RUTHFULLY YOURS

Raúl Castro’s demands include reparations and no more U.S. asylum for doctors who defect.

Less than two months after his “historic” outreach to Havana with a promise to “normalize relations,” the U.S. commander in chief is getting the back of Raúl Castro ’s hand.

On Dec. 17, President Obama floated his plan to revise a half-century-old U.S.-Cuba policy by promising engagement. “We intend to create more opportunities for the American and Cuban people,” he said. The trouble is that as his statements in recent weeks have shown, Raúl Castro has no interest in doing things differently.

The message from Havana is that if Mr. Obama wants a Cuba legacy it will have to be on Cuba’s terms. That means he will have to go down in history as the U.S. president who prolonged the longest-running military dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere.
Days before Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs Roberta Jacobson arrived in Havana on Jan. 21 for talks, the Cuban state newspaper Granma published the government’s list of “demands” for normalizing relations. One of them was that the U.S. recognize Cuban state-run community groups as nongovernmental organizations. It did not name any, but the notorious “committees to defend the revolution,” which exist to enforce repression by spying on the neighbors, come to mind. Also on the list published in Granma was a demand that the U.S. end its asylum program for Cuban doctors who escape while serving in third-world countries where they have been sent to work for slave wages.

The Crusades — gruesome as they were — were not some early outbreak of “Islamophobia.” They were an effort, by Christian nations in Europe, to defend Christians in the Middle East who were being slaughtered by Muslim tribes, and specifically to take back the city of Jerusalem from the Muslim armies who had invaded it.

It is a very strange interpretation of history to put the blame for slavery on Christians, but to ignore William Wilberforce, Abraham Lincoln and other Christians who led the world in fighting to abolish it. Slavery is still practiced by Muslims in Mauritania and, as recently seen, by Boko Haram.

Barack Obama is the President of the United States, but to judge from his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast last Thursday morning, one might get the impression that he thinks himself far more than that.

He and his speech-writers presumably realised with the news in America, as in the rest of the world, dominated day in and day out with atrocious news stories from Muslim communities in the Middle East, the President would probably have to make a reference to Islamic violence.

It is Israel’s head on the block, and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is weighing the political fallout of irritating a President who is generally irritated with Israel vs. nuclear fallout.

Thomas Friedman suggests again that Israel subordinate its national security concerns to American politics. Friedman remains a stalking horse for President Obama’s views.

If U.S. military action in Iran were to fail, the blame should accrue to U.S. strategy, planning and execution, and not to Israel’s justifiable concern that that it is #1 on the “hit list.”

Perhaps Friedman could please go protect somebody else?

Kenichi Hartman Grew up biracial (white/Asian) and tricultural (American/Japanese/Jewish), mostly in Tokyo and Palo Alto. Made Aliyah in October 2011 along with his loving wife and two adorable daughters.

Part one:http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-startup-samurai-in-the-startup-nation-an-interview-with-kentaro-sakakibara-part-i/

Kentaro Sakakibara interview part III – What do the Japanese know about Israel

KH: You mentioned before that you’ve been getting opposition on Twitter from your fellow Japanese about setting up Samurai House in Israel.

KS: People have been raising all sorts of doubts and questions through Twitter and personal communication. We’ve been getting it from everybody! It seems like there’s no one in Japan who hasn’t asked me what the heck I’m doing here! (laughs). It’s really tiring every time I go back to Japan now because I have to constantly answer the same questions about “Why Israel?” Really, I should record my answer and push “play” every time someone questions my decision to go to Israel.

KH: So what’s the nature of the push-back you’re getting about being in Israel? I can think to two basic reasons: (1) Israel is perceived to be very dangerous, so people in Japan might wonder why you’re going out of your way to risk the personal safely of you and your associates; or (2) You are being overly hasty in embracing cooperation with Israel, because the Arab-Israeli or Palestinian-Israeli conflict still has not been resolved.

KS: The opposition is usually much more simplistic than that. They think Israel = Middle East = just like Syria. It’s all just one big jumble in their heads. People ask, “What’s over there, just desert and wars, right?” Most Japanese still don’t get that what’s going on Israel is unique compared to the rest of the region. There are more than a few people who think that Israel is primarily a Muslim country because, after all, it’s in the Middle East! So they think I’m just wasting my time, and doing it in a very dangerous place!

Israeli tech sweeps Verizon contest with $1.5 million in prizes
Three start-ups from Israel – representing a quarter of all participants – named Powerful Answer contest winners

In a worldwide contest by US telecom giant Verizon to search out top technologies that can help people live better lives, Israeli start-ups swept three out of the twelve prizes awarded – including one of the top prizes, a million-dollar payout.

Oded Ben-Dov, the inventor of the winning Sesame Enable smartphone, plans to use the money his invention was awarded for a full rollout of the device, which lets individuals who cannot use their limbs due to the effects of conditions like ALS, paralysis, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injuries to make phone calls, surf the web, and send text messages, all with a slight movement of their head.

“It’s a very proud and happy day for the disabled, and for us at Sesame Enable,” said Ben-Dov upon hearing that he won a million dollars in the Verizon Powerful Voices contest. “Now we have the resources to continue our work, enabling the severely disabled to interact with the online world in a way that was impossible until now.”

Relations between blacks and Jews in the US have been poor since 1968, when the New York teachers strike pitted the overwhelmingly Jewish United Federation of Teachers against a black community-controlled school board. The traditional flirtation of the black community with various forms of Islam, from the homegrown version of the original Nation of Islam to the increasing numbers of black converts to more normative Islam, has added an anti-Zionist flavor; and there seems to be no lack of outright anti-Jewish agitators like Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, and of course Jeremiah Wright.

In this context, the appropriation by anti-Israel elements of the ‘Ferguson’ movement against police violence and putative racism makes sense. There is, they think, a fertile field in the black community to plant with comparisons between blacks and Palestinian Arabs, between the PLO and Hamas and the SCLC, SNCC, CORE, etc. groups that fought the battle against Jim Crow in the South in the 1950s and 1960s.

We have witnessed over and over again Arab and Muslim war crimes on a never ending spiral of horror inflicted upon Israel’s civilian population. No doubt, future salvos of missiles will rein down upon Israeli villages, towns and cities, fired by the Iranian supported Hamas occupiers of Gaza and by Hezbollah in Lebanon. As before, the world will yawn.

But then, remarkably, it will doubtless awaken when the Jews have the unmitigated gall, temerity and chutzpah to defend themselves under unbearable Muslim violence and provocation as they were forced to do during the latest Gaza War.

It will be then, as always, that an outpouring of brutish and irrational hatred towards the Jewish state will explode in much of the morally bankrupt mainstream media, and among the thousands of hate filled Muslims who will take to the streets of European capitals in violent displays of hate.

The world had also yawned before and during the dark years of World War 2 when Jews were disappearing all over Europe. It was a time of towering intolerance and we have now retreated to those terrible years yet again.

Over at Mosaic Magazine, former Bush aide Michael Doran claims that the Obama administration has had a secret strategy to engage Iran from the time it took office. He’s right, but neglected to mention that George W. Bush and his National Security Advisor Condileeza Rice adopted the same strategy from the same source in November 2006, after the Republicans got crushed in the 2006 Congressional elections. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got a pink slip, Vice President Dick Cheney got benched, and “realist” Robert Gates–the co-chairman of the 2004 Council on Foreign Relations task force that advocated a deal with Iran–took over at Defense. Michael Doran reports all of this, all, that is, except Gates’ central role in the plan. That would place a good deal of the blame at Bush’s doorstep.

Writes Doran:

When he arrived in Washington in 2006, [Obama] absorbed a set of ideas that had incubated on Capitol Hill during the previous three years—ideas that had received widespread attention thanks to the final report of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan congressional commission whose co-chairs, former secretary of state James Baker and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, interpreted their mission broadly, offering advice on all key aspects of Middle East policy.

A four star admiral, who was in charge of the largest single military command in the world, slammed Barack Obama, and warned Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated every U.S. National Security Agency under Obama’s administration.

The stunning claim, from one of America’s highest-ranking career officers, has shocked Washington, D.C., and came just days before Obama would invite more than a dozen Muslim Brotherhood leaders to a private, press-banned meeting in the White House.

Admiral James A. Lyons – the former Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the largest single military command in the world, and “the father” of Red Cell – the Navy’s anti-terrorism units – said that “the transformation of America has been in full swing ever since 2008,” the year Obama was elected based upon his campaign promise to “fundamentally transform America.”

A teacher at France’s only state-funded Muslim faith school has quit
his job, writing in a leading newspaper that the establishment was
riddled with anti-Semitism and was “promoting Islamism” to pupils.

Philosophy teacher Sofiane Zitouni wrote in left-leaning daily
Libération on February 5 that the Averroès Lycée (high school) in the
northern French city of Lille was a hotbed of “anti-Semitism,
sectarianism and insidious Islamism”.