RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/why_not_zimbabwe.html

When I heard about President Barack Obama’s plans for a $100 million trip to Africa with his family and entourage, I was surprised that Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) is not on the itinerary.

I would think that Zimbabwe would be a place that President Obama would especially like to visit, because Zimbabwe is a country where almost all of Obama’s redistributionist dreams have come true. And Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe (an avowed Marxist) is surely among Obama’s pantheon of heroes and role models (along with Marx, Stalin, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Saul Alinsky and Rev. Jeremiah Wright).

Robert Mugabe has presided over the “fundamental transformation” of a thriving Rhodesia, once “the breadbasket of Africa” (and a nation with significant heavy industry including mining, iron, and steel) into a Zimbabwe dependent on imports of food and emergency relief supplies to fend off starvation of its population.

Mugabe favored a one-party state, total black rule, and a monopoly on land. He presided over the driving off (and sometimes the slaughter) of productive white farmers, and then gave the farms to unskilled blacks as rewards for military service or political loyalty. Agricultural productivity dropped by more than half, as did employment associated with running a successful agricultural enterprise.

Mugabe also presided over a treasury that printed more and more money to cover government debts, which resulted in such out-of-control inflation that Zimbabwe had to abandon its own currency and use foreign currencies such as the Euro, British pound, U.S. dollar, South African rand, and Botswanan pula.

A Disciplined Sentiment
Against the berserk certitude of idealists, Burke urged a deference to tradition and to the wisdom of felt attachments.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323949904578536270967604416.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

The great revolutions of history typically produce written works celebrating their achievement. The French Revolution, however, was immortalized by a denunciation. Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” appeared in 1790, when Britons were still welcoming the Revolution as a blow to Bourbon tyranny. Burke’s dissent has resounded through the ages. No reactionary diatribe, the “Reflections” promoted a “manly, moral, regulated liberty” and a cautious reform of the decadent French monarchy. But it lividly denounced the “short-sighted coxcombs of philosophy” seeking to remake France as a radical utopia, as if the “constitution of a kingdom be a problem of arithmetic.” Armed with a doctrinaire logic of rights, these revolutionaries were indifferent to history and hostile to tradition. “The age of chivalry is gone,” wrote Burke. “That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”

The “Reflections” foretold, with a prescience that is freshly incredible on every rereading, the grisly mechanisms of the Terror, the execution of Louis XVI and the despotism of Napoleon. The book was faintly embarrassing when it first appeared. The British prime minister, William Pitt, derided it as “rhapsodies in which there is much to admire, and nothing to agree with.” Time would rebuke this judgment. The “Reflections on the Revolution in France” became the most famous statement of conservatism ever written.

Edmund Burke: The First Conservative

By Jesse Norman

(Basic, 325 pages, $27.99)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324021104578551291160259734.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Tocqueville saw a nation of individuals who were defiant of authority. Today? Welcome to Planet Government. In “Democracy in America,” published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation. “The inhabitant of the United States,” he wrote, “has only a defiant and restive regard for social […]

http://unitedpatriotsworldwide.com/vinienco/ The Destruction of the Syrian Air Force The Destruction of the Syrian Air Force: The Syrian Air Force has suffered major losses in the last year, as the aircraft and helicopters were unleashed on rebels (and civilian supporters) and took a beating. Of the 370 usable fixed wing war planes the Syrian Air Force […]

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/169056#.UcF_5K8UHQw

Terrorist Earns Hebrew U. Doctorate, Refuses to Shake Hands

Two-time terrorist who planned a suicide bombing is given his degree. He refuses to shake the university president’s hand.

Maayana Miskin

A terrorist who served two prison terms for involvement in terrorism, including a plot to carry out a suicide bombing, has been awarded his doctorate in chemistry from Hebrew University, Maariv reports.

The terrorist is an Israeli citizen and a resident of eastern Jerusalem.

During the graduation ceremony in Hebrew University’s Har Hatzofim campus he refused to shake hands with Hebrew University President Professor Menachem Ben-Sasson. His name was read aloud at the ceremony and he was applauded by the crowd.

He began working on his doctorate prior to his second terror conviction, several years after serving time in prison for membership in a terrorist organization. He did his research in the Hebrew University laboratories.

At the same time, he was in close touch with local terrorist groups and assisted them in plotting a suicide bombing attack in Jerusalem. He assisted in finding a young Arab man to carry out the planned attack.

http://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/135066/ruth-wisse-jokes

Jewish Comedy Has Earned Big Praise, But Is It Time to Stop the Joke-Telling?Scholar Ruth Wisse likes to laugh as much anyone, but also sees peril when Jews can’t seem to quit clowning around. In ‘No Joke’ she explains why.

What are the three words a woman never wants to hear when she’s making love? Honey, I’m home. Whether their circumstances are happy or fraught, Jews have been pointing out the humor in their predicaments since the biblical era, when Sarah the matriarch saw the fact that she’d bear a child at her advanced age as a cruel joke. But it was only since the Enlightenment that, as a people, the Jews became known as a witty lot—reveling in word play, contradiction, and self-deprecation. Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse loves a good punchline (and, with her grandmotherly comportment, has perfected the straight-man delivery) but rejects the idea that Jewish humor is a uniform thing and, furthermore, that it’s something of which to be proud.

In No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, Wisse considers the variations of humor from Heinrich Heine to YouTube. She joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to share some gallows humor, to compare the jokes of the Haskalah to those told in yeshivas, and to argue that engaging in humor that distracts us from suffering, rather than confronting it, is not worth the laughs. [Running time: 32:16.]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

In Venezuela, savvy shoppers are hunting down scarce supplies of toilet paper with a smartphone app. The smartphones, compact packages of electronics, are several generations more advanced than the white square, but they are available when the toilet paper isn’t, because unlike the toilet paper they aren’t subsidized and price controlled.

While Hugo Chavez did at one point unveil a Chavezphone for the poor, he succumbed to the wonders of Cuba’s Socialist medicine before they could become as big as Obamaphones. But if Venezuela ever falls to the dumbphone, then there won’t be a smartphone app to find a smartphone with.

The sight of modern men and women hunting down toilet paper with smartphones seems like the Soviet Union as reimagined by William Gibson, but it’s a common enough outcome in an economy that is really a patchwork of uneven subsidies.

The Arab Spring was fueled by the social media apps of smartphones and anger over insufficient subsidies for staples such as bread and fuel. The smartphones may bring you the revolution, but it’s the toilet paper and bread shortages that set them off.

The problem is a commonplace one that Americans will shortly begin experiencing with the subsidized medicine of Obamacare.

  www.israelnationalnews.com Outraged French Jews will hold a demonstration Sunday over a government-funded Paris museum exhibit glorifying suicide bombers. The exhibit, which featuresphotographs by Palestinian Authority Arab photographer Ahlam Shibli, is entitled “Death.” It is being shown at the Jeu de Paume museum. The exhibit features portraits of Arab suicide bombers, from the military wing of PA […]

http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2013/06/jordanian-newspaper-lets-kill-jews.html

This article, by Dr. Muhammad Qasem Batayena writing in Jordanian newspaper Assawsana. is the worst one I have ever read. And that’s saying something.

Batayena is apparently a Ba’athist, and in other articles he writes of his support for the Assad regime and he refers to Saddam Hussein as a “martyr.” Even so, as you will see, he will happily use Koranic references as well.

The title of the piece is “Let’s Kill the Jews Everywhere.”

I’m not an extremist, nor racist… I’m not bloodthirsty and not vengeful… I’m not a terrorist and I’ve never been a killer… All my life I hated the color red, and my dictionary never included the word “blood”… I am not bloodthirsty at all… but I’m an oppressed Muslim and an Arab whose will has been taken away from him… that is how we were shaped in (these) bad times, which we haven’t chosen (to be born into)… this is how it was planned that we should be… we are living in volcanic lands… We smell the smell of blood coming from every direction… they [presumably the Jews] turned the color of the ground into red… our people’s body parts were scattered and their factions fought each other (literally “shot at each other”) through Arab-like Hebrew hands [“musta’ariba”, see Wikipedia for analog Mista-arvim]… and because I look at all these things without doing a thing – for that I’m an Arab.

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/132459/dumb-and-dumber?all=1

Errors by the party in power can get America into trouble; real catastrophes require consensus.

Rarely have both parties been as unanimous about a development overseas as they have in their shared enthusiasm for the so-called Arab Spring during the first months of 2011. Republicans vied with the Obama Administration in their zeal for the ouster of Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak and in championing the subsequent NATO intervention against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Both parties saw themselves as having been vindicated by events. The Obama Administration saw its actions as proof that soft power in pursuit of humanitarian goals offered a new paradigm for foreign-policy success. And the Republican establishment saw a vindication of the Bush freedom agenda.

“Revolutions are sweeping the Middle East and everyone is a convert to George W. Bush’s freedom agenda,” Charles Krauthammer observed [1] in February 2011. “Now that revolution has spread from Tunisia to Oman,” Krauthammer added, “the [Obama] administration is rushing to keep up with the new dispensation, repeating the fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine that Arabs are no exception to the universal thirst for dignity and freedom.” And William Kristol exulted [2], “Helping the Arab Spring through to fruition might contribute to an American Spring, one of renewed pride in our country and confidence in the cause of liberty.”

They were all wrong. Just two years later, the foreign-policy establishment has fractured in the face of a Syrian civil war that threatens to metastasize into neighboring Iraq and Lebanon and an economic collapse in Egypt that has brought the largest Arab country to the brink of state failure. Some Republican leaders, including Sen. John McCain [3] and Weekly Standard editor Kristol [4], demand American military intervention to support Syria’s Sunni rebels. But Daniel Pipes, the dean of conservative Middle East analysts, wrote [5] on April 11 that “Western governments should support the malign dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad,” because “Western powers should guide enemies to stalemate by helping whichever side is losing, so as to prolong their conflict.” If Assad appears to be winning, he added later, we should support the rebels. The respected strategist Edward Luttwak contends [6] that America should “leave bad enough alone” in Syria and turn its attention away from the Middle East—to Asia. The Obama Administration meanwhile is waffling about what might constitute a “red line” for intervention and what form such intervention might take.

The once-happy bipartisan consensus has now shrunk to the common observation that all the available choices are bad. It could get much worse. Western efforts [7] have failed to foster a unified leadership among the Syrian rebels, and jihadi extremists appear [8] to be in control of the Free Syrian Army inside Syria. Syria’s war is “creating the conditions for a renewed conflict, dangerous and complex, to explode in Iraq. If Iraq is not shielded rapidly and properly, it will definitely slip into the Syrian quagmire,” warns [9] Arab League Ambassador Nassif Hitti. Iraq leaders are talking of civil war and eventual partition [10]. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, meanwhile, warned [11] on May 1, “Syria has real friends in the region, and the world will not let Syria fall into the hands of America, Israel or takfiri [radical islamist] groups,” threatening in effect to turn the civil war into a regional conflict that has the potential to destabilize Turkey. And the gravest risk to the region remains the likelihood that “inherent weaknesses of state and society in Egypt reach a point where the country’s political, social and economic systems no longer function,” as Gamal Abuel Hassan wrote [12] on May 28. Libya is fracturing, and the terrorists responsible for the September 2012 Benghazi attack are operating freely.

This is a tragic outcome, in the strict sense of the term, for it is hard to imagine how it could have turned out otherwise.