RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-Fray-Earth-to-Bennett-Earth-to-Bennett-353126

Full disclosure: I voted for Bennett’s party in the last elections, not because I really believed in the man or his political program, but because I saw them as the “least of all evils” on offer at the January 2013 polls.

Since then, however, I have had occasion for second thoughts and am approaching the conclusion that I may have been mistaken.

Getting it all wrong

My gathering buyer’s remorse was greatly heightened by the op-ed in the Journal, in which he presented an “enhanced” version of his ill-conceived policy proposal, perversely dubbed the “Stability Plan.” In it he recommends doing virtually everything that should be avoided, and avoiding everything that should be done.

What is truly astounding is that anyone could get so much so wrong in such a short article of under 800 words.

As one whose vote contributed to getting Bennett into a senior post in the governing coalition, it is deeply disturbing to see him bandy about such reckless policy prescriptions, totally detached from reality, with such cavalier abandon.

It is difficult to know what is more troubling: Whether Bennett believes the delusional drivel he wrote in his op-ed, or whether he doesn’t but wrote it anyway.

Thus, while I agree with his repudiation of the two-state paradigm, and his rejection of negotiations with Hamas, Bennett’s proposal, if implemented, is likely to be even more disastrous for the Zionist ideal of a historically durable nation-state for the Jewish people in their ancient homeland.

I have pointed out in previous critiques of his plan, it will solve none of the major problems facing Israel today on the Palestinian issue.

Quite the opposite. In all likelihood it will exacerbate many.

Untenable geographically

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2839/Report-from-the-Future-The-Umma-States-of-America.aspx

Imagine a curious soul or two in the not-too-distant future furtively peeling back the layers and learning the cruel truth: that their forbears willingly exchanged all of their precious liberties for tyranny rather than assess and educate and protect themselves against Islamic conquest — violent, pre-violent, smooth, explosive, financial, political, kafiyya-wrapped or Armani-suited. I think they will marvel because, as they will so very tragically know first-hand, Islam is so simple: its culture of death, its oppression of women and non-Muslims, its defilement of children, its suppression of conscience, religion and speech. They will be astonished, also very angry, over the way free men and women in 20th-21st centuries saw fit, not to embark on emergency measures to ensure energy independence from Islamic oil, block Islamic immigration, and shield financial markets and academia from sharia-compliance, but rather to erect a massive and invasive security state that robbed all citizens of their liberties as they fiddled away the Islamic threat. Mustn’t offend? Mustn’t offend? That was more important than saving the blessed beauty of our lost civlization…?! Incredulously, they will learn how “public intellectuals” invented all manner of “division” within Islam, detected endless “signs” of “evolution” to come, supported disastrous “democracy” movements, diagnosed “moderation” ever-aborning, projecting all in a static of isms and ists that confounded and dumbfounded and confused. To be sure, it kept “public intellectuals” gainfully occupied, but it did nothing to stem the waves of conquest that made life in the West a sharia-compliant and, of course, post-Communist hell on earth. Obamacare Allahu Akbar.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

First-ever bone graft, using bone grown in lab. (Thanks to Atid-EDI) A human patient with deficient jawbone has received a successful bone transplant using bone grown by Israel’s Bonus BioGroup using the patient’s own fat cells. The company expects the graft to be fully tolerated, without immunological rejection.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/07/bonus-biogroup-ltd-idUSnBw075977a+100+BSW20140507

Protein could reverse Alzheimer’s damage. A protein discovered by a Tel Aviv University research team may reverse the damage caused by Alzheimer’s. Laboratory tests showed that TAU (tubulin-associated unit) restored levels of the dementia-protecting protein NAP. It also restored disease-shrunken brains to normal size.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-discovery-could-reverse-alzheimers-damage/

Protecting the brain during heart operations. Israeli biotech Keystone Heart’s TriGuard is a cerebral protection device specifically designed to minimize the risk of brain damage during heart valve replacements and other cardiovascular procedures. Keystone has just raised $14 million of investment funding.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-cerebral-protection-co-keystone-heart-raises-14m-1000939820

Israeli ALS treatment to be presented at Turkish conference. Professor Dimitrios Karussis, Principal Investigator of BrainStorm’s clinical trials of its ALS stem cell treatment at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center, will present at the Joint Congress of European Neurology, May 31-June 3 in Istanbul, Turkey.
http://www.brainstorm-cell.com/index.php/news-a-events/299-may-19-2014

Israelis live longer. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that men in Israel live until the average age of 80.2 and are ranked fourth in the world. Only men in Iceland (81.2), Switzerland and Australia live longer. Israeli women (84) are tenth in the world, compared to Europe (76) and the rest of the Middle East (68).
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4520549,00.html

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Israeli glasses can see in the dark. “Lumus” and “Opgal“, two cutting-edge Israeli optics companies, have collaborated to develop a Google Glass-style night-vision display system. The Therm-App mobile device, mounted on headgear, transmits high-resolution images to the Lumus wearable display.
http://itrade.gov.il/singapore/2014/05/15/google-watch-google-glass-face-competition-2-israeli-rivals/

Unsurprisingly, even though these latest anti-Semitic murders happened many
hours ago, they are not mentioned anywhere on the home page of the New York
Times at the present time, which instead is carrying anti-Israel stories.
Business as usual at the NY Times and elsewhere in the Western media – an
international media that has done its fair share to whip up anti-Semitic
incitement (often through its total fabrications about Israel) that leads to
attacks such as the one today in Brussels. On The Guardian home page at the
present time, there is a mention of a shooting in Brussels without mentioning it
happened at a Jewish institution.

In the video below, see actors Ed Begley, Jr. and Mariel Hemingway and producers Josh and Rebecca Tickell agree to use “Middle East oil money” to put an end to American energy independence. Plus, they tell a potential “Saudi funder” that they will hide his contribution in a morass of NGO names so that no one will ever know where the money for the anti-fracking film came from. (Check out the names of the NGOs offered).
This video shows how Hollywood is willing to “collaborate, collude, or otherwise assist Saudi interests to facilitate propaganda…to generate public opposition to U.S. energy independence.” These Hollywood traitors were willing to increase SAUDI oil revenue in the bargain!
That 17 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals is not a problem for them. That Saudis have been financing the downfall of America is a NON-ISSUE for these Benedict Arnolds.
This is the Hollywood made rich by American citizens who they freely betray!
Bring back HUAC now!

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cannes-video-hollywood-environmentalists-anti-706051

Events in Thailand give the lie to conventional wisdom that rapid economic development leads inevitably to political progress and stability, were such evidence still required.

Thailand has made remarkable economic progress in the last half century, climbing into the ranks of middle income countries. Hit by the 1996-97 East Asian Financial Crisis and then later by the 2007-08 worldwide financial debacle, its gross national product nevertheless has more than doubled since 1995. Income disparities – both between the Bangkok capital megatropolis of 5.4 million and the countryside and among individuals – is high but the latter is trending downward. Only 15% of its 70 million people live below the poverty line, mostly in rural areas Access to pure drinking water and sanitation is universal. Maternal and infant mortality have dropped dramatically. Unemployment had been less than 1% until this latest coup. Foreign investors have piled in, notably making Thailand the center for automobile manufacturing and assembly in Southeast Asia.

Nor can the explanation for Thailand’s political troubles be blamed, as it is so often in Africa and Asia, on a colonial past. The British and French were content in the 19th century race for empire to permit the Thais to live in a backwater, a kind of neutral zone between the expanding the British Indian Empire [including Burma and Malaya next door] and French Indochina including Laos, Thailand’s Siamese twin. [An obscure footnote to history: London’s notorious “22 demands” made on a defeated, tacit Japanese ally immediately after World War II, were rejected when local U.S. Office of Strategic Services veterans fabricated Washington support for the Thais.]

Breakdowns in the constitutional monarchy peacefully established in a bloodless revolution in 1932 have repeatedly brought the military to power. [This is the twelfth takeover in 80 years.] These, too, have generally been peaceful, often with the approval of the elite and the King. Some observers even saw these military usurpations as a breakthrough for its largely rural cadre against the growing domination of emigrant Overseas Chinese merchants in Bangkok with their strong familial ties. That contrasted strongly with what cultural anthropologists have characterized as the loose traditional Thai family structure.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has done a public service with his essay “The Case for Reparations,” and the service he has done is to show that there is not much of a case for reparations. Mr. Coates’s beautifully written monograph is intelligent and sometimes moving, and the moral and political case he makes is not to be discounted lightly, but it is not a persuasive case for converting the liberal Anglo-American tradition of justice into a system of racial apportionment. Mr. Coates and those who share his views would no doubt observe that the Anglo-American practice, despite its liberal rhetoric, was a system of racial apportionment, and a brutal one at that, for centuries, with real-world consequences that continue to be large facts of American life to this day — and they would be correct. But the remedy Mr. Coates proposes would not satisfy the criterion of justice, nor is it likely that it would reduce or even substantially eliminate the very large socioeconomic differences that distinguish the black experience of American life from the white experience of it.

The most valuable aspect of Mr. Coates’s essay is as a corrective to the tendency to treat the systematic political and economic repression of black Americans as though it were a matter of distant history and a question that had been for the most part settled at Gettysburg, with a few necessary legislative reforms in the following century. The process of extirpating effective racism did not end in 1868 or in 1964; even assuming a zero racial handicap on a forward-going basis, we would expect it to take decades before the average economic differences between blacks and whites were to disappear. (If, indeed, we should expect them to disappear at all.) And the economic disadvantages imposed on African Americans did not end with slavery. Mr. Coates recounts, among other abuses, how black workers leaving the South for such communities as Chicago’s North Lawndale were systematically excluded from the formal banking system, in no small part by federal housing policy that denied FHA mortgage insurance to neighborhoods into which blacks had moved or were moving, leaving black would-be homeowners with few options other than the “on contract” purchase, essentially a rent-to-own scheme that was rife with abuse and dishonesty.

Upwardly mobile blacks were fleeced by similar schemes for many years, and blacks remain to a disproportionate extent outside the traditional financial institutions — for instance, a quarter of unmarried black men have no bank account, and fewer than half of black households invest in stocks or similar financial instruments. The relatively hard time blacks have dealing with financial institutions has some truly perverse outcomes: Whites have more college degrees but less student-loan debt; white women are more likely to be homeowners than are black women, but they have smaller mortgages; blacks are less likely to be approved for credit cards, and they have more credit-card debt. While the median black household income is about a third lower than the median white household income, blacks’ median net worth is radically lower: about 5 percent of the median white net worth. The median net worth for a single white woman in her prime earning years is about $43,000; the median net worth for a black woman in her prime earning years is about $5.

UKIP’s recent electoral performance is a watershed moment.

On Thursday, Britain held local and European elections. The BBC’s political editor has described the results as an “earthquake” in British politics. Charging out of the wilderness, the U.K. Independence party (UKIP), which is anti-EU, has stabbed the heart of the U.K. political establishment.

Before Thursday, UKIP had only one councilor (the U.K. term for an elected official in local government). Now, that number stands at 157. The European returns won’t be released until Sunday, but polls suggest that in those elections UKIP will claim first place.

Taken together, the British and European elections represent a watershed moment in British politics. Where the Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat parties once dominated British political life, UKIP has introduced a fourth face to the nation’s discourse. Three particular lessons should be taken from UKIP’s victory.

Voter anger over EU interference in U.K. law
The European judiciary has long drawn British anger — and for good reason. Take the case of Abu Hamza. Earlier this week, a federal jury convicted him on numerous terrorism charges. Still, while the English courts had approved Abu Hamza’s extradition to America with little hesitation, the EU Court of Human Rights obstructed that process for over two years. As I’ve noted before, the EU judiciary is an enemy of robust counterterrorism. But it’s not just EU counterterrorism that has infuriated U.K. voters. Unlike English law, which relies on the principle of precedent, EU law is shaped largely by judges constantly reinterpreting it to advance EU federal authority.

Supporting the EU judicial agenda, EU bureaucrats also work tirelessly to impose leftist regulations on British society. This arrogance has not gone unnoticed or, as UKIP’s fortunes illustrate, unanswered.

Languishing in Omdurman Federal Women’s Prison in Khartoum, Sudan, Dr. Meriam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag and her 20 month-old son, Martin Wani, await their fate. While the liberal selfies of the world move on with their political correctness, social networking, and mindless entertainment, three fragile lives are about to be extinguished for the unthinkable high crimes of being Christian.

And where, pray tell, are Barack and Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, liberal Dreamers and all the other Muslim apologists in this country? Aside from the U.S. government expressing that it is “deeply disturbed,” our quasi leadership’s silence is absolutely deafening. Martin and the baby are – after all – U.S. citizens, locked in a cage in a dungeon full of infection and terror.

Make no mistake, Obama and his minions spring into action to defend Islam whenever necessary. But American lives, Christianity, or traditional values – well that’s another story all together.

The President’s own actions demonstrate where his loyalties lie, and they clearly aren’t with America or its Constitution. In 2012, imprisoned Muslim terrorists at the American Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan cleverly passed secrets back and forth using the interior pages of the Qurans from the prison library. When it was discovered, American troops appropriately burned the books. After the burning, Muslim leaders seized the opportunity to strike out at America, rioting and massacring 41 people. Of course, they ignored the obvious – that their own Muslims had already defaced the Qurans by writing in them. American soldiers were gunned down by “friendly” Muslims on the base, and four lost their lives.

Like everything Daniel Pipes writes, his column this week about the prospects of Islamism is interesting and admirably honest. If every public intellectual were as willing as Daniel to check his premises regularly and modify them when new facts call them into question, our discourse would be a lot more civil and edifying.

His column is about “Islamism,” which is the ideology I (among others) call “Islamic supremacism” — a.k.a “radical” or “extremist” Islam, or even “sharia-ism” in the recent coinage of my friend Joy Brighton . . . all of us, it should be conceded, grappling for the pitch-perfect term that (we hope) justifies sidestepping the gnawing question whether Islam itself inevitably breeds aggressive Muslim groups even if it is otherwise widely construed, or at least practiced, benignly.

Daniel has previously rejected the possibility that Islamism, which is innately dictatorial, could evolve into something that approximates pluralistic democracy. He now surveys recent developments and concludes it is conceivable — not likely, but conceivable — that Islamism could evolve and improve.

To me, the developments Daniel cites are just glimmers here and there along a mostly discouraging trajectory. I will make three points, more in reaction than in direct response to his observations.

1. Only our own lower expectations of what liberal democracy is make it possible to speculate that Islamism could become borderline democratic. While Daniel mines some hopeful signs that Islamism — or at least branches of it — could be progressing away from unyielding authoritarianism, the parallel phenomenon (which is not the subject of his column) is that Western democracy is regressing away from a culture of individual liberty protected by limited government. If it now seems conceivable that Islamism could democratize, it can only be owing to modern democracy’s accommodation of more centralized and intrusive government.

2. The only conclusion of Daniel’s that I have a real quarrel with is his assertion that

Islamism has significantly evolved over the past 13 years. As recently as 2001, its adherents were synonymous with criminals, terrorists, and revolutionaries.

I think this conflates Islamism with our perception of Islamism. Personally, I don’t believe Islamism has materially changed at all. Instead, beginning about 21 years ago with the bombing of the World Trade Center, there was a vigorous effort on the part of progressive policy-makers and thinkers — an effort that still persists — to convince the public that the only “radical” Muslims were violent jihadists (who were incongruously portrayed as both “extremist” Muslims and practitioners of a “false Islam”). All other Muslims, we were told, were “moderates,” no matter how immoderate their beliefs. There was very little public understanding of sharia — the Islamic societal framework and legal system — and of the fact that imposing its implementation is the rationale for both jihadist terror and the non-violent agitations of Islamist groups.