RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323936404578579962612795172.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

The glamour seems to be wearing off for Edward Snowden. The self-admitted leaker of America’s national-security secrets and hero of the world’s anti-American left now finds himself at the mercy of Vladimir Putin, the old KGB man and one of the world’s leading authoritarians.

Since fleeing Hong Kong with his WikiLeaks entourage, Mr. Snowden has been stuck for more than a week in transit purgatory at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. On Sunday night he formally requested Russian political asylum, but on Monday President Putin played coy. Russia won’t extradite Mr. Snowden to the U.S. but may not let the American stay in Russia either, he said.

Perhaps Mr. Snowden should have had someone other than Julian Assange as a travel agent. A better guide might have told him that Freedom House ranks Russia as “not free” and on par with Algeria in respect for political rights and civil liberties. Seventy-nine journalists have been killed in Russia since 1992, more than in any other country, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The Russian activist Alexei Navalny, who publishes his investigations of official corruption on his Web blog, faces a lengthy jail term on politically trumped-up charges. These things are good to know if you’re a self-styled crusader for “transparency” looking for a refuge.

Amid Obama Administration pleas not to shelter the American, Mr. Putin said Mr. Snowden should seek refuge elsewhere. And he offered “one condition” for him to stay: “He must cease his work aimed at inflicting damage to our American partners, as strange as it may sound from my lips.” But the Russian also cracked that Mr. Snowden “sees himself as a human rights activist and a freedom fighter for people’s rights” and doesn’t intend to “cease his work,” so Moscow may not be right for him.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/07/zombies-in-the-mineshaft/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=8f82571312-Mosaic_2013_7_3&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-8f82571312-41165129

So I saw World War Z, the new Brad Pitt movie about a worldwide zombie outbreak, and here’s the surprising thing: I can’t decide whether it’s the most anti-Semitic movie ever made, or the most Zionist movie ever made.
I know what you’re thinking: Isn’t that the way with a deeply profound work of art—that it makes you question your assumptions and goes beyond narrow ideological categories? Well, yes. It is the way of a deeply profound work of art. But World War Z isn’t a deeply profound work of art. It’s not deep, it’s not profound, and it’s not art. It’s actually pretty dumb, as you can tell when you learn that the people who made it think the United Nations possesses its own deepwater navy and aircraft carrier. (If that were actually the case, I would probably support a zombie takeover of the earth.)

World War Z is a combination horror movie, disaster movie, war movie, and spy movie. It’s both very scary and very boring, though, I must confess, not at the same time. Which is to say, when it’s not frightening it’s incredibly dull, and when it’s not tedious it makes you gnaw on your fingernails and cover your eyes in horrified anticipation. It’s probably more boring than scary; but if you like scary, you’ll love it.

Okay—enough with the consumer guidance, and back to the anti-Semitism/Zionism question. About an hour into the movie, Brad Pitt is told by a CIA agent that the only place on earth where the zombies have been stymied is Israel. This led my friend Kyle Smith in the New York Post to say that the movie “takes a pernicious turn when Israel, alone, is said to have known about the zombie apocalypse in advance. In a world where perhaps hundreds of millions believe Israel knew about 9/11 beforehand, this shows poor judgment, to put it mildly.” So that’s the anti-Semitic part.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352591/inhospitable-earth-jonah-goldberg You just can’t out-gloom an environmentalist. The Atlantic invited some luminaries to answer the question “How and when will the world end?” Some contributions were funny. Others were simply plausible — a volcanic eruption from underneath Yellowstone National Park is frightfully overdue. But only an environmentalist like Bill McKibben could be a killjoy about […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/352590/will-egyptian-military-scrap-sharia-constitution-andrew-c-mccarthy If you read Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, you’re not surprised by anything that’s happening in Egypt. At the moment, the situation is fluid, so take reports with due caution. That said, “sources” inside the Egyptian military tell Reuters that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has drafted a “political roadmap” which it […]

http://www.rollcall.com/news/north_korea_is_no_paper_tiger_commentary-226001-1.html?pos=oopih North Korea fell off the front pages when the media decided Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un is a fat paper tiger. But North Korea is resolutely sending military advisors to help Syria, an embattled ally and an excellent customer for chemical weapons. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights notes that North Korean officers are […]

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/jul/2/engelhard-hemingway-and-generation-lost/ In the end, the will to die was stronger than the will to live. On the morning of July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway aimed a double-barreled, 12-guage shotgun at his head, pulled the trigger and thus ended the short happy life of America’s most famous writer. He was 61 and we do not know […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-common-core-straight-jacket?f=puball American education was based on some very fundamental principles and, from the 1640s until the 1840s, they were, in the words of Joseph Bast, the president of The Heartland Institute, “real civics, real economics, and real virtues.” Bast is the co-author of “Education and Capitalism” and in a recent speech at the Eighth annual […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=4843 There is nothing to suggest that the mass demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square against Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi are any more indicative of hunger for democracy than the 2011 protests that led to the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak. This is not to say that the Egyptian people aren’t hungry. On the contrary, […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/living-in-a-backwards-world-2/

A new meme or figure of speech has begun to circulate among conservative writers and thinkers with increasing frequency and appositeness—namely, that we are living in a world turned upside down, to cite the title of a major book by Melanie Philips, itself derived from Christopher Hill’s study of revolutionary 17th century in England. (The term “world” is used by these writers to refer primarily to the Western sociopolitical domain or provinces thereof.) Almost everywhere we look we see this trope corroborated by extensive empirical testimony, of which I will flag only a few significant instances.

It is a world, as we have just seen, in which respectable and knowledgeable anti-jihadist freedom fighters Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller are forbidden entry to the U.K. as disturbers of public order and social peace while avowed terrorists are welcomed into the country and allowed to live handsomely on the public dole. It is in this same benighted nation that anti-Sharia activists Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll of the English Defence League are arrested for entering a Sharia-controlled zone in Tower Hamlets, a borough of London, on their way to Woolwich to honor Drummer Lee Rigby, slaughtered by Islamic terrorists. As reported on The Gates of Vienna website, “the Metropolitan police have now taken on the responsibility of enforcing the borders of these shariah-controlled zones, applying the rules laid down by the Islamic inhabitants.”

It is a world in which courageous media analyst Philippe Karsenty, who has shown beyond doubt that the infamous al-Dura event implicating Israel is an out-and-out hoax perpetrated by France 2 TV, finds himself convicted by the French courts for defamation—the Dreyfus affair redux. The Court of Cassation’s decision to remand the case to the Court of Appeals, which had originally acquitted Karsenty and then overturned its prior verdict, is not only “outrageous,” as Karsenty justifiably claimed, but legally problematic. As the JTA news source reported, “In returning the case to the appeals court, the high court said the appeals court had overstepped its bounds in ordering France 2 to send it the rushes of the report.” In other words, from the perspective of the High Court, soliciting evidence is impermissible. Shades of Canada’s Human Rights Tribunals and Supreme Court decision, which regard truth as unacceptable in their proceedings if it offends a member of a designated minority group. The same travesty exists in many European nations.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ There was once an America that built its shining cities on a hill in the name of virtue. That nation has been replaced by another nation that builds housing projects in the name of guilt. We used to elect the best men for the job, or at least we believed we did. Now we […]