spark a regional arms race.And this is happening.

As the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens (a former Jerusalem Post editor in chief) noted this week, Turkey signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with Japan that includes “a provision allowing Turkey to enrich uranium and extract polonium, a potential material for nuclear weapons.”

Saudi Arabia has long had a nuclear cooperation deal with Pakistan, whose nuclear weapons program the Saudis financed. Jordan and Egypt have both raised the prospect of developing nuclear programs.

And in 2007, Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear installation built for it by North Korea and paid for by Iran.
In his article, Stephens cited a recent report by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board stating that the world is entering into “a new nuclear age” that, as we see is characterized by everyone, including non-state actors, seeking to develop and proliferating nuclear capabilities.

( Friedman was a former VN/Cambodia journalist for Human Events weekly, 1970)

Diana West’s book “American Betrayal” has sparked a lot of controversy among conservative historians and I would like to put in my two sense because I have been studying the issue of Communist/Soviet penetration of our Government, especially in the 1930’s and 1940’s, for a long time. I’ve been lucky because I have met a few of the people who helped to break the Alger Hiss story, as well as to expose Communist Party USA operations and individuals both within the government and without.

For that reason, I would like to do some highlighting of such contacts because it shows how extensive the Communist issue has been on my life.

I met and heard Whittaker Chambers speak shortly before he died. I actually talked to him (I was about 16 at the time). I also met the late Isaac Don Levine, an American journalist who covered the Russian Revolution of 1917, and who later took Chambers to meet presidential advisor A.A. Berle, in the White House, to have Chambers reveal directly to him what he knew about Alger Hiss as both a Communist Party member and as a Soviet spy.

· As a counter-balance speaker to Chambers, our boys club advisor brought in a local ACLU attorney who promoted a book entitled “The Un-Americans” by Frank Donner. It was a leftist attack on Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley and other Communist Party defectors, as well as on the FBI, CIA, congressional investigative committees and private groups who did research on communism.

What the speaker did not say, or perhaps did not know, was that Donner was a deep cover Communist Party USA member, who worked in the Party’s security apparatus along with Frank Wilkinson, once a California government employee who went to jail for perjury. Donner eventually emerged as the ACLU’s man heading a “Surveillance Project” at Yale.

· I also have met and questioned both of the theoreticians of the CPUSA (Herbert Aptheker) and the Trotskyite “Socialist Workers Party” (George Novak, once a secretary to Leon Trotsky in Mexico). Both polite but shallow ideologues at best.

I was proud to have been mentored in internal security by the late Herbert “I Led 3 Lives” Philbrick, the FBI undercover agent, and the late Herb Romerstein, a former very young member of the CPUSA, then an Army veteran of the Korean War, a state investigator specializing in Communist penetration of education, and then a government analyst and investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its successor, the House Internal Security Committee. He also worked for the House Select Intelligence Committee and the State Department’s section on Soviet Disinformation and Propaganda operations.

Stan Evans published my first monograph in 1976, as part of the American Conservative Union’s ACU Education and Research Institute (“The Meaning of the Bicentennial: Volume One – The Peoples Bicentennial Commission). He also served as an editor of “The Pink Sheet on the Left/American Sentinel” while I was an Associate Editor, writing on internal security and terrorism matters.

Both Evans and Romerstein wrote several books within the past 2-10 years dealing with Soviet penetration of the U.S. Government. Diana West’s book “American Betrayal” looks like a continuation of the last Evans/Romerstein book “Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government”, Threshold Editions, 2012.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/nonie-darwish/the-islamic-grinch-who-stole-the-olympics/print/ Coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, has so far been over-shadowed by the threat of terror from Islamic jihadists. Cursing videos posted on the Internet by jihadists promise that the “demon Olympics” will have an “atmosphere of fear and terror” and tell the athletes that “Satan is with you.” Even Egyptian-born […]

THE ABSOLUTE BEST BOOK ON THIS SUBJECT IS DAVID FROMKIN’S A PEACE TO END ALL PEACE
Product Details
A Peace to End All Peace, 20th Anniversary Edition: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern… by David Fromkin (Jul 21, 2009)

World War I may have ended in 1918, but the violence it triggered in the Middle East still hasn’t come to an end. Arbitrary borders drawn by self-interested imperial powers have left a legacy that the region has not been able to overcome.

Damascus, year three of the civil war: The 4th Division of the Syrian army has entrenched itself on Kassioun Mountain, the place where Cain is said to have slain his brother Abel. United Nations ballistics experts say the poison gas projectiles that landed in the Damascus suburbs of Muadamiya and Ain Tarma in the morning hours of Aug. 21, 2013 were fired from somewhere up on the mountain. Some 1,400 people died in the attack — 1,400 of the more than 100,000 people who have lost their lives since the beginning of the conflict.

Baghdad, in the former palace quarter behind the Assassin’s Gate: Two years after the American withdrawal, Iraqis are once again in full control of the so-called Green Zone, located on a sharp bend in the Tigris River. It is the quarter of Baghdad where the Americans found refuge when the country they occupied devolved into murderous chaos. Currently, the situation is hardly any better. On the other side of the wall, in the red zone, death has once again become commonplace. There were over 8,200 fatalities last year.

Beirut, the capital of Lebanon that is so loved by all Arabs: The city has long been a focal point both of Arab life and of Arab strife. The devout versus the secular, the Muslims versus the Christians, the Shiites versus the Sunnis. With fighting underway in Libya and Syria, with unrest ongoing in Egypt and Iraq, the old question must once again be posed: Has Beirut managed to leave the last eruption of violence behind or is the next one just around the corner?

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4698/boycotters_contempt_for_ordinary_palestinians Though they will deny it, their actions speak louder: BDS campaigners simply do not care about the circumstances, hopes and dreams of ordinary Palestinians The curious case of SOS – Scarlet, Oxfam and Sodastream – has enabled us to hear something almost totally inaudible most of the time – the voice of ordinary Palestinians. […]