RUTHFULLY YOURS

After long and determined resistance, I was recently persuaded to open a Facebook account. I did so for two reasons: to see what the fuss was all about; and as a means of publicizing my books, articles and music. I have been on Facebook for a month or so and have come to regret my decision. It is a snare and a delusion, a pseudo-world we mistake for an actual community, and, for the most part, a waste of time. What’s more, for a brief period, it became a source of nuptial contention.

I rarely quarrel with my wife, but the other evening found us embroiled in a heated donnybrook about the value of Facebook. I had watched her growing increasingly more absorbed in an exchange with a shadowy and irritating figure by the name of Michael over the war between the West and an insurgent Islam. Neither could persuade the other. Janice’s argument was logical, evidence-based, and limpidly expressed, demonstrating that Islam was the scourge of the contemporary world. “Michael” fell back on the usual pabulum regarding Western colonial depredations and “root causes,” to the utter exclusion of historical fact and theological compulsion. There was nothing to be gained by this collision of intractables, but I could see post leading to counter-post leading to counter-counter-post ad vomitatum while the clock ticked on and evening darkened into night.

President Obama, speaking to an audience of mostly young people celebrating India’s Republic Day in New Delhi on Tuesday, told the crowd, “I realise that the sight of an American president as your chief guest on Republic Day would have once seemed unimaginable. But my visit reflects the possibilities of a new moment.” He pointed out that he was the first American president to participate in the country’s Republic Day and boasted, “And I’m the first American president to come to your country twice!”

The president went on to refer to himself an astonishing 118 times in the short 33-minute speech, touching on injustices in the United States and in his own personal life.

Obama told the enthusiastic crowd that he and Michelle have been strengthened by their Christian faith. “But there have been times where my faith has been questioned — by people who don’t know me — or they’ve said that I adhere to a different religion, as if that were somehow a bad thing,” Obama said.

Jeb Hensarling who ran unopposed is one of the smartest and sharpest conservative congressmen today….and just for the record he gets a rating of -3 from the Arab American Institute…….rsk

The Republican Party made a mistake when it let the political left blame the 2008 housing crash on big banks, free-market competition and “deregulation.” House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling is doing his best to correct the historical record, and if his GOP colleagues want to push serious financial market reform, they would be smart to support him.

Here’s a sample of the Texas congressman’s straight talk, from a Tuesday committee meeting: “Contrary to the fable told by the left, the root cause of the financial crisis was not deregulation but dumb regulation. Regulations and statutes that either incented or mandated financial institutions to loan money to people to buy homes they ultimately could not afford to keep. Exhibit one, Fannie and Freddie’s affordable housing goals. Seventy percent of all troubled mortgages were backstopped by Fannie, Freddie and other federal agencies.”

Venezuela jails opposition political figures as terrorists. Russia and China put critics in psychiatric hospitals.

Democracy has been under threat around the world for many years from authoritarian rulers, military leaders and terrorist groups. Last year the pressures intensified significantly.

Vigorous debate over how democracies should respond to terrorism is under way in Europe, Australia and North America. Elsewhere, however, leaders cite the threat as a pretext to silence dissidents, shutter critical media and smother civil society. Thus Venezuela imprisons opposition political figures such as Leopoldo López as terrorists, and China invokes terrorism to support harsh prison sentences against nonviolent Uighur activists. But the exploitation of the terrorist threat is just one aspect of a general trend by repressive regimes toward heavy-handed tactics.

Unlike during the Cold War, autocrats in recent decades have favored more nuanced methods for protecting their monopolies of power—such as elections that are free but not fair. The aim was to maintain a veneer of democratic pluralism and avoid practices associated with 20th-century dictatorships.

The debate over Islamic terrorism has shifted so far from reality that it has now become an argument between the administration, which insists that there is nothing Islamic about ISIS, and critics who contend that a minority of Islamic extremists are the ones causing all the problems.

But what makes an Islamic radical, extremist? Where is the line between ordinary Muslim practice and its extremist dark side?

It can’t be beheading people in public.

Saudi Arabia just did that and was praised for its progressiveness by the UN Secretary General, had flags flown at half-staff in the honor of its deceased tyrant in the UK and that same tyrant was honored by Obama, in preference to such minor events as the Paris Unity March and the Auschwitz commemoration.

There is a report coming from The Philippines that 49 members of an elite police unit were killed early Sunday while attempting to enter an Islamic zone to arrest suspected terrorists.

The most disturbing aspect of this report is that the police are being blamed for the killings because they did not contact Moro Islamic Liberation Front officials and let them know of their intentions to make arrests.

The feeling of the guerrillas is that this area is clearly under Islamic Law (sharia) and under no jurisdiction of national or local police forces.

Iran’s price for Obama’s coveted legacy The president threatens Israel to placate the mullahs

The importance of any political event is best measured against its opponents’ reactions. By that yardstick, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s agreement to speak about the dangers of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons before a joint session of Congress is already enormously significant.

Mr. Netanyahu’s March 3 speech will come during a period of extended discussions between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia , plus Germany (the P5 plus 1 group) — with the naive objective of bringing about an end to Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

LET THE FOREIGNER COME By Yisrael Medad

The remarkable historical development for the past several centuries has been that the Jewish people, while still being persecuted by Christians, are being, in a parallel development, assisted by Christians to realize the ancient dream of the ‘return to Zion’, a process they term as the “Restoration”, and thereby accomplish the establishment of the Jewish national home in Israel. This is true since the days of Sir Henry Finch who, 1621 wrote his “The World’s Great Restauration, or Calling of the Jews”, and Napoleon, Lord Shaftesbury and Laurence Oliphant (who wrote the Land of Gilead) including Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Shklov and his conversations in 1827 with the convert Joseph Wolf to promote diplomacy with the British Consulate in Jerusalem on to Lord Balfour and his declaration and until the present day.

At the present, the help is being expressed at the highest levels in the corridors of governments, foreign ministries, Houses of Parliament and Congresses and on the ground, literally, in acts iof voluntary labor in the vineyards and orchards in the hills of Judea and Samaria, and, in the words of Rabbi Eliezer Melamed:

“In modern times, we have witnessed increased support for Israel among evangelical Christians…They see with their own eyes how the Jewish people is returning to its land after its awful, two-thousand-year-long exile, and is creating a prosperous country. They see new settlements and vineyards flowering in the very areas described by the Bible, and they are excited by our miraculous return to Zion. They are overwhelmed by the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies of the prophets of Israel… “Christians fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah”, September 18, 2013.

Whose problem is it that Islam isn’t compatible with Western civilization: a Muslim’s, or yours?

One of the most succinctly put conundrums facing “moderate,” passive, non-violent Muslims was cogently put by Saba E. Demian in his Gatestone article of January 25th, “Europe’s Civil War: The Politics of Separateness.” In it he states:

One unanswered question is whether Islam is a religion of peace. First, the Arabic word Islam does not mean “peace” but an act of subjugation to God (Allah) and His will. Second, the basis and teaching of Islam is understood universally to consider non-Muslims as infidels. Third, infidels have to be wiped out [or compelled to submit to Islam and pay jizya or the protection tax] There is no gainsaying the word of Allah in the Koran, the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad and the shari’a. Thus, Muslims by birth or conversion, regardless of whether they are ultraconservative, moderates or secularists, are trapped in this vise-grip of enforcing the will of Allah on everyone, non-Muslim or Muslim, if they veer away from the straight and narrow. [Brackets mine]

Or attempt to veer away from the contentious, violence-sanctioning elements of Islam, or to renounce Islam, or to repudiate it.

In watching “Night Will Fall,” the documentary made from the British and American footage of the liberation of the concentration camps at the close of WWII, what struck me first was the irrationality of Nazis starving a slave population that was intended to work. How inefficient that was as people diminished to skeletal weight and racked by dysentery and typhus could not have performed tasks with even the semblance of purposeful activity. This only adds to the mystery of why the Germans went to the expense and bother of constructing and staffing camps and transporting victims to them, often from great distances, instead of killing people in situ as they frequently did in mass ditches dug by the victims at the outskirts of towns and villages. According to Daniel Goldhagen (How Auschwitz is Misunderstood NYT 1/25), it was to distance the killers from their victims. Though this was true for prisoners brought from all over Europe, it certainly wasn’t true for German Jews who were brought to camps in Germany which were in close proximity to their former neighbors. A look at the map that Alfred Hitchcock created for the original documentary shows camps dotting Germany, often within a mile of cities and villages.