RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Palestinian Authority was created by the Israeli Labor Party in 1994. The Labor Party believed that, with the breakup of the Soviet Union and America’s ringing defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War, radicalism had essentially become a losing proposition and the Palestinians knew they had no choice but to work out peaceful coexistence with Israel.

Since then the idea of Israeli-Palestinian peace has been an obsessive theme of international politics. For a time it also sharply divided Israel into two camps of believers and nonbelievers; today, after two decades of terrorism and rocket fire, all polls show that the nonbelievers are by far the dominant camp.

For those who bother to inform themselves about the Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza—their education, culture, politics, religion—the ongoing insistence of U.S. and European establishments that Israeli-Palestinian peace is the order of the day, with Israel as the party that stymies it, is surreal almost beyond belief.

Palestinian schools, media, and mosques entirely negate Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state, and systematically deny any Jewish connection to the Land of Israel and Jerusalem. They also honor and glorify Palestinian terrorists in every possible way, from stipends and ceremonies for living ones to the naming of streets, public squares, sporting events, and children’s camps after deceased terrorists. Glorification is especially lavished on those who killed large numbers of Israelis in mass attacks.

For about six years, what used to be the unitary Palestinian Authority has been divided into what are essentially two entities—the remaining Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and Hamas-run Gaza. The latter is an Islamist statelet openly sworn to Israel’s destruction; the U.S. and even the European Union officially outlaw Hamas as a terrorist organization.

The Palestinian Authority, however, with its relatively secular Fatah leadership, continues to be regarded as a force for peace. The problem with that view is that it is an inversion of the truth.

Bangladesh is on the road to becoming another Afghanistan, fulfilling the clearly stated desires of jihadists and fundamentalists, according to Bangladeshis who have fled their homeland.

Imams describe women as filth and demand that they cover themselves. They accuse exploited female garment workers of prostitution when they are forced to work late into the night to earn a living. Schoolchildren have to dress in Islamic garb, even if they are not Muslims. Workers are discriminated against if they are other than Muslim. Land grabs by Muslims of property owned by minorities occur all the time — with impunity. Atheist bloggers are beaten and even killed for “insulting Islam,” and all this under the supposedly secular Awami League administration.

The Hindu empire once stretched from Afghanistan to Indonesia, before the Muslim invasions whittled it down. According to Dr. Sachi Dastidar, professor of politics at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, Long Island, forty-nine million Hindus are missing from the Bangladesh census over the period of 1947 to 2001. At the time of the partition of India in 1947, Hindus comprised thirty-one percent of the population of Bangladesh. The population of Hindus in Bangladesh is now down to a mere nine percent. The numbers are shrinking very fast due to coerced conversions; the kidnapping of girls and women, as well as rapes followed by murder; forced flight — and genocidal massacres.

In the near future, all the non-Muslims may be “ethnically cleansed” from Bangladesh. The world will have lost one more part of the globe to fundamentalists and gained one more staging ground for new attacks on the West.

The minority population in Bangladesh lives under constant fear of loss of life and property, especially in the countryside, where Muslim transgressions more easily escape being publicized.

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/11/19/the-shia-didnt-like-renegade-yemenite-jew-abdullah-ibn-saba-either/ At Pajamas Media I blogged about the mainstream Sunni doctrine which insists Abd Allah b. Saba, an alleged renegade Yemenite Jew was the founder of the heterodox Shiite sect. He is held responsible—identified as a Jew—for promoting the Shiite heresy and fomenting the rebellion and internal strife associated with this primary breach in Islam’s […]

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/11/books-good-nazis-bad/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=2ffa570fd9-Mosaic_2013_11_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-2ffa570fd9-41165129

“I don’t think we really need another film about the Holocaust, do we? It’s like,how many have there been?” Thus lamented Kate Winslet in the U.S. debut of the Ricky Gervais series Extras in late 2005. Winslet was playing herself, and she was in the process of explaining why she’d accepted the role of a nun in a Holocaust movie. She continued: “I’m doing this this because I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust you’re guaranteed an Oscar…. Schindler’sbloody List, The Pianist—Oscars coming out their ass.”

It was a cunning bit of snark at the time, and it only became more so three years later when—life imitating satire—the Academy voted to grant Winslet her first Oscar for her performance in, yes, a Holocaust movie, The Reader. It was a particular irony given that this was a subpar performance in a mediocre film, and that Winslet actually deserved the award for another performance the same year, in Revolutionary Road, for which she was not nominated. Suffice it to say that the whole episode did not exactly put to rest the calculated gamble that Holocaust movies beget Oscar gold.
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The Ligh

And so another awards season brings another film (adapted from another international bestseller) offering up the unrelated and uncontroversial lessons that reading is good and Nazis are bad. The Book Thief, directed by Brian Percival and based on the novel by Markus Zusak, is essentially The Reader reimagined as an Afterschool Special: similarly earnest and plodding, but with the sex and moral ambiguity removed.

http://blogs.cfr.org/abrams/2013/11/18/the-case-of-the-phony-fatwa/ It’s common knowledge that Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, has issued a fatwa banning the possession of nuclear weapons. This “fact” has recently been cited by President Obama and by Secretary of State Kerry. In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September, the President said the Supreme Leader has issued a […]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/alanjohnson/100245799/george-orwell-betrayed-islamist-tariq-ramadan-gives-a-lecture-in-his-name/

The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language. (George Orwell, Politics and the English language, 1946.)

This week in London, the annual George Orwell Lecture was given by the Islamist writer Tariq Ramadan. Where is one to start?

George Orwell was against religious censorship. Tariq Ramadan campaigned successfully to cancel a production of Voltaire’s play Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophete in Geneva.

Orwell was a rational man. When Ramadan taught at the College de Saussure he argued in favour of Islamic biology over Darwin.

Orwell risked his life fighting for the Spanish Republic against Franco’s fascists. Ramadan is a coward when it comes to fighting fascism. In November 2003, on French television, the future French president Nicolas Sarkozy invited Ramadan to condemn the practice of stoning women. He would not. Ramadan squirmed: “I have called for — because I know my position is a minority one within the Muslim world today — a moratorium so that there can be a real debate between Muslims.”

Orwell opposed state control and religious indoctrination. Ramadan would like the former to impose the latter. He wants Muslim parents to control the content of state school programmes according to “Islamic values”.

Ramadan pokes fun at feminism with silly jokes. Western society supposedly obliges women to “become brick workers or lorry drivers to show that women are effectively liberated”. (OK, so maybe there is a connection to Orwell, who was a bit of a sexist.)

http://www.leebsmarketforecast.com/content/the_complete_investor/lavabit-founder-ladar-levison-plots-route

You come home from work, turn on the TV, and start chuckling at your favorite comedy. Everything feels normal, but it’s not. You’re inside the Government Matrix. No joke. You’re watching a show—and a captured operation.

The California Endowment, a private foundation spending millions on ads aimed at enrolling young adults and Hispanics in Obamacare, now also has granted $500,000 to educate TV writers and producers on Obamacare, and suggest ways to weave its many splendors into fictional prime-time shows.

“We know from research that when people watch entertainment television, even if they know it’s fiction, they tend to believe that the factual stuff is actually factual,” said grant recipient Martin Kaplan of the University of Southern California’s Norman Lear Center.

If your insurance is canceled, your new premium costs triple, and your doctor won’t see you, will you forgive all after seeing Modern Family’s hilarious episode on the glorious Affordable Care Act?

The California Endowment’s grant to “educate” television’s creative talent does not plop the government into the writers’ room, not directly anyway. But Endowment president Robert K. Ross, an active Obamacare advocate, also happens to sit on the board of Covered California, the official state-run insurance exchange set up by ObamaCare. That’s about as convincing a separation as Lucy and Desi’s twin beds on I Love Lucy.

I have a dream that some Hollywood big shot will shout, “I may be a second-rate hack, turning out third-rate entertainment, but I do have integrity. I won’t relinquish my show for government use as a deceptive propaganda tool.”

Considering Hollywood’s wholesale capitulation to China, that has as much chance of realization as does a Duck Dynasty star of winning an Academy Award. In 2012, China’s richest man, Wang Jianlin, bought the AMC movie theater chain for $2.6 billion, forging the world’s largest movie theater chain.

http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2013/11/18/the-counterfeit-arabs.html They are the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. They are indistinguishable from those Arabs who live in the surrounding artificial states such as Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia or the other entities throughout the Middle East created by the colonial powers, France and Britain. Both powers were victorious after the Ottoman Turkish Empire lay defeated […]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/week-will-be_767320.html

This isn’t going to be a good week for me. Friday will mark the 50th anniversary of the death in Dallas of President John F. Kennedy, and between now and then I expect a complete media blitz—make that a blitzkrieg—of stories, films, docudramas, book reviews, and counterfactual explorations about the event and, by extension, about all that the nation lost with the death of the brilliant but ill-fated president. Dallas policemen, such media duffers as Bob Schieffer and Jim Lehrer, Lee Harvey Oswald’s dentist, Jack Ruby’s rabbi, everyone still alive who has any memory of or connection with the assassination will be called upon to cough up his driblet of information.

I happen to be a member of that minority—perhaps in America the minoritiest of all minorities—who doesn’t get it. I understand the sadness of a still youngish man killed in the presence of his wife before a vast television audience. What I don’t get is the glamor of, the intense emotion surrounding, the general significance of John F. Kennedy. Nor do I understand the eagerness of so many of my countrymen to make the Kennedy family America’s equivalent of the royals.

These groups [human rights, media, Western donor governments] see only what the Israeli authorities do. On the side of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, or Hamas in the Gaza Strip, they “see no evil.” For Western governments, so long as the Palestinian Authority leadership says it is committed to the peace process with Israel, its leaders are allowed to rule as a dictatorship.

The Palestinian Authority also apparently does not want the outside world, especially international donors, to hear about the financial corruption or violations of freedom of the media. It seems to want criticism to be directed only toward Israel in the hope that this will invite international pressure on the Israelis and force them to accept at the negotiating able all of Abbas’s demands .

The Palestinian Authority has resumed its security crackdown on Palestinian journalists and bloggers in the West Bank.

But the crackdown has thus far sparked protests only from Palestinian journalists.

Western governments that fund the Palestinian Authority continue to turn a blind eye to the breach of freedom of expression in the West Bank.

International human rights groups and organizations purporting to defend freedom of the media also continue to ignore the violations against freedom of expression under the Palestinian Authority.

These groups only see what the Israeli authorities do. On the side of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, or Hamas in the Gaza Strip, they “see no evil.”