RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=346054

PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas must have gotten a kick out of it on Monday when he visited the White House and President Barack Obama praised him as “somebody who has consistently renounced violence, has consistently sought a diplomatic and peaceful solution that allows for two states, side by side, in peace and security.”

After all, the same day the men met, Abbas’s regime continued its week-long celebration of the deadliest Palestinian terrorist attack on Israel to date.

On March 11, 1978, PLO terrorists commandeered a passenger bus on the coastal highway and massacred 37 people, including 12 children.

Dalal Mughrabi, a female terrorist, led the raid. Ever since, she has been lionized by the PLO.

While he met with Obama, Abbas’s adviser Sultan Abu al-Einein proclaimed that Mughrabi was the ultimate role model for Palestinian women.

In Einein’s words, (reported by Palestinian Media Watch), “In March, [we mark] Palestinian Women’s Day, in March, Palestinian Mother’s Day also occurs, in March… [we remember Dalal Mughrabi] who would not agree to anything other than to establish her state between Jaffa and Lebanon in her special way.”

Einein urged Palestinian youth to follow Mughrabi’s example of mass murder. “Let the young people hear me: Allah, honor us with Martyrdom, Allah, give us the honor of being part of the procession of Martyrs.”

The Israeli Right didn’t need the Mughrabi festival to understand that Obama’s claim that Abbas wants peace is ridiculous. As Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon explained last Saturday, Abbas is “a partner for taking, not for giving.”

Israeli Leftists, who have slavishly championed Abbas, are finally catching on. Last month, in an op-ed in Haaretz, long-time PLO champion Shlomo Avineri acknowledged the dynamic at work in the two-state policy model and how Abbas uses it to Israel’s disadvantage.

Avineri wrote that it is not that Abbas “is no partner for talks, but that he is an excellent partner for talks — as long as they are talks designed to lead Israel to make more and more concessions, and to put them in writing. Then, on one pretext or another, he is unwilling to sign and brings the negotiations to a halt, so they can be restarted in the future ‘where they left off’: with all the previous Israeli concessions included, and no concessions having been put forward by the Palestinian side.”

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The story of Islam is a murder mystery. It’s not a murder mystery that asks who did it, but when it will end. The detective peering through his magnifying glass at a curly hair caught in the door isn’t wondering who did it. He already knows who the killer is. The great mystery is how to make him stop.

This isn’t a story about right and wrong. In the terrains of tribe and clan that the murderers come out of, whether they are raised in a village with two goats and a well or a mansion overlooking a major city; Right is power and Wrong is not having power.

A man is right because he has power. A woman is wrong because she doesn’t. A Muslim is right because he has power. A Christian is wrong because he doesn’t.

When a woman has power and a man doesn’t, the man has been dishonored. When a Christian has power and a Muslim doesn’t, the Muslim has been dishonored.

There is only one answer for dishonor, death. Kill the one who has dishonored you so that you may feel powerful again. The men with the magnifying glasses will call it extremism, but it’s so much simpler and so much more complicated than that.

The powerful need not compromise. They have honor. Those who have no power but do not compromise also have honor. The extremist does not compromise whether in power or out of it. Therefore he always has honor. The extremist is willing to die for the power and honor of Islam.

Islam is never powerless, but is always compromised in some way short of perfect purity.

Perhaps it fails to drive out all the non-Muslims and doesn’t force women to cover their eyes. Or maybe it tolerates chess and kite flying. Even the crudest Salafist finds some human norm short of total and complete extremism. He compromises and the seed of that compromise gives birth to a movement that will not compromise even on that.

Each Islamic movement carries within it the seeds of its own extremist counter-movement and that movement too will carry its own seeds of death. The Islamic revolution devours its own children forever for honor’s sake.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absolute honor is the search for absolute power. A power so pure that it transcends the human means necessary to achieve that glorious end. A purity so total that it will elevate the smuggled cocaine, the rapes and murders, the torture and the broken oaths, to the golden truth that the ends of Islam justify all its mangled means.

The murderer kills because he wants power. He goes on killing for honor’s sake. When the blade slips or the victim pulls a gun, then the murderer skulks off into the night nursing his grudges and pledging that he will return or his children will return or their children, for the sake of his honor, on and on through the ages.

This is what the media calls a cycle of violence, but it would be more accurate to call it the cycle of honor.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“We get what we deserve” is a common phrase that describes everything that happens to us, from the behavior of our children, to the money we make, to the political leaders we elect. The concept comes from Luke, writing in the New Testament, “…for we receive the due reward of our deeds.” That phrase – not the Biblical one, but that which has become common usage – should have special meaning for the 76% of New York City residents who did not bother to go to the polls last November 4th. Recent polls suggest that even the few that did go to the polls may be having second thoughts.

The press declared Bill de Blasio’s victory a “landslide,” in that he won about 72% of the votes cast. The new Mayor took it as a mandate, just as did his fellow populist Democrat in the White House in 2008. The fact is, though, turnout in New York City was a record low, the lowest since “mid-20th Century,” according to the New York Times. His Republican opponent was the competent, but uninspiring Joseph Lhota. A 24% turnout meant that only 17% of New York’s eligible voters actually cast their ballots for him, hardly a mandate; though an early endorsement from President Obama made him comfortable in saying, “I won!”

The problem with ideologues, as we have learned from President Obama, is that their “hope and change” prevents then from focusing on practical problems. In their desire to see things as they wish them to be, they ignore the world as it is. People who walk with their heads in the clouds cannot avoid stepping into puddles. In his first few weeks, Mr. de Blasio has stepped into a lot of puddles. Early on, his SUV was seen speeding and failing to stop at two stop signs, when there was no emergency. A day or so later a NY Post photographer caught him jaywalking across a Brooklyn street. Neither offense was unduly serious, except that just days before he had proposed traffic safety initiatives. His attitude was typically elitist: ‘do as I say, not as I do.’

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7783

International relations and ‘marit ayin’

When Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon criticized the United States in a speech he delivered on Monday at Tel Aviv University, he must have known that serious backlash would follow. After all, this was not his first rodeo with the White House and State Department.

Earlier this month, when asked in an interview on Channel 2’s “Meet the Press” whether he considered U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to be an “honest broker,” Ya’alon hesitated. “That’s something we will have to see during the course of the negotiations,” he said.

Two months ago, Ya’alon accused Kerry of “acting out of misplaced obsession and messianic fervor.” When this statement, which had been made in private, was leaked, Ya’alon got into a lot of hot water at home and abroad, and immediately issued a public apology.

His words this week were no more minced.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-Fray-Shimon-Netanyahu-or-Binyamin-Peres-346075
Anyone watching portions of the PM’s AIPAC address might have been excused for thinking Bibi had morphed into Peres. But worse, much worse, was still to come.

By virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, [we] hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.

– Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948

I think it’s a mistake for some people to be raising it again and again as the critical decider of their attitude toward the possibility of a [Palestinian] state, and peace.

– John Kerry on Binyamin Netanyahu’s insistence on public recognition by the Palestinians of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, March 14

The “Jewish state” question is hard for many non-Israelis to understand… But for Netanyahu and his followers, the question is essential. Arab leaders have never conceded that a non-Arab state can hold a permanent place in the Middle East… Until they do so, there will be no real peace, because Palestinians will keep pressing to weaken and eventually eliminate Israel’s Jewish majority.

– Jackson Diehl, “Obama’s Middle East fallacy” – The Washington Post, March 17.

In last week’s column, I warned that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s continued capitulation to concessionary demands has proven dysfunctional and counter-productive, and has not created any understanding of Israel’s position, but rather a stimulus for additional demands.

As if on cue…

Readers will recall, I wrote: “Once exposed, his weakness precipitated mounting pressures to give way again and again. And each time he did, rather than receiving commendation for his ‘moderation,’ all Netanyahu got was continuing condemnation for not complying with the next emerging demand.”

And then, as if on cue, just as the column was submitted, the next demand emerged, along with incipient condemnation for his refusal to comply.

This resounding affirmation of the accuracy of my assessment-cum-prognosis was provided courtesy of none other than US Secretary of State John Kerry, with his demand that Israel forgo its eminently reasonable insistence that the Palestinians publicly acknowledge the very raison d’etre of its establishment – to be the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Since compliance with this new demand would in effect largely nullify much of the rationale for Israel’s continued existence, the very fact that it is now being raised should be cause for grave concern for Israel and its supporters in the US.

After all, to mollify the Obama administration, Netanyahu has over the past five years consented to a series of previously inconceivable concessions, despite expressing prior unequivocal opposition to them, frequently excoriating political rivals for contemplating similar concessions in the past.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/52303#CurDomainURL#/blog.cfm

On the very day that tax evader and renegade oil speculator Marc Rich died on June 26, 2013 in Lucerne, Switzerland, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Rich was pardoned on the very last day of former President Clinton’s second term in January 2001 in a series of pardons shepherded by current US Attorney General Eric Holder. President Clinton had been entreated by Rich’s, ex-wife, Denise, a major Democrat fundraiser, aided by representations from ADL director, Abe Foxman, who was reported to have earned a large fee for facilitating the pardon. Despite Marc Rich engaging in back door oil deals with the late Saddam Hussein, the apartheid South African government and the Palestinian Authority, President Clinton had signed off. He has subsequently rued granting Rich’s pardon.

Judicial Watch finally received the results of the FOIA request and published the redacted copy on its website, yesterday. Reading it, one can only surmise whether this might prove to be a problem for several people; former US Ambassador to Israel during the Clinton era, Martin Indyk and then Israeli Foreign Minister, now President , Shimon Peres.and possibly ex-Mossad head, Efraim Halevy.

Peres assumed the Israeli Premiership after PM Rabin’s tragic assassination by an Israeli extremist in November 1995.The period referenced in the Judicial Watch post followed the arrival back of the PLO-Fatah under the late Yassir Arafat in furtherance of the ill-fated Oslo Accords signed in September 1993 at the White House under Clinton’s auspices. Arafat became the first President of the PA and, in 1996 began a series of attacks on Israeli joint patrols in the disputed territories the period of a near decade long Palestinian violence against Israel. Indyk is currently Secretary Kerry’s Special Envoy facilitating negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on a purported final status agreement. This redacted cable could be problematic for Hillary Clinton’s possible candidacy for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2016?

http://acdemocracy.org/obama-kerry-deny-recognition-of-israel-as-jewish-state/
On March 20, 2013, in Jerusalem, President Obama recognized Israel as the Jewish State. Moreover, he insisted the ”Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state, and that Israelis have the right to insist upon their security.” He repeated this statement the following day, saying, “let me just reiterate that a central element of a lasting peace

must be a strong and secure Jewish state, where Israel’s security concerns are met, alongside a sovereign and independent Palestinian state.”

In Jerusalem, in December 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry stated:

“And I join with President Obama in expressing to the people of Israel our deep, deep commitment to the security of Israel and to the need to find a peace that recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, recognizes Israel as a country that can defend itself by itself, and that is an important principle with which the prime minister and the President and I are in agreement.”

Exactly a year later Obama is denying Israel’s right to be recognized as a Jewish State. During his March 20 meeting with PA president Mahmoud Abbas, President Obama omitted talking about the Israeli recognition requirement in favor of stressing security concerns.

Solicitors told how to draw up Sharia-style wills penalising widows and non-believers

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10716844/Islamic-law-is-adopted-by-British-legal-chiefs.html

Islamic law is to be effectively enshrined in the British legal system for the first time under guidelines for solicitors on drawing up “Sharia compliant” wills.

Under ground-breaking guidance, produced by The Law Society, High Street solicitors will be able to write Islamic wills that deny women an equal share of inheritances and exclude unbelievers altogether.

The documents, which would be recognised by Britain’s courts, will also prevent children born out of wedlock – and even those who have been adopted – from being counted as legitimate heirs.

Anyone married in a church, or in a civil ceremony, could be excluded from succession under Sharia principles, which recognise only Muslim weddings for inheritance purposes.

Nicholas Fluck, president of The Law Society, said the guidance would promote “good practice” in applying Islamic principles in the British legal system.

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/dreams-of-the-wicked-sons-father-yitzhak-ben-ami.html

In the summer of 1982 Yitzhak Ben-Ami published his memoir of the Irgun Years of Wrath, Days of Glory, a chronicle of the struggle, in the 1920s and 1930s, by the Zionist Revisionists and the Irgun Zvai Leumi (the movement of Jabotinsky and Begin) to get Jews from Europe to Palestine and then to fight the British and the Arabs for independence.

Ben-Ami was a founder of The American Friends for Jewish Palestine in 1939 and from 1946 to 1948 was executive Director of “The American League for a Free Palestine.”

Yitzhak Ben-Ami and I were friends. Our children attended the same schools–Collegiate and Princeton University. His article, reprinted below, appeared in 1983 in The Collegiate Review published by the Collegiate School in New York. It was written after the Lebanon War and the killing of Arabs by Arabs in the Sabra Shatilla Camp in Lebanon occasioned a tsunami of criticism of Israel. Although Ariel Sharon ultimately cleared his name in a suit brought against Time Magazine for accusing him of responsibility for those attacks, the floodgates had opened and pusillanimous Jews joined the chorus in condemning Israel even before the self-imposed investigation by Israel’s highest court had studied all the evidence.

Yitzhak Ben-Ami died in 1984. His daughter Deborah Benami-Rahm chairs the Yitzhak Ben-Ami Memorial Colloquium on Rescue from the Holocaust founded by the Wyman Institute.

Although we were not close, I know three things about him: He despised fools; he reserved particular enmity for the “beautiful” Jews who attacked and harmed Israel; and he loved his son Jeremy very much and held great hopes for him. Once, when we met in Princeton, he told me how proud he was that a member of his family was studying at Princeton. As he put it “We’ve come a long way from Grodno.”

For Yitzhak Ben Ami his son’s betrayal of his hopes would have been a tragedy. For his son is not only a fool but maliciously devotes his energies to attacking Israel through the vicious organization he co-founded, J Street. Even its shabby pretense of supporting some Platonic ideal of a “beautiful Israel” has crumbled as co-founder Daniel Levy has openly declared he believes the creation of Israel “an act that was wrong.” J Street’s duplicity, on its funding as well as its goals, has appalled even some of the “beautiful people” whom his father despised.

Jeremy Ben Ami personifies what renowned playwright and author David Mamet has called “The Wicked Son.” The wicked son is filled with the self-hatred of the Jew estranged from his heritage: at some level he identifies as a Jew, but he disparages Israel with words and deeds that gratify enemies.

The “New” Israel Versus The “Beautiful” Israel By Yitzhak Ben-Ami

An intense ideological split is dividing the Jewish communities of Israel, Western Europe and the United States. On the one side are the so-called proponents of the beautiful Israel. Why “beautiful?” As adherents of Ahad Ha’am and Zionist Socialism, they maintain that the first priority of the renascent Hebrew nation is the quality of life, one that is motivated by high ethics and ideals. In pursuit of this goal, they impose upon themselves a double standard that requires them to be better than others in order that they may become “a light unto nations.”

On the other side are the followers of Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Menachem Begin, the Prime Minister of Israel, is their representative today. The standard that is good enough for the democratic world is good enough for Israel so far as they are concerned. To them, and to me, dedicated as we are to the ethics of our heritage and prophets, the survival of the nation–today or decades ago, comes first.

Following is my rebuttal to my Rabbi who, on the holiest night of the Jewish year, attacked the concept of “survival at any cost” before his congregation.

http://freebeacon.com/j-street-endorses-palestinian-refusal-to-recognize-israel-as-jewish-state/

Jeremy Ben- Ami is a venal jerk who has roken the Fourth Commandment ” Honor they mother and father” repeatedly. His late father Yitzhak Ben-Ami, was my friend- a true Zionist, a member of the Irgun and a “passenger” on the Altalena.

In a development that is not sending shockwaves through the pro-Israel community, the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” advocacy group J Street has declared its support for the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

In a statement posted on the group’s website, executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami says that to “keep moving forward, both [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] now need to give a little.”

Netanyahu, he says, must drop his insistence that Abbas recognize Israel as a Jewish State because “it is simply unrealistic and unreasonable to expect any Palestinian leader to consent” to such a demand.

Ben-Ami never goes on to say what Abbas “needs to give.”