RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7125

Rouhani’s curtain call

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has been strutting through the halls of the World Economic Forum in Davos like an Oscar nominee at the Academy Awards. And why wouldn’t he be working the red carpet with a wide grin on his face, while treated like a movie star?

After all, being an actor comes easily to the head of the Islamic republic. Since taking the reins in Tehran in August, he has been type-cast in as a “moderate.” It is a role he has assumed with ease. Not only does it require few rehearsals, since his script is both short and predictable. But the Western audiences to whom he is playing get caught up in his performance, even when he forgets his lines and lets it slip that he only differs from his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in style but not content.

It is thus that the long-time Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini loyalist — and current Ayatollah Ali Khamenei protégé — has been able to stave off stepped-up sanctions from the United States and Europe by pretending to engage in diplomatic discussions over Iran’s nuclear program. No matter how many centrifuges continue to spin or how much uranium continues to be enriched, all Rouhani has to do to buy more time to perfect long-range ballistic missiles for future nuclear warheads is to assure his P5+1 negotiating partners — the U.S., Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France and Germany — that his intentions are “peaceful.” Then, when presented with evidence to the contrary, he goes on the offensive, accusing them of imposing “illegal sanctions.”

2014.01.21 (Mastung, Pakistan) – Over two dozen Shia pilgrims on a bus are massacred by a Lashkar-e-Jhangvi suicide bomber.
2014.01.21 (Karachi, Pakistan) – Fundamentalists murder three members of a polio vaccination team.
2014.01.21 (Beirut, Lebanon) – Four people are killed when an al-Nusra sucide bomber detonates in a Shia neighborhood.
2014.01.20 (Wulgo, Nigeria) – Islamists take out a teacher in his own home with an AK-47.
2014.01.20 (Baghdad, Iraq) – A series of Mujahideen attacks in Sunni neighborhoods leave fourteen dead Iraqis.
2014.01.20 (Baghdad, Iraq) – Jihadis bomb a market, killing three patrons.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/369338/cuomo-still-prince-darkness-andrew-stiles New York’s governor has a long history of nasty behavior toward opponents. New York governor Andrew Cuomo recently berated conservatives — including pro-lifers, Second Amendment supporters, and gay-marriage opponents — as people who “have no place in the state of New York.” But Cuomo has a long history of behaving like a schoolyard bully. Just […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/369312/print Fixated as we Americans are on Canada’s three most attention-getting exports — polar vortexes, Alberta clippers, and the antics of Toronto’s addled mayor — we’ve somewhat overlooked a major feature of Canada’s current relations with the United States: extreme annoyance. Last week, speaking to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Canada’s foreign minister calmly but […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/369309/satan-state-house-jonah-goldberg The Constitution is powerless against Satan. Earlier this month, the state of Oklahoma received a proposal from New York–based Satanists to build near the state capitol a seven-foot-high statue of Baphomet, a goat-headed pagan idol. The Satanists’ letter boasted that “the statue will also have a functional purpose as a chair where people of […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/nuclear-deterrence-second-to-one?f=puball On November 8th, 2013, at Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia, Professor Mathew Kroenig of Georgetown University, explained that “there is no reason to believe that the U.S. nuclear arsenal somehow causes proliferation in other countries.” This is a startling statement because the assumption in much of the nuclear deterrent commentary is that US […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/democrats-failure-factories

Teachers unions supply the Democratic Party with money and foot soldiers. But if Democrats intend to make income inequality their issue in 2014 and 2016, they will have to give up their slavish devotion to these unions, which deny inner-city kids a shot at a quality education and an escape route from poverty.

A few Democrats, such as former Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, have challenged union power, but not New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Anyone eyeing Cuomo as the backup candidate for president in 2016, in the event Hillary Clinton doesn’t run, needs to take a look at his failed record on school reform.

New Yorkers are fleeing the upstate region’s moribund economy and moving to states with more jobs, fewer taxes and job-killing regulations. But inner-city school kids in Rochester, Syracuse and Buffalo aren’t going anywhere. Despite the phrase “no child left behind,” that’s exactly what they are: kids left behind. They are victims of Cuomo’s indifference to school failure and the greed of teachers unions.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hollywoods-muslim-lies/ In real life, terrorists are almost always Muslim. In the movie theater, they are anything but. America’s fictional secret agents, covert operatives and rogue cops who play by their own rules have spent more time battling Serbian terrorists than Muslim terrorists.  Before September 11, 24′s Jack Bauer was fighting the international menace of Serbian […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/obamas-middle-east-fantasies/

“With respect to Israel,” President Obama said in his interview this week to the New Yorker,

the interests of Israel in stability and security are actually very closely aligned with the interests of the Sunni states…. What’s preventing them from entering into even an informal alliance with at least normalized diplomatic relations is not that their interests are profoundly in conflict but the Palestinian issue, as well as a long history of anti-Semitism that’s developed over the course of decades there, and anti-Arab sentiment that’s increased inside of Israel based on seeing buses being blown up.

Obama meant, of course, an alliance against Shiite Iran. Indeed, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has referred several times to behind-the-scenes cooperation between Israel and Sunni Arab states against the Iranian threat. The catch is “behind the scenes”; Israel is still too much the regional pariah to bring these interactions out in the open.

Obama adduces the Palestinian issue and Arab anti-Semitism going back “decades” as the factors preventing an “informal alliance” and “diplomatic relations.” The implication is that these problems—along with Israeli “anti-Arab sentiment”—can be overcome. The administration, spearheaded by Secretary of State Kerry, has indeed thrown itself headlong into another round of the “Israeli-Palestinian peace process.”

The problems with Obama’s take on the matter, however, begin with the word “decades.”

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/01/19/pray-on-your-own-time-and-in-your-own-space/

I learned recently that Carleton University in the nation’s capital, Ottawa, following in the footsteps of other Canadian universities, has set aside a designated and enlarged prayer space, intended mainly for Muslim students who, as the Ottawa Citizen reports, “pray five times a day and for years have suggested that they need more room.” Otherwise, as president of the Muslim Student Association Mohamed Abdalla informs us, students end up praying in stairwells or libraries. That would clog up the works p.d.q., especially when convened five times a day.

Such accommodation, however, has no place in the public mandate of the academy’s parietal affairs, and Muslim students who proceed to foreground their faith in this disruptive manner should perhaps consider attending a Muslim university, or no university at all. The easing of the prayer crunch by constructing or expanding a designated venue, accepted by the author of the Citizen puff job as a prudent expedient, should not disguise the fact that public prayer (and in particular numerous prayer sessions punctuating the scholarly habitat) has no place in the Western university whatsoever.

I do not believe that Muslim students need more room. I believe that they need less mollycoddling and fewer concessions made in the name of their religious convictions. The university is a secular institution operating under an implicit code of academic conduct, which stipulates, inter alia, that classes be attended, that academic work proceed under rules of normative and respectable behavior, that examinations be held and properly invigilated, that modes of dress not be offensive, and that religious observances not interfere with a course of study. Allowing students to march five times a day to a prayer room in the midst of pursuing a concentrated program of academic activity, whether in the middle of a class or in the middle of a test or in the middle of a joint research project, does not seem an optimum means of following a university curriculum.