RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/14464/where-is-our-shame

CLIVE CROOK, who for many years was a senior editor at The Economist, wrote the other day that he used to think his finest moment at the magazine was in June 2000, when he approved what became one of the most memorable covers in the publication’s history — a photo of North Korea’s ruler Kim Jong Il, “looking wonderfully absurd” as he waved stiffly to an audience. The headline above the picture: “Greetings, earthlings.”

Millions of North Koreans have starved to death because of Pyongyang’s deranged policies.

Now, having read the new UN report on the Kim regime’s institutionalized barbarity, Crook feels a “pang of shame” at the thought of that cover. North Korea jokes no longer seem so funny.

Indeed. It has been known for years that North Korea is a totalitarian hellhole ruled by megalomaniacs who have turned the country into a vast concentration camp. Millions of North Koreans have died from starvation caused by their government’s deranged policies; millions more have been victimized by its fanatic efforts to repress any hint of independent thought, and by its merciless assaults on human dignity. But the report issued by the UN panel this month, after a year-long investigation that gathered evidence from more than 320 victims and witnesses, paints such an extensive and meticulous portrait of evil that it compares in significance, as the Washington Post observed, to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s devastating history of the Soviet labor camps, The Gulag Archipelago.

Israel demographicIsrael demographyIsrael jewish PopulationIsrael PopulationMichael WidlanskiUNRWAUNRWA PalestiniansYasser ArafatYasser Arafat population timebomb People who predict population trends need to learn from weather forecasters: when your forecasts are wrong more than right, go home before they lock you at home.‎ Many who yell “demography” when discussing ‎Israel’s future, pretend to have the facts on their side. Actually, […]

Hamas’ real problem with the UNRWA curriculum is that it could spoil the Islamist movement’s ongoing efforts to stir the hearts and minds of Palestinian children to wage jihad against the “enemies” of Islam. Hamas wants Palestinian children to be taught how to become suicide bombers and seek the death of Jews and “infidels.”

Palestinian schoolchildren in the Gaza Strip have been denied the opportunity to learn about human rights after the Hamas government determined that such a subject “dangerously contravenes Palestinian and Islamic culture.”

Hamas’s announcement came in response to an attempt by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to include a course on human rights in schools run by the agency in the Gaza Strip.

The UNRWA bid drew strong condemnations from the Hamas government, whose representatives accused the international agency of seeking to “brainwash” Palestinian children.

Mutasame al-Minawi, a senior official with the Hamas-run Ministry of Education, explained that the main reason why his government was opposed to the human rights subject being taught in Palestinian schools is because it “ignores the nakba [catastrophe] of the Palestinian people, seeks to scrap the right of return for Palestinian refugees [to Israel] and promotes the culture of peaceful resistance and submission as a way of restoring our rights.”

Al-Minawi said that UNRWA proposed two years ago to include in its school curriculum the subject of human rights. UNRWA was hoping, he added, that the subject would be taught to children from Grades 7-9.

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/menachem-begins-broadcast-to-the-nation-may-15-1948-the-state-of-israel-has-arisen.html

” We shall be accompanied by the spirit of those who revived our nation, Zeev Benjamin Herzl, Max Nordau, Joseph Trumpeldor and the father of resurrected Hebrew heroism, Zeev Jabotinsky. We shall be accompanied by the spirit of David Raziel, greatest of the Hebrew commanders of our day; and by Dov Gruner, one of the greatest of Hebrew soldiers. And in this battle, we shall break the enemy and bring salvation to our people, tried in the furnace of persecution, thirsting only for freedom, for righteousness and for justice. God, Lord of Israel, protect your soldiers. Grant blessing to their sword that is renewing the covenant that was made between your chosen people and your chosen land. Arise O Lion of Judea for our people, for our land. On to battle. Forward to victory. ”

This speech was broadcast on May 15, 1948 in the newly liberated and recognized modern state Israel. World War II officially ended in August 1945, less than three years before. In that war, 6,000,000 Jews had been killed- one of every three Jews in the world, and in their memory and answering the prayers of Zionists for for two thousand years, the state of Israel was reborn. Menachem Begin who played an outsize role in Jewish history broadcast this speech to a nation that was soon attacked by enemies on all sides. Israel prevailed. The rest is history and a true miracle. rsk

Editor’s Note: This is excerpted from Begin’s address on Israel’s independence day on the Irgun’s radio station. His words are worth remembering in this time of unprecedented challenges to Israel’s right to exist.

Citizens of the Hebrew Homeland, Soldiers of Israel, Hebrew Youth, Sisters and Brothers in Zion! Today is truly a holiday, a Holy Day, and a new fruit is visible before our very eyes. The Hebrew Revolt of 1944-1948 has been blessed with success — the first Hebrew revolt since the Hasmonean insurrection that has ended in victory. The State of Israel has arisen in bloody battle. The highway for the mass return to Zion has been cast up. The foundation has been laid — but only the foundation — for true independence.

One phase of the battle for freedom, for the return of the entire People of Israel to its homeland, for the restoration of the whole Land of Israel to its God-covenanted owners, has ended. But only one phase. We should recall that this event has occurred after 70 generations of dispersion and unending wandering of an unarmed people and after a period of almost total destruction of the Jew as Jew. Thus, although our suffering is not yet over, it is our right and our obligation to proffer thanks to the Rock of Israel and His Redeemer for all the miracles that have been done this day, as in those times. We therefore can say with full heart and soul on this first day of our liberation from the British occupier: Blessed is He who has sustained us and enabled us to have reached this time. The State of Israel has arisen. And it has risen “Only Thus”: through blood, through fire, with an outstretched hand and a mighty arm, with sufferings and with sacrifices. It could not have been otherwise.

And yet, even before our state is able to establish its normal governing institutions, it is compelled to fight, or rather, to continue to fight satanic enemies and blood-thirsty mercenaries, on land, in the air and on the sea. In these circumstances, the warning sounded by the Philosopher-President Thomas Masaryk to the Czechoslovak nation when it attained its freedom after three hundred years of slavery has a special significance for us. In 1918, when Masaryk stepped out on to the Wilson railway station in Prague, he warned his cheering countrymen: “It is difficult to set up a state; it is even more difficult to keep it going.”

We are surrounded by enemies who long for our destruction. Our one-day old state is set up in the midst of the flames of battle. And the very first pillar of our state must therefore be victory, total victory, in the war which is raging all over the country. For this victory, without which we shall have neither freedom nor life, we need arms; weapons of all sorts, in order to strike the enemies, in order to disperse the invaders, in order to free the entire length and breadth of the country from its would-be destroyers. But in addition to these arms, each and every one of us has need of another weapon, a spiritual weapon, the weapon of unflinching endurance in face of attacks from the air; in face of grievous casualties; in face of local disasters and temporary defeats; unflinching resistance to threats and cajolery.

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-post-american-and-post-communist-world/

Sixty years ago an uprising in the Ukraine would have been met with machine guns fired from behind the armor of Communist ideology. With the fall of the USSR, Russia didn’t have much of an ideology to deploy against Ukrainian nationalism.

Putin tried to replace Communism’s international agents of influence by cobbling together a crude network of leftist anti-imperialists, paleo-libertarians and assorted conspiracy theorists and exploited it with classic tradecraft. Assange and Snowden showed how damaging this could be to the United States, but Assange, Snowden and all the rest of the gang couldn’t keep the Ukraine in Putin’s hands.

The anti-government sentiments projected by RT can bring in useful idiots, Assange and Snowden are evidence of that, but they lack Communism’s power to influence millions through the medium of a comprehensive ideology whose followers were willing to lie and die for it in unending numbers.

If Russia had set out to suppress an uprising 60 years ago, its talking points would have been on the lips and printing presses of innumerable writers and papers. To see what that would look like today, just compare and contrast the coverage of protests in Ukraine and Venezuela. Putin destroyed whatever goodwill he had left from the left by coming out against gay rights. Maduro however is a Socialist in good standing. The media coverage of Venezuela and the Ukraine reflect that ideological disparity.

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/where-have-all-the-flower-children-gone/

That silence you hear issues from the media/celebrity axis regarding the massive protests in Venezuela where hip college kids are being beaten, tear-gassed and shot down in a manner to shame anything done by Mayor Daley’s police in 1968 or the Ohio National Guard in 1970. Six Venezuelan youths are confirmed dead and hundreds have been injured and/or arrested.

Forget looking in the mainstream media for the nitty-gritty of this communist repression. The Venezuelan regime —under the (literal!) and expert tutelage of their Cuban colonial overlords–is easily censoring the sheeplike mainstream media. The truth, however, is seeping out through social media. Please don’t miss these dramatic videos.

But these are Communist police and National Guardsmen doing the beating, gassing and shooting, you see. Hence the silence. Worse still, these Venezuelan storm-troopers are “practiced at the art of repression” thanks to hands-on training by the best in the business: Castro’s police.

There is no place in the media-celebrity narrative on Latin American police repression for this sort of thing. Pinochet? Somoza? Batista?—sure! These Latin American dictators thrived on repressing young hipsters. But they were all “right-wingers.” So it was only natural. A good word regarding any of those regimes by a rocker celebrity would have lead to instant and permanent blacklisting.

Government Power is an Economic Inequality

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The liberal defenders of government power attack concentrations of wealth, but in the true concentration of wealth is not found in the hands of a few billionaires, but in the hands of the government.

The editorialists talk about income inequality and the 1 percent, but they focus on individuals rather than institutions, and it is the concentration of wealth and power in institutions that threaten civil liberties.

The top 10 wealthiest men and women in America barely have 250 billion dollars between them. Federal budgets run into the trillions of dollars, and the national debt approaches 15 trillion dollars. And that’s not taking into account state budgets. Even Rhode Island, the smallest state in the union, with a population of barely a million, has a multi-billion dollar budget.

As the 10th richest man in America, Michael Bloomberg wields a personal fortune of a mere 18 billion dollars, but as the Mayor of the City of New York, he disposed of an annual budget of 63 billion dollars that was three times his own net worth. Spending so much money would wipe out the net worth of any billionaire in America.

That is the difference between the wealth wielded by the 10th wealthiest man in America, and the mayor of a single city. And that is the real concentration of wealth. Not in the hands of individuals, but at every level of government, from the municipal to the state houses to the White House.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/371997/print

But the Pentagon has chosen a path that may buy some time.

Far-called our navies melt away —
On dune and headland sinks the fire —
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!

— Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional” (1897)

Kipling lamented the decline of British power, a decline that contributed to the outbreak of World War I. But the decline of British power was not intended. In contrast to the British case, the Obama administration appears to be intentionally pursuing a policy of American decline. Unlike his predecessors from both parties since World War II, President Obama has embarked on a grand strategy that seems to relegate the United States to the status of just “one among many.” The president has firmly rejected the idea of American exceptionalism and the status of the United States as the “indispensable nation” that must provide the “public good” of security. His actions with regard to the domestic economy have also made it difficult, if not impossible, for the United States to increase defense spending in the future if such a response becomes necessary. This is a radical shift and a dangerous one.

The foreign-policy failures of the Obama administration are legion: the risible Russian “reset” that has enabled Vladimir Putin to strut about as a latter-day czar; the betrayal of allies, especially in Central Europe, not to mention Israel; snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq by failing to achieve a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) that would help to keep Iraq out of the Iranian orbit; the muddled approach to Afghanistan; our feckless policy — or lack of policy — regarding Iranian nuclear weapons, not to mention Libya and Benghazi as well as Syria.

President Obama has said that he was elected to end wars, not to start them, as if wars were ends in themselves, not means. But ending wars is no virtue if the chance for success has been thrown away, as it was in Iraq.

Now comes the latest defense budget to validate the view that President Obama seeks nothing less than American decline. The Department of Defense has absorbed substantial reductions in recent years. In an attempt to preempt defense-spending cuts that did not reflect strategic considerations, former secretary of defense Robert Gates initiated some $900 billion in reductions.

During his recent visit to Indonesia, Secretary of State John Kerry delivered 5,957 words on so-called “global warming.” As he told students at Jakarta’s American Cultural Center on February 16: “Terrorism, epidemics, poverty, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction — all challenges that know no borders — the reality is that climate change ranks right up there with every single one of them.” Kerry added, “Climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” He continued: “The science of climate change is leaping out at us like a scene from a 3D movie.”

Meanwhile, in the nation that Kerry represents, snow coated 49 of the 50 United States, including Mount Mauna Kea in Hawaii; only Florida escaped. The morning of February 18 brought snow to the sidewalks of New York, which were already icy from a February 15 snowstorm — the sixth in one week. That blizzard, in turn, arrived barely a day after the previous blast, which dumped snow from Georgia to Maine, toppled power lines, left at least a half million Americans in the dark, and killed 25 people.

After six feet of snow pounded mountains in Colorado in recent days, three avalanches have devoured four people. These snow slides have been “breaking trees that have been there a long time,” the Colorado Avalanche Information Center’s Brian Lazar told the Washington Post. “This is a good indication that avalanches are running bigger than they have.” So far this winter, avalanches have killed 15 individuals.

Two polar vortices lately have made New Orleans feel like Chicago with flying beads. The Great Lakes are now 85 percent frozen. “Average ice cover at this point in the season is 35 percent,” the Michigan Daily reports. “The current levels are the highest since 1979, when the lakes were almost 95 percent covered.” Lake Erie already is at that level; Lake Huron is nearly 96 percent frozen.

Cold rain and snow have cancelled some 87,000 flights since December 1. That’s a record since the Transportation Department started tracking scrapped airline departures in the winter of 1987.

Americans who awoke on cold airport floors probably ground their molars as they looked up and saw Kerry pontificating on TV screens near their departure gates. It must have been equally galling for Americans to shovel their snowy driveways and then hear Obama declare in drought-ravaged Los Baños, Calif., on February 14: “Unless and until we do more to combat carbon pollution that causes climate change, this trend is going to get worse. And the hard truth is even if we do take action on climate change, carbon pollution has built up in our atmosphere for decades.” Obama ominously added: “The planet is slowly going to keep warming for a long time to come.”

True, the Golden State has been cursed with scarce rain lately (and, conversely, blessed with toasty sunshine that allowed one to bike comfortably in shorts and then enjoy Christmas dinner in Los Angeles while wearing a Madras shirt). But the Endangered Species Act has aggravated matters.

Congress should deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions by authorizing, now, the president to use military action.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371512/authorize-force-now-robert-p-george-michael-stokes-paulsen

The six-month “interim” agreement between Iran and the U.S. and other nations on Iran’s further development of its nuclear capacity has now gone into effect. Many Americans of both political parties believe it is a bad deal — one that will not lead to a suspension of Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. The Israelis and the Saudis agree with them. We too have grave doubts.

What if the skeptics are right? We had better think that possibility through very carefully — and do it now. President Obama and key leaders in Congress have stated that the acquisition of nuclear arms by Iran is unacceptable. The president has assured the public, and our allies, that he will not let it happen. If the president is speaking truthfully on this matter, then the possibility of the failure of the “interim” deal means that the United States must be prepared to deploy military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear-development sites.

No American wants that to become necessary. Yet is there any reason to suppose that, if it does, the constitutional debates over presidential authority to take military action will be any more helpful than the embarrassment attending President Obama’s “red-line-already-crossed,” on-again, off-again handwringing over the use of military force against the Assad regime in Syria this past September? Can anyone fail to imagine Iran’s leaders chortling at the sight of America’s Congress debating a resolution authorizing the use of military force, all the while that Iran takes advantage of the time to prepare to defend its weapons against a U.S.-led attack?