RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://spectator.org/articles/57426/each-according-his-delusions
The latest faux issue to insinuate itself into our political polemics travels under the unedifying name of “income inequality.” As political abstractions go, this one is more incoherent than most. (Shabbier too in its naked appeal to envy and resentment.) Almost no one who uses the term says what he means by it. But it has the ring of yet another incitement to leftist larceny.

Since President Obama heaved this dead cat into the room a few weeks ago, I’ve been waiting for anyone speaking for the Republican Party to say that this hustle is nothing more than Marxist boilerplate. Since no one in the Grand Old Party has either the courage or the awareness to say this, I guess it’s up to me.

If income inequality is the problem, then income equality is the goal. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, to coin a phrase (or to each according to his or her fanciful desires, if we are to adopt the Sandra Fluke addendum to the original Marx).

Are we to have a government committee to insure that the corporate CFO with the 10th floor corner office makes the same as the security guard sitting in the ground floor lobby? Should universities add what the full professor of women’s studies and the janitor in her building make and pay them both half the total? Should the guy who drives the studio limo make the same as Tom Hanks did on his last picture? Should the burger flipper at the corner McDonald’s make the same as the chef de cuisine at the Chez Pretense? On a more personal example of blatant income inequality, Obama, with his presidential salary and other sources of income, fetches in a multiple of what I make. Will he be sending me a check to equalize things between us? I won’t hold my breath.

http://bit.ly/1aYGyua

1. (Bloomberg, Gwen Ackerman and David Wainer, January 8, 2014): “Israel’s technology industry is growing up and the stock market is benefitting. Investors and entrepreneurs are increasingly choosing initial public offerings (IPO) over buyouts, with eight Israeli companies raising $361MN in 2013, the most since 2007. While mergers and acquisitions still represent the highest proportion of transactions, with $6.3BN in 2013, Israeli companies opting for listings from London to NY are closing the gap…. Owners of Israeli companies no longer seek to sell their early-stage companies to get a speedy return on their money…. Israel’s Enzymotec raised $71MN in September, and its shares have almost doubled since then. Israel’s Eix.Com garnered $127MN from investors in November; Israel’s largest IPO in the US in more than six years, and its stock is up 48%. Technology companies contribute about 80% of Israel’s industrial exports…. Among the largest Israeli technology companies changing hands in 2013 were the purchase of Waze by Goggle for $966MN and Cisco’s acquisition of Intucell for $475MN. Other companies have resisted buyers. Check Point grew by raising money from selling shares, multiplying in value since its 1996 NASDAQ IPO and is now worth $13BN.”

2. In 2013, twenty Israeli companies were acquired, for over $4BN, by foreign companies, compared to $3.9BN in 2012, $5BN in 2011, $1.6BN – 2010, $1.3BN – 2009, $2.6BN – 2008, $3.6BN – 2007, $10.1BN – 2006, $3.4BN – 2005 and $0.7BN in 2004 (Globes Business Daily, Nov. 13, 2013).

3. In 2013, Israeli companies raised $1.565BN on Wall Street, compared to $627MN in 2012, $1BN – 2011, $400MN – 2010, $190MN – 2009, $200MN – 2008, $1.84BN – 2007, $974MN – 2006, $1.16BN – 2005 and $1.25BN in 2004 (Globes, Nov. 13, 2013).

4. The NY-based International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF) acquired Israel’s Aromor for $88MN (Globes, Jan. 16). Canada’s Dorel acquired Israel’s Tiny Love for $50MN (Yedioth Achronoth, Jan. 12).

http://www.investigativeproject.org/4270/hizballah-preparing-for-war-with-israel Hizballah continues to entrench itself in the Syrian civil war, while facing a string of radical Sunni bombing attacks in their Lebanese strongholds. The terrorist organization is also facing renewed international backlash regarding its alleged role in the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. These challenges contribute to the group’s deterioration in […]

http://www.timesofisrael.com/australia-fm-dont-call-settlements-illegal-under-international-law//

In an exclusive interview with The Times of Israel, Julie Bishop suggested that, contrary to conventional diplomatic wisdom, the settlements may not be illegal under international law. She refrained from condemning Israeli initiatives to build additional housing units beyond the Green Line or from calling on Israel to freeze such plans, merely saying the fact that settlements were being expanded showed the need for the sides to quickly reach a peace agreement.

“I don’t want to prejudge the fundamental issues in the peace negotiations,” Bishop said. “The issue of settlements is absolutely and utterly fundamental to the negotiations that are under way and I think it’s appropriate that we give those negotiations every chance of succeeding.”

Asked whether she agrees or disagrees with the near-universal view that Israeli settlements anywhere beyond the 1967 lines are illegal under international law, she replied: “I would like to see which international law has declared them illegal.”

The position that settlements breach international law — adopted by the United Nations Security Council, the European Union and many other states and international bodies, but rejected by Israel — is based on an interpretation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Article 49, paragraph 6, states that an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” Violations of the convention are considered war crimes under international law. Israel is a party to the convention and therefore bound by it.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-Fray-Sovereignty-Yes-but-beware-of-annexing-Area-C-338475
Partial annexation of Judea-Samaria will solve none of the problems Israel faces today, and exacerbate many

As we know, Area C includes the entire Jewish population and along with it a small number of about one hundred thousand Arabs.

– Deputy Transportation Minister Tzipi Hotovely, Sovereignty, Issue 2, January 2014

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

– Sherlock Holmes, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”

As readers will recall, last week I mentioned that a new edition of the political journal Sovereignty was recently published by Women in Green and the Forum for Sovereignty. The journal carried various ideas for alternatives to the two-state paradigm. Among them was my proposal for a tripartite “Humanitarian Paradigm,” the details of which I have elaborated on here in numerous columns.

Laudable initiative, lamentable proposals

The journal is certainly an eminently laudable – and long overdue – initiative, in that it highlights the need for concerted intellectual endeavor to break the stifling stranglehold that the two-state paradigm has had on the political discourse since the early 1990s.

Lamentably, however, it has been a platform for several suggestions that are likely to be no less detrimental than the two-state principle they aspire to supplant.

Map of the West Bank.Last week, I focused attention on the grave dangers of policies which advocate annexing the entire area of Judea-Samaria and conferring permanent residence – and subsequent citizenship – on Palestinian-Arabs living there.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7051

On Thursday morning, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a surprise trip to Amman to meet with Jordan’s King Abdullah II. This isn’t the first time the two leaders have held clandestine conversations at the royal palace over the past five years. But the circumstances surrounding this particular visit are especially noteworthy.

Not only did it come on the heels of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s latest round of Middle East shuttling; it took place a mere two days after a scathing, off-the-record indictment of Kerry, made by Defense Minister Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon, was published in Yedioth Ahronoth.

Though Ya’alon’s remarks — that Kerry is “obsessive” and “messianic” and should “take his Nobel prize and leave us alone” — were spot on, he must have taken temporary leave of his senses for uttering them in the presence of a reporter and believing they would remain private.

Netanyahu wisely opted to stay out of the fray, though he was likely among those who told Ya’alon to issue a public apology, and fast. Netanyahu has had enough trouble trying to keep Kerry from imposing conditions for a Palestinian state that would spell the destruction of Israel. And just when he thought he was beginning to make a tiny bit of progress in getting it through Kerry’s thick skull that Palestinian incitement to kill Jews poses an obstacle to American peace fantasies, out popped Ya’alon’s sentiments about the secretary of state, giving the Obama administration yet another excuse to rap Israel on its already raw knuckles.

In the language Golfese- a bogey is something you score- “one over par on a hole” (Huh? I don’t play but I have heard the term) and it is not a good thing.

In Israel, however, a “Bogie” is terrific. It is the nickname of General Moshe Ya’alon who just riffled John Kerry’s feathers by calling him obsessive and messianic and adding “he should win a Nobel prize and leave us alone.” The State Department got its collective knickers in knots and demanded that he apologize.

Why should he apologize to a man determined to shrink Israel to indefensible borders; to a man who so overtly supports Israel’s Islamic enemies; who slandered the United States of America and its fighting forces which he branded as “war criminals” guilty of “…war crimes committed in Southeast Asia [were] not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”??? That was his testimony to Congress in 1971 . As an anti war activist he continued the libels accusing American troops of raping, cutting off ears, heads, and limbs, and razing villages in the manner of Genghis Khan, and other unspeakable atrocities.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/beheadings-bombings-and-new-yorks-little-bangladesh/

Walk along Church Avenue and turn east onto McDonald Avenue and you will see where the old standards of working class Brooklyn, aging homes with faded American flags and loose siding, surly bars tucked into the shadows of street corners and the last video stores hanging on to a dying industry give way to mosques and grocery stores selling goat meat.

Mosques grow like mushrooms in basements, cell phone stores offer easy ways to wire money back to Bangladesh and old men glare at interlopers, especially if they are infidel women.

This is where Mohammed Siddiquee settled a dispute the old-fashioned way by beheading his landlord.

Mohammed wasn’t the first man in Brooklyn to use violence to settle a rental dispute, but beheadings are more traditional in his native Bangladesh than in Brooklyn, though over in neighboring Queens, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, Bangladesh’s most wanted war criminal, heads up the local Islamic Circle of North America, whose Islamist thugs beheaded poets and buried professors in mass graves.

Here in Kensington, where the alphabet streets that march across Brooklyn down to the ocean begin, the bars retreat along with the alphabet from those areas marked by the crescent and the angry glare. And there is another one like it at the other end of the alphabet where the Atlantic Ocean terminates the letters at Avenue Z bookending the Brooklyn alphabet with angry old men and phone cards for Bangladesh.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/robert-gates-revelations-confirm-horowitzs-party-of-defeat-on-the-glazov-gang/

On this special episode of The Glazov Gang, Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director and Editor-in-Chief of PolitiChicks.tv, filled in for Jamie and interviewed Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, Daniel Greenfield, who runs the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Ann-Marie and Daniel gathered to discuss Why Obama Freed a Terror Lawyer. The discussion occurred in Part II and focused on the Justice Department’s recent liberation of Lynne Stewart.

http://carolineglick.com/the-truth-hurts/

To hear it from the White House, and from Israel’s leftist media, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon is a major liability. As half the planet now knows, Ya’alon is harshly critical of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s persistent efforts to force Israel to surrender its land and ability to defend itself to the PLO.

In a private conversation that Ya’alon did not expect to be made public, he criticized Kerry’s so-called security plan that offers Israel advanced technology in exchange for PLO control over its eastern border. Ya’alon also rejected the notion that the PLO is interested in making peace. And he stated the inconvenient fact that PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas is only in power because Israel has security control over Judea and Samaria.

Ya’alon also said, again in a private conversation, that Kerry’s razor-sharp focus on Israel and the PLO owes to an “incomprehensible obsession,” and that by neurotically pushing for a deal that has no chance of being concluded or achieving peace, Kerry is exhibiting “messianic” character traits.

Ya’alon’s private statements about Kerry were no harsher than public statements that the Saudis have made regarding the Obama administration’s regional policies. Last November, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal. According to Goldberg, the Saudi royal attacked US President Barack Obama “with a directness that would make Benjamin Netanyahu blush.”