RUTHFULLY YOURS

Kenichi Hartman Grew up biracial (white/Asian) and tricultural (American/Japanese/Jewish), mostly in Tokyo and Palo Alto. Made Aliyah in October 2011 along with his loving wife and two adorable daughters.

Part one:http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-startup-samurai-in-the-startup-nation-an-interview-with-kentaro-sakakibara-part-i/

Kentaro Sakakibara interview part III – What do the Japanese know about Israel

KH: You mentioned before that you’ve been getting opposition on Twitter from your fellow Japanese about setting up Samurai House in Israel.

KS: People have been raising all sorts of doubts and questions through Twitter and personal communication. We’ve been getting it from everybody! It seems like there’s no one in Japan who hasn’t asked me what the heck I’m doing here! (laughs). It’s really tiring every time I go back to Japan now because I have to constantly answer the same questions about “Why Israel?” Really, I should record my answer and push “play” every time someone questions my decision to go to Israel.

KH: So what’s the nature of the push-back you’re getting about being in Israel? I can think to two basic reasons: (1) Israel is perceived to be very dangerous, so people in Japan might wonder why you’re going out of your way to risk the personal safely of you and your associates; or (2) You are being overly hasty in embracing cooperation with Israel, because the Arab-Israeli or Palestinian-Israeli conflict still has not been resolved.

KS: The opposition is usually much more simplistic than that. They think Israel = Middle East = just like Syria. It’s all just one big jumble in their heads. People ask, “What’s over there, just desert and wars, right?” Most Japanese still don’t get that what’s going on Israel is unique compared to the rest of the region. There are more than a few people who think that Israel is primarily a Muslim country because, after all, it’s in the Middle East! So they think I’m just wasting my time, and doing it in a very dangerous place!

Israeli tech sweeps Verizon contest with $1.5 million in prizes
Three start-ups from Israel – representing a quarter of all participants – named Powerful Answer contest winners

In a worldwide contest by US telecom giant Verizon to search out top technologies that can help people live better lives, Israeli start-ups swept three out of the twelve prizes awarded – including one of the top prizes, a million-dollar payout.

Oded Ben-Dov, the inventor of the winning Sesame Enable smartphone, plans to use the money his invention was awarded for a full rollout of the device, which lets individuals who cannot use their limbs due to the effects of conditions like ALS, paralysis, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injuries to make phone calls, surf the web, and send text messages, all with a slight movement of their head.

“It’s a very proud and happy day for the disabled, and for us at Sesame Enable,” said Ben-Dov upon hearing that he won a million dollars in the Verizon Powerful Voices contest. “Now we have the resources to continue our work, enabling the severely disabled to interact with the online world in a way that was impossible until now.”

Relations between blacks and Jews in the US have been poor since 1968, when the New York teachers strike pitted the overwhelmingly Jewish United Federation of Teachers against a black community-controlled school board. The traditional flirtation of the black community with various forms of Islam, from the homegrown version of the original Nation of Islam to the increasing numbers of black converts to more normative Islam, has added an anti-Zionist flavor; and there seems to be no lack of outright anti-Jewish agitators like Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, and of course Jeremiah Wright.

In this context, the appropriation by anti-Israel elements of the ‘Ferguson’ movement against police violence and putative racism makes sense. There is, they think, a fertile field in the black community to plant with comparisons between blacks and Palestinian Arabs, between the PLO and Hamas and the SCLC, SNCC, CORE, etc. groups that fought the battle against Jim Crow in the South in the 1950s and 1960s.

We have witnessed over and over again Arab and Muslim war crimes on a never ending spiral of horror inflicted upon Israel’s civilian population. No doubt, future salvos of missiles will rein down upon Israeli villages, towns and cities, fired by the Iranian supported Hamas occupiers of Gaza and by Hezbollah in Lebanon. As before, the world will yawn.

But then, remarkably, it will doubtless awaken when the Jews have the unmitigated gall, temerity and chutzpah to defend themselves under unbearable Muslim violence and provocation as they were forced to do during the latest Gaza War.

It will be then, as always, that an outpouring of brutish and irrational hatred towards the Jewish state will explode in much of the morally bankrupt mainstream media, and among the thousands of hate filled Muslims who will take to the streets of European capitals in violent displays of hate.

The world had also yawned before and during the dark years of World War 2 when Jews were disappearing all over Europe. It was a time of towering intolerance and we have now retreated to those terrible years yet again.

Over at Mosaic Magazine, former Bush aide Michael Doran claims that the Obama administration has had a secret strategy to engage Iran from the time it took office. He’s right, but neglected to mention that George W. Bush and his National Security Advisor Condileeza Rice adopted the same strategy from the same source in November 2006, after the Republicans got crushed in the 2006 Congressional elections. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got a pink slip, Vice President Dick Cheney got benched, and “realist” Robert Gates–the co-chairman of the 2004 Council on Foreign Relations task force that advocated a deal with Iran–took over at Defense. Michael Doran reports all of this, all, that is, except Gates’ central role in the plan. That would place a good deal of the blame at Bush’s doorstep.

Writes Doran:

When he arrived in Washington in 2006, [Obama] absorbed a set of ideas that had incubated on Capitol Hill during the previous three years—ideas that had received widespread attention thanks to the final report of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan congressional commission whose co-chairs, former secretary of state James Baker and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, interpreted their mission broadly, offering advice on all key aspects of Middle East policy.

A four star admiral, who was in charge of the largest single military command in the world, slammed Barack Obama, and warned Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated every U.S. National Security Agency under Obama’s administration.

The stunning claim, from one of America’s highest-ranking career officers, has shocked Washington, D.C., and came just days before Obama would invite more than a dozen Muslim Brotherhood leaders to a private, press-banned meeting in the White House.

Admiral James A. Lyons – the former Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the largest single military command in the world, and “the father” of Red Cell – the Navy’s anti-terrorism units – said that “the transformation of America has been in full swing ever since 2008,” the year Obama was elected based upon his campaign promise to “fundamentally transform America.”

A teacher at France’s only state-funded Muslim faith school has quit
his job, writing in a leading newspaper that the establishment was
riddled with anti-Semitism and was “promoting Islamism” to pupils.

Philosophy teacher Sofiane Zitouni wrote in left-leaning daily
Libération on February 5 that the Averroès Lycée (high school) in the
northern French city of Lille was a hotbed of “anti-Semitism,
sectarianism and insidious Islamism”.

When John Boehner announced that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had accepted his invitation to address Congress, the Obama Administration reacted strongly. The criticism was not directed primarily at Boehner, who apparently did not inform the White House of the invitation, and may have acted unconstitutionally in delivering it, but against Netanyahu, for breaching diplomatic protocol by accepting the invitation without first notifying the White House.

For example, AP reported that White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest “says typical protocol is that a country’s leader would contact the White House before planning to visit the United States. But Earnest says they didn’t hear about Boehner’s invitation until Wednesday morning, shortly before the speaker announced it publicly.” State Department spokesperson Jan Psaki was a bit more circumspect, stating that “traditionally we would learn about plans of leaders…separately from…the Speaker,” i.e., one assumes, from the leader or his representiative.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.

On Wednesday, Hamas leader in Gaza Mahmoud Zahar called on Hamas terrorists in Lebanon and Syria to attack Israel “to help us liberate Palestine.”

At the same time, Zahar denied that Hamas has been involved in the terrorist insurgency in Egypt. As he put it, “Our guns are always trained on the enemy,” that is, Israel.

The Egyptian regime was not impressed by Zahar’s protestations.

Last Saturday, an Egyptian court upheld an October 2014 decision by the Egyptian government to outlaw Hamas’s terrorist shock forces Izzadin Kassam, and designate it a terrorist organization.

Both the government’s initial designation and the court’s decision were in some sense, watershed events. They represent the first time an Arab regime ever defined any Palestinian terrorist organization as a terrorist group.

But in truth, Egypt had no choice. Despite its insistent protestations that the Jews are its only enemies, Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been a major player, indeed, arguably the key player in the jihadist insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula that threatens to destroy the political, economic and military viability of the Egyptian state. The declared purpose of the insurgency is to overthrow the regime of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and integrate Egypt into Islamic State’s “caliphate.”

Last week saw yet another devastating terror assault against Egyptian security forces and civilians in Sinai and in cities around Egypt. Thirty- two people, mainly soldiers, were killed in a coordinated, multifaceted attack that included Hamas’s three signature modes of operation – mortars, rockets and suicide bombings.

Last week’s assault, like almost all previous ones, was credited to Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, a jihadist group that has pledged allegiance to Islamic State and declared Sinai a province of its “caliphate.”

According to a report by Yoram Schweitzer from the Institute for National Security Studies, Hamas members were among the original founders of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis. The Egyptian government views Hamas-controlled Gaza as the rear headquarters of the group. In founding the group, Hamas cooperated with local Salafist Beduin and with al-Qaida terrorists who escaped Egyptian prisons during the January 2011 uprising against then-president Hosni Mubarak.

Michael Auslin is a resident scholar and the director of Japan Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he specializes in Asian regional security and political issues. Before joining AEI, Auslin was an associate professor of history at Yale University

Like the Lilliputians, North Korea will continue to tie down the world’s Gulliver. Both, in their own way, are status quo powers. The longer Washington waits for the Kim regime to collapse under its own weight, the more dangerous Northeast Asia becomes. Watch this space

The computer screens at Sony Pictures Corporation went dark and then flickered back to life with a ghoulish image and threatening message on November 24, 2014, and thus began the most brazen cyberattack in memory. Two weeks later, a shadowy group called The Guardians of Peace, which claimed responsibility for the attack, demanded that the company pull its release of the upcoming film The Interview, a dark comedy about assassinating North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

The group’s demand immediately led to allegations that the government of the world’s most isolated totalitarian state had started a new chapter in its long history of aggression against the outside world.

The North Korean government had condemned the movie back in June, employing its usual threatening bluster in a letter to the United Nations that vowed to take a “decisive and merciless countermeasure” if the movie were released. Pyongyang’s later denial of responsibility was dismissed in the wake of the FBI’s conclusion that North Korea was indeed the cyber culprit, and new sanctions were announced by the Obama administration in January 2015.