RUTHFULLY YOURS

MY OH MY SUCH HUFF AND PUFF FROM SUCH LIMITED DEFENSE OF ISRAEL….MR. DERSHOWTIZ HAS PAID TRIBUTE AND ENDORSEMENT TO PRESIDENT OBAMA AND TO THE ENEMIES OF THOSE WHO DAILY PAY A STEEP PRICE FOR DEFENDING ISRAEL FROM AN ARAB ONSLAUGHT BY POPULATING THE WEST BANK WITH THE SETTLEMENTS. HE REMAINS COMMITTED TO THE POLITICALLY CORRECT BUT SUICIDAL NOTION OF A TWO STATE SOLUTION WHILE
“DEFENDING” ISRAEL WITH HIGH SOUNDING RHETORIC………RSK

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3582/defending-israel

Whenever I speak in support of Israel or in criticism of its enemies, the dogs of defamation are unleashed against me. The attacks, all from the hard left, seemed coordinated, focusing on common ad hominem themes. They accuse me of being a plagiarist, a supporter of torture, a right wing Zio-fascist, a hypocrite, an opponent of the two-state solution and a supporter of Israel’s settlement policies. All these allegations are demonstrably false but this does not seem to matter to those whose job it is to try to discredit me.

Let me begin with the charge of plagiarism—a charge originally made by the discredited academic, Norman Finkelstein, who has falsely charged virtually every pro-Israel writer with the same academic crime. In my case, the charge centered around a one-paragraph quotation from Mark Twain in my book The Case for Israel. I cited the paragraph to Mark Twain, but Finkelstein said that I should have cited it to a woman named Joan Peters, because he believes I found the quote in her book. But the truth is that I found the quote ten years prior to the publication of Peters’ book and used it repeatedly in debates and speeches. When Finkelstein leveled his absurd charge, I immediately reported it to the Harvard University President and to the Dean of the Law School and ask that it be thoroughly investigated. Harvard appointed its former president, Derek Bok, to investigate the charge. After a thorough investigation he found it to be utterly frivolous. But to the dogs of defamation this only goes to prove that Harvard must be part of the pro-Israel conspiracy.

The second charge is that I am pro-torture, despite my repeated categorical statements in my writings that I’m opposed to all torture under all circumstances. I do believe that torture will be used, not should be used in the event we ever experience a ticking bomb situation. Accordingly I have suggested that no torture should ever be permitted without a court approved warrant, of the type the ACLU has demanded in targeted killing cases. But to the dogs of defamation, this distinction is irrelevant. Because I am pro Israel, I must be pro torture. This is particularly ironic, since both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas routinely torture dissidents, without their leaders being called pro torture by the same hard left defamers who falsely accuse me.

Another Tack: That unwitting indecency revisited Ever since my column, “That unwitting indecency,” saw light two weeks ago, I’ve needed to occasionally consult the mirror to make sure I hadn’t morphed into a hideous monster that feeds on Irish tots. The column recounted my encounter in Cahersiveen, a tiny Irish township, with pupils hoisting “Save Palestine” […]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/author/lee-smith Yesterday the Bulgarian government announced the results of its investigation into the July 18, 2012 bus bombing that killed 5 Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver in the city of Burgas. At least two members of what appears to have been a three-man team belong to Hezbollah. More specifically, explained Bulgaria’s interior minister, […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3405 Last month, the Knesset passed a two-pronged law aimed at tackling eating disorders. Fashion models are now required to produce medical records proving that they are not malnourished. In the absence of proof of sufficient body mass — in accordance with World Health Organization standards — they cannot be hired for photo shoots, commercials, […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frank-crimi/afghan-woman-forced-to-marry-her-rapist/ A year after she was pardoned from prison on the condition she agree to marry her rapist, a young Afghan woman, faced with distressingly few options, has now reluctantly wed her attacker. In 2009, Gulnaz, then 16 years old, gained international attention after she was raped by her cousin’s husband and sentenced to 12 […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/kirsten-powers-the-last-liberal/ Last week Kirsten Powers, one of the more visible Democratic contributors to Fox News, wrote a lengthy piece for that organization’s website called “Obama vs. Fox News –behind the White House strategy to delegitimize a news organization.” In it she rather shockingly set herself apart from her more radical cohorts on the left by […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/339963/enhanced-argumentation-techniques-jonah-goldberg Zero Dark Thirty, the film about the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden, got a fresh infusion of buzz over the weekend when outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta confirmed again that enhanced-interrogation techniques aided the effort to find bin Laden. “Some of it came from . . . interrogation tactics that […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/340023/mission-new-congress-mario-loyola Congress needs to mind its own business, and let the states mind theirs. As the March 1 sequester deadline looms, congressional conservatives should wake up to the fact that an agenda focused solely on spending cuts is a losing agenda, one that wouldn’t help matters much even if it prevailed. Our very system of […]

http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=47498a2e1ad97dd3d09ae19c5&id=09d104b9db&e=ce445aaf82 In the early biography of Muhammad written by Ibn Ishaq there are many fascinating and intriguing incidents. One unforgettable story tells how Huwayyisa came to embrace Islam: The apostle said, ‘Kill any Jew that falls into your power.’ Thereupon Muhayyisa b. Mas’ud leapt upon Ibn Sunayna, a Jewish merchant with whom they had social […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/340012/will-senate-confirm-cia-director-who-denies-existence-what-secretary-state-called-glob

Will the Senate Confirm a CIA Director Who Denies the Existence of What the Secretary of State Called “the Global Jihadist Threat”?
In observations conveniently made on the way out the door, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged that the United States faces “a spreading jihadist threat,” led by al Qaeda. [For those who may have forgotten, that would be the jihadist network the Obama administration heretofore told us had been crushed thanks to the president’s steely resolve.] Again and again, Madame Secretary told a senate committee that the administration was now gravely concerned about this growing “jihadist threat” — worried that Syrian chemical and biological weapons could “fall into the wrong hands, jihadist hands”; worried about migrant al Qaeda operatives “who are in effect affiliates, part of the jihadist syndicate”; and worried about the “complicated set of allegiances between jihadist groups.”

Sounds like a huge national security challenge, no? Only problem is that President Obama’s nominee to head the nation’s premier intelligence agency denies that there is a jihadist threat.

Our enemies, John Brennan insists, “are not jihadists, for jihad is a holy struggle, an effort to purify for a legitimate purpose, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing holy or pure or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.” In fact, Brennan, the White House counterterrorism czar through the first Obama term, maintains that the president agrees with him on this point:

President Obama [does not] see this challenge as a fight against jihadists. Describing terrorists in this way, using the legitimate term ‘jihad,’ which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve.

Brennan’s confirmation hearing is today. As Steve Emerson recounts in a comprehensive post on the dreadful nomination, Brennan has repeated the trope that there is no violent jihad numerous times. In shaping Obama’s national security policy, his top agenda item has been to deny the palpable nexus between Islamic doctrine and Islamist brutality, and thus to blind our intelligence community to the ideological underpinnings of the threat against our nation, the West and Israel. Say what you will about Obama’s other nominations, including the hapless Chuck Hagel. Never has there been a more monumental mismatch between man and mission than Brennan and CIA director.

As I have explained here and elsewhere, Brennan’s meanderings about jihad are frivolous. On their face they are silly because Islam and the West do not have a single, consensus value system. In fundamental ways, we don’t agree on what a “legitimate purpose” is.

Even those who buy into the revisionist attempt to evolve the concept of jihad into a personal struggle to “purify oneself” or attain “a moral good” must, if they are being honest, concede that Muslims mean “purity” and “morality” as determined by sharia, Islam’s societal framework. To sharia-compliant Muslims, “purifying” oneself or one’s community might include demanding the killing of apostates and homosexuals, or demanding the suppression of speech that exposes some of the other draconian and iniquitous elements of Islamic doctrine. We in the West would regard these as morally monstrous … but that they are sharia desiderata cannot be credibly denied. A “personal struggle” to achieve them would thus be a legitimate “jihad,” even under Brennan’s interpretation.