RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303293604579256021556967710

In the same week that Pope Francis was named Time’s Person of the Year, word arrived of the charitable contributions made by the Jane Fonda Foundation. Grand total for the years 2007 to 2011: zero dollars. The last time Ms. Fonda’s Foundation made a charitable gift, reports the Smoking Gun website, was in 2006, to the tune of $1,000.

The Foundation itself has $800,000 in assets. Ms. Fonda’s representatives insist she’s made larger gifts, particularly through her family foundation, which in 2011 made about $350,000 in contributions from $7.2 million in net assets. But even that’s not quite 5%, the legal minimum required to remain a private foundation.

Ms. Fonda isn’t exactly the world’s first cheapskate limousine liberal: Think of Bill Clinton claiming a tax deduction for donating his underwear, or the $353 Al Gore gave to charity in 1997. But the contrast between Francis and Fonda is worth pondering as liberals cheer—and conservatives try, uneasily, to explain or ignore—the pope’s recent denunciation of economic concepts championed by this newspaper.

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/israel-storms-ahead
Thankfully Israel’s recent cold weather storm has subsided, leaving the country to get back to normal – whatever “normal” means. Because no amount of snow and ice can put a freeze on the latest deluge of the Jewish State’s medical, scientific and social achievements.
Scientists at Hadassah Medical Center can now perform lightning fast checks on women worried about the risk of genetic breast cancer. They have developed a simple blood test for the presence of gene mutations BRCA1 and BRCA2 that involves gene expression profiling – far quicker, cheaper and more accurate than the previous method of full gene sequencing. Meanwhile, Israel Technion scientists have discovered that waves of low-power laser light produce a much faster analysis of an individual’s genome.
Israeli research into brain disease has the potential to rescue the world from an impending avalanche of dementia sufferers. This debilitating condition is set to treble globally by 2050, which is why Israeli scientists were invited to attend the G8 Dementia Summit in London. The G8 has also established a taskforce on Social Impact Investment, to which the Israeli organization Social Finance Israel presented an initiative for tackling type-2 diabetes. It comprises Social Impact Bonds that invest in companies tackling social or medical issues and then governments pay dividends based on results.
The Jewish State was rewarded for its flood of international scientific research contributions when Israel became the first and only non-Euro member to be elected to the prestigious CERN European nuclear physics council. Now, if they wish, Israeli scientists can conduct research into electrical storms using the longest subatomic particle accelerator in the world. In comparison, the Israeli-developed Objet30 OrthoDesk 3D printer is tiny, but the torrent of digital dentistry products that can flow from it is simply jaw dropping. Small dental labs can now produce stone models, orthodontic appliances, delivery and positioning trays, retainers and surgical guides, which previously could only be manufactured by large laboratories.
There is a constant ebb and flow in diplomatic contacts between Israel and the Arab world. There was a moderate thaw in relations when the Jordan-based SESAME scientific research project chose Professor Eliezer Rabinovici of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University as its new vice president. The media then positively gushed with delightwhen Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority agreed to build a pipeline from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. The initiative will produce millions of cubic meters of drinking water for the region, replenish the critically dwindling Dead Sea and generate hydroelectric power. There was another upsurge in relations when Israel’s Technion received a cascade of applications from thousands of students from Arab countries, wanting to enroll in its new online nanotechnology course.

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/12/16/21911592-climate-change-experts-fraud-was-crime-of-massive-proportion-say-feds?lite

THE MONSTER AGENCY EPA WAS CREATED BY RICHARD NIXON IN 1070….A BEHEMOTH THAT HAMPERS RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT, ENERGY INDEPENDENCE AND ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE WHICH SHOULD BE TAKEN DOWN…..AND GOVERNOR RICK PERRY WAS THE ONLY GOP CANDIDATE TO SAY HE WOULD DO IT….RSK

The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change deserves to go to prison for at least 30 months for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job, say federal prosecutors.

John C. Beale, who pled guilty in September to bilking the government out of nearly $1 million in salary and other benefits over a decade, will be sentenced in a Washington, D.C., federal court on Wednesday. In a newly filed sentencing memo, prosecutors said that his lies were a “crime of massive proportion” and “offensive” to those who actually do dangerous work for the CIA.

Beale’s lawyer, while acknowledging his guilt, has asked for leniency and offered a psychological explanation for the climate expert’s bizarre tales.

“With the help of his therapist,” wrote attorney John Kern, “Mr. Beale has come to recognize that, beyond the motive of greed, his theft and deception were animated by a highly self-destructive and dysfunctional need to engage in excessively reckless, risky behavior.” Kern also said Beale was driven “to manipulate those around him through the fabrication of grandiose narratives … that are fueled by his insecurities.”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/decorated-marine-faces-loss-of-career-for-sounding-alarm-about-taliban?f=must_reads

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/19/why-was-firefighter-marine-reserve-maj-jason-brezler-betrayed.html

More than a year after three Marines were shot to death on their base in an insider attack by an Afghan police chief’s “tea boy,” there is still no official explanation for why a warning that could well have prevented the tragedy seems to have gone unheeded.

There is also no explanation for why the police chief was allegedly allowed to sexually assault children with apparent impunity on an American military facility.

But authorities have taken action against one person they should be praising, the 32-year-old Marine Reserve officer who issued the warning about the police chief and his crimes.

Marine Reserve Maj. Jason Brezler—now also a firefighter with the elite Rescue 2 of the FDNY—faces a forced exit from the Marine Corps as a result of an inconsequential security infraction he committed in his hurry to respond to an urgent email from Afghanistan that he received two years after he returned home.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/12/creepiest_obama_story_yet_just_got_creepier.html at December 17, 2013 – 12:56:16 PM CST December 17, 2013

Rick Moran called the hanging of a huge Barack Obama portrait at the US Embassy in London the “Creepiest Obama story yet” yesterday. But it gets worse. Check out the size and placement (hat tip: Weasel Zippers) of the portrait, a tapestry by renowned Chuck Close, a government-approved (National Medal of Arts winner) artist. Ladies and gentlemen, we are well into Dear Leader territory:

That’s right, the portrait of The One We Have Been Waiting For is larger than Presidents Lincoln and Washington, who flank him, almost like apostles. The visual message declares that their significance is that they paved the way for the Lightworker. Was there nobody in the London Embassy able to understand how grotesque this is? Or were people siomply too afraid to speak up?

Here’s the kicker:

“The tapestry is one of 10 that will be made available for sale (at $100,000 each) as part of a fundraiser supporting the Obama Victory Fund.” [italics in original]

That’s right: our Embassy to the United Kingdom is displaying a propaganda portrait created for the purpose of raising a million dollars to propel President Obama to a second term. Inquiring minds want to know who the owner of the portrait is. Has it been loaned to the embassy?

http://www.jewishtribune.ca/news/2013/12/17/leaders-in-denial-over-source-of-antisemitism-author-charges

Dr. Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of Jihad, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism and Sharia Versus Freedom, has a new monograph, The Mufti’s Islamic Jew-Hatred: What the Nazis Learned from the ‘Muslim Pope.’

Jewish and non-Jewish political and religious leaders are in denial about the real source of Islamic antisemitism, according to Dr. Andrew Bostom.

Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism and Sharia Versus Freedom. His new monograph, The Mufti’s Islamic Jew-Hatred: What the Nazis Learned from the ‘Muslim Pope,’ consists of the first authoritative English translation of a 1937 religious proclamation by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, followed by Bostom’s analysis and footnotes.

The Jewish Tribune interviewed Bostom by phone from Rhode Island after his appearance at an event in Toronto held by the Jewish Defence League. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Jewish Tribune: What was the theme of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s fatwa?

Andrew Bostom: “It was an attempt to galvanize the entire global Muslim ummah [community] to wage a jihad to destroy Palestinian Jewry and the nascent Jewish state.

http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2013/12/16/convicted-terror-supporter-attends-congressional-briefing/

A convicted terrorist supporter who is currently under house arrest attended a Capitol Hill briefing hosted by a pro-Muslim Brotherhood group in a congressional office building earlier this month, according to reports.

Sami Al-Arian, a former engineering professor at the University of South Florida, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to aid the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in 2006. He has been under house detention in Northern Virginia since 2008 for refusing to testify in a subsequent terror financing trial.

Al-Arian admitted in the plea agreement to having had worked with the PIJ and other groups from the 1980s to the 1990s. He said he helped assist the PIJ after it was officially designated as a terrorist organization in 1995.

Al-Arian showed up at the briefing at the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 5, the Investigative Project on Terrorism reported. A group called the Egypt Freedom Foundation hosted the event.

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2013/12/17/its-about-the-settlements-stupid/

Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, the misnamed occupied territories, are not the obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They are the acid test of peace. To argue that peace is conceivable unless the bulk of the settlements remain in place constitutes stupidity or hypocrisy. Leave aside the issue of whether Jews have the right to live in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. Ignore the fact that the settlers live overwhelmingly on what was waste land and turned into gardens, vineyards, and industries which have uplifted the lives of Palestinian Arabs more than all the aid that has passed through (or rather stuck to) the fingers of the kleptocrats of the PA. Leave aside also Israel’s requirement for defensible borders: that is a critical issue but not identical to the continued presence of settlements.

Accepting the settlements is the sine qua non of any viable peace agreement. It does Israel no good to defend Israel’s right to exist but to condemn the settlers, as does Alan Dershowitz, not to mention the leaders of liberal Jewish denominations.

I believe in land for peace. That is a tautology: In territorial disputes the two main variables always are land and peace. But that implies more land for more peace and less land for less peace. The Palestinian Arabs had an opportunity to accept an Israeli state on just 5,500 square miles of land in 1947, and refused to do so. The armistice lines of 1948 left Israel with 8,550 square miles, and the Arab side refused to accept that. In 1967 Israel took an additional 5,628 square miles of land in dispute under international law; Jordan does not claim it, and no legal Arab authority exists to claim it. It is not “illegally occupied.” It has never been adjudicated by a competent authority.

To demand the 1948 armistice lines (the so-called 1967 borders) is to refuse any penalty for refusing to make peace in the past. That is the same as refusing any peace at all. Wars end when one side accepts defeat, and abandons the hope of restoring the status quo ante by force of arms. 1947 was a catastrophe (“Nakba”) for the Palestinian Arabs, to be sure, but it was a catastrophe of their own making; until they accept at least some degree of responsibility for the catastrophe, they will not be reconciled to any peace agreement. That is precisely what Palestine’s negotiator Saeb Erekatmeant when he eschewed any recognition of Israel as a Jewish nation-state because “I cannot change my narrative.” The “narrative” is that the Jews are an alien intrusion into the Muslim Middle East and eventually must be eliminated by one means or another.

http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/fostering-a-culture-of-philanthropic-giving-in-israel/?utm_source=Tue+Dec+17&utm_campaign=Tue+Dec+17&utm_medium=email

[This is the second article in a series on Israeli philanthropy. This segment of the series includes two parts. Part one focuses on organizations and initiatives that promote organized and strategic giving by Israeli philanthropists. Part two features organizations and initiatives that encourage micro-donations from the Israeli public.]

Part I: Promoting Strategic Philanthropy
by Frayda Leibtag

Tzedakah, charity, is a core Jewish value and a significant amount of giving takes place in Israel every day. The food donation boxes in Israeli supermarkets are always overflowing with products. Free-loan funds, for money as well as household items, clothing, books, equipment and services, abound in the ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel. Israeli passersby frequently give their small change to beggars on the street. According to a May 2013 Fact Sheet produced by the Myers-Brookdale Institute, 68% of Israelis age 20 or older donate, and in an international comparative survey conducted by the 2012 World Giving Index, Israel ranked in the 19th place among 146 countries included in the index (U.K. is ranked 4 and the U.S. 13). Israelis give, but not in the organized and controlled fashion that is formally termed philanthropy. Organizations and initiatives such as Committed to Give, Sheatufim, Jewish Funders Network (JFN) Israel, Keren Baktana and Takdim are working to promote and support a culture of philanthropy and giving in Israel.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4463/pope_says_he_knows_good_people_who_are_marxists_i_don_t

Pope Francis has run into hot water over some recent remarks about Marxism. Hard-hitting, Conservative U.S. talk show host Rush Limbaugh had accused the Pope of making some comments that went “beyond Catholicism” and were “pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope”.
USSR — 20 million

China — 65 million

Vietnam — 1 million

North Korea — 2 million

Cambodia — 2 million

Eastern Europe — 1 million

Latin America — 150,000

Africa — 1.7 million

Afghanistan — 1.5 million

Communist movements, parties not in power — 10,000