RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Palestinian Authority has no intention of recognizing Israel’s right to exist. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Methodists are laboring under the false hope that “peace and justice” is possible if only Israel would be more accommodating.

The United Methodist Kairos Response Committee has adopted “apartheid” and boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) strategies, without considering how this may instead actually increase friction, strife and division.

The Methodists and other Christian groups with “peace and justice” interests such as the Presbyterian Church USA, United Church of Christ, Scottish Presbyterian Church and the members of the World Council of Churches need to accept some responsibility for aggravating the anti-Semitism energizing the popular imagination today.

The Methodist Church could instead consider actions of a kind designed to help rather than undermine peace — projects envisioned by a variety of goodhearted and resourceful people, who see opportunities where others clearly appear to be more interested in hurting Israel and the Jews than in actually helping the Palestinians.

Roughly 850 delegates from every corner of the world are currently preparing for the upcoming United Methodist General Conference (May 10-20, 2016). The quadrennial policy conference brings together representatives of 12.5 million members worldwide, including 7 million in the USA. During this ten-day event, delegates will consider a variety of church governance issues and a broad spectrum of social action proposals presented by member committees.

The United Methodist Kairos Response (UMKR) is one such committee. This group’s alleged mission, to promote “peace and justice” in Israel and Palestine, is sadly based on promoting the Palestinian cause — at Israel’s expense. Israel, according to the UMKR, appears to be the sole cause of Palestinian suffering.

Although the group accuses Israel of expanding “illegal settlements” in Arab territory, according to Elliott Abrams and Uri Sadot, writing in Foreign Policy, the accusation is totally untrue:

“To the question, ‘Is Israel vastly increasing the pace of settlement activity, making the establishment of a future Palestinian state less and less likely?’ the short answer, and the right answer, is no.

“Just as Israel was denounced far and wide for ‘settlement expansion,’ regular reports released by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics on settlement activity reveals is that Israel’s actual settlement construction pace has reached a historical low. Only 507 housing units were approved for construction by Netanyahu’s government in the first six months of 2014, a 71.9% decrease from the same period in 2013. About one-third of those is being built inside the major blocks it is understood Israel will keep in any final status agreement.

“For a population of more than 300,000 Israelis living in the West Bank, that pace of construction does not even allow for natural population growth, much less rapid expansion.

“It’s a lose-lose situation for Bibi, as nasty attacks from settler leaders coincide with those from prime ministers, foreign ministers, and presidents across the globe. The Israeli prime minister deserves credit, under these circumstances, for sticking to what he has said and appears to believe: Israel must build where it will stay, in Jerusalem and the major blocks, and it is foolish to waste resources in West Bank areas it will someday leave.

Freedom of speech is the ultimate liberal value — and it is the first value that people who wish to control us would take away.

If a court in a Western society decides to censor or punish Geert Wilders or others for non-violent speech, the court not only attacks the very humanistic values and liberal society we claim to hold dear; it brings us a step closer to totalitarianism. Even the idea of having an “acceptable” range of views is inherently totalitarian.

But what does one do if immigrants prefer not to assimilate? Europeans may be faced with a painful choice: What do they want more, the humanistic values of individual freedom or an Islamized Europe?

Censorship is not a path we should wish to take. While we may rightly fear those on the political right, we would do well to fear even more the autocratic thought police and censorship on the political left.

You are not truly a proponent of free speech unless you defend speech you dislike as fervently as speech you like.

There are many issues concerning the views of the Dutch MP, Geert Wilders, head of rapidly growing political party, the Freedom Party (Partij voor de Vrijheid, or PVV). Dutch prosecutors have charged Wilders with insulting deliberately a group of people because of their race and inciting hatred. Wilders’s trial focuses on a speech he gave, in which he asked a crowd of supports whether they wanted more or fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands. In another instance, Wilders is reported to have stated that The Hague should be “a city with fewer burdens and if possible fewer Moroccans.” Wilders admits to having made the remarks.

Srdja Trifkovic discusses on Radio Sputnik International the sentencing of Dr. Radovan Karadzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
Trifkovic: The verdict had been written well in advance of Karadzic’s arrest in 2008. All key points in the verdict had been prepared well in advance based on a previous sentence, against General [Radislav] Krstic, when the “Srebrenica genocide” was quasi-legally verified. This is the logical outcome of a politicized tribunal with politicized proceedings…

Sputnik: What are we going to see now, when it comes to the future of the Republika Srpska?

Trifkovic: We are going to see the use of this verdict as another building bloc in the political case for the dismantling of the Dayton Agreement, signed in the fall of 1995, which recognized the Republika Srpska as a semi-autonomous entity within Bosnia-Herzegovina. This will be used, together with some previous verdicts, as justification for a sustained attempt to delegitimize its existence and to claim that—having verified the guilt of Karadzic—it is now time to look for another arrangement for the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a more or less unitarized state—in which, by virtue of their members, the Muslims will have predominance.

Sputnik: Many people will probably think “well, this is the end of an era, the end of the story,” but it’s not going to be like that in your opinion?

Trifkovic: Not at all. The whole show at The Hague Tribunal has the task of providing legal justification for the decisions made by the Western powers in the 1990’s. Nobody at The Hague is looking at the circumstances that led to the civil war in Bosnia, the way in which the illegal referendum on February 29-March 1, 1992 resulted in the war; or at the role of the American Ambassador in Belgrade at that time, Warren Zimmermann, who flew to Sarajevo in March 1992 to dissuade Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim leader, from accepting the plan put together by the European Union under Portugals’ presidency, the plan which could have prevented the war even before the first shot was fired. This is selective justice by a tribunal with a clear brief to prove Serbian guilt as retroactive justification for political decisions made at the time.

JAKARTA, Indonesia—Indonesia’s foreign ministry said Tuesday that 10 Indonesian nationals are being held hostage after their ship was hijacked in Philippine waters.

The ministry said in a statement that the owner of the hijacked tug boat and coal barge has received two telephone calls purportedly from militant group Abu Sayyaf, which is demanding a ransom.

It doesn’t know exactly when the incident occurred but said the shipowner was first contacted on Saturday. The ministry’s statement referred to the hostage takers as pirates.

Abu Sayyaf, which is on U.S. and Philippine lists of terrorist organizations, is notorious for bombings, extortions and kidnappings for ransom in the volatile south of the Philippines. It has been weakened by years of U.S.-backed Philippine military offensives but remains a security threat.

Retired leader Fidel Castro accused U.S. President Barack Obama of sweet-talking the Cuban people during his visit to the island last week and ignoring the accomplishments of Communist rule, in an opinion piece carried by all state-run media on Monday.

Obama’s visit was aimed at consolidating a detente between the once intractable Cold War enemies and the U.S. president said in a speech to the Cuban people that it was time for both nations to put the past behind them and face the future “as friends and as neighbors and as family, together.”

“One assumes that every one of us ran the risk of a heart attack listening to these words,” Castro said in his column, dismissing Obama’s comments as “honey-coated” and reminding Cubans of the many U.S. efforts to overthrow and weaken the Communist government.

Castro, 89, laced his opinion piece with nationalist sentiment and, bristling at Obama’s offer to help Cuba, said the country was able to produce the food and material riches it needs with the efforts of its people.