RUTHFULLY YOURS

On the fifth anniversary of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti remains a poster child for waste, fraud and corruption in the handling of aid. Nowhere is the bureaucratic ineptitude and greed harder to accept than at the 607-acre Caracol Industrial Park, a project launched by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with U.S. taxpayer money, under the supervision of her husband Bill and his Clinton Foundation.

Between the State Department and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which hands out grants to very poor countries thanks to U.S. generosity, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on this park in an attempt to attract apparel manufacturers. But the park is falling far short of the promises made to provide investors with necessary infrastructure. If things continue this way, frustrated investors will look for greener pastures.

“”Hollande sat through most of the ceremony, but when Netanyahu’s turn at the podium arrived, the French president got up from his seat and made an early exit.”

France asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stay away from a weekend solidarity march in Paris but he ignored the request and attended anyway, Israeli media reported on Monday.

The same message was conveyed to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in a bid to avoid the commemoration of the 17 people killed in Islamist attacks in the French capital last week being clouded by the Middle East conflict, the reports said.

But when Netanyahu rejected the appeals of the French government, Abbas was swiftly invited, Channel Two television and Israeli newspapers reported.

President Francois Hollande had wanted to “focus on solidarity with France, and to avoid anything liable to divert attention to other controversial issues, like Jewish-Muslim relations or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” the liberal Haaretz newspaper reported.

There was also concern Netanyahu would use the event to “make speeches” as he prepares for a March 17 general election, in which he is seeking a fourth term.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=22753
WATCH: France under attack

Is France handling the recent terrorist attacks properly? • What do the attacks mean for French society and French Jewry? • Watch as host Lital Shemesh speaks with Israel Hayom editor Steve Ganot and columnist Ruthie Blum about the French terror attacks.
Israel Hayom Staff

On Saturday, I spoke at length with a man named Joseph, a French Jew who had family members and friends inside the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris when it was stormed by Amedy Coulibaly, an Islamic jihadist who ultimately murdered at least four Jews for the cause of Islam. He spoke to the families and some of the survivors and told me some shocking and terrible details about what happened during the attack – revealed here for the very first time.

When I spoke to Joseph, he was grief-stricken: “I lost a good friend and it’s very hard, very hard. You have no idea how difficult it is.” Joseph was close friends with Yohan Cohen, who was murdered in the jihad attack. Coulibaly was threatening to kill a three year-old, and Cohen tried to save the child by grabbing Coulibaly’s gun; the jihadist shot Cohen in the head.

OH LIGHTEN UP…WEARING A SCARF OUT OF RESPECT IS NOT LIKE BEING ASKED TO WEAR A FULL NIQAB IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL….IN NYC DURING ONE OF THOSE “WORLD RELIGIONS” TOURS THE BOYS WERE ASKED TO WEAR YARMULKES WITHIN A HOUSE OF WORSHIP….BIG DEAL….RSK
Where are the liberals calling for separation of church and state when you want them?

Girls attending a taxpayer funded Douglas County, Col., school are going to be forced to wear Muslim head coverings during a field trip to local mosque scheduled for Jan. 13, according to EAGNews.org.
The situation came to light after local radio host Peter Boyles said he got a hold of the permission slip sent to parents for the excursion.

The world religions field trip is next Tuesday, January 13. We will be visiting the Denver Mosque, the Assumption Greek Orthodox Cathedral, and the Rodef Shalom Synagogue. We will then eat lunch at Park Meadows Food Court.

Students must either bring a sack lunch or money to purchase lunch at the food court.

It is in how best to achieve the common goal of lifting the security and well being of all Americans in the most equitable way possible, while preserving the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and embedded in our Constitution, which differentiates the Left from the Right. At their essence, those differences are elemental and clear. The Left wants to use government to give things to people; the Right wants to use government to make it easier for people to fend for themselves. The old Chinese adage about a man and a fish applies.

While you wouldn’t know it from the media and despite the polarization in Washington, the political spectrum in America is less of a barbell and more of a bell curve – a continuum; though we all know that those lumped at opposite ends have recently taken on additional weight. Nevertheless, to argue that only one party is interested in the poor and that the other is only interested in tax cuts for the rich detracts from the fundamental differences between the Left and the Right. Mainstream media, which are largely leftist in their opinions, help perpetuate Democrats’ propaganda that it is the ends not the means that separates the two political parties. If one’s news is limited to sound-bites and political ads, one will find themselves ignorantly drowned in a miasma of disinformation.

Two centuries after the great composer’s birth, his anti-Semitism remains a bitterly contested issue. Perhaps that’s because neither his defenders nor his detractors have come to grips with its, or his, true nature.
Reading Nathan Shields’ powerful essay, “Wagner and the Jews,” reawakened memories from two decades ago when I attended the Bayreuth festival as a music critic. My most potent recollections are not of the performances I heard of Wagner’s music; nor do I recall any great revelations about the mind of the master who designed and built this self-aggrandizing temple. But I was left with three sensory impressions, and they have proved indelible.

First there was the sound of the theater, the venerable Festspielhaus. The music had an almost material presence. It didn’t seem to emerge from the orchestra pit extending under the stage but took shape, instead, in the resonant air of surrounding space, like the sound of an organ in a great cathedral. Wagner was as great an acoustician as he was an orchestrator.

It feels almost tasteless to be writing about good news while France is mourning a horrific terror attack. Yet there’s been so much good news from Israel over the last week that my biggest dilemma has been which item to pick. Having discussed immigration yesterday, it’s time to move onto Israel’s Arab minority–specifically, the stunning new Israel Democracy Institute survey in which 65 percent of Arab citizens said they were either “quite” or “very” proud to be Israeli in 2014, up from 50 percent the previous year.

To be fair, the poll was conducted between April 28 and May 29–meaning after the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian talks broke down, but before the summer’s war in Gaza, the shocking murder of an East Jerusalem teen by Jews, and other difficult events of the past several months. Thus had it been taken today, the number might well be lower.

Nevertheless, given the torrent of accusations of “racism” and “apartheid” that have been hurled at Israel for years now from both inside and outside the country, it’s quite remarkable to discover that as of eight months ago, 65 percent of Israeli Arabs were “proud” to be citizens of that “racist,” “apartheid” Jewish state, and 64 percent said they usually felt their “dignity as a human being is respected” in Israel. This raises the obvious question of whether perhaps Israeli Arabs know something about Israel that its detractors don’t.

In this regard, it’s worth considering some of the survey’s other surprising findings. For instance, 57 percent of Israeli Arabs said they have faith in the Israel Police–second only to the Supreme Court (60 percent), and significantly higher than the proportion of Jews who said the same (45 percent). This reflects the fruit of a decade-long effort by the police to rebuild trust with Arab communities after the nadir reached in October 2000, when policemen killed 13 Arabs in course of suppressing massive, violent Arab riots. Since then, police have tried hard to recruit more Arabs to the force, open more stations in Arab towns, and maintain a regular dialogue with Arab community leaders. And as the survey shows, this effort is working.

Even more astounding is that 51 percent of Arabs expressed confidence in the Israel Defense Forces–aka the “occupation army” that, according to Israel’s detractors, ruthlessly oppresses their Palestinian brethren in the West Bank. This exceeds the level of confidence Israeli Arabs expressed in the Knesset, the media, or their religious leadership and suggests they don’t buy the canard of IDF brutality enthusiastically swallowed overseas. I also suspect the IDF–and Israel as a whole–benefited from comparisons with the real atrocities being perpetrated in Syria and the heavy-handed tactics used by Egypt’s military: The contrast with the meltdown in much of the Arab world can’t help but make Israel look more attractive.

The massive march today in France is a wonderful sight in many ways, and represents France’s rejection of efforts to crush freedom of expression and especially to ban criticism of Islam.

But in addition to the ubiquitous “Je Suis Charlie” slogans it would have been nice to see more “Je Suis Juif” signs as well. After all, the journalists of Charlie Hebdo knew exactly what risks they were running. Their offices had already been bombed, and the constant presence of two police guards (both murdered by the terrorists last week) was a powerful reminder of the dangers. The French Jews who were murdered were just shoppers, preparing for the Sabbath. The journalists were killed for their deliberate actions–challenging and criticizing Islamic beliefs. The Jews were killed for being Jews.

Terrorism against French Jews is not new. In 2012 a terrorist murdered three schoolchildren and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse. There was no million-citizen march. And suppose that last week’s terror attack in Paris had not aimed at Charlie Hebdo, but “only” killed four Jews–or eight or twelve, for that matter. Does anyone believe a million French citizens would be marching in Paris, with scores of world leaders joining them? One is reminded of the synagogue bombing on Rue Copernic in Paris in 1980, after which Prime Minister Raymond Barre publicly declared that “A bomb set for Jews killed four innocent Frenchmen.” That shocking lack of solidarity– that definition of Frenchmen to exclude the Jews– does not seem to have been cured, and the French today appear to feel more solidarity with the journalists who were killed than with the Jews who were killed.

Hamas should be the last to denounce assaults on journalists and free speech. Its security forces in the Gaza Strip continue to arrest and intimidate Palestinian journalists on a regular basis. Just hours before the Hamas statement, a Hamas-affiliated website, Al-Resalah, tweeted a photo of the three slain French terrorists and described them as “martyrs.”

Hamas’s condemnation of terrorism — which apparently fooled many good people who sincerely hoped that maybe “this time” Hamas was actually reforming — should be seen only as efforts to appease the EU and persuade its governments that they were right to remove Hamas from the terrorist list.

In French, Hamas said “it condemns the attack… and insists that differences of opinion and thought cannot justify murder.” Hamas, however, was extremely careful not to condemn the terror attack on the Jewish supermarket in Paris — because Hamas believes that attacks against Jews are legitimate. Condemning the killing of Jews would have meant that Hamas would also have to denounce its own terror attacks against Jews.