RUTHFULLY YOURS

Brussels, April 19 – Fresh on the heels of yet another brutal video clip featuring a mass-execution of “infidels” by Islamic State fighters, sixteen Foreign Ministers of the European Union decided to address the danger by voting to mark products produced in Israeli settlements.

IS militants in Libya conducted two mass executions this week, beheading one group of Ethiopians and Eritreans along the Mediterranean coast and shooting the other. Dozens of victims were killed in the two incidents, which were filmed and distributed to international media. In response, the EU ministers vowed to take measures to protect those threatened by IS barbarism, and determined that the best way to prevent recurrences of mass beheadings in Syria, Iraq, and Libya would be to apply a distinctive label to all products imported into EU nations from areas in the West Bank where Jews live.

Israel analysts shocked by Obama’s comments on sanctions, S-300 supply‘This is the new America. We had better get used to it,’ says TV commentator after president leaves door open to Iran’s sanctions demand, defends Putin’s missile sale

There was no immediate official Israeli response to the president’s comments, which were made after the start of Shabbat in Israel, when politicians generally do not work.

“Jaws dropped” around the studio, said the Channel 10 News diplomatic commentator Ben Caspit, as news broke of Obama’s declared empathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to supply Tehran with the S-300 missile defense system.

I had no idea this conference took place…please see who participated….. as well as Ralph “Nadir” (synonyms: lowest point, lowest level, all-time low, bottom, rock-bottom) of American Israel bashers….rsk
Following the heavy coverage of AIPAC’s (the virulently pro-Israeli government lobby) multi-day annual Washington convention in March, the mainstream media might have been interested for once in covering alternative viewpoints like those discussed at the April 10th conference “The Israel Lobby: Is it Good for the US? Is it Good for Israel?” (Israellobbyus.org). Fairness and balance in reporting should produce at least some coverage of such an event.

Organized by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, which was launched about thirty years ago by a British Army Officer who served in World War II and two retired U.S. Ambassadors to countries in the Middle East (wrmea.org), the day-long program at the prestigious National Press Club should have been intriguing to reporters. After all, are they not interested in important, taboo-challenging presentations on a critical dimension of U.S. foreign and military policy?

The presenters were much more newsworthy than most of the speakers at the AIPAC convention who redundantly restated the predictable AIPAC line. “The Israel Lobby: Is it Good for the US? Is it Good for Israel?” had presenters ranging from the courageous, principled columnist, Gideon Levy of Israel’s best and most serious newspaper, Haaretz; Princeton Professor emeritus of international law and the former UN Special Rapporteur for Palestinian territories, Richard Falk; former members of Congress, Paul Findley (R-IL) and Nick Rahall (D-WV); author and an Israeli general’s son, Miko Peled; Dr. Jack Shaheen, the award-winning author documenting stereotypes of Arabs and Arab-Americans in Hollywood and the U.S. media; and even a former AIPAC supporter M. J. Rosenberg (mjrosenberg.net) who witnessed the power of AIPAC money as both a congressional staffer and later an AIPAC senior staffer in the nineteen eighties.

First the right stuff:

The GOP’s hawks were well represented at the event, led by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has limited foreign policy experience but articulated a muscular vision during his Saturday keynote address. Walker said the threats posed by radical Islamic terrorism won’t be handled simply with “a couple bombings.”
“We’re not going to wait till they bring the fight to us,” Walker said. “We’re going to bring the fight to them and fight on their soil.” And Rubio is right up there in just about everything.

Then the blather:

Jeb Bush:”Our enemies need to fear us, a little bit, just enough for them to deter the actions that create insecurity,” Bush said earlier in the conference. He said restoring alliances “that will create less likelihood of America’s boots on the ground has to be the priority, the first priority of the next president.”

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham addressed the question of putting U.S. troops directly in the battle against the Islamic State group militants by saying there is only one way to defeat the militants: “You go over there and you fight them so they don’t come here.”

New York Rep. Peter King said: “If America becomes isolationist, if America sits back from its responsibilities, that gap is going to be filled by enemies.”

Businesswoman Carly Fiorina offered a similar outlook. “The world is a more dangerous and more tragic place when America is not leading. And America has not led for quite some time,” she said.

After eight years of a president who has hung Israel out to dry, American Jews might be expecting some relief at the 2016 election.

After eight years of a president who has hung Israel out to dry, American Jews might be expecting some relief at the 2016 election. Surely, they might be thinking (unless they are the 70-odd percent of US Jews who voted for President Obama) anyone else can only be an improvement? Enter Hillary Clinton.

Earlier this week, to the surprise of no one who has not spent the past two decades on Mars, Hillary announced she would be running for president.

To be more precise, she is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination – but then if you’re Hillary, humility is not your thing. Since her husband, Bill, was in power, she has behaved as if her own eventual succession to the White House was part of the divine right of kings.

Something’s in the air, and it’s not just the normal spring rituals of protests, love and allergies. It’s the unsettling sound of radicalism tearing America apart.

Ideas that only recently were relegated to the fringes are now going mainstream. And policies that were settled, established norms are under vicious assault.

Here’s the real shocker: The radicals are not limited to Occupy Wall Street and other anarchists demonstrating against cops, capitalism and all authority. Instead, respected public figures and government officials who would normally defend the establishment are leading the charge against it.

Take the growing New York movement to opt out of standardized student tests. While unions are protesting the use of tests for teacher evaluations, many middle-class parents are joining them.

Indeed, the most prominent opt-out leader is Rob Astorino, the county executive of Westchester County and last year’s GOP gubernatorial nominee.

Astorino, who presides over a suburban bastion of orderly and manicured prosperity, wants to repeal the Common Core standards adopted by New York and more than 40 other states. He boasted that he and his wife, a special-ed teacher, withheld their children from the exams for the second year because the tests “are poorly and secretly devised, developmentally inappropriate, disruptive to wider learning, and federally rather than locally engineered, among other concerns.”

http://www.cv6.org/1942/doolittle/doolittle.htm “THIS FORCE IS BOUND FOR TOKYO-TO COL. DOOLITTLE AND HIS GALLANT COMMAND GOOD LUCK AND GOD BLESS YOU Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, 13 April 1942 In the wake of shock and anger following Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt pressed his military planners for a strike against Tokyo. Intended as revenge for Pearl Harbor, and […]

At a time when American morale was at its lowest point during World War II, the secret mission dubbed the “Doolittle Raid” seemed too audacious even for screenwriters pumping out war movies in Hollywood.

Seventy-three years later, Victor Egger still shakes his head as he recalls his role on April 18, 1942 — just four months after Japan’s devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. “I still find it hard to believe,” Egger said.

For the young Texas sailor, just two months shy of his 21st birthday, the bombing raid on Tokyo and other Japanese cities led by Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle signaled the start of a bold six-month campaign. As the fate of the world hung in the balance, Egger took part in some of the greatest battles in U.S. Navy history.

Now Egger, 93, a resident of a Grand Prairie assisted living facility, finds himself in another battle. He’s determined that this history, made up of thousands of acts of heroism great and small, be remembered amid his generation’s fading footsteps.

Egger recalled chatting recently with the grandson of a fellow resident when the subject of Doolittle’s raid came up. “He’d never heard of him!” Egger said. “Young people don’t know anything about this.”

That’s why, leaning on his walker, he still talks to groups, especially students. “I feel the biggest mistake veterans have done,” he said, “is not talk about their experiences during the war.”

Only two men are left alive from the 80 airmen and pilots who took off from the deck of the USS Hornet on April 18, 1942, and set out to send Japan a message that the U.S. would stop at nothing to win the war begun by Japan a few months earlier.

Retired Lt. Col. Richard “Dick” Cole, 99, and Staff Sgt. David Thatcher, 93, are the last of the Doolittle Raiders — the men who struck the first blow against the Japanese empire by bombing Tokyo. They are in Dayton, Ohio, today to present the Raiders Congressional Gold Medal to the National Museum of the US Air Force.

Let us please stipulate that in a rational world, a woman like Hillary Rodham Clinton would have absolutely no chance of being nominated for, much less elected, president of the United States. She has achieved nothing, accomplished nothing (unless you count the four dead Americans at Benghazi, for which she will ultimately be held responsible); she is an exremely poor public speaker, full of annoying verbal and physical tics; she is legendarily dishonest; she is a hard-core Alinskyite; and in general a wretched human being. By rights, she should be laughed off the stage, the same way the smart set laughed at Lurleen Wallace, who succeeded her husband George Wallace, the racist Democrat, as governor of Alabama back in 1967. She has no natural political constituency, except the manufactured “women’s vote,” and no rationale for her candidacy except that it’s “time” for a woman president, just as it was “time” for a part-black African, part-Arab, half-white, paternally cultural Muslim to pass for a traditional African-American Christian and be elected president in 2008.