RUTHFULLY YOURS

Why, yes, Mark Steyn does mention me in his new book, thanks.

Twice.

But leaving aside pages 228 and 409 for a moment:

Why (else) should you read The (Un)documented Mark Steyn?

For the same reason you’d buy — and maybe gift someone — The Who Hits 50! or Sound System:

Because a “greatest hits” collection — and that’s what Steyn’s new book is — is an ideal way to either introduce yourself to an artist’s work, or have all the “good ones” in one convenient package.

So no more having to google “Martha + Stewart + coxcomb + topiary” when Christmas rolls around.

If you’re looking for that pithy Mark Steyn quote that you just know will be perfect for your next best man speech or poli-sci 101 term paper, you’ll probably find it in here.

But while these columns have been previously published, remember:

The collection includes over 80 (!) columns that Steyn has written for various newspapers around the world.

That means, for example, that non-Canadian readers will likely encounter for the first time samples of Steyn’s writing for Maclean’s magazine and the National Post, which is where I first made his acquaintance.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com  http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now One billion products sold last year contained microchips from Israel’s CEVA. ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS   20,000 doctors use G-Med.  (Thanks to Israel21c) Israel’s G-Med, the world’s first and only global social-professional network exclusively for physicians, allows doctors anywhere to consult with colleagues, and manage multinational research projects.  Launched in 2013, G-Med now has […]

NEW YORK STATE POLITICS- OUR GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO IS RUNNING FOR REELECTION….WITH A SIDEKICK KATHY HOCHUL FOR LT. GOVERNOR…IT IS INSTRUCTIVE THAT BOTH ARE RUNNING ON THE FUSION TICKETS- AS DEMOCRATS, INDEPENDENTS, AND WORKING FAMILIES AND WOMEN’S EQUALITY..PARTIES. EVEN LIBERALS LIKE CHUCK SHUMER ESCHEWS THE LATTER AND RUNS JUST AS A DEMOCRAT. KATHY HOCHUL WAS A REP. FOR NEW YORK’S DISTRICT 26 FROM JUNE 2011( WINNING IN A SPECIAL ELECTION) UNTIL SHE LOST IN 2012 AFTER AN UNDISTINGUISHED TERM……NEW YORK STATE IS ECONOMICALLY DEPRESSED AND CUOMO’S STEADFAST OPPOSITION TO FRACKING, THE XL PIPELINE HAS DOOMED RECOVERY. HE SHOULD LOSE HIS BID TO ROB ASTORINO…..RSK

Governor Andrew Cuomo thinks Westchester, N.Y., is a racially discriminatory county. He’s certainly entitled to his opinion, but if he really thinks that, you might ask, why does he continue to live there?

Cuomo’s opponent in this year’s gubernatorial race, Westchester County executive Rob Astorino, has received endless criticism from the left for refusing to comply with a federal housing settlement, culminating in a series of attacks ads from the Cuomo campaign effectively calling the county executive racist, saying that he is the “only county executive in the nation who refuses to comply . . . with federal anti-discrimination laws.”

Astorino has been battling with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) since he took office in 2010. Astorino’s predecessor, Andrew Spano, signed an agreement with HUD that required the county to spend tens of millions of dollars building affordable housing in 31 of the wealthier Westchester communities. Astorino “vociferously opposed” the deal Spano reached, as he told National Review Online, but having no choice, adhered to the agreement once he took office.

The county is ahead of schedule in the building of the 750 affordable housing units, but HUD has demanded that the county go beyond the original agreement by spending more and allowing the federal government to have the power to change local zoning laws.

Astorino has adamantly refused. In a press release at one point, he explained, “I opposed the 2009 settlement because I was afraid it would open the door for the federal government to overpower the decision making authority of local communities. As it turns out, my fears have been realized.” In retaliation, HUD has withheld $20 million in grants from Westchester since 2011.

The borders of the United States are supposed to serve as a barrier to safeguard America and Americans from aliens whose presence in the United States would undermine national security, public safety, public health, employment opportunities and wages for American workers, or otherwise have a negative impact on our nation and our citizens.

The push for the eradication of America’s borders by a multitude of organizations and special interest groups has succeeded in creating a false narrative that claims that somehow securing U.S. borders and enforcing America’s immigration laws are unfair. These opponents of border security often resort to hurling vicious false accusations and invectives at those who want our borders made secure and our immigration laws effectively and fairly enforced.

Typically, supporters of border security and effective enforcement of our immigration laws are accused of lacking compassion and being “Anti-Immigrant.”

Stop and consider how preposterous this allegation is. Our immigration laws that the pro-enforcement Americans want applied not only provide the grounds for excluding and removing aliens (deportation), but also provide the grounds by which the U.S. admits more than one million lawful immigrants each year. Further, these laws provide for the naturalization of hundreds of thousands of new American citizens each and every year. How can supporting the effective and balanced enforcement of these very same laws constitute an “anti-immigrant” position?

As for “lacking compassion,” why is it acceptable to not be concerned about American citizens? Today, it is estimated that one in four American children lives below the poverty line, and the rates of poverty are even higher among America’s Latino and black communities.

Why is protecting Americans from dangerous communicable diseases, international terrorists and transnational criminals not considered “compassionate?”

THIS IS A HARROWING TALE OF BARBARISM…AND HERE IS A MOST TELLING COMMENT LEFT BY A TIMES READER NAMED HECTOR WHO COULD BE A PROFESSOR IN AN IVY LEAGUE SCHOOL OR A FRIEND OF OUR CRAVEN ADMINISTRATION:

“I bet US bombs have decapitated a thousand times more Muslims than ISIS has decapitated Americans. We should quit while we’re ahead.”

ISIS Hostages Endured Torture and Dashed Hopes, Freed Cellmates Say

The hostages were taken out of their cell one by one.

In a private room, their captors asked each of them three intimate questions, a standard technique used to obtain proof that a prisoner is still alive in a kidnapping negotiation.

James Foley returned to the cell he shared with nearly two dozen other Western hostages and collapsed in tears of joy. The questions his kidnappers had asked were so personal (“Who cried at your brother’s wedding?” “Who was the captain of your high school soccer team?”) that he knew they were finally in touch with his family.

It was December 2013, and more than a year had passed since Mr. Foley vanished on a road in northern Syria. Finally, his worried parents would know he was alive, he told his fellow captives. His government, he believed, would soon negotiate his release.

What appeared to be a turning point was in fact the start of a downward spiral for Mr. Foley, a 40-year-old journalist, that ended in August when he was forced to his knees somewhere in the bald hills of Syria and beheaded as a camera rolled.

His videotaped death was a very public end to a hidden ordeal.

The story of what happened in the Islamic State’s underground network of prisons in Syria is one of excruciating suffering. Mr. Foley and his fellow hostages were routinely beaten and subjected to waterboarding. For months, they were starved and threatened with execution by one group of fighters, only to be handed off to another group that brought them sweets and contemplated freeing them. The prisoners banded together, playing games to pass the endless hours, but as conditions grew more desperate, they turned on one another. Some, including Mr. Foley, sought comfort in the faith of their captors, embracing Islam and taking Muslim names.

Deal for at least 8,000 missiles and 300 launchers comes amid border tensions with China and exchanges of fire with Pakistan

India has opted to buy Israel’s Spike anti-tank guided missile, a defence ministry source said on Saturday, rejecting a rival US offer of Javelin missiles that Washington had lobbied hard to win.

India will buy at least 8,000 Spike missiles and more than 300 launchers in a deal worth 32bn rupees ($525m), the source said after a meeting of India’s Defence Acquisition Council.

Prime minister Narendra Modi’s five-month-old government wants to clear a backlog of defence orders and boost India’s firepower, amid recent border tensions with China and heavy exchanges of fire with Pakistan across the Kashmiri frontier.

“National security is the paramount concern of the government,” the source quoted Defence Minister Arun Jaitley, who also holds the finance portfolio, as telling the procurement panel. “All hurdles and bottlenecks in the procurement process should be addressed expeditiously so that the pace of acquisition is not stymied.”

Among other business cleared by the panel, India will issue a request for proposals to supply six submarines, added the source, who was not authorised to comment on the record and did not elaborate.

The terror attacks in Montreal and Ottawa Canada should have not surprised anyone.

The recent jihadist attacks attacks in Montreal and Ottawa came after years of repeated calls to fight the infidel by Canadian Islamist religious and “civic” leaders-including Imams and new coverts to Islam. They use mosques, Islamic centers, demonstrations, YouTube, print, online and social media. Though most state they are not supporting the ISIS, they advocate the very same ideology.

And despite ISIS proven brutality and heightened recruitment campaigns, many in the West, including the U.S. and Canada continue to chronically suffer from Political Correctness, refusing to identify the jihadist as Muslims. They all but ignore jihadist yelling Allah- Akbar while spraying bullets into crowds, or stabbing to death pedestrians. Instead, they claim these are misguided, or meanly ill individuals, refusing to acknowledge that while not all Muslims are jihadists, all jihadists are Muslims.

Muhammad Robert Heft, the Toronto based convert to Islam, seems to be well guided and very well funded.

Heft, founded and runs the Paradise Forever, (P4E Support Group Inc.), as a part of his Da’wah (proselytization efforts). Heft is also the Canadian representative for Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Charity and Humanitarian Establishment based in Dubai UAE, (مؤسسة محمد بن راشد آل مكتوم للأعمال الخيرية والإنساني) -https://www.facebook.com/mrheft/info?ref=page_internal), a member of the Union of Good, an umbrella organization that supports Hamas. The Union of Good was declared an “unlawful organization” in 2002 by the Israeli government and The U.S. Treasury Department designated it an SDGT in 2008 because of its ties to Hamas.

On his Facebook, Heft blames “Westerners” of “terrorism” aimed at the Muslim world. He argues that “Islamic terrorism” is an “oxymoron” because Muslims “use the Quran and the Sunnah [Muhammad’s way of life] as their guide.” Moreover, western capitalism is prone to terrorism by its nature, because “terrorism can be very profitable,” he claims.

Incredibly, Heft also serves as a community outreach liaison on Islamist radicalization for Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

PARDONS FOR PEDOS

Covering up for Gutman’s sexual abuse of children would have been about more than just the State Department’s usual white wall of silence. Like many European ambassadors in the new administration, Gutman was not a diplomat — he was a donor. A man like Christopher Stevens might be sent to Libya, but positions in European capitals were mostly reserved for major contributors to the Democratic Party.

When it came to money, Howard Gutman, a top Washington lawyer, brought in the cash by raising $500,000 for Obama’s campaign committee and another $275,000 for his inauguration committee. And Gutman was not just an Obama boy. He had donated the legal maximum to Hillary’s presidential bid.

That was a lot of money. Enough to let a donor molest as many children as he cared to.

Clinton’s Pardons for Pedophiles

Palestinian Authority President’s Advisor: Murderer of American-Israeli Baby is “Heroic Martyr”

COWARDICE AND CRUELTY

ISIS is using the same tactics with America as it did with the Iraqi Army. Beheadings and humiliations of captured prisoners. It is showing its members and its supporters that it is stronger than America.

This is what terrorists do.

ISIS hasn’t won battles against enemies that stood and fought. It broke the morale of its opponents by humiliating them. This is a powerful thing in the Middle East’s honor/shame cultures where fighting forces have poor professionalism and draw their morale from a false sense of confidence. You’ve seen all those videos of Jihadists running out of cover or accidentally blowing themselves up.

This is the attitude that keeps the enemy going. They don’t really follow orders. They don’t really learn how to do things. What unites them is a sense of inevitability. Puncture that by humiliating them and they collapse. Their macho shows are all hat and no cattle. There’s nothing underneath the bravado except cowardice and cruelty.

Why is ISIS Provoking America? To Humiliate It.

There is a striking contrast today in world politics between the West’s submission to Islam and its assault upon Israel; this, ironically enough, occurs while we witness an Islamic assault upon Europe.

Unable to contend with Islam’s massive penetration of the continent, or to deal effectively and morally with its barbaric warfare against peoples in the Middle East, Europe has chosen to stalk Israel, embattled and attacked on many fronts.

The abandonment of the Jews in 1939-1945 in Europe and the murder of six million of them by the Germans represent a historical theme and modern chapter of the old hatred. Europe is not cleansed of this madness and fury; and it is incapable of seeing the justice and reasonableness in Israel’s existence and policies, bashing her over Jerusalem, settlements, human rights, and military operations. Nietzsche said that Europe would be a boring place without the intellectual ferment and cultural contributions of the Jews, but it would apparently be a happy place for some Europeans.

Now, with the blatant eruption of a reinvigorated anti-Semitism in Europe, the political campaign against Israel acquires its explicit racial underpinnings. The more vitriolic the attacks on Israel, running the spectrum from censure, defamation, to delegitimization, the more transparent the European culprit aflame with concentrated racist hatred of the Jews and their Jewish state.

The political backlash against Israel from the summer war in Gaza testifies to the moral bankruptcy of Europe and the loss of any equitable sense of justice. Now the Palestinian aggressor, undefeated and unrepentant, is to be rewarded with Gaza’s reconstruction. Mahmoud Abbas, unwilling to recognize the Jewish state of Israel, is to be rewarded with his own Palestinian state, according to sentiments in Sweden, Britain, and no doubt elsewhere.

The discourse of peace surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum remains as divorced from morality and reality as could ever be imagined in this lopsided political universe. The laws of sociology and the lessons of history make the two-state solution a non-starter. After 47 years, the settlement map of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, their size and spread, preempt an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 armistice lines. The idea of a Palestinian state over all of the territory is not in the demographic and geographic cards. Moreover, the embedded friction between the Jews and the Arabs, after so much bloodshed, enmity, and mistrust, is a visible obstacle to a mutually satisfactory agreement between them on all outstanding issues – borders and refugees, water and security, and Jerusalem. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is intractable and unsolvable according to the current modalities of proposed peace-making.

The Pentagon says that North Korea likely has a nuclear weapon that can be mounted on a missile. Hats off to Wendy Sherman, architect of the 1999 nuclear deal with North Korea that was supposed to prevent this sort of thing. In return for hundreds of millions of dollars of food and oil at a time a million or more people were starving to death under the North Korean regime, the United States received meaningless concessions that did little or nothing to stop North Korea’s nuclear program. That deal was described by former Secretary of State James Baker as “appeasement.”

The only positive thing that could be said about the latest agreement is that it will probably avert a short-term crisis. But at what price? It will make the United States even more reluctant to adopt a more muscular approach toward Korea and thus could actually increase the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula. And the North Koreans may well conclude that their bad behavior will continue to be rewarded.

And so they did and so it was.

For her part, Ms. Sherman displayed a disturbing tendency to gush about Kim Jong-il, the North Korean dictator with whom she negotiated. Apparently flattery of politically powerful people was a career strategy she mastered. Foreign Policy Magazine noted in 2011:

Sherman, who served as State Department counselor and North Korea policy coordinator under former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, traveled to Pyongyang with Albright in 2000. Here’s how the NPR obit on Kim, who died this past weekend, described her take on Kim:

Wendy Sherman, a special adviser to President Clinton on North Korea, accompanied then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang in 2001, and met Kim along with Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson.

“We shared similar impressions of meeting him. He was smart and a quick problem-solver,” Sherman says. “He is also witty and humorous. Our overall impression was very different from the way he was known to the outside world.”