RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sarahhonig.com/2013/06/14/another-tack-plucky-in-pajamas/

In our collective memory Levi Eshkol is perceived as a weak, even a vacillating prime minister. Perhaps this was unjust already back on the eve of the Six Day War, when his image became thus ingrained in our popular lore. Certainly, compared to many of his successors in ensuing decades, Eshkol can be portrayed as a resolute upholder of Israeli national pride – especially when clad in pajamas.

Merely by refusing to change into proper daytime attire, Eshkol struck a plucky patriotic pose. In his humble night clothes he evinced more audacity than most of the wishy-washy variety that followed him in office.

Eshkol took his steadfast stand in the ungodly hours of May 27, 1967, when Soviet Ambassador Dmitri Chuvakhin arrived on the PM’s doorstep and demanded to wake him up to deliver an urgent message from Moscow. The envoy insisted he couldn’t wait till dawn.

Rather than be overawed and flustered, Eshkol chose to deliberately express his defiance of what was surely a bullying superpower diktat. He told his bureau chief, veteran diplomat Aviad Yaffe, that “under no circumstances do I have any intention of getting dressed for him” [Chuvakhin].

Those were the suffocating super-tense days in which the Arabs boasted belligerently that they were about to annihilate the Jewish state, after Egypt had blockaded the Tiran Straits and ignominiously tossed the UN peacekeepers out of Sinai.

Surrealistically, as the scary siege against Israel intensified, both the State Department and the White House “couldn’t find” copies of America’s ten-year-old guarantees to prevent precisely such a scenario. This was despite the fact that these very much-publicized guarantees were what swayed Israel, under Washington’s aggressive prodding, to withdraw from the Sinai in 1957.

Israel seemed alone, callously abandoned by its allies and coldly intimidated by the Russians. Things looked grim. How today’s crop of Israeli politicians would have coped with such extreme challenges is a matter of conjecture. But Eshkol stood his ground in his PJs and in fluent Russian rejected the stern warnings against a preemptive strike delivered by the emissary dispatched to harass him in the middle of the night.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/06/13/superman-saving-his-jewish-creators/#

JNS.org – Millions of Americans will flock to movie theaters this week to see “Man of Steel,” in which Superman will once again be called upon to save the world from some menace. But back in 1975, Superman’s Jewish creators found themselves broke, nearly homeless, and desperately in need a hero of their own. It’s a story with the pathos and drama of a comic book adventure—and it has a happy ending.

As teenagers growing up in Cleveland’s mostly-Jewish Glenville neighborhood in the 1930s, writer Jerry Siegel and his artist friend Joe Shuster created Superman, the mighty costumed hero who has been a fixture of American pop culture ever since.

Siegel later wrote that he and Shuster were influenced by a combination of “being unemployed and worried during the Depression and knowing hopelessness and fear,” and “hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed Jews in Nazi Germany.” The Superman character emerged from their “great urge to help the downtrodden masses, somehow.”

Comics historians have compared Superman’s origins to both the Jewish immigrant experience and the biblical story of young Moses. With the planet Krypton on the verge of destruction, desperate parents send their infant off in a rocket ship to Earth, where heis raised by strangers—Jonathan and Martha Kent taking the role of Pharoah’s daughter. Whether disguised as the Midwestern newspaper reporter Clark Kent, or as an Egyptian prince whose Jewish roots are hidden, our hero would prefer to quietly assimilate into his surroundings but his outrage at injustice propels him into the role of rescuer.

Not realizing the fortune Superman would reap, Siegel and Shuster sold their first 13-page Superman comic strip, and the rights to the character to National Periodicals (later known as DC Comics) for $130.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/The-betrayal-of-the-Jewish-Left-316472

In condemning Jews who speak out against jihad and Islamic supremacism, leftist rabbis are enabling the worst enemies of the Jewish people.

Last Monday in the Toronto Star, Rabbi Dow Marmur wrote an article criticizing what he referred to as my “customary rants against Islam,” saying that they would “create tensions between the two communities.”

“Rants against Islam,” i.e. condemnations of Islamic anti-Semitism, hatred of infidels, wife beating, honor killing, clitoridectomies, murder of apostates, denial of the freedom of speech, and so much more. On the heels of three anti-Semitic attacks in Montreal, another Canadian rabbi saw fit to condemn a fellow Jew for the crime of telling the truth about how jihadists use core Islamic teachings to justify various kinds of violence.

Nor was he the first rabbi to do so – a chorus of rabbis have condemned my work, claiming that it interferes with their dialogue with Muslims. But what are these rabbis really accomplishing with his dialogue, other than to obscure the root causes of the Islamic anti-Semitism that is increasing around the world? Rabbi Eric Yoffie recently published a vicious and defamatory piece attacking me in The Jerusalem Post. Where was Yoffie countering “hate” when Islamic jihadists murdered the Fogel family in Israel? Or when jihadists targeted the Chabad house in Mumbai for a savage and bloody attack? Or when Christians are persecuted on an increasingly frequent and violent basis in Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere? Instead, he opposes me for standing up against this real hatred.

http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2013/06/10/metadata-and-the-common-defense/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=metadata-and-the-common-defense The revelation that the super-secret National Security Agency has been vacuuming up so-called “metadata” from foreign and American communications has lots of us in a full-scale flail. The libertarian Right denounces it as an unacceptable abuse of government power.  Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) is inviting millions of Americans to join him in bringing a […]

http://send.hadavars.com/index.php?action=message&l=2096&c=19077&m=17562&s=a317a26441993bdd8f740ee9a6c71bce 1.  Google is acquiring Israel’s Waze for $1.1BN.  Microsoft controls 10% of Waze. Google acquired, in 2012, two Israeli start ups for $25MN (Globes Business Daily, June 10, 11, 2013).  China’s Fusson acquired Israel’s Alma Lasers for $221MN (Globes, May 29).  Singapore’s Biosensors International acquired Israel’s Spectrom for $51MN (Globes, May 24).  The Pennsylvania-based […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3762/propaganda-war Raw footage of the event establishes that the Al-Durah affair is a prime example of Palestinian organizations’ manipulating the media with falsified footage and incorrect testimony. In 2000, a French television station, France 2, broadcast footage of a gunfight between Palestinian terrorists and Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. Caught in the middle, a […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3763/national-defense-jihad-ideology It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the deliberate blinding of our homeland security defense capabilities, perpetrated by the Muslim Brotherhood in close cooperation with the witting, willing assistance of our own national security agency leadership , is propelling the U.S. towards catastrophe. Counterterrorism expert Patrick Poole has compiled a meticulously-documented record of […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/steven-plaut/zippergate-in-zion/

While most of Israeli academia is the occupied territories of the radical tenured Left, no other institution besides Ben Gurion University has essentially made leftist anti-Israel agitprop its raison d’etre. At Ben Gurion University the notorious Department of Politics continues to operate as the worst anti-Israel indoctrination center in the country. It is a department in which no pro-Israel or non-leftist opinion may be expressed. It routinely holds one-sided “academic conferences” in which only Marxist or leftist anti-Israel opinion may be voiced. After its misbehavior and atrociously low academic standards became the focus of a report by a special international panel of experts appointed by Israel’s Council on Higher Education, Ben Gurion University carried out “reforms” in the department consisting of hiring even more anti-Israel leftists to teach there.

At Ben Gurion University animosity to Israel is a sufficient condition for a faculty member to be hired, and in some departments it is also a necessary condition. Pluralism and diversity at Ben Gurion University consist of having men and women, Arabs and Jews, Ashkenazim and Mizrachim and others all indoctrinate students in leftist ideology. In other words, pluralism of thought is widely suppressed on the campus. Academic standards are often trashed there when anti-Israel faculty are hired, and churning out Bash-Israel hate propaganda “counts” at BGU as scholastic achievement and academic excellence.

All of this is largely the doing of Ben Gurion University’s current leftist president, Rivka Carmi, although previous presidents of BGU were just as bad. (Carmi’s predecessor was Avishai Braverman, a Labor Party politician and the only “economist” in Israel who does not know that the minimum wage causes unemployment. Before him was Shlomo Gazit, another leftist activist, who favors international arming of the Hezb’Allah terrorists.)

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7516 Sometimes the only antidote for poison is more poison. The body politic just can’t take it any more and throws up everything. The result would suit the Democrats just fine. The Democrats pushing immigration reform want the issue, not the reform, and they think a defeat they could hang on the Republicans could give […]

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/The-frontier-in-Israeli-history-316423

The concept of the frontier, in Jewish terms, is not merely economic, political or geographical.

In 1862, at the beginning of the Civil War, Congress passed and president Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which granted unclaimed and uninhabited state land to American “settlers.”
This act was meant to encourage pioneer farmers, some of whom referred to their new territory with biblical names, like “Zion.”

To a large extent, these pioneers defined America’s national character – “rugged individualism,” boldness and courage and a deep belief in American destiny. The frontier became a symbol of American freedom, independence and ingenuity.

Nearly 75 years ago, an American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, asked a fascinating question that has been the subject of professional debate ever since and that might be relevant for Israel: What was the impact of the frontier on American history? He proposed that the frontier functioned as a sort of socioeconomic safety valve and was a perennial democratizing force in American society. The loss of the frontier (around the turn of the century), he concluded, meant not only the loss of land, but the loss of an ideal – “liberty” and “freedom of opportunity” and a “creative vision of a new order of society.” Settlement of the West was, Turner believed, the essence of the American experience.