RUTHFULLY YOURS

The inevitable destruction resulting from fanaticism wound with fantasy.

Why those who are pro-Israel — Jew and gentile alike — should be on high alert
JewishWorldReview.com |

W ERUSALEM— Standing next to US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday morning, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni gushed that through his indefatigable efforts to bring Israeli and Palestinian officials to Washington, Kerry proved that “nothing can stop true believers.”

As usual, the cognitively-challenged Livni told us something she hadn’t intended to say. The term “true believer” was coined by Eric Hoffer in his classic work The True Believer from 1951, which Livni has obviously not read. Hoffer’s epic study of the psychological roots of fanaticism, described a true believer as a person so fanatically committed to a cause that no amount of reality can make him abandon it.

And that just about sums up Kerry, and the man he works for, US President Barack Obama.

Kerry visited Israel six times in the four months leading up to the meetings in Washington this week, during which Americans, Palestinians and Israelis discussed the size of the table they will be sitting around in the coming discussions.

During the sam

http://myprivateselfmeandyou.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-moral-defeat.html E-PAL  Joel Fishman is a fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Chairman of the Foundation for the Research of Dutch Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Sometime in the early seventies, I lived in the Boston area and attended a shiur (class in Jewish texts) of Joseph Ber Soloveitchik (1903 […]

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13626#.Ufpq-M7n_AU Mahmoud Abbas, Israel’s Palestinian peace partner, (an oxymoron if ever there was one) just announced that: “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli – civilian or soldier – on our lands.” And this was uttered by Abbas even as the farcical but perilous peace talks in Washington, […]

Another Tack: Who’s the sucker? Almost five years ago the foreign ministry, then under the aegis of Tzipi Livni, published the following official press release: On 25 August 2008, Israel released 198 convicted Palestinian terrorists. Israel undertook this risky measure in the hope of promoting dialogue with the pragmatic Palestinians who reject terrorism and are engaged […]

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139605/robert-springborg/sisis-islamist-agenda-for-egypt?page=show Addressing graduates of military academies is a standard responsibility for high-ranking military officers all over the world. But last week, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the commander of Egypt’s armed forces, which recently deposed the country’s first freely elected president, went far beyond the conventions of the genre in a speech to graduates of Egypt’s Navy […]

You Know the Karadzic Trial Isn’t Going Well When… …the tribunal resorts to repackaging a Hitler-era policy against Serbs, as a Serbian policy against Hitler’s side. An astonishing paragraph appeared in The New York Times and Al Jazeera. Astonishing even from the tried and true Balkans tall-tellers who for 20 years have been doing the […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3905/europe-moral-values

European governments speak as enemies of Israel, behave as enemies of Israel and take decisions only enemies of Israel would take. They are at war with Israel. There is no doubt they hope for results similar to those at Auschwitz, just by other means. If moral values are what Israelis and Jews are looking for in Europe, they are looking in the wrong place.

For nearly two millennia, the European continent has been a land of persecution and hatred for the Jewish people. The blood libels and the vilest accusations against the Jews have been accompanied by violence, pogroms, and confinement in ghettos and of course death camps. Eight decades ago, in the 1930’s, anti-Semitism was considered honorable and aroused few objections. Later, the Nazi machine set into motion the “final solution,” and zealous collaborators existed in virtually all of continental Europe. “Willing executioners” were not only Germans — far from it.

After 1945, anti-Semitism suddenly became unmentionable, and European anti-Semites had to be silent. But they did not disappear. In the 1960s, after the Six Day War, a new way of being anti-Semitic emerged that allowed them to recycle their old way: they could not be “anti-Semites”, but they could be “anti-Israelis”. They rejoiced when General de Gaulle in France spoke of the Jews as a “proud and domineering people,” and saw those words as a kind of official sanction, a green light. Since then, “anti-Israelism” rapidly became mainstream. European politicians, diplomats and journalists have done their best never to miss an opportunity to berate and criticize Israel. Anti-Semitic terms used in the 1930s began to be used again, this time to describe the Jewish State.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3911/eu-political-wing The Muslim Brotherhood is embraced as a friend and partner of Europe, but Jewish sportsmen, artists and scientists are considered a dangerous threat to peace in the Middle East. The EU’s policies towards Israel and the Jews has become so vicious, dishonest and unfair, that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3913/uk-muslim-prison-population “Nowadays jails are run mostly by Muslims … It hurts as a Muslim to have someone disrespect my religion. If we deal with him one time, with violence, and show him what time it is, he will never disrespect our religion again … For Muslims, you’d say it’s good, but for non-Muslims, it’s very, […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/hating-jews-a-global-study/print/

“This is a serious book – an important book. Yet it is also a book, alas, in which several of the contributors seem to shy away from spelling out the role of Islamic theology itself – of, most fundamentally, the actual contents of the Koran – in Islamic antisemitism. Yes, the Nazi-Muslim connections are important; but the reason why Nazi attitudes toward Jews took root so swiftly in the dry sand of the Muslim world, and flowered so lushly, is that they differed very little, in substance, from attitudes that are articulated repeatedly throughout Islam’s holiest of books. I can understand, to be sure, why authors on the subject of Jew-hatred might want to take extra pains to avoid saying anything that might expose them to charges of Muslim-hatred; but let’s face it, those charges will be leveled anyway. What matters is the truth: and the truth is that Islam, from its very beginnings, has demonized Jews, and that this demonization is not a peripheral but a central element of the Muslim faith. Unless and until we recognize this fact, and address it head-on, we will not get very far at all in our effort to challenge the toxic Jew-hatred that is on the rise everywhere on the planet where the followers of Muhammed make their homes.”

“The study of antisemitism,” admits Bruno Chaouat, a professor of French in Minnesota, “can be tedious.” This admirably candid confession appears relatively early in the pages of Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives, a collection of nineteen new essays edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, the distinguished director of Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and author of several major books about the Holocaust. Chaouat is right, of course: while a single anecdote about irrational hate can breed sorrow, anger, and/or shock, a thick book consisting entirely of such material is more likely to be, quite simply, numbing. It is Rosenfeld’s accomplishment to have assembled a volume that, rather than seeming to repeat the same points over and over again, feels consistently fresh as it moves from region to region, approaches its topic from one angle after another, and serves up new historical information and cultural insights at every turn.