RUTHFULLY YOURS

The warmth and hospitality that Pope Francis showed to Raúl Castro at the Vatican last week has baffled many Catholics—and for good reason. The dictator went to Rome for a PR boost. The pontiff obliged him.

During their encounter Castro mocked the faith with a quip about returning to the church if the pope behaved. He also mocked every Cuban refugee, dead or alive, by giving the pope, of all things, a piece of art depicting a migrant at prayer.

Pope Francis gave the dictator a copy of his 2013 apostolic exhortation titled “The Joy of the Gospel,” in which he sharply criticizes economic freedom. Talk about preaching to the converted. As Raúl put it, “The pontiff is a Jesuit, and I, in some way, am too. I studied at Jesuit schools.” No kidding.

BAGHDAD—Islamic State seized control of the capital of Iraq’s largest province, killing hundreds of government forces and dealing a crushing setback to U.S.-backed efforts to halt the spread of the extremist group.

The fall of the western city of Ramadi, once home to nearly half a million people, represents Islamic State’s biggest military victory this year, gaining it another major Iraqi city among the territory it controls in Iraq as well as Syria.

The advance, a day after a U.S. special-operations team in Syria killed Islamic State’s finance leader, has exposed the fragility of Iraqi forces, despite U.S. efforts to train them. Just as army units melted away in the Iraqi city of Mosul last summer, local police fled by the hundreds from Ramadi.

In Washington, neither the situation in Anbar nor the developments in Syria were seen as likely to alter the timing or tempo of U.S. operations. Both the U.S. raid in Syria and the apparent fall of Ramadi reflect President Barack Obama’s attempts to minimize the chances of large-scale involvement by American forces, and are unlikely to lead to deeper U.S. action in either country.

Competing with the WSJ’s coup in first publicizing the Asian Tiger Mom, the Times has captured Wednesday Martin, an anthropologist whose subject has been the super-rich slender mothers of the upper east side. She has also covered the same demographic in London but for the interest of their local readers, the Times has focused on the local “Poor Little Rich Women” who have been coined by Ms. Martin with the cliche’d acronym Glam SAHMS – glamorous stay at home moms. (SundayReviewNYT5/17) From the pictures on her website, we see that Wednesday has obviously learned a thing or two from her life among the savages – the best place to get her hair colored, where to buy de rigeur high heels and brightly colored sleeveless dresses and how to get a professional make-up job before embarking on a public relations campaign. Despite her insistence that she was up front with her subjects about writing a book, she clearly felt the need to look just like the women she was preparing to eviscerate.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs staged a highly successful
event at the 5th Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem
between 12-14 May.

Delegates from around the world gathered to hear an impressive array
of speakers, led by Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The
conference was intense. Even the lunches during the three days became
platforms for keynote speakers including Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive
Vice Chairman of the Confederation of Presidents of Major American
Jewish Organization, Robert Wistrich,

http://m.weeklystandard.com/blogs/media-gets-pope-s-abbas-comments-wrong_948653.html
The post on Ruthfully has been removed….apologies….rsk

Media Gets Pope’s Abbas Comments Wrong
If anyone needs further evidence of why the news agencies often can’t be trusted to report accurately on Israel and the Palestinians, and why major news outlets such as the New York Times and the BBC should stop repeating agency copy without verifying it, here is an important example from this weekend.

According to Italian and Spanish news outlets and according to the Vatican’s own website, Pope Francis told Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that he could be an angel of peace. “May you be an angel of peace,” he urged Abbas, effectively saying that if Abbas would take the decision to accept one of the peace offers that various Israeli prime ministers have made to him, or at least make a serious counter-offer, he could be an angel of peace. The pope did not say that Abbas – infamous for ordering the Munich Olympic massacre, among many other atrocities – was “an angel of peace.”

Western Civilization Heritage Israel Program (C.H.I.P) provides mainly non-Jewish middle-school-age children in the community the opportunity to gain direct knowledge of their heritage through tours to the State of Israel, affording them a deeper understanding of the origin of the monotheistic faiths, solidifying for them an ever-lasting impression of the Holy Land, and creating a special bond between them and the modern State of Israel.

C.H.I.P’s educational tours will establish relationships between the state of Israel and middle school students who are of an impressionable age, reaching them before they encounter the prevalent deception about the state of their heritage and the nation state of the Jewish people. C.H.I.P Educational Tours Project will help Jews and non-Jews form a strong bonded coalition, built on first-hand interaction. This Project will capture students’ experiences for the purpose of countering negative messages and impressions that have become prevalent among higher learning institutions worldwide.

Please visit our website http://chipeducationaltours.org/

See this video :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqx-mV64rm8&feature=youtu.be

Nurit Greenger, President

C.H.I.P (Western Civilization Heritage Israel Program)

E-mail: CHIPeducationtours@gmail.com

Website: http://chipeducationaltours.org/

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CHIP4Israel

All manner of people are giving commencement speeches to students graduating from colleges and universities these days. It is doubtful that any will be remembered because the prospects of students depend in large part on the economy into which they are entering, the majors they pursued, their individual ambitions, and capacity for hard work. Then, too, there’s dumb luck which often plays a role.

For those graduating this year, my profound sympathy because the economy could not be much worse short of being declared an official Depression. Out of a total of 330 million Americans, there are currently 93,194,000 Americans who are not in the workforce because they can’t find a job or have given up looking. Even in the field of manufacturing—not something you studied for—the number of jobs have declined by 7,231,000, some 37% since manufacturing peaked in the U.S. in 1979.

U.S. economic growth rate has slowed to 0.2%. In short, it is virtually non-existent. So, with your diploma in hand, unless you majored in the sciences, math or engineering, you are not likely to join the workforce any time soon. Those of you who majored in social work, theatre arts, elementary education, and something called parks and recreation, are going to be at the bottom of the salary scale for the rest of your life.

Of the previous graduates from 2008 to the present who voted for Barack Obama, just 14% have real jobs. You have had the vast misfortune of being born just in time to live through the worst presidency in the history of the nation. If, in fact, you even know the history of the nation.

Character assassination. A simplistic moral universe in which the U.S. is the villain and Israel the only country yet more villainous. Anonymous sources that cannot be checked. Dark charges based on a crazy patchwork of suppositions. Far-out conspiracy theories. Con men as sources. Reputable sources misquoted. These constitute the decades-long modus operandi of Seymour Hersh, the man now serving as star investigative reporter of the New Yorker.
That modus operandi is clearly in evidence in Hersh’s only book-length assault on Israel, The Samson Option (about Israel’s nuclear deterrent), published in 1991. Typically for Hersh, he even gets the Biblical account wrong. Explaining the book’s title, Hersh writes that “Samson, according to the Bible, had been captured after a bloody fight.” 1 What the Bible records – as any literate person knows — is that Samson became helpless after Delilah seduced him into telling her that the secret of his strength lay in his long hair, and she summoned one of the Philistines to cut it off as he slept in her arms.
Anyone who had followed Hersh’s career as a 1960s style “Movement” journalist would have expected Hersh to take up cudgels against Israel sooner or later. His books and articles are permeated by the theme of America-the-enemy; indeed The Samson Option was his first book without that theme. Here the U.S. government is the innocent, deceived victim of Israel and the nefarious Jewish lobby. It took Israel to purify (however briefly) America.

Seymour Hersh has courted controversy with his false narrative of how Bin Laden was killed and has met proper opprobrium….but he has a cult of readers and admirers such as Trevor Timm who do not wish to be upset by real facts. I am posting one of several investigative columns exposing his lies and agenda…..by Rael Jean Isaac…..rsk

SEYMOUR HERSH HAS DONE THE PUBLIC a great service bybreathing life into questions surrounding the official narrativeof the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.

Barrels of ink have been spilled ripping apart Hersh’s character, while barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or refute his claims—even though there’s no doubt that the Obama administration hasrepeatedly misinformed and misled the public about the incident. Even less attention has been paid to the little follow-up reporting that we didget, which revealed that the CIA likely lied about its role in finding bin Laden, which it used to justify torture to the public.

Hersh has attempted to force the media to ask questions about its role in covering a world-shaping event—but it’s clear the media has trouble asking such questions if the answers are not the ones they want to hear.

Hersh’s many critics, almost word-for-word, gave the same perfunctory two-sentence nod to his best-known achievements—breaking the My Lai massacre in 1969 (for which he won the Pulitzer) and exposing the Abu Ghraib torture scandal 35 years later—before going on to call him every name in the book: “conspiracy theorist,” “off the rails,” “crank.” Yet most of this criticism, over the thousands of words written about Hersh’s piece in the last week, has amounted to “That doesn’t make sense to me,” or “That’s not what government officials told me before,” or “How are we to believe his anonymous sources?”

While there’s no way to prove or disprove every assertion Hersh makes without re-reporting the whole story, let’s look at the overarching criticisms one by one:

Delegitimization provides the sociopsychological rationale, the moral and discursive basis to harm the delegitimized group, even in the most inhumane ways… Delegitimized groups are rhetorically constructed as worthy targets of violence.

The Oxford Handbook of Intergroup Conflict, 2012

The above is what we Israelis, as this volatile region’s most relentlessly delegitimized group, must keep uppermost in mind every mid-May.

Whereas we celebrate our state’s Independence Day according to the Hebrew calendar, the Gregorian anniversary, May 15, is annually commemorated by Arabs as a day of lamentation for the Nakba. It’s the catastrophe according to their loaded terminology, which renascent Jewish sovereignty supposedly inflicted on the supposedly indigenous people of this land – the Palestinians.

The notion that Israel was born in sin is delegitimization in the most extreme sense.