RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/03/31/3-unwritten-short-stories-still-haunting-this-ex-fiction-writer/?print=1

WHEN REFLECTING ON REALITY HORNIK HAS WRITTEN “CHOOSING LIFE IN ISRAEL”….THE BEST ANTHOLOGY OF THE BEST ESSAYS AND COLUMNS FROM ISRAEL…..RSK

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” So declared the 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson, known for his aphoristic wit.

It may be too stark. If it’s true, there are legions of blockheads out there — people who publish works in literary journals that pay in contributor’s copies; people who publish on websites that have considerable readerships but do not pay their writers for their efforts (there are not a few of those).
I would modify it to: No man but a blockhead ever wrote short stories so that he could send each one to ten or twenty literary journals until one accepts and publishes it, and then have no sense at all that anybody is actually out there reading it.

At least, that was the dictum I arrived at after years of doing just that. As I’ve described, about a decade ago I decided I’d had enough and stopped writing fiction.

That is, “I’ve” stopped; but that doesn’t mean my subconscious has. It still comes up with stories and presents them to me, requesting that they be written.

In most cases these notions quickly fade and are almost totally forgotten. Some, though, persist — in some cases even for years. It’s a standoff: the idea remains somewhere in my head, and I know it’s there but keep declining to execute it, to translate it into typed words on the screen and see what grows from that.

I can think of three of these ideas that particularly won’t go away, like a stray dog who parks himself on your doorstep and mournfully refuses to budge. I thought it would be worth giving a peek at these. They’re probably representative of a larger phenomenon—people who have given up certain kinds of writing but whose “minds” haven’t.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/lets_try_walking_in_the_palestinians_shoes.html

President Obama told Israelis to “[p]ut yourself in [the Palestinians’] shoes — look at the world through their eyes.”

Jews invented empathy, 3,000 years before Freud. Every Passover, Jews are commanded to experience the Exodus as if we lived it ourselves, to never forget what it feels like to be oppressed. Israelis bend over backwards empathizing with Palestinians. Could President Obama please ask the Palestinians to walk a mile in Israeli shoes?

But let’s listen to the president anyway; let’s use our well-practiced powers of empathy to imagine walking in the Palestinians’ shoes. Listen to what they say, and notice how they behave. We have a lot of direct communication about what Palestinians are feeling inside. We can read Palestinian news, watch their TV programs, find out what they teach their children in school.

MEMRI is the go-to site for translations of Arab media. Here’s the latest commentary from a Palestinian journalist in their daily paper:

… because of their deceptiveness, cunning, and killing of prophets, the Jews have been a hated nation from time immemorial. … [T]he Jews were the cause behind fitna (internal strife) among Muslims, and that throughout history, they had plotted to destroy every country they had inhabited — even those which had welcomed them — and that this explained their expulsion from many of these countries.

A little too much Jihadi-Nazism to really want to walk in those shoes.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/definition_of_marriage_what_can_we_learn_from_islam.html Before America embarks on changing the concept of marriage, I hope they will at least agree on examining cultures that do not define marriage as a covenant between one man and one woman. In their eagerness to achieve their goals, the pro gay marriage enthusiasts are marching towards what they perceive as progress and […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324789504578380382204116270.html?mod=opinion_newsreel Reflections of a Medical Ex-Practitioner The glow of the personal relationship with patients is being extinguished. A fundamental principle in medicine is that if you get the diagnosis wrong, you’ll probably apply the wrong therapy. A corollary is that if the therapy isn’t working, increasing the dose may make things worse. That’s where we […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323646604578400880700237570.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond How Did Oswald Payá Really Die? New evidence about the car crash that killed a noted Cuban dissident points to a coverup. When someone is killed in a civilized country and police slap around a witness and suppress evidence it is known as a cover-up. In Cuba it’s called “reform.” Viva Orwell.Cuba’s “ministry of […]

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/04/07/U-S-Army-Instructor-Beware-Religious-Extremism-of-Evangelicals-and-Roman-Catholics
A U.S. Army training instructor giving a training brief on “extremism” to an Army Reserve unit in Pennsylvania has labeled Evangelical Christianity and Roman Catholicism as examples of religious extremism right alongside Al Qaeda.

In addition to Al Qaeda, the instructor also equated Evangelical and Catholic “extremism” with that of Hamas, Sunni Muslims, the Nation of Islam, and the Ku Klux Klan.

When news of this leaked out, the Army was quick to say the instructor’s position was not condoned by the U.S. military, and that the portions of the power-point slide show used to list Evangelicals and Catholics “was not produced by the Army and certainly does not reflect [Army] policy or doctrine.”

Throughout President Obama’s presidency there has been a strong, top-down reaction toward what was perceived as a prejudiced focus on Islamist extremism under George W. Bush. No word yet on what actions might be taken to counter a prejudiced focus on Christianity and Roman Catholicism.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3182/opisrael_hackers_fail_to_erase_israel_from_the_internet

After much hype, the large-scale attacks on Israeli internet sites has ended with few victories

Anonymous hackers and their global counterparts were left embarrassed on Sunday evening as the large-scale “OpIsrael” exercise to “erase Israel from the internet” failed to bring about the calamitous repercussions for the Jewish State that was promised.

While many had feared the co-ordinated cyber attack, timed to coincide with Israel’s Holocaust Rememberance Day, the efforts failed to prompt widespread downtime for Israeli government websites and big business. Instead, the hackers had minor successes targeting small firms and indeed individuals’ Facebook and Twitter pages.

Hackers made unsubstantiated claims, such as that of shutting down Tel Aviv’s entire internet services, and causing Israel to lose over $5bn in stock market loses on Sunday. The facts surrounding such claims however, remain unclear.

Cyber-security experts labelled the attempts as unsophisticated and branded the hacktivists as lacking in knowledge.

As the day of attacks on Israel progressed, The Commentator noted that targets seemed to switch from high-profile organisations and government sites, to individual Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and indeed in some cases, the hackers outright lied about their successes.

Nir Goldshlager, Israel’s most famous “white hat” hacker and CEO of Break Security told The Times of Israel, “…they claimed that they hacked into the site for the Israel Police, with the site’s address police.gov.li. They may have hacked it, but by getting the domain mixed up (.li instead of .il) whatever it was they thought they were hacking, it wasn’t the Israel Police site.”

A cursory glance at maps of the OpIsrael conversation on Twitter showed much chatter emanating from Israel’s surrounding Muslim and Arab countries. Accordingly, Israeli hackers struck back, apparently bringing down dozens of websites in Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, and North African countries, from where many of anti-Israel DDoS attacks originated.

http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2013/04/mainstream-jewish-institutions-celebrate-anti Major Jewish institutions show a marked propensity to promote and celebrate the enemies of Israel and even antisemites. Here are some examples, working backwards chronologically: Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University: Plans to give its International Advocate for Peace Award is going to Jimmy Carter, author of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, on April 10. […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3660/israel-natural-gas Europe is to a large extent, dependent on Russian gas, supplied by Gazprom. A quarter of Europe’s entire gas consumption is provided by Gazprom. As a new player in the market of gas exporters, Cyprus could reduce the European dependency on Russian gas. Golda Meir once quipped that Moses could have done the Jewish […]

http://jewishworldreview.com/0413/no_place_on_earth.php3 Nearly 70 years after the end of World War II, one has to dig pretty deep to find a unique Holocaust story for the big screen. So it’s not surprising that one of the latest Holocaust films has its genesis in a 77-mile gypsum cave in Ukraine, one of the longest such caves in […]