RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israel rights group, Shurat Hadin, has announced its intentions to file complaints against three officials of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO, Fatah) at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Complaints will be filed against Jibril Rajoub, Majed Faraj, and Rami Hamdallah for war crimes and human rights violations in the Palestinian Authority.

Attorney for the NGO, Nitzana Darshan-Leitner said, “Abbas and his friends in the terrorist organizations think that the law can only be used as a weapon against Israel, but that they not be held accountable for crimes against Israel or their own people. The PLO and Hamas need to understand that the International Criminal Court is a double-edged sword.”

Shurat HaDin (Israel Law Center) has filed three more war crimes suit against Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) officials in the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague.

The NGO says that while the Palestinian leadership can be indicted for terror acts carried out from 2002 onward, Israel can only be indicted for deeds done from the day the PLO joined the Rome Statute – the request to join was signed last week.

The most senior U.S. delegation in decades will soon be in Havana to engage a declared enemy of the United States in discussions about “normalizing” relations. Covering much more subject matter than routine migration issues, these meetings stem in large measure from the December 17 return of spies to Cuba who are responsible for American deaths.

Obama sent three Cuban spies back to the island, trading them for the release of American Alan Gross. Mr. Gross had been held hostage for five years for the “crime” of teaching Jewish Cubans how to connect to the Internet. As part of this lopsided deal, the Obama administration also declared American policy a failure and offered a large basket of potential economic and diplomatic benefits.

The experts there are getting the change they believed in — and just listen to them howl.

Obamacare has come to Harvard, and the faculty is in a state of shock and dismay.

In what has to be considered an early contender for the most hilarious and enjoyable news story of the year, the New York Times recounts the tumult over Obamacare in Cambridge.

“For years,” the Times writes, “Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.”

For even the most heinous crimes, juries are very reluctant to impose the death penalty.

Unless the federal court indulges last-ditch efforts by the defense for further delay, the least interesting aspect of the case against accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will begin this week: the determination of guilt or innocence.

That is the backwards nature of a capital case. In ordinary trials, a jury is there only to decide the question of guilt. When the death penalty is involved, though, the jury also imposes the sentence, usually the task of the trial judge. A death-penalty case is thus a bifurcated trial, and it is the later sentencing phase that really matters.

Despite the partnership between the terrorist organizations Hamas and Fatah (the new name for Arafat’s PLO), some Europeans nations are demanding that Israel immediately accede to Hamas/Fatah demands or they will proceed in the UN to declare a Palestinian State. The U.N. will impose on Israel conditions that will not only strip her of her capital, Jerusalem, but place Israelis in instant jeopardy from rockets launched against her from this newly-declared state abutting Israel. Like Gaza before, this newest Arab Palestinian state will become a terrorist state and a proxy of Iran.

Knowing that Fatah and Hamas will get a better deal pushing for a Palestinian state unilaterally declared by the U.N. rather than sitting for serious negotiation with Israel, Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah and a well-known denier of the Holocaust, has deliberately made negotiations impossible and dangerous for Israel by setting pre-conditions that are suicidal to Israel, conditions to which no sane Israeli government concerned about survival can yield.

Thus, Israel has been placed in a no-win situation. If it agrees to Abbas’s negotiation demands it has to (1) relinquish historic Jerusalem, (2) uproot almost 500,000 of its citizens from neighborhoods the Arabs demand be Juderein (free

Daniel Greenfield on “The Top Stories of 2014 and Predictions for 2015″ — on The Glazov Gang
The good, the bad and the ugly.
http://jamieglazov.com/2015/01/05/daniel-greenfield-on-the-top-stories-of-2014-and-predictions-for-2015-on-the-glazov-gang/

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a people in economic straights will search for a scapegoat. With Europe – six years after the financial crisis – still mired in economic difficulties, the rise of extremism is a consequence of that behavior. And there is little question that the fringe that represents extremism is broadening.

Even though a dozen European countries have communist parties, it is telling that when one Googles ‘European extreme political parties,’ the only ones that show up are those on the right. It reflects the media bias, and that those on the left fear only right-wing autocracies. Conservatives, on the other hand, dislike ‘big’ government in any form; thus are concerned about totalitarianism no matter whether it emerges from the right or the left.

It was interesting that Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a New Year’s Day speech, denounced Europe’s far-right parties, slamming the organizers of recent anti-Islam protests in Germany. She described them as having “hearts often full of prejudice, and even hate.” Her attack on right-wing populism was echoed by France’s François Hollande and Italy’s retiring president, the 89-year old Giorgio Napolitano. While xenophobia in any form is to be reviled, it is curious that all three ignored the anti-Semitism that has been emerging from, among other places, Europe’s elite (generally Leftist in their political philosophy), but perhaps most frightening, from Muslim communities – the fastest growing segment of Europe’s population. The speeches ignored left-wing populism, which are every bit as ubiquitous and virulent as that from the right. Evil knows no political bounds. If Hitler was Beelzebub, Stalin was Mephistopheles. It would appear that ignoring anti-Semitism is politically acceptable in Europe, while denouncing Islamophobia is politically correct.

“The government, which has Tomahawk missiles and Apache and Lakota helicopters, used the code name ‘Geronimo’ in the attack that killed bin Laden but objects to the name of the Washington Redskins.” – George Will

The new Republican Congress should move full speed ahead to repeal and replace Obamacare. It would be unwise to wait for the Supreme Court to perform this service for the American people.

With GOP command of Capitol Hill starting tomorrow, Republicans should use their hard-won mandate to obliterate Obama’s medical Godzilla. A record 58 percent of registered voters want to junk Obamacare, according to a December 10 Fox News survey. As well they should. Among other recently revealed shortcomings — according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Employer Health Benefits, 2014 Annual Survey (“Employee Cost Sharing” chapter) — the average deductible for individual plans has climbed from $826 in 2009 to $1,217 in 2014. This is an average annual increase of approximately 8.1 percent on Obama’s watch. Also, a Commonwealth Fund survey discovered that 40 percent of working-age adults have skipped medical treatments because they cost too much.

This is a very comprehensive article….Nonetheless, among my favorite compositions are all the Wagner Overtures…and especially Rienzi which still gives me goosebumps….Ars Vincit Omnia?…rsk
Two centuries after the great composer’s birth, his anti-Semitism remains a bitterly contested issue. Perhaps that’s because neither his defenders nor his detractors have come to grips with its, or his, true nature.

In 2013, as the classical-music world lurched from crisis to crisis, with orchestras on strike and opera companies vanishing into thin air, the bicentennial of the birth of the towering German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) offered a brilliant exception to the prevailing gloom. Productions of his operas filled houses from Seattle to Buenos Aires, and the great companies of Europe and the United States vied to present ever grander stagings of the colossal 15-hour cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. At a time when so many preeminent musical institutions are collapsing into bankruptcy or labor disputes, Wagner is one institution that seems to endure.

Yet Wagner’s powerfully continuing appeal in terms of dollars spent and seats filled is only a part, and the less important part, of his enduring significance. Wagner has always been remarkable not only for the breadth but for the depth of his impact, a depth that can be measured both by the intensity of the devotion that his works inspire and by the fact that his devotees have included many of the intellectual and political elite of Western society. When his fame was at its zenith in the latter part of the 19th century, his most fervent admirers were as varied as the young Friedrich Nietzsche, the poet Charles Baudelaire, and King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who helped to bankroll Wagner’s great festival in the northern Bavarian town of Bayreuth.