RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired Communications Ministry Director-General Avi Berger.

On Monday, Zionist Union and opposition leader Isaac Herzog posted a rant about this on his Facebook page. “[Netanyahu] is waging a war on the media with all his might,” he wrote.

Later that day, Herzog addressed the move during a Zionist Union faction meeting, calling it “reminiscent of Israel’s neighbors who long ago forgot the role of the media.” And then he specified one such neighbor.

“Perhaps Netanyahu doesn’t like [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, but he is undoubtedly learning his tricks,” Herzog said, warning the prime minister not to tamper with Israel’s freedom of the press.

It is not clear why Netanyahu dismissed Berger so abruptly. There are two main rumors circulating that, if true, provide partial answers.

The first surrounds the semi-scandal surrounding Netanyahu’s failure to give former Communications Minister Gilad Erdan a portfolio in the new government. Erdan, a long-time Netanyahu loyalist and Likud party front-runner, was expected to receive a choice post. When he got none, many eyebrows were raised. Berger, whom Netanyahu just sacked, was appointed by Erdan in October 2013.

The BDS movement has arguably become a major source of intolerance in Australian society as has also been the case in the UK and USA.

The presentation to be made tomorrow is entitled “How the BDS destroys prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace and reconciliation”.

By any reasonable judgement, the month of March 2002 was a particularly horrific episode in the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During that awful period, there were eight separate suicide attacks by Palestinian Islamic terrorists on Israeli civilians resulting in the deaths of 63 people and many hundreds injured. The final straw was the attack on the Passover Seder in Netanya’s Park Hotel which killed 30 people and injured 140. This attack provoked the Israeli invasion of the leading West Bank cities known as Operation Defensive Shield in an attempt to destroy the terror networks, and stop the carnage.

Yet it was precisely at this point that the international campaign for a boycott of Israel commenced. Two UK academics Steven and Hilary Rose proposed a boycott of all Israeli academics and academic institutions. Their initiative was copied in May 2002 by two Australian academics John Docker and Ghassan Hage, both of whom had a long-time record of hardline criticism of Israel. Their boycott petition, which was signed by 90 Australian academics, was based on the binary opposites of good and bad nations, and made the following key points:

While the Palestinians are rightly requested to reign in their extremists, the Israelis have elected their extremists to power’;
Israel has perpetrated ugly murder, rampages, systematic crimes of war, and an anachronistic act of colonization in the West Bank and Gaza;
Israel is impervious to moral appeals from world leaders;
While some academics and intellectuals in Israel oppose the government and some also are involved in cooperative Israeli/Palestinian research projects, the vast majority have either supported the Israeli Army onslaught on the Palestinians, or failed to voice any significant protest against it;
As with boycotts against apartheid South Africa, international action is now required to stop the massacres perpetrated against the Palestinian people;
We call for a boycott of research and cultural links with Israel. We urge our colleagues not to attend conferences in Israel, to pressure our universities to suspend any existing exchange or linkage arrangements, and to refuse to distribute scholarship and academic position information.

She backs workers’ right to join unions, yet served cheerfully and lucratively on the board of a mega-retailer whose policy it is to foil labor organisers at every turn. What principles does the likely Democratic contender hold dear? No one, least of all the candidate, appears to have a clue.

Amidst a crescendo of emotional and misdirected idealism, Americans set a new benchmark for identity politics in 2008, when they elected a presidential candidate whose chief qualification was neither experience nor notable intelligence but the mere colour of his skin. What ensued has been a string of unmitigated public policy failures, the quadrupling of America’s debt and the erosion US power and influence in the world’s most hostile regions. An optimist would hope American voters have gained a bitter wisdom from their Obama indulgence, but if they have learned nothing and succumb to the tantalizing temptation of electing yet another token, this time on the basis of gender rather than race, the only explanation will be that the attraction of Mrs Clinton’s XX chromosomes far outweigh her decades of dizzying inconsistency.

At Friday’s Department of Defense press briefing, Brigadier General Thomas Weidley gave it the full Baghdad Bob:

In Ramadi, after a period of relative stability in the tactical situation, Daesh [Isis] executed a complex attack on Iraqi Security Forces today. These forces were able to repel most of these attacks, but some gains were made by Daesh in previously contested areas…

Iraqi Security Forces, as well as federal and local police, continue to control most of the key facilities, infrastructure and lines of communication in the area. Ramadi is a major population center, the provincial capital of Iraq’s largest province, and a location where Iraqi Security Forces, police and local tribes have been working together for nearly a year to defend.

Since the beginning of OIR [Operation Inherent Resolve – seriously], the coalition has provided precision air support for the ISF with approximately 420 airstrikes in the Fallujah-Ramadi area. In the past month, we’ve conducted 165 airstrikes in support of Iraqi Security Forces in Ramadi, which have destroyed operational resources and facilities such as Daesh-controlled buildings, fighting positions, armored and technical vehicles…

The Obama administration had a deftly coordinated response to the sacking of Ramadi by ISIS: This, too, shall pass, and hopefully quickly so we don’t have to answer more questions about the failure.

Secretary of State John Kerry got the spin rolling early on a stop in South Korea, predicting that “as the forces are redeployed and as the days flow in the weeks ahead, that’s going to change, because overall in Iraq, Daesh has been driven back.”

“It is possible to have the kind of attack we’ve seen in , but I am absolutely confident in the days ahead that will be reversed,” Kerry said. “Large numbers of Daesh were killed in the last few days and will be in the next days, because that seems to be the only thing they understand. There is no negotiation. There is no proposal whatsoever to educate a child or build a school or a hospital or do something positive.” ISIS has launched the Islamic State Health Service and has been luring Western doctors [1] to work in their hospitals, including Australian Dr. Tareq Kamleh.

“And I think the people of Iraq and the people of the region understand that, which is why every single country in the region, bar none, is opposed to Daesh and is engaged in fighting them,” Kerry added.

On board Air Force One en route to New Jersey today, White House spokesman Eric Schultz acknowledged ISIS’ seizure of Ramadi, 80 miles west of Baghdad, was a “setback.”

“But there’s also no denying that we will help the Iraqis take back Ramadi,” Schultz said. “The president is being kept up to date on the situation there. I don’t have any new strategy to preview or that’s under contemplation right now, because as we’ve said for a while now, this was going to be a long-term proposition, that there would be ebbs and flows in this fight.”

Watergate Redux? Will Sid ‘Vicious’ Upend Hillary? by Roger L Simon

Another shoe, a big one this time, dropped in the endless Benghazi-missing-emails-erased-servers-what-difference-does-it-make controversy that the Clintonistas are trying so hard to push under the rug before it upends Dame Hillary’s presidential campaign. And the scoop comes, once again, from the New York Times, of all places, not some rascally website run by rightwing lunatics like this one.

Emails have surfaced from long-time Clinton bag man Sid Blumenthal indicating the whole Libya debacle was instigated by a cast of sleazy lowlife profiteers out of an Elmore Leonard novel. Smarmy Sid was pumping info from this dramatis personae to Hillary (at more than one email address) about goings on in that benighted country and our then secretary of state believed him — at least most of the time — passing his “knowledge” on to her underlings.

And this is a woman who wants to be president?

Higher premiums, impenetrable bureaucracy — where’s the upside?

Obamacare has enmeshed many Americans in a bureaucratic nightmare. True, the law has helped some uninsured people obtain coverage. But millions of people have seen their health-insurance plans canceled, because the plans did not meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. Others, particularly young Americans, have seen premiums rise to pay for the roster of newly added benefits.

Tommy Groves (not his real name), a young professional working at a small firm in Washington, D.C., was among the nearly 5 million Americans who received termination-of-coverage letters from their health-insurance providers because their plans did not comply with the ACA’s requirements. While about half the states offered to extend canceled plans for another year, later increased to two years, the District of Columbia required its residents to get new insurance.

Yup we really need more legislators like Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Maxine Waters, Debbie Wasserman, Sheila Jackson Lee, Jan Schakowsky, and other sterling examples of liberal women ….oh yes and don’t forget Susan Collins Republican mediocrity…. we want the best and toughest legislators regardless of gender and proportional representation….rsk

Earlier this month, I predicted that a scheduled hearing at the Federal Election Commission was shaping up to be nothing more than a presentation of “the goofy gender ideology and politics of the progressive Left and academia.” And, oh, how right I was.

The May 12 forum on “Women in Politics” was organized by FEC chairwoman Ann Ravel without the approval of any of her colleagues and outside the legal authority of the FEC’s authorizing statute. Its avowed purpose: to “begin an open discussion” of why women are supposedly “significantly underrepresented in politics.”

But the question that hangs over Rotherham — and which even the latest independent review could not answer — is why so many people got away with these crimes for so long. It was left to a few intrepid journalists and four private citizens to uphold the law.

“It appears inevitable that Mr. Rahman will denounce this judgement as yet another instance of the racism and Islamophobia that have hounded him. … It is nothing of the sort. The law must apply fairly and equally to everyone. Otherwise we are lost.” — Judge Richard Mawrey QC.

Bad people do bad things, but when all the institutions of state fail to stop them, that is a problem for us all.

A veteran of the 1968 protest movements of 1968 once confided what, looking back, troubled him about his generation’s rebellion. “All young people rebel.” he said. “What is strange is that our parents’ generation gave in.” It is a sentiment that could just as easily be applied to modern Britain, if not the West. It is not surprising that people do bad things. What is surprising is that so many institutions and authorities allow them to get away with it.

Oh no! Not the International Criminal Court! [2]

What will North Korea possibly do if we refer it to the International Criminal Court? Besides laugh a lot.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday accused North Korea of a litany of crimes and atrocities while reassuring South Korea of America’s “ironclad” security commitments.

Obama Inc. also made “ironclad” security promises to the Gulf Arabs and Israel, so we know what those are worth.