RUTHFULLY YOURS

Back in January 2003, the Project Daniel Group advised prime minister Ariel Sharon on the issue of Iranian nuclearization. In its then-confidential final report to Sharon, titled “Israel’s Strategic Future,” the group underscored a significant core conclusion: allowing Iran to become a nuclear power can never be construed as an acceptable option. To further support this position legally, as well as strategically, the group referenced a very basic or “peremptory” national right under international law. This prerogative, we counseled, is known formally as “anticipatory self-defense.”

Our jurisprudential message was loud and clear: international law is never a suicide pact. Under no circumstances can a state ever be expected to become complicit in its own annihilation. Indeed, following the authoritative 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, a country may even maintain a limited right to use nuclear weapons.

The Blame Game is not a game. It is serious business, particularly at this point of implosion. We still have the capabilities to think and speak and even act, but they should no longer be regarded as an open-ended proposition.

At this perhaps precious moment, then, it is important not to waste the opportunity to assess blame (and, best case scenario, regroup) in yet another aerobic exercise of venting at the Left (self-congratulation). Especially not when we — our side, not the Left — are to blame.

Outpost
Editor: Rael Jean Isaac
Editorial Board: Ruth King, Rita Kramer

Outpost is distributed free to Members of Americans for a Safe Israel

In Memoriam: Beverly Bar Illan

AFSI mourns the death of Beverly Bar-Illan, author, editor and staunch proud Zionist. Her love of Israel, expressed in her columns, culminated in her conversion to Judaism and subsequent Aliyah with her husband David, the late pianist, editor of the Jerusalem Post and chief of information and planning for Benjamin Netanyahu during his first tenure as Prime Minister. We offer deep condolences to her sons Tony and Brian and her many friends and admirers in Israel and America.

Next AFSI Mission to Israel: June 2-10, 2015

Join us for an extraordinary, eye-opening experience.
Learn about the real Israel.
Reservations now being taken.

Baltimore is burning because community organizers and various thugs are tearing the city apart in the aftermath of the strange death of a young black man who was in the custody of police — and President Obama is trying to make things worse.

In an incredible non-coincidence the rioting follows a weekend rally by the Occupy Wall Street-like Baltimore Peoples Assembly. There also was a first wave of rioting over the weekend. Outside activists have been flooding into Baltimore, according to reports. Police and civilians have been injured. A CVS store was looted and set on fire. Rioters chopped up fire hoses to prevent firefighters from doing their job. Criminal gangs have declared open season on cops. Rioters have been throwing cinder blocks, bricks, and other objects at police. And there aren’t enough cops to go around. Baltimore police are begging police officers in other states to come to Baltimore to help out. Schools are closed Tuesday.

Mona Eltahawy is no Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan or Ayaan Hirsi Ali…… She is an inveterate Israel/Jew basher and apologist for Jihad…..As the reviewer points out….

“The sloppy thinking in “Headscarves and Hymens” reflects an unfortunate tendency in Ms. Eltahawy’s political advocacy. In 2012, after publicizing her plans on the Web, she was charged with vandalism for defacing with pink spray paint a controversial subway ad reading: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” She compromises her credibility especially on the subject of Israel and anti-Semitism: In 2011, for example, she claimed that “not one anti-Israeli or anti-American sentiment was expressed” during the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. As a writer so passionate about women’s rights, Ms. Eltahawy may want to look more closely at the one country in the Middle East where women have been elected prime minister and wear bikinis on the beach.”
Everyone should know the name of Genet Girma, who wore a placard on her wedding reading: ‘I am not circumcised, learn from me.’

If you are cursed to be born a girl in Egypt, there is a 90% chance you will have your genitals cut in the name of purity. In Yemen, there is a 55% chance you will never learn to read and a 79% chance you will never work. And in the United Arab Emirates, your father or husband can beat you and remain fully compliant with the law so long as he leaves no mark.

Yet Muslim women who decry this appalling reality are often branded traitors to their culture and handmaidens to the imperialist forces of Dick Cheney. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani have all been dismissed as attention-seeking contrarians or unsophisticated bigots who perpetuate stereotypes about Muslims and the Arab world.

Mr. Coffin and Mr. Edney, both former senior lawyers with the George W. Bush administration, are partners in the international law firm Steptoe & Johnson LLP.
Corporate gifts to foreign charities have been treated as illegal bribes—resulting in million-dollar penalties.
Consider these facts: The chairman of a Canadian company named Uranium One reportedly donated $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. At the same time the company was seeking U.S. government approval to sell a 51% controlling stake to Rosatom, the state-owned Russian nuclear agency. Meanwhile, a Russian investment bank with close ties to the Kremlin paid former President Bill Clinton a half-million dollars to speak in Moscow.

Anything worth investigating here? Not according to the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, President Barack Obama, whose spokesman announced Friday that the allegations were little more than the discredited musings of “a conservative author,” unaccompanied by “any evidence” and apparently unworthy of further discussion.

But imagine if similar payments, under similar circumstances, were made by a U.S. company to a charity closely associated with, say, the Nigerian foreign minister. The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission would be banging on that firm’s doors, asserting serious violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The Clintons are counting on America to digest their ethical lapses the way a python swallows a goat.

Recently I wrote a column about Hillary Clinton’s method of lying: bald deceit sold to liberals with a wink-and-nod as the price of advancing a progressive agenda in this bigoted country of ours. Several readers wrote me to object that the mendacity I ascribed to Mrs. Clinton applied equally to Republicans.

Maybe. But what was striking about these critics is that none of them bothered to rebut the point that Mrs. Clinton is a habitual liar who treats truthfulness in politics the way a calorie-counting diner might treat hollandaise sauce on steak: to be kept strictly on the side or dribbled on in measured doses. Her lying has become as much a given in the liberal mind as Bill Clinton’s womanizing: He does his thing, she does hers.

Get over it.

All of which means that Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid is an exercise in—and a referendum on—cynicism, partly hers but mainly ours. Democrats who nominate Mrs. Clinton will transform their party into the party of cynics; an America that elects Mrs. Clinton as its president will do so as a nation of cynics. Is that how we see, or what we want for, ourselves?

Let us not give Castro the resources he needs to continue his 56-year reign of terror on his own people, and his continued support for terrorists and terrorist states.

To enrich and solidify that dictatorship at this time only prevents the Cuban People from being able to forge a better life for themselves through elections in a few years, now that they are finally “on the one-yard line,” when the Castro brothers, now in their late eighties, could simply be left to their natural, un-bankrolled, ends. In a dictatorship such as this, only the dictators benefit.

As Sonia Alvarez Campillo was was leaving Catholic Mass on July 14, 2013 with fellow members of Ladies in White, her pro-democracy organization, she was assaulted by Raul Castro’s agents.

These “security” agents broke Alvarez Campillo’s wrist as well as her husband’s ribs in their attack on her and other members of her group.

Sunday after Sunday in Cuba, the Ladies in White (Damas de Blanco) — members of a movement started in 2003 by wives and other female relatives of jailed dissidents in Cuba — have peacefully demonstrated for freedom and human rights in cities across Cuba. They have continually been harassed, beaten, and imprisoned in Raul Castro’s Cuba.

In an attack just two months ago, Lady in White member Digna Rodriquez Ibañez was pelted with tar by agents of the regime.

WASHINGTON — CLINTON nostalgia is being replaced by Clinton neuralgia.

Why is it that America’s roil family always seems better in abstract than in concrete? The closer it gets to running the world once more, the more you are reminded of all the things that bugged you the last time around.

The Clintons’ neediness, their sense of what they are owed in material terms for their public service, their assumption that they’re entitled to everyone’s money.

Are we about to put the “For Rent” sign back on the Lincoln Bedroom?

If Americans are worried about money in politics, there is no larger concern than the Clintons, who are cosseted in a world where rich people endlessly scratch the backs of rich people.

They have a Wile E. Coyote problem; something is always blowing up. Just when the Clintons are supposed to be floating above it all, on a dignified cloud of do-gooding leading into 2016, pop-pop-pop, little explosions go off everywhere, reminding us of the troubling connections and values they drag around.
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There’s the continuing grotesque spectacle of Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin. And there’s the sketchy involvement of the Clintons’ most prolific fund-raiser, Terry McAuliffe, and Hillary’s brother Tony Rodham in a venture, GreenTech Automotive; it’s under federal investigation and causing fireworks in Virginia, where McAuliffe is running for governor.

Many Israelis were disgusted to learn that Bill Clinton was originally scheduled to scarf up $500,000 to speak at the Israeli president Shimon Peres’s 90th birthday festivities in June. I guess being good friends with Peres and brokering the accord that won Peres the Nobel Peace Prize were not reasons enough for Bill to celebrate. The Israeli branch of the Jewish National Fund had agreed to donate half a mil to the Clinton foundation. Isn’t the J.N.F. “supposed to plant trees with donor cash?” Haaretz chided before the fund pulled back. “I guess money does grow on trees.”
I never thought I’d have to read the words Ira Magaziner again. But the man who helped Hillary torpedo her own health care plan is back.

In a Times article last week headlined “Unease at Clinton Foundation Over Finances and Ambitions,” Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick offered a compelling chronicle about an internal review of the rechristened Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation that illuminated the fungible finances and tensions between Clinton loyalists and the foundation architects Magaziner and Doug Band, former bag carrier for President Clinton.

Despite all the rhetorical flourishes, humanitarian concern about Palestinian Arabs is not the motivating factor behind divestment. At bottom, the measures are driven by hatred of Israel.

In a college-wide vote, Princeton university undergraduates voted against a resolution to divest funds from Israeli companies or certain companies that are used in Israel. The ballot closed on April 22, and the results were announced on Friday, April 26.

The proposal lost with 52.5 percent voting against it and 47.5 percent voting in favor.