RUTHFULLY YOURS

My mother died in 1998 after a brief illness. She was beautiful, elegant, and game. She trudged through the jungles of South America, Africa, Borneo, and India with her high heels and matching purses. And she always traveled with a huge box of cosmetics. She had a quality that was above intelligence and wit. She anticipated people’s needs.

In Israel in 1950 she invited six of her friends for lunch. They had survived the Holocaust- some hiding in unspeakable circumstances of fear, starvation and cold, and others survived Auschwitz and were prone to weeping and recounting. Out came the box of cosmetics and my mother and I…at her direction….gave them manicures in addition to lunch. While we buffed, and pushed cuticles and filed and moisturized their hardened hands and brittle nails, my mother sang songs in Polish and Yiddish and reminded them of youth in high-school, gossip, boy friends, flirtations and dress-ups and parties and dancing….the life they had before the darkness. Suddenly they were singing, chatting and laughing and when we applied the colors they waved their hands in the air admiring their hands and shiny pink and red nails. When they left they all took polish in what one called “happy colors.”

She had a knack. Sofia Salomon my mother was unique.

This is a very pertinent column… Generals David Petraeus and Stanley A. McChrystal established COIN- Field Manual (FM) 3-24, the manual on counterinsurgency, with a focus on winning hearts and minds,that was far more concerned with sensitivity to the mores of local enemy savages than to protecting our own troops. rsk

When it comes to gaining or losing allegiance, the sword is mightier than the pen.
Those who argue against publishing Mohammed cartoons — like the ones featured in Pamela Geller’s now-famous “Draw Mohammed” contest — often claim that the cartoons don’t just provoke terror, they also alienate Muslim friends and allies. Thus, even if one wishes to be defiant in the face of jihadist aggression, publishing the cartoons is still foolish because of the effect on our friends.

As we mentioned a week ago, I’m none too well at the moment, and it so happens my preferred position in which to write causes me severe pain – which is presumably some kind of not so subtle literary criticism from the Almighty. But I’m back, more or less, with lots to catch up on. There were two big elections in recent days, with dramatic results: in Alberta, the Tories were wiped out; in Scotland, the Labour Party was slaughtered; in England, the Liberals were crushed. Strange times.

I’ll have more to say about the elections in the days ahead, but for now let me offer a whole-hearted good riddance to Ed Miliband, the now departed Labour leader who, in a desperate last-minute pander, offered to “outlaw Islamophobia”. That was the British political establishment’s contribution to a rough couple of weeks for free speech, culminating in the attempted mass murder in Garland, Texas.

“Carter Causes Consternation with Election Call for Palestinian Arabs”

Former US president Jimmy Carter has created a stir with his call for Palestinian Arabs to hold elections to end the internecine struggle between Hamas and the PLO in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza.

Speaking at a joint news conference with PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah – after cancelling his stop in Gaza where he was supposed to meet Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh – Carter – now a member of the independent Elders Group of global leaders – declared:

“We hope that sometime we’ll see elections all over the Palestinian area and east Jerusalem and Gaza and also in the West Bank”

It is not just the Arab-Israeli conflict that fuels anti-Semitism. It works the other way around too: the old-fashioned anti-Semitism is the reason behind a biased narrative of the conflict in the Middle East.
The rise of anti-Semitism in U.S. colleges has alarmed conservative groups for quite some time, yet it was largely ignored by the liberal media until recently. The turning point was a spate of shocking, high-profile incidents involving student government bodies, normally bastions of political correctness and darlings of the radical left, which were covered by the New York Times, CNN and other news outlets. Forced to address this seemingly awkward issue, the media offers two rationalizations. The first argues that the Jewish students make up a largely successful group, and therefore, are not on the list of “protected species.” This argument is rather weak. Indeed, the Chinese students make up an even more successful group, but no public expression of anti-Chinese sentiments would be tolerated.

Syria’s Scud-C ballistic missiles put several big Turkish cities “within range.”

Half of the Turkish squadrons that would fly over Syrian skies may not be able to return home safely.

Turkey simply does not have a long-range anti-missile defense architecture to counter the Syrian (and/or Iranian) missiles.

On June 22, 2012, a Turkish RF-4E military reconnaissance aircraft took off from an air base in eastern Turkey. It flew at low altitude, as most spy planes do, and violated Syrian airspace before it was hit — most likely — by a missile fired from a Syrian- or Russian-operated air defense system.

Two Turkish pilots were killed. Their bodies were later recovered from the Mediterranean Sea with help from a US ship.

“After the [Christian governor] told them [U.S. authorities] that they were ignoring the 12 Shariah states who (sic) institutionalized persecution … he suddenly developed visa problems. … The question remains — why is the U.S. downplaying or denying the attacks against Christians?” — Emmanuel Ogebe, Nigerian human rights lawyer based in Washington D.C.

“In the same week that the State Dept says it will take the engagement of religious leaders seriously … it refuses a visa to a persecuted Christian nun who has fled ISIS, Sister Diana.” — Chris Seiple, President, Institute for Global Engagement.

Late on the evening of May 8, Newsmax TV announced that pressure from Americans acquainted with Sister Diana Momeka’s visa rejection has just caused the State Department to reverse its decision and permit her entry into the United States. Until then, however, she and others were barred

Daniel Greenfield wrote on FrontPage about the absurdity of the news media in accusing Pamela Geller and Bosch Fawstin of encouraging violence by conducting a drawing Mohammad contest and inviting others to the event:

“The actual attempt at mass slaughter was dismissed as the terrorists ‘take the bait’ from the cartoonists who had been fiendishly plotting to be mass slaughtered by them for the publicity.”

But, this is the actual motive of Islamic terrorists; they are fiends looking for “bait” to take in order to be killed by their intended victims (or by a lone policeman, as in Garland) so their names can be publicized as “martyrs for Allah.” The only time terrorist outfits like ISIS, Al Qaeda, et al. value and recognize such self-sacrificing fools (aka “brothers”) is when they’re dead. This policy reduces the average jihadist to the level of a passive receptor, or a human lemming, who just can’t help himself for wanting to die, of seeking immediate if not eventual death.

But then, Islam is a nihilist ideology, chock full of absurdities.

Listening to Laura Ingraham’s interview with Pamela Geller, I made some notes on their lines of argument. Geller, obviously, is for the cartoon contest as an exercise of the American right to speech free from Islamic dictates; Ingraham supports Geller’s right to free speech but opposes the contest, nonetheless, as not “helpful.”

Geller opens by taking exception to Ingraham’s earlier comment calling the cartoon contest needlessly provocative. Geller argues that, on the contrary, it is murdering cartoonists that is needlessly provocative, and then says something about the importance of not surrendering to violent sharia enforcement. Once established, she says, we will enforce it again and again and again.

Ingraham replies with a list of her own bona fides regarding freedom of religion, persecuted Christians, the war in Iraq, also professing her own Roman Catholic faith. She then says she doesn’t think the US effort to combat the Islamization of the globe is “necessarily helped” by putting on Mohammed art contests, although she supports PG’s right to do so. She then intimates that PG was merely grandstanding, which PG takes exception to. (PG: Where did I say I was “brave,” LI: I didn’t say you said that — although LI did imply exactly that.)

Constant blame being thrown at US president for many difficulties Israel is currently facing is in reality a distraction from fact that Israel itself is not functioning like a full-fledged sovereign state.

Similarly, after more than 20 years of the disastrous Oslo “peace process” and all the carnage and suffering that it brought, as well as in the face of a strengthening international campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel, many Israelis are perturbed by Obama’s continued insistence that Israel must work towards the fulfillment of the two-state solution.

Together these point to Obama’s unwavering belief that the source of all the instability in the region is not Arab/Islamic terror or Arab/Islamic hatred of Israel and the West, but rather previous western injustices that need to be rectified. In the case of Iran, this means the fostering of positive relations after years of America treating Iran like a pariah state while in the case of Israel this means the ending of its supposed unlawful occupation of Judea and Samaria in order to help bring to fruition the creation of yet another Arab state in the region.