RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The fate of the Jews of France is like the canary in the coal mine: it announces a much larger conflagration”.

This is what a great French intellectual told me this week.He is the historian of the Sorbonne University, Georges Bensoussan, the director of the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris and of its Revue d’Histoire.

In the first eight months of 2014, France is leading the list of the world’s countries whose Jewish population is emigrating to Israel, with 5,000 Jews who chose to abandon the République to live in the Jewish State.

“It is a real novelty, a real turning point in the history of the aliyah of Jews from France since 1945”, says Bensoussan. “It is one per cent of the entire Jewish population of France. The French aliyah will be two and half times larger than the aliyah from the United States for a community ten times smaller”.

While French Jews are leaving for Israel, French Muslims are leaving for jihad in Iraq and Syria.

“France has the largest contingent of European volunteers for jihad in Syria. 900 French Muslims according to the police. This reflects the demographic upheaval and the non-integration and severe dissimulation of the Muslim population.

There is a surprising fact: the choice of name. The Arab immigration in France is the only one in the history of this country that continues to give children the names of the parent’s world of origin

This process of concealment is the result of historical factors such as colonization and decolonization in a background that everyone has forgotten, “‘History weighs on the minds of the living’ said Karl Marx”. The French model of integration is imploding.

“French multiculturalism is nonsense. France is a nation united around a language, literature, history. Communitarianism is antithetical to French history. Multiculturalism does not work anywhere”.

Several weeks ago a former Israeli ambassador spoke up to offer his prescription for “peace in the Middle East” and I was amazed all over again. They always amaze me, these dreamers. They never learn, so, as if the folly of abandoning Jewish Gaza weren’t enough, once again they’re back to a “two-state-solution.”

I won’t mention his name because we’re entering our High Holy Days and I prefer not to do lashon hara (slander, ed.). I’m being watched. For the same reason I won’t mention another Israeli “expert” who came along only yesterday to insist that for the sake of peace, Israel must dismantle itself immediately. Same deal, and the disease keeps spreading among our peaceniks.

King David, by the way, prayed for the utter annihilation of all his enemies – but that’s another column.

There was no “two-state-solution” and there were no “peace processes” when King David ran the show. That ought to be a hint.

So once Israel does this, shares the land, the Arabs will be astonished by these sweet gestures. They will start dancing with us at our Bar Mitzvahs.

Do you remember when it was the very religious among our people who were damned for being “messianic?”

So how about these “Liberals” from inside and outside the faith? Their dream is that the minute Israel and the rest of the West go groveling, capitulate and surrender, everything that ails Fevered Islam will be cured overnight. Islamists who’ve been drinking from intoxicating waters will sober up in a flash the instant we renounce ourselves and submit. So goes their messiah.

American oil companies used to sponsor a lot of cultural programming. As the Saudis nationalized and began to take control, that has shifted.

The Saudis are not big opera buffs, but their regime spreads anti-Semitism around the world. And the Metropolitan Opera’s current decision to mount The Death of Klinghoffer, a widely denounced anti-Semitic modern opera in a season packed with productions that are rarely less than a century old, is a curious aberration.

The Metropolitan Opera’s manager Peter Gelb is predicting bankruptcy in two years as the Met has blown through a fortune, for example spending $169,000 on a poppy field used as opera scenery.

The Met is incapable of budgeting and its needs money badly.

Saudi Petroleum International is a local arm of Saudi Aramco and a significant donor to the Metropolitan Opera. The Saudi Minister of Petroleum, Ibrahim Al-Naimi, has even been listed on occasion as a principal sponsor.

The Met has increasingly been making its money from digital broadcasts, rather than theater performances, making it more reliant on international audiences. Its “Live in HD” digital broadcasts go out to countries such as Lebanon, Morocco, as well as to Dubai.

The HD business has become the Met’s bread and butter and like a lot of the luxury trade, it’s looking for a cut of the gushing wells of oil money from nouveau riche sheiks and princes.

Catering to their bigotry is not the classiest way to get it, but it certainly has a history of working.

This is not just offensive. It’s dangerous.

The month after we observed the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, the Metropolitan Opera, one of the world’s most prestigious cultural institutions, will bow to forces of anti-Semitism and pro-terrorist sentiment. The Met is to present an obscene opera titled “The Death of Klinghoffer” — a musical celebration of the senseless murder by Palestinian monsters of a defenseless, elderly Jewish New Yorker.

People of good conscience are not taking this artistic assault lying down.

“Are we in hell?” veteran actor Tony Lo Bianco asked me.

“I don’t know who we are anymore,” he said. “Our values have been destroyed. We’ve gone politically correct, and we’ve destroyed ourselves.”

Since it was first produced at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1991, “The Death of Klinghoffer” has outraged some audiences. But it also has inspired hatred among people of all religions with its romantic portrayal of an act of violence committed by creatures who don’t deserve to breathe air.

The opera, by American composer John Adams with a libretto by his countrywoman Alice Goodman, dramatizes the murder — not merely the “death,” as the title implies — of Leon Klinghoffer.

Conventional economic theory does a poor job of explaining the growth eruptions that transformed Western Europe during the 19th century and parts of Asia during the late 20th century, the Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps argued in his 2013 book Mass Flourishing (Princeton, £19.95). Phelps’s book drew positive reviews but not enough thoughtful consideration. It challenges many of our prized assumptions about what makes economies succeed.

It is not scientific discovery, nor engineering skill, nor education, nor the astuteness of entrepreneurs that generates economic transformation, Phelps observed, although all of these elements are important. Rather, it is the willingness of the whole of society to plunge into “the topsy-turvy of creation, the frenzy of development” — to pull up stakes and move, to abandon old ways of doing things and try new ones, to abandon the safe harbor of the familiar and embrace novelty.

Phelps is closer in spirit to Paul Johnson’s 1991 study The Birth of the Modern than to any of the economic theorists. What he calls “mass flourishing” in contrast to ordinary economic growth stems from a radical change in attitudes and ideas through the whole of society.

“The advent of the modern economy,” Phelps writes, “brought a metamorphosis: a modern economy turns people who are close to the economy, where they are apt to be struck by new commercial ideas, into the investigators and experimenters who manage the innovation process from development and, in many cases, adoption as well. In a role reversal, scientists and engineers are called in to assist on technical matters. In fact, it turns all sorts of people into ‘idea-men,’ financiers into thinkers, producers into marketers, and end-users into pioneers.”

Like Paul Johnson, Phelps dates Europe’s growth take-off from 1815. The scientific revolution and the Age of Navigation produced no dividends for ordinary folk until modernity enveloped Europe and turned whole societies into innovators. “The modern economies were not the old mercantile economies,” Phelps writes, “but something new under the sun.”

The living standards of ordinary Europeans in 1800 were not much different from those of Roman or medieval times. But modernity brought “a cornucopia of material benefits”, Phelps observes. “By 1870, total domestic output per capita in Western Europe as a whole had risen 63 per cent above its 1820 level. By 1913, there was a further rise of 76 per cent.”

The rapid expansion of the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) in Iraq, and the fact that many of its fighters are Saudis, have sparked growing fears in Saudi Arabia that the extremist organization might spread to the kingdom. Among the reflections of this fear were the Saudi responses to an official IS release about Faisal bin Shaman Al-‘Anzi, a 25-year-old Saudi medical doctor who joined the organization and who on July 11, 2014 perpetrated a car-bomb suicide attack at a Peshmerga checkpoint in Kirkuk in northern Iraq, killing and injuring some 30 people.[1] Until the release of this news, Al-‘Anzi’s family had denied reports that he was a fighter and claimed that he had been killed while working at an IS clinic. Responding to the photo below, which shows him brandishing a large knife, his brother explained that he sometimes carried a weapon for personal protection while traveling through combat zones.[2]

Al-‘Anzi brandishing an ISIS butcher knife (image: Alwatanvoice.com, July 22, 2014)
Al-‘Anzi’s story sparked outrage in the Saudi press. Columnists asked how a doctor, who is supposed to save lives and treat people regardless of religion, race or gender, could abandon his calling and become a suicide bomber in the ranks of an organization like ISIS, whose values are diametrically opposed to those of his profession. They also stressed that the roots of the phenomenon are to be found within the institutions of Saudi society itself, from the education system and the family to the civil service and the military. The columnists urged Saudis in particular and Muslims in general to wake up and start monitoring this phenomenon, and some suggested reexamining the entire ideological and moral foundations of the Saudi state.

The following are excerpts from some of the articles:
Liberal Columnist Halima Muzaffar: What Caused A Doctor To Shed His Humanity And Become A Criminal?

The successive atrocities committed by the Islamic State (IS, previously called the Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham – ISIS) have diverted the discussion away from an understanding of this organization’s political program, creating the erroneous impression that it is simply a more vicious version of Al-Qaeda. According to this view, this organization presumably intends to attack the West by means of its foreign militants who hold Western passports and could return to Western countries to carry out terror attacks – and hence it is paramount to destroy the IS forthwith. Saudi King ‘Abdallah bin ‘Abd Al-‘Aziz promoted this approach when he said that he was certain that those jihadists “would arrive in Europe within a month and in America within two months”.[1]

This report seeks to clarify the IS’s doctrine based on the organization’s official writings and speeches by its leaders. It will argue that, unlike Al-Qaeda, the IS places priority not on global terrorism, but rather on establishing and consolidating a state, and hence it defers the clash with the West to a much later stage. In this, it is emulating and reenacting the early Islamic model.
Unlike Al-Qaeda, IS Prioritizes State-Building

Although the IS and global jihad organizations affiliated with Al-Qaeda share similar beliefs about the necessity to wage jihad for the sake of Allah and establish a caliphate where Islamic shari’a law will be instated, a major distinction exists between them in terms of the order of priorities for implementing these major goals. Whereas in Al-Qaeda, emphasis is on worldwide jihad prior to the declaration of the yearned-for Islamic caliphate (see Osama bin Laden’s February 23, 1998 declaration of jihad against the Crusaders and the Jews), IS doctrine is characterized by prioritizing the establishment and consolidation of the caliphate state as the immediate and overriding objective.[2] This objective is presented by the IS leaders as a matter of survival[3] that warrants making compromises dictated by reality, the major compromise being deferral of the struggle with the West to a distant future. In other words, the IS’ doctrine under Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi explicitly puts off the clash with the West to different times, and concentrates in the immediate term on the region where the Islamic caliphate is being established.[4] The IS’s English-language magazine Dabiq says that the Islamic State “is a marvel of history that has only come about to pave the way for al-Malhamah al-Kubra [the grand battle against the Crusaders at the End of Days].”[5]

John Campbell (R) Incumbent – is Retiring in 2014

Mimi Walters (R) Challenger
State Sen., Ex-State Assemblywoman, Ex-Laguna Niguel Councilwoman & Investment Banker
http://mimiwalters.com/

http://mimiwalters.com/issues/

HEALTHCARE The Obama administration’s takeover of our health care system was wrong and I will work to repeal Obamacare and replace it with market-based reforms that protect patient choice, keep costs down and preserve the greatest health system in the world.

IMMIGRATION America’s immigration and border security systems are broken. America needs a clear and enforceable policy that begins with secure borders, treats all in a humane and fair manner and doesn’t reward those who break our laws. We also need a guest worker system, especially for our farms and agricultural industries.

FOREIGN POLICY-ISRAEL The United States and Israel have a historic and unique friendship that must be preserved. The two countries share a common bond based on a belief in freedom, human rights and democratic principles. While countless others have failed or are currently failing, Israel has always stood as a shining example of a thriving democratic nation in the Middle East.
Terrorism in the name of religion is a threat Israel and its citizens have had to live with for many decades. The spread of Islamic terrorism has touched every corner of the globe and threatens freedom-loving people everywhere. Israel is a proven and unwavering friend and partner to the U.S. in our efforts to combat these threats and wipe out terrorism.
Israel not only has a right to exist, it has a right to exist in peace. Both of our nations are dedicated to finding a lasting peace, but peace will not and cannot come at the expense of our own security. As a member of Congress, I will work to make sure our two nations remain strong and vigilant, with all the resources needed to meet any terrorist threat or military challenge. I will work to preserve and enhance our friendship and alliance, so we can continue to work towards a lasting peace in the Holy Land that protects the security of both nations.
Military aid to Israel is the most tangible expression of support for the Jewish State, and I stand firmly behind the 10-year Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) that provides Israel with aid necessary to defend herself from increasing threats in the region. This is a cost-effective tool that enables both America and Israel to remain safe and secure. I would also support separate measures aimed at supporting Israel in the development and procurement of advanced systems of defense.

I WENT TO A SMALL DINNER RECEPTION FOR YADLIN AND HAD THE IMPRESSION THAT ALTHOUGH HE IS A BRAVE ISRAELI WHO LED THE OSYRAK MISSION, HE IS NOT TOO BRIGHT… HIS MAIN CONTENTION WAS THAT IRAN DOES NOT POSE SUCH A THREAT AND THE IRANIANS THEMSELVES WOULD TAKE CARE OF IT… AND NOW THIS COLUMN CONFIRMS THAT HE IS A MAJOR FOOL….RSK

Why Israel needs to move now toward a division of the land—even in the absence of a peace deal.

Elliott Abrams’ analysis of Israel’s strategic environment is almost entirely on point. He is right that Israel’s status quo is much more sustainable than is commonly argued, and right again on the absurdity of claims that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict constitutes the “epicenter of global politics.” Indeed, it would be equally farfetched to claim that Germany’s 500,000 Jews were the epicenter of World War II. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, itself a subset of the Israeli-Arab conflict, is but one in a long list of the Middle East’s entrenched rivalries and fault lines. Even on Israel’s own national-security agenda, the Palestinian threat no longer figures as high as the much more severe and urgent challenges presented by Iran’s nuclear ambitions and Hizballah’s ever-growing arsenals.

Still, sustainable as the status quo may be, sustainable is not coterminous with desirable. Yes, the warnings of alarmists at home and abroad are misguided if not hysterical; and yes, Israel should not forget the price of failures brought upon it by hastily concluded schemes for “comprehensive” peace agreements. But that is not the end of the matter. Since its inception, modern Zionism has been centered more on creating new realities than on enduring imperfect ones, however sustainable they may turn out to be.

“A republic, if you can keep it,” Abrams quotes Benjamin Franklin saying about the fledgling United States in 18th-century Philadelphia. But modern-day Israel does not have the luxury of standing by as a mere spectator to the Palestinian leadership’s misgovernance. Even if the Palestinian Authority, for its part, persists in refusing any reasonable peace proposal, practical and moral reasons argue against the resigned acceptance of any such reality. Practical—because of the risk of yet another failed state on Israel’s doorstep. And moral—because, even while defending itself from recurrent violence and aggression, and even while conscious of the limits of its own power, Israeli society has always taken upon itself the obligation to relieve human suffering where it can. If skeptical, one need only have observed the many truckers shuttling food and medical supplies to Gaza’s civilians during the recent campaign there, or the doctors at Israel’s top-tier hospitals who deliver medical care to Syrian and West Bank Arabs.

As my text for today, I take the words “inappropriate”, “disproportionate”, “challenging” and “extraordinary”. I intend to examine them in their current context, starting with the last.

Increasingly, the word “extraordinary” is splattered about the papers like a Rorschach test. “What an extraordinary performance she gives . . . it’s really extraordinarily moving . . . that extraordinary moment when she’s carried aloft in that most extraordinary of arias . . . It’s simply extraordinary.”

Except it isn’t. Not any more. Overuse has rendered it the most mundane, least expressive adjective in the language and it has come to mean its exact opposite, ordinary.

Similarly, the word “challenging” has sprung from political correctness and has come to suggest not resistance or defiance but something insoluble. It is applied liberally and equally to disability, the NHS, resolving the problems in the Middle East, and opening a West End show in a hot summer.

Which brings me to the inappropriate use of the word inappropriate. Explained in the dictionary as “unsuitable or not relevant to the topic”, it has come to define any bad or unethical behaviour, mostly relating to insults and sexual mores. I’m ashamed to report that I used it myself once when asked by the press why a relationship had broken up. I blamed his “inappropriate behaviour”. The word was so much in the zeitgeist, it seemed more on-trend than saying, “Actually, he was just weird.”

I’m not averse to language moving on. I understand why a “frightfully decent chap” became “a nice guy”; every generation needs their own vernacular. In my day, “nice” itself was deemed lazy and unimaginative — and indeed, originally meant “stupid”. It has long since been replaced by “cool”, “wicked” and, I’m told, “sick”. What’s sauce for the goose is coulis for the cognoscenti. Hearing myself on radio, I’m always depressed by the number of times I say, “you know.” But my real tooth-grinding kicks in when words evolve in dangerous directions.

“Disproportionate” is such a word. And these days, it seems to be used almost exclusively to describe any action — defensive or responsive — by the state of Israel.