RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4178/cardiff-university-kawthari

What chance do Muslim and non-Muslim students — who oppose the incitement to hatred against non-Muslims and the subjugation of women — have of exposing extremists such as Al-Kawthari, if he is pronounced a “representative voice of Islam” by academics who claim to be experts on the British Muslim community?

Extreme Islamic preachers do not only appear on university campuses at the request of radicalized students; increasingly, extremists are afforded a university platform, with all the credibility that comes with it, by the academics themselves.

The Centre for the Study of Islam, based at the University of Cardiff in Wales, for instance, has recently announced a lecture series starting this February. The Centre was opened in 2005 by Yusuf Islam, the former musician known as Cat Stevens who has called for apostates and adulterous women to be stoned to death. In keeping with that spirit, one of the presentations this February is to be delivered by Muhammad ibn Adam Al-Kawthari, who will be discussing “The Role of a Mufti in Modern Society.”

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4181/blow-people-up-what-a-surprise

If we cannot see what is happening, it seems likely that we simply do not want it to be happening. But apparently not enough to try to stop it from happening.

How could a nice young British boy do a thing like this? That is what people said when a British man cut the head off Daniel Pearl in 2002. It was what they said when our British men boarded the London tube trains and blew up their fellow passengers in 2005. It was what they said when a young British student tried to detonate a bomb over Detroit in 2009. And it is what they asked again earlier this month when Abdul Waheed Majeed, a 41-year-old man from Crawley, West Sussex, turned out to have become a suicide bomber in Syria. The strange thing is that a lot of people seem no closer to any kind of answer.

Abdul Waheed Majeed had gone through a story so similar to every previous story that you wonder how wilfully deaf some people must be, or whether there has been a significant section of the press and political class who have simply not been paying attention in recent years.

Because it turns out that Majeed was once a member of the now-proscribed British extremist group, al-Muhajiroun. This is a group that has been linked to more terrorist charges in the UK than any other group, including al-Qaeda. Al Muhajiroun’s current de facto leader (since being banned, they operate under a shifting array of names) – Anjem Choudary – has said that Majeed worked as a driver for the former leader of the group, Omar Bakri Mohammad, by helping ferry him to and from his talks. Alas in those days he seems never to have had the urge to blow up the vehicle.

http://www.nysun.com/national/how-romney-missed-brthe-central-point-brabout/88591/

“Now it is a matter of fact that when emergency struck both Hillary and Barack did nothing and Ambassador Stevens and three brave men perished. My answer to Mr. Romney’s advice offered on “Meet the Press” Sunday is that everyone running for high office has a past that is relevant to the present. Hillary’s past is, if the press does its job, inescapable.”

WASHINGTON — First Mitt Romney loses a presidential election that he was predicted to win in a walk. Then he appears some 15 months later on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” to lecture the nation on how Republicans might lose the presidential election once again. “I don’t think Bill Clinton is as relevant as Hillary Clinton if Hillary Clinton decides to run for president in 2016,” Mr. Romney opined.

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/sfsu-student-continued-posting-violent-threats-against-idf-jews/2014/02/19/0/

A violence-glorifying student who has made repeated graphic threats against Israelis and pro-Israel Americans is finally gone from SFSU, but is presumably still in San Francisco, along with his knives.

Back in December, The Jewish Press ran a story about Mohammad Hammad, the San Francisco State University student and president of SFSU’s General Union of Palestine Students. Hammad had posted a picture and a message on the social media site Tumblr, which shows Hammad with a knife, beneath which is the caption, “I seriously can not get over how much I love this blade. It is the sharpest thing I own and cuts through everything like butter and just holding it makes me want to stab an Israeli soldier.” The California-based AMCHA Initiative, which brought Hammad’s original threats to the public’s attention, released another statement today. This statement links to many more violent and threatening statements by Hammad which he made after the one that was the original focus of the group’s concern. The AMCHA Initiative is dedicated to documenting, exposing and eradicating anti-Semitism on American campuses

John Kerry is the gift that keeps on giving. His latest hot air is the warning in Indonesia ” Saying that climate change ranks among the world’s most serious problems — such as disease outbreaks, poverty, terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called on all nations to respond to “the greatest challenge of our generation.” And, he went on to dismiss skeptics “… “We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific fact.”

That is pretty dumb. However, is it any dumber than continuing to bully Israel into processing “peace” with those who aver in speeches, sermons, press releases, broadcasts, schools, lectures and columns, that Israel cannot and should not continue to exist? Is it any dumber than pretending that there can be a “peaceful” and demilitarized Arab/Moslem sovereignty in the elevations and lowlands of the area (2,700 square miles) between pre-1967 Israel and the Jordan River? Is it dumber than willfully forgetting what happened when Israel evacuated from the Gaza strip? Is it any dumber to ignore the history of Moslem/Arab Jew hatred and jihad since the advent of Islam?

Even the mainstream media is chuckling at his globaloney but who is challenging his stupidity and cupidity on Israel?

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7405

Every time it seems American foreign policy couldn’t get any worse, Secretary of State John Kerry comes along to set the record straight. The weekend was no exception.

In Indonesia on Sunday, during the last leg of an Asia tour that included South Korea and China, Kerry took the opportunity to talk about the dangers of climate change. The speech he delivered in Jakarta at the U.S. Embassy-run American Center took place a day after a second round of “peace talks” in Geneva between representatives of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government and members of the opposition ended at an impasse. (Ironically, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem also raised the issue of climate, but he wasn’t referring to global temperatures. Rather, he was blaming the U.S. for “creating a very negative climate for dialogue in Geneva.”)

Kerry’s address to a packed audience of Indonesian students, community leaders and government officials also came two days ahead of a resumption of nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 powers (the U.S., Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France and Germany) in Vienna.

None of this was what the U.S. secretary of state wanted to discuss while visiting the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, however. Instead, he was there to warn the Indonesians about greenhouse gas emissions and “big companies” that are ostensibly wreaking havoc on the planet in general, and specifically causing typhoons, floods and Friday’s eruption of a volcano on the island of Java.

http://carolineglick.com/the-anti-zionist-challenge-to-the-jewish-estabishment/

There is a difference between speech and war. Both are forms of expression, to be sure. But the essence of the former is engagement, and the essence of the latter is destruction.

This distinction is apparently too subtle for many of Israel’s Supreme Court justices. On Sunday, the Court heard arguments on the constitutionality of the 2011 Anti-Boycotts law. The law allows targets of boycotts to sue boycotters for damages in civil courts, and empowers the finance minister to revoke the non-profit status of NGOs that engage in boycotts. It is being challenged by a consortium of foreign-funded, radical, anti-Zionist NGOs.
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The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East by Caroline Glick (Mar 4, 2014)

The essence of boycotts is destruction, not engagement.

True, boycotters express an opinion when they boycott their targets. But just so, armies express an opinion when they bomb enemy targets.

The question is not whether in levying boycotts, the boycotters are expressing a position. It is whether the primary purpose of a boycott is to express an opinion or to annihilate its target.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Three people died in riots in Caracas last Thursday. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro predictably blamed the deaths on “neofascists financed by the United States.” Nothing was said about empty shelves in stores, food shortages, or an inability to buy a car, gasoline or toilet paper. The accusation was apparently made without irony and absent any appreciation for the fact that Maduro’s (and Hugo Chavez’s) political party, the United Socialist Party, exhibits many of the characteristics of “old-fashioned fascism,” including the National Socialist Party of 1930s Germany. While Maduro doesn’t have Hitler’s “brown shirts” (or at least not visibly) and, apart from Americans, has not yet singled out a particular group for blame, the economic consequence of his policies have been to deprive the people of the basic necessities of life.

It is unsurprising that a man who surrounds himself with Communist allies like Cuba, China and Russia, as does Senor Maduro, should invoke Fascism as evil, while inferring that Communism is good. In truth, they are not at polar ends of a linear political spectrum. The spectrum is circular, not horizontal, with the two political beliefs intersecting on the side directly opposite democracy.

Communists are more subtle than Fascists, in that they use words like “reform” and they claim to address inequality; thus are more widely accepted in the West. Yet, both communists and fascist are murderously indiscriminate toward those considered enemies. The number of civilians killed by Stalin is estimated to be north of 20 million, probably more than were killed by Hitler. Both men suspended the rule of law and they eliminated dissenters. Both thrived on hatred and divided their people, isolating a segment of their citizens on whom to pin blame. For Hitler, it was Jews; for Lenin and Stalin, it was the aristocracy; for Castro, it was plantation owners. In Venezuela, an informal militia roams cities and towns on motorcycles intimidating political opponents. They may not wear brown shirts, but they derive from comparable ideologies.

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/02/16/near-death-experiences-a-new-take-on-life-part-1-sam-parnia-explains-where-the-field-is-leading/?print=1

Sam Parnia is one of the world’s leading experts on death—on how people can medically be brought back from the dead, and on what happens to the mind, or soul, or consciousness, after people die.

Of UK origin, Parnia works these days as assistant professor of medicine at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. He is also directing the joint American-Canadian-British AWARE study, which he calls “the world’s largest ever study of mind and brain during cardiac arrest.” And he is the author, most recently (with Josh Young), of Erasing Death, an up-to-date exploration of both of Parnia’s areas of expertise—resuscitation from death, and death itself.

About half of this book focuses on resuscitation science—which, since the 1960s, has been able to bring people back from states of clinical death. What Parnia has to say is interesting and informative, though it is not the reason I got hold of the book; I’m more interested in what could be called the mystical angle.

Basically, in Parnia’s telling, resuscitation science is both making unprecedented advances and not doing that well. Thanks to the new technique of cooling the body of a clinically dead person, cell deterioration in the body can be slowed down, and people can be resuscitated for ever-longer periods after death has occurred. On the other hand, survival rates—the percentages of people who are actually brought back to life—are still low and have not improved since the 1960s. “It’s really amazing,” Parnia says, “but absolutely true.”

What’s needed, Parnia contends, is for the resuscitation field to be much better organized, standardized, and coordinated. At this point, the quality of resuscitation care you get at a hospital—or whether you even get it—is pot luck. Parnia thinks the situation can be drastically improved, which would not only mean bringing a lot more people back to life, but restoring a lot more of them intact instead of in vegetative or brain-damaged states.

In August 2009 a chauffeur in New York City named Joe Tiralosi had a cardiac arrest and died. He was rushed to New York Presbyterian Hospital, where his body was cooled with ice packs and saline injections. It was then believed that, after ten minutes without a heartbeat, a patient can only be revived in a vegetative state. Joe Tiralosi was revived after forty minutes without a heartbeat. He then died again, was revived again, and eventually returned to his wife and two children in perfect health.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/is-france-going-national-socialist/?print=1

January 2014 will be remembered as an ominous turning point in French politics: the moment when explicit anti-Semitism was accepted again as a legitimate political view by at least a segment of the public.

First, there was the Dieudonné case. Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, 48, known as an artist as just Dieudonné, is an African-French former humorist who over the years has turned his shows into anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish gatherings. More recently he created and launched the “quenelle,” an inverted Hitlerian salute (one arm down, the other one touching the shoulder) to be used as an expression of contempt for Jews and everything related to the Holocaust.

As Dieudonné was about to start a grand tour of France in January, Minister of the Interior Manuel Valls issued orders and guidelines to préfets (local government commissioners) and mayors to ban his shows as public-safety risks. Moreover, the police raided Dieudonné’s home in Paris and found close to one million dollars in cash. Since Dieudonné and his wife and producer Noemie Montagne have repeatedly maintained they are nearly bankrupt, they may be investigated for tax evasion or money laundering.

While many citizens congratulated Valls for acting decisively against a dangerous agitator, many others — including in his own socialist and left-wing constituency — criticized him for “curbing free speech and expression” in line with his own “politically correct” agenda.