RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israel’s citizens have to realize their strength.
I’m pretty sure it was Mark Twain who compared Jews to horses – if they knew their own strength we should be afraid to ride them.

That was in the days of Herzl before everything, or rather at the start of everything.

I am no Mark Twain but in my stays and service in Israel I noticed something of an inferiority complex among my brothers and sisters, or call it a grasshopper mentality that remains a legacy from our days in the Wilderness when the Spies misinformed us about “giants” who lived on the other side.

Compared to them, compared to the rest of the world, what are we? Yes, grasshoppers.

For more than a year I have attempted to raise awareness of the urgency of oral testament in order to preserve and disseminate the feats and efforts of all of those who were involved in the Campaign for the Release of Soviet Jewry. The activities which started in the Soviet Union in the late 60’s continued there and throughout the western world until the 90’s when the flood gates opened and the mass of Jews who wanted to emigrate, arrived in Israel.

We all know that the oral testament of survivors of the Holocaust is the most profound vehicle for creating understanding, sympathy and identity with what took place in In Europe during World War Two.

In their wisdom Spielberg and others realized that there can be no more powerful witness than a survivor of the horror. The human being, not the book or the movie is what will have the greatest effect on the listener now and in years to come.

The objective at the end of the day is not just to inform but to exemplify the struggle and courage of those who were involved and to learn from it.

As with the holocaust survivors many who were the leading activists in the Soviet Jewry struggle are no longer with us. Those who still remain will not be here to give testimony in another 10 years or so.

One group of Christian captives is shot, the other beheaded.

Islamic State released a video on Sunday that purports to show militants killing two groups of Ethiopian Christian men in Libya. If confirmed, it would be the second such mass execution of foreign Christians in the tumultuous North African country.

The video, which couldn’t be independently verified, shows one group of at least 15 men being shot and another group of about the same size being beheaded. The number of those killed wasn’t possible to confirm. The Ethiopian government didn’t comment on Sunday.

Ismail Shukri, the head of military intelligence for a militia from the Libyan city Misrata, said the video underscores that the Islamic State presence in Libya is emerging as a major threat to further destabilize the fractured country.

“There’s no way to negotiate with people who commit such acts,” he said. “They are against Islam and humanity.”

Man is the despoiler in the Church of St. Green, but Genesis says we are here to work the earth.

This Wednesday we mark Earth Day. A week from now, the Vatican will add its own contribution to what Pope Francis calls “human ecology” in the form of a summit called “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity.” The summit will in turn be followed by an encyclical some time later this year.

Many find the whole idea unsettling. They fear it means a papal imprimatur for the political and economic orthodoxies of the green movement, confusing the faithful and leading to another series of press conferences that will begin with a Vatican spokesman saying, “What the pope meant to say . . .”

The fears are not without cause. There are many signs that do not augur well, from the muddled section on economics in the pope’s first encyclical to his posing for a photo while holding up an anti-fracking T-shirt, to press coverage anticipating he will be to the fight against greenhouse gases what Pope John Paul II was to the fight against Soviet communism.

Previous quarrels between Washington and Jerusalem were about differing Mideast perceptions. Now the issue is how the U.S. perceives itself.

Recent conversations with senior Israeli officials are shot through with a sense of incredulity. They can’t understand what’s become of U.S. foreign policy.

They don’t know how to square Barack Obama’s promises with his policies. They fail to grasp how a president who pledged to work toward the abolition of nuclear weapons is pushing an accord with Tehran that guarantees their proliferation. They are astonished by the nonchalance with which the administration acquiesces in Iran’s regional power plays, or in al Qaeda’s gains in Yemen, or in the Assad regime’s continued use of chemical weapons, or in the battlefield successes of ISIS, or in Russia’s decision to sell advanced missiles to Tehran. They wonder why the president has so much solicitude for Ali Khamenei’s political needs, and so little for Benjamin Netanyahu’s.

Modern Poland is very philo-semitic and supportive of Israel- but- one cannot whitewash their vile history during the Holocaust. With notable, brave and few exceptions who risked all to help and hide Jews, the Poles had a history of violent anti-Semitism and betrayed and turned in Jews to the Nazi occupiers. Furthermore read about the Kielce Pogrom -an outbreak of violence against the Jewish community centre gathering of refugees in the city of Kielce, Poland on 4 July 1946 in the presence of the Polish Communist armed forces (LWP, KBW) which resulted in the killing of 42 Jews. And there is documented evidence of anti-Jewish violence in many cities in 1946…..rsk Postwar Pogrom

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/books/review/23margolick.html?n=Top%252FReference%252FTimes%2520Topics%252FSubjects%252FC%252FConcentration%2520Camps

Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation.By Jan T. Gross.Illustrated. 303 pp. Random House. $25.95.

(Reuters) – Poland has summoned the United States’ ambassador in Warsaw over an article written by a top U.S. intelligence official on Poland’s alleged responsibility for the Holocaust during World War Two, a foreign ministry spokesman said on Sunday.

The article by FBI director James Comey, published in the Washington Post earlier this week, prompted an outcry in Poland and drew condemnation in the media and from politicians.
A foreign ministry spokesman said on his Twitter account that the U.S. ambassador would be summoned to the ministry over the article, and that Poland would demand an apology.
Comey said in the article: “In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do.”

Poland says the passage wrongly implied it was complicit in the Nazi genocide of European Jews.

Russian missiles to defend the nuclear sites saves the mullahs

Vladimir Putin’s decision to lift Russia’s embargo on the sale of surface-to-air missiles to Iran is a reminder that we have to walk and chew gum at the same time. While we engage in the political self-absorption that consumes us for two out of every four years, we can’t afford to ignore nations such as Russia and Iran, especially when they act in concert.

Mr. Putin announced last week that five squadrons of the Russian Antey 2500, an upgraded version of the air and missile defense S-300 system, will soon be delivered to Iran. The Antey 2500 is capable of launching two kinds of missiles — up to eight per battery — and features multiple radars and command-and-control equipment. Mounted on tracked vehicles, the system is highly mobile. It will be a significant upgrade to Iran’s already-capable air- and missile-defense systems.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Iranian air defense systems will be almost impenetrable where it’s deployed, except by stealth aircraft and cruise missiles. (It may be possible to overwhelm it with a large enough volley of cruise missiles.) America has many stealthy aircraft and other weapons, but the Israelis don’t. The upgraded S-300 will mean that the Iranians can effectively defend at least their five most important nuclear weapons sites.

Iran is on both sides of the table
It is a general rule of negotiations that you don’t negotiate with yourself. This advice is intended to prevent one side from being the only party that offers bridging proposals or compromises, and continues to offer more even after every offer is rejected as inadequate by the second party.

In such cases, the negative party simply waits to see how far the offering party will go, and whether it will eventually come around to fully accepting every demand. The offering party proves, by its succession of improved offers and its unwillingness to give up on the negotiations, to be the more desirous, even desperate, to conclude a deal. Such a strategy inevitably means that the offering side will lose on the substance of the negotiations.

However, if the real goal of the offering side is simply to conclude a deal, any deal, and the terms of the deal itself are less significant, then it may still regard a negotiating defeat as a victory.

The negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 over Iran’s nuclear program have provided pretty clear evidence that the United States has been playing the role of the offering party, and Iran that of the negative party. The other members of the P5+1 have been somewhere in between, also anxious to reach a deal and resume commercial activity with Iran, but not as anxious as the Obama administration to give away the store on the various features of Iran’s current nuclear program that they will be allowed to retain and on the inspections regime going forward. In fact, one member of the P5+1, France, has even argued that the United States has at critical stages in the negotiations all but lobbied for Iran’s position in the negotiations with the other P5+1 members, U.S. President Barack Obama has made it clear that his real goal in chasing after Iran for almost all of his six-plus years in office, was to conclude a deal over Iran’s nuclear program that would enable Iran to rejoin the “community of nations,” whatever that term might mean to him.

In New Hampshire

“I’m really intimidating a whole bunch of folks, aren’t I?” Bush said after a woman in the audience here pleaded for “more of a fight” in selecting the party’s eventual nominee and less of a coronation. “I will have to earn it,” he said, turning more serious. “I will share my heart.”

Moreover, he focused on his record as governor of the nation’s third most populous state, and on his immediate family: Bush noted that his life changed when he met his now wife, Columba, in Mexico and that he thinks about the presidency more in terms of his four grandchildren (including days-old Jack) than family history. Asked about U.S. foreign policy mistakes during his brother’s terms, Bush asserted that “that’s not particularly relevant. In a world of deep insecurity, focusing on the past is not really relevant. What’s relevant is what’s the path of American going forward?”

He’d been speaking for a little more than ten minutes, telling stories about his battles in Wisconsin to a crowd of Republicans nodding their heads in enthusiastic agreement. Then, in the middle of an extended passage on the United States’ role in the world, Walker invoked “what makes us arguably the greatest nation in history.”

Arguably? At a Republican gathering in the Obama era?

He didn’t pause and no one seemed to notice. After more than two-dozen speeches here over a long weekend that served as the unofficial start of the New Hampshire primary process, the audience probably assumed that Walker had given the nod to American greatness without any qualifier, as had virtually every other speaker.

It was the only hiccup in a very strong speech. Walker guided the crowd through a brief history of his tenure as Wisconsin governor, punctuating the story with suggestions about what his reforms in back home might mean if he were to attempt something similar as president. “Washington is 68 square miles surrounded by reality,” he said, adapting a popular conservative appraisal of Madison.