RUTHFULLY YOURS

“They chopped children in half. They chopped all heads off. How do you respond to that? That is what we have been going through. That is what we are going through.” — The Reverend Canon Andrew White, “Vicar of Baghdad”.

“At dawn on Christmas Day, the barbaric regime of Iran hanged 7 people in mass execution in Shiraz.” — NCR-Iran.

There are always more and more frequent cases where the blasphemy law is used to target religious minorities or to settle cases of disputes or private rivalries, or simply as an instrument of blackmail.” — Shardar Mushtaq Gill, Pakistani Christian lawyer.

Sudan’s security agents and police have “broad powers to arrest Christians and other lowly-regarded people without cause, for creating public disturbance. The Christians were released after paying a fine of $250 each.” — Morning Star News.

Islamic law holds that new churches are never to be built in Muslim lands and existing ones never repaired. Even so, many of these partially wrecked churches continue to be used, and are even packed, during church services.

Once again, the month of Christmas witnessed some of the most barbaric attacks on Christians throughout the Islamic world.

Paul Weston is a British-based writer who focuses on the damage done to Western Civilisation by the hard left’s ongoing cultural revolution, which seeks to destroy the Christian, capitalist and racial base of the West. He is the leader of Liberty GB, his website may be found here, and his political Facebook page here. For links to his previous essays, see the Paul Weston Archives.

When a country is slowly dying (or being slowly murdered) it makes for depressing reading when one charts its death throes. This is precisely why I don’t write articles such as this on a regular basis. I really don’t want to foreshorten the time we have left by depressing people to such an extent they break out the accumulated sleeping pills, or reach for a tumbler of whisky and the trusty old service revolver in the study.

But sometimes it has to be done. The contents of this article are nothing new. They are not an exceptional set of events in an exceptional time. They are simply one week’s worth of news stories representing what goes on day-in day-out, week-in week-out, year-in year-out, within a country that dies a little death every day from the left-wing knife intent on making a thousand cuts.

It is hard to know where to begin, but the ongoing population replacement of the native British is always a good start. The foreign-born population of London is set to outnumber the native-born within the next fifteen years. What should be noted here is that the English are already a minority in London and that the majority of “native” London-born are not actually English at all. This ongoing catastrophe means our virtual extinction even before one factors in the booming foreign-born. In other words, the capitol city of England is already lost to the English and it will become exponentially worse very quickly.

The demographic decline of the English due to below replacement-level birth rates, coupled with the demographic explosion of Islam via mass immigration and high birth rates, is leading toward another totally predictable catastrophe in terms of democracy. For the first time in the history of Britain, foreign-born voters are set to decide the electoral outcome of several parliamentary constituencies.

As the years and decades pass, the ever-decreasing native British will find themselves increasingly unrepresented in national politics, something which even the liberal/left might find irksome in the extreme as reality finally dawns on their cranially challenged multiculti world view. At the moment, though, they are all for it. The English living in the London area of Brent are a minority, but local Labour MP Barry Gardiner thinks this a jolly good thing, and said:

“The great thing is that we

Ruth Lynn Deech, Baroness Deech, DBE is a British academic, lawyer and bioethicist, most noted for chairing the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, from 1994 to 2002, and as the former Principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford

Transcript:

Baroness Deech (CB): My Lords, with unfortunate timing, this debate is taking place two days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, despite the millions spent on Holocaust education and remembrance, the museums and memorials and the school visits to concentration camps, there is a gap in memory and education that needs to be bridged. The desire and opportunity to murder 6 million people of a different religion whose presence on his territory the murderer resents must not arise again. The message Jews took from the Holocaust was that their nationalism was necessary. It has been a success. Israel is not Saudi Arabia; it is not North Korea, Iran or Pakistan. It is a flourishing and democratic outpost in the desert with an astonishing record. It is a safe haven, an imperative for existence that can be applied to no other country in the world.

Yasser Arafat declared an independent state of Palestine in 1988 and recognition followed from 100 states. The subsequent failure to change anything on the ground demonstrates the truth of the international law on recognition: namely, that statehood has to be founded in fact, not in numbers of recognitions.

As far as this Motion goes, almost every word of it is dubious. There can be no contribution towards a two-state solution because recognition of Palestine, falsely based, will only make the situation more dangerous. There can be no two-state solution unless Palestine recognises Israel, which she has steadfastly refused to do. There is no statehood attaching to Palestine in international law because it does not meet the criteria. A sovereign state of a Muslim Palestine has never existed—not before 1948, and not before 1967. It was Egyptian and Jordanian territory. Ehud Olmert’s offer of a state was rejected in 2009. The intention of many of the players in the region has always been the elimination of a Jewish presence in the area, not the establishment of yet one more Muslim state. The problem with Israel is not that it has displaced anyone; according to its neighbours, the problem is that its population is largely Jewish.

The practical result of a premature state of Palestine would simply be to free up the import of arms into the new state. The aim underlying this move is the takeover of Israel. Why is there no preparation by the Palestinians for statehood? There is no governance structure, no independent administration, no industrialisation and no negotiation of trade agreements with its neighbour, Israel. The state would not be a state in any recognisable form. Its leaders have declared that the current residents, whose status as refugees defies all logic, would remain defined as refugees. They would not be granted citizenship, nor would the state of Palestine open its doors to the Palestinian diaspora—those Palestinians whose miserable lives in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and elsewhere in the region are worse than the lives of those in Gaza and the West Bank. It has also declared that it would be a Judenrein state, unlike the 1.8 million Arab residents of Israel who have chosen to stay there.

So if a state has no citizens, and will not grant them citizenship in defiance of international law, what would it be for? It would be for a closer jumping-off point for the demolition of the State of Israel in pursuance of the alleged right of return. As other noble Lords have said, Fatah and Hamas want a one-state solution. Why should Israel recognise Palestine if there is no reciprocity but only a step towards elimination in return?

In the climate of extremism that is sweeping Europe, why should a country want to take a step that risks feeding it more? The only purpose is manipulative—to allow Palestinians to pursue claims against Israel at the UN and other international bodies. In the face of what is happening in Europe, what agenda do the proponents serve? Would it not be a good idea to examine the excesses of this position and turn to state building on the ground as an alternative?

Israel’s antagonists often accuse her of apartheid. In the worst times of genuine apartheid in South Africa, Mandela was planning his future independent country’s constitution, educating its leaders, preaching peace, not vengeance, and acting as a statesman. In the early days of Zionism, before statehood, the Jewish residents of what was to be Israel prepared their governance structure, set up the organs of a state, created universities, made the desert bloom, prepared a legal system and a free press, trade unions, hospitals and charities. None of this is present in the Palestinian leadership; nothing is readied. It is not a state under international law, but I have no time to describe that.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

There are good and bad white blood cells. Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers have discovered that neutrophils (a form of white blood cell) contain many different subtypes. Some of these prevent cancer and others promote it. It opens avenues for therapies that increase anti-tumor neutrophils and limit pro-tumor ones.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/25078

Graft-vs-Host disease treatment gets boost. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has granted Israeli biotech Enlivex “orphan” status for its ApoCell treatment to prevent Graft-vs-Host Disease. It will speed up development of the Israeli innovation that stops rejection of transplanted cells and bone marrow.
http://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/enlivex-granted-eu-orphan-drug-designation-for-lead-product-apocell-for-graftversushost-disease-20150126-00574

Researching Autism with Japan. A team of Israeli and Japanese researchers has embarked on a project to discover how autistic spectrum disorder develops in the brain. It follows the conference “Advances in Brain Sciences”, jointly hosted by the Weizmann Institute of Science and Japan’s RIKEN Brain Science Institute.
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/israel-japan-researchers-teaming-on-autism-and-brain-research/2015/01/21/

Norwegian charity prize for Israeli cancer expert. (Thanks to Israel21c) Norway’s largest charitable organization, the Olav Thon Foundation has chosen Tel Aviv University cancer geneticist Professor Yosef Shiloh as one of the two recipients of its very first international medical research award.
http://www.israel21c.org/news/israeli-cancer-geneticist-wins-first-olav-thon-foundation-prize/

350,000 people to benefit from new medicines. Israel’s Health Council has added an additional 73 medicines and technologies into the Government’s subsidized “Health Basket”. The changes will benefit 350,000 Israelis at a cost of NIS 324 million.
http://www.health.gov.il/English/News_and_Events/Spokespersons_Messages/Pages/01012015_1.aspx

Mapping the brains of the blind. Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem are studying brain activity of blind people in order to shed new light on how our brains can adapt to the rapid cultural and technological changes of the 21st Century. Already they have found that reading Braille utilizes “visual” areas of the brain.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/25101
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Send video messages from your wristwatch. Israeli start-up Glide has developed video texting that is so fast, you be watching the video the other side of the world before your friend has finished recording it! And now, Glide is putting that technology onto smart watches. Remember Dick Tracey’s watch? It’s been superceded.
http://www.jpost.com/Business/Business-Features/For-Glide-video-is-the-new-text-389136

Ecological makeover for Tel Aviv bus station. The Onya Collective is turning Tel Aviv’s massive concrete bus station into a blossoming center for urban ecology. This includes hydroponics, growing plants without soil, under special LED lights. Gardens grow lettuce and strawberries using drip irrigation from the air-con system.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-tel-aviv-a-concrete-elephant-goes-from-blight-to-bloom-2/

China-Israel innovation cooperation. (Thanks to Michelle) Beijing hosted the first meeting of the China-Israel government innovative cooperation joint committee. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both sent their congratulations.
http://english.gov.cn/premier/news/2015/01/29/content_281475046958053.htm

Micro-irrigation for India. Israeli water company Netafim has been selected to partake in a $60 million micro-irrigation project in the Indian state of Karnataka. The project will span 12,000 hectares, help 6,700 farmers in 22 villages, increase crop production and save 50 percent of their water consumption.
http://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Netafim-joining-60m-Indian-irrigation-project-389166

A Digital Upgrade at the Tower of David Museum. (Thanks to Michelle) Jerusalem’s Tower of David Museum is introducing a new digital initiative. Position any mobile device over the view and an audiovisual guide, using IDF mapping technology, will identify and explain landmarks within the frame.
http://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/a-digital-upgrade-at-the-tower-of-david-museum/?_r=1

You won’t need this in Israel. Israeli Shalom Koresh has invented a new invisible kippa (skull cap) made from artificial hair called “Magic Kippa.” It is for Orthodox Jews in Europe where recent terrorist attacks against the Jewish communities have left many afraid to go out in public wearing a kippa.
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2015/01/25/a-new-invisible-magic-kippa-helps-jewish-men-who-fear-attacks/

How is that the Middle East’s sole democracy prompts so much angst, loathing, and condemnation? As a veteran news service correspondent explains, when an IDF soldier’s offensive T-shirt is deemed newsworthy and neo-Nazi rallies at Palestinian universities are not, there’s your answer.

The speech below was delivered by reporter Matti Friedman before the Britain Israel Communication & Research Centre in London on January 26:

One night several years ago, I came out of Bethlehem after a reporting assignment and crossed through the Israeli military checkpoint between that city and its neighbor, Jerusalem, where I live. With me were perhaps a dozen Palestinian men, mostly in their thirties – my age. No soldiers were visible at the entrance to the checkpoint, a precaution against suicide bombers. We saw only steel and concrete. I followed the other men through a metal detector into a stark corridor and followed instructions barked from a loudspeaker – Remove your belt! Lift up your shirt! The voice belonged to a soldier watching us on a closed-circuit camera. Exiting the checkpoint, adjusting my belt and clothing with the others, I felt like a being less than entirely human and understood, not for the first time, how a feeling like that would provoke someone to violence.

Consumers of news will recognize this scene as belonging to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which keeps the 2.5 million Palestinians in that territory under military rule, and has since 1967. The facts of this situation aren’t much in question. This should be an issue of concern to Israelis, whose democracy, military, and society are corroded by the inequality in the West Bank. This, too, isn’t much in question.

The question we must ask, as observers of the world, is why this conflict has come over time to draw more attention than any other, and why it is presented as it is. How have the doings in a country that constitutes 0.01 percent of the world’s surface become the focus of angst, loathing, and condemnation more than any other? We must ask how Israelis and Palestinians have become the stylized symbol of conflict, of strong and weak, the parallel bars upon which the intellectual Olympians of the West perform their tricks – not Turks and Kurds, not Han Chinese and Tibetans, not British soldiers and Iraqi Muslims, not Iraqi Muslims and Iraqi Christians, not Saudi sheikhs and Saudi women, not Indians and Kashmiris, not drug cartel thugs and Mexican villagers. Questioning why this is the case is in no way an attempt to evade or obscure reality, which is why I opened with the checkpoint leading from Bethlehem. On the contrary – anyone seeking a full understanding of reality can’t avoid this question. My experiences as a journalist provide part of the answer, and also raise pressing questions that go beyond the practice of journalism.

Please also remember German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, another noble German who died in 1967.
He was the first post-war Chancellor of Germany from 1949 to 1963. Dr. Adenauer, known as “Der Alte” (the elder in German) was the most impassioned advocate of reconciliation between the German people and of material reparations for victims of the Nazis.
He insisted that the Germans recognize their guilt and responsibility without excuses…for their enormous crime against the Jews.

The German leader’s odyssey of reconciliation was culminated by a pilgrimage to Israel by Dr. Adenauer in May 1966 after he stepped down as Chancellor. During that visit he restated his faith in the ultimate reconciliation between the Germans and the Jews. He bore with dignity, fortitude and understanding the inevitable anti-German demonstrations which his historic visit provoked in Israel.

Because of his efforts books which exculpate or deny the Holovaust are considered crimes in Germany and subject to fines and even imprisonment…..rsk

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/01/31/former-german-president-richard-von-weizsaecker-dies-at-94/22641313/

BERLIN (AP) — Former German President Richard von Weizsaecker, who urged his country to confront the Nazi past, promoted reconciliation and denounced far-right violence during a 10-year tenure that spanned the reunification of west and east, has died. He was 94.

President Joachim Gauck’s office announced Weizsaecker’s death on Saturday. Weizsaecker, a patrician and eloquent figure who was president from 1984 to 1994, raised the profile of the largely ceremonial presidency and established himself as a moral conscience for the nation.

Weizsaecker’s May 1985 speech marking the 40th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II cemented his reputation. It won widespread praise as an effort to bring fellow Germans to terms with the Holocaust.

“All of us, whether guilty or not, whether young or old, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it,” said Weizsaecker, who served as a regular soldier in Adolf Hitler’s army. “Anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present.”

“The 8th of May was a day of liberation,” he told the West German parliament. “It freed us all from the system of National Socialist tyranny.”

Later that month, the Netherlands’ German-born Prince Claus presented the president with a Dutch translation of the speech, telling him that it enabled him finally to acknowledge his roots in a country where resentment of the Nazi occupation remained widespread.

In October 1985, Weizsaecker made the first visit to Israel by a West German head of state. His Israeli counterpart, Chaim Herzog, said the comments had won Weizsaecker “a special place in the history of your people.”

“Richard von Weizsaecker stood worldwide for a Germany that had found its way to center of the democratic family of peoples,” current President Joachim Gauck said in a message of condolences to Weizsaecker’s widow. “He stood for a federal republic that faces up to its past

The other day I quoted this letter from Mindy Alter in The National Post:

Mark Steyn reminds us of the similarities between jihadists and climate-change alarmists. Both are fanatical. Both hew to ideologies that brook no dissent or criticism. Both go ballistic — albeit in markedly different ways — when some “blasphemer” has the audacity to make withering fun of them and their orthodoxies. Most crucially, however, is the fact that both are control freaks who seek to micro-manage our lives, the climate-change alarmists via onerous environmental regulations, the jihadists via Sharia law.

To which I responded:

Oh, c’mon on, it’s not quite that bad: The Allahu Akbar crowd demand death for apostasy. So far the climate mullahs are only advocating prison terms for us apostates.

I spoke too soon: Greenpeace Activist Calls For Climate Change ‘Deniers’ To Be Beheaded

President Obama’s self-congratulatory State of the Union message last week made it sound like our nation’s problems are behind us. But on Tuesday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office set the record straight with a blistering warning.

The CBO cautioned that America’s unaffordable public programs and crushing debt will condemn us to anemic economic growth.

Total federal debt will reach $22.3 trillion by 2020. Unsustainable, says the CBO — especially when now-low interest rates return to normal.

Don’t count on spendaholics in Congress to take this warning seriously. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), for example, responded to the CBO by boasting about this year’ s $468 billion federal deficit — the smallest since Obama took office — and smirking at “Republican rhetoric about ‘a big government’ boogeyman.”

Sorry, senator. The CBO predicts you won’t be seeing deficits that small again except in the rear-view mirror. By 2020, the deficit will nearly double, as federal spending reaches a staggering $4.8 trillion.

A four-foot stack of $100 bills totals $1 million. To get to $1 billion, you need seven stacks as high as the Washington monument. To get to $4.8 trillion, you need 33,000 Washington monuments.

Or an increasing number of entitlement programs. The CBO report devotes an entire chapter to the nation’s newest entitlement, ObamaCare, presenting three distressing facts on the programs next five years:
• The cost of subsidies on the exchanges will more than triple, from $32 billion to $106 billion in 2020.
• Over the same period, federal Medicaid costs (also goosed by the ObamaCare law) will double.
• Despite all the spending, 30 million people will still be uninsured. That’s more than the number the law helps.

Nick Gray is Director, Christian Middle East Watch, a British organisation dedicated to objective and factual discussion of Middle Eastern issues, especially of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Christian leaders be careful what you link to

The extraordinary case of an English Christian vicar using social media in Holocaust Memorial week to highlight conspiracy theories that Israel perpetrated the 9/11 attacks shows how casual and unyielding hatred of the Jewish state has become in mainstream Britain

The pleasant and rather up-market town of Virginia Water in South-West London must have wondered what was going on this week as it was invaded by live-broadcast satellite TV vans and their accompanying film crews and reporters.

As random worthy citizens of Virginia Water were interviewed it came to light that it was their vicar, Rev Dr Stephen Sizer, who had brought this invasion upon them.

Stephen Sizer is an evangelical clergyman of long standing, who besides pastoring his congregation somehow manages to cause dismay and concern over speeches, writings and Facebook posts concerning Israel. In fact, it would not take too deep a reading of his material to encourage one to label him as firmly anti-Israel in both his politics and theology.

Sizer repeatedly claims that he cares “…passionately about the safety of the Jewish people and the right of Israel to exist within internationally agreed borders”. For someone making such an apparently balanced statement, Sizer’s writings and activities betray an attitude towards the conflict that is anything but balanced.

The administration makes a desperate and indefensible claim.

No doubt because of my background investigating, prosecuting, and studying terrorism, the cynical claim by White House spokesmen that the Taliban is not a terrorist organization has annoyed me even more than the Obama administration’s nonstop lying usually does. No surprise then that I could be found railing about it on The Kelly File Thursday night.

In that spirit, ten thoughts for the weekend:

1. Under federal law, there are only three requirements for a group to qualify as a “foreign terrorist organization”: It has to be (a) foreign, (b) engaged in “terrorist activity” (bombings, assassinations, etc., carried out to intimidate people and change policy), and (c) a national-security threat to the United States. The law that covers this is Sec. 1189(a) of Title 8, U.S. Code, from the federal Immigration and Nationality Act. It’s here, and it’s just the first few lines — even a president who routinely ignores the laws he is sworn to execute faithfully should be able to make some time for it, maybe on the plane ride between the golf course and the Saudi palace.