RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/kerry-in-israel-blind-alleys-and-empty-words/

Secretary of State John Kerry was in Israel on Monday and Tuesday, after a stop in Turkey. Reports indicate the usual mix of Obama-administration delusions and dubious promises.

The Jerusalem Post reported Israeli officials’ “astonishment” at statements Kerry made in Istanbul on Sunday, when he praised the Turkish government’s “sensitiv[ity]” and lack of “triumphalism” in responding to Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s “apology” over Israel’s Mavi Marmara raid.

That apology was made by phone to Turkish prime minister Erdogan over two weeks ago at the tail-end of President Obama’s visit to Israel. Some believe Obama pressured Netanyahu into making the call; some sources in Israel have said Israeli officialdom was itself keen on mending fences with Turkey out of a hope of renewed strategic cooperation on regional threats.

But what is clear is that Turkey’s response has been less than heartwarming and tends to confirm those who stressed Erdogan’s ideological hostility (if not outright anti-Semitism) toward Israel. As Israeli officials reminded the Post, the Turkish press has been full of reports and interviews with Erdogan and his foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu “gloating over the apology.” A day after the apology, billboards in Ankara gave a clear triumphalist message.

Erdogan has announced plans to visit Hamas in Gaza. Davutoglu hosted a dinner for relatives of Turks killed on the Mavi Marmara and members of the Al-Qaeda-linked IHH organization that sent the ship. Meanwhile Israeli-Turkish talks on supposedly renewing ties have been delayed by two weeks.

Kerry appears to respond to such developments with Orwellian inversions instead of serious stocktaking.

Once in Israel, Kerry surprised no one by pursuing the Palestinian issue, meeting with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and prime minister Salam Fayyad (reportedly soon to be sacked by Abbas). The UK’s Telegraph reports that Kerry “wanted to adopt the Arab Peace Initiative…as a basis” for restarting Israeli-Palestinian talks.

The Arab Peace Initiative was a plan broached by Saudi Arabia in 2002 in an effort to rehabilitate its post-9/11 image. It purports to offer Israel full diplomatic relations with Arab countries in return for withdrawing to indefensible borders and being inundated with Palestinian “refugees.” The Telegraph says Kerry

was said to have proposed wording that would soften the initiative’s demand for Israel to withdraw to pre-1967 borders, saying they could be modified by mutual agreement, while inserting stronger security guarantees for Israel.

It also says Abbas turned him down flat, insisting on full Israeli return to the 1967 lines and the release of terrorists from Israeli prisons. No surprises there either, since Abbas has, on various pretexts, refused talks with Israel since Kerry’s boss assumed office in 2009.

Yet the Telegraph goes on to say that Kerry “is expected to visit Israel and the West Bank every fortnight in an effort to give momentum to efforts at renewing the peace process….”

If accurate, this will be a remarkable waste of American energy and resources on something that has repeatedly proved to be a dead-end at best.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/basic-competencies-and-the-mooc-surge?f=puball It is difficult to know if MOOC’s (Massive Open On-line Courses) are a conspiracy to undermine the Academy or mankind’s final redemption, a way to open the avenues of higher education. However one sees it, millions of people are already taking on-line courses. There is a revolution taking place driven by technology and cost […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/muslims-attack-coptic-cathedral-in-cairo?f=puball On the afternoon of Sunday, April 7, Egyptian police surrounded and protected Saint Mark’s Coptic Cathedral of Cairo, the headquarters of the Coptic Pope, after four hours of attacks on the church by Muslims throwing Molotov cocktails, rocks, and firearms, and where Christians gathered to mourn their dead. A liturgy was being held for […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/jews-in-boxes

Golly Moses! What a great idea! Leave it to the Germans to come up with really great ideas for solving the problems of the Jews.

The Jew in a box exhibit in the Berlin Jewish Museum is really what was needed to bring the Jews and Germans together. Especially when the Jews in a box, according to the New York Times, have no special knowledge about the Holocaust, Judaism, or Israel.

The Berlin Museum’s idea was to give the German people a greater opportunity to learn about Jews in a country which has so few of them. Only 0.025% of the population. Gee, I wonder why?

Isn’t this what the German people wanted, yearned for, fought for, worked so hard for? Judenrein.

But now things are altogether different, according to the good people at the Berlin Museum. Germans are different now, human nature has caught up with the twenty-first century and modern tolerance. They want to meet Jews, see what they’re like, mix with them, touch them, maybe pinch them, just a little…maybe stick needles into them…just a little…just to see what will happen. There’s nothing like satisfying scientific curiosity.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/margaret-thatcher-a-singular-ambition A refreshing antidote to Nock’s Our Enemy, the State is John Blundell‘s Margaret Thatcher: A Portrait of the Iron Lady (New York: Algora Publishing, 2008). For a time, as Prime Minister of Great Britain, Thatcher not only retarded the progress of statism but reversed its course. There certainly was nothing fatalistic in her or […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324050304578411030629324960.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond

The glowing reports about Fidel Castro that New York Times NYT -1.48% journalist Herb Matthews wrote from Cuba’s Sierra Maestra have often been used to explain why, in the late 1950s, the U.S. so underestimated the Jesuit-educated megalomaniac who would destroy his own country. More than a half century later, the 1960 National Review cartoon featuring a smiling Castro above a caption that read, “I got my job through the New York Times,” still resonates with exiles.

Now Cuban editor and writer Roberto Zurbano has the opposite problem: He lost his job through the New York Times. To be more precise, Mr. Zurbano, it seems, got fired from his job in Havana because he wrote a March 24 opinion piece for the New York Times that contradicted two of the dictatorship’s most sacred teachings.

Cuban propaganda holds that the revolution elevated the island’s black populations and ended oppression. It also holds that the island is now undergoing reforms that are creating opportunity for everyone. Well, not quite, according to Mr. Zurbano. “Change,” he wrote, “is the latest news to come out of Cuba, though for Afro-Cubans like myself, this is more dream than reality.”

He reminded Times readers that “racial exclusion” has deep roots on the island, adding that “a half century of revolution since 1959 has been unable to overcome it.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324100904578401083677703420.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Ten more Marines per ship won’t matter if there aren’t ships in the Mediterranean Sea to deploy from.

In the rush to paper over its delinquencies in the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the Obama administration seems unaware that its failures are fundamental rather than merely anomalous. They are, unfortunately, a portent of the future.

On March 26, this newspaper reported that “In the wake of the attack, the military has examined how to improve its rapid response forces,” specifically by “adding special operations teams of roughly 10 troops to ships carrying larger Marine Expeditionary Units.” MEUs shipborne in amphibious ready groups usually number 2,200 Marines in special forces, reconnaissance, armored reconnaissance, armor, amphibious assault, infantry, artillery, engineer and aviation battalions, companies and platoons. They can get over the beach fast, and they fight like hell.

On March 21, 2011, during Operation Odyssey Dawn, an American F-15 went down in Libya. Immediately after the Mayday, the 26th MEU started rescue operations from the USS Kearsarge, and a short time later two of its Harrier fighter jets, two CH 53 helicopters, and two MV 22 Ospreys were at the scene, with more than a hundred Marines. Hundreds more might easily have arrived if required. Forces like this could have shattered the assault in Benghazi in minutes. Adding 10 men to such echelons rich in special forces would have little relevance. Fine in itself, the proposal is an obfuscation. The issue is not the composition of already capable MEUs but rather that one was not available when the attack took place.

From World War II onward, the U.S. Sixth Fleet stabilized the Mediterranean region and protected American interests there with the standard deployment, continued through 2008, of a carrier battle group, three hunter killer submarines, and an amphibious ready group with its MEU or equivalent. But in the first year of the Obama presidency this was reduced to one almost entirely unarmed command ship. No MEU could respond to Benghazi because none was assigned to, or by chance in, the Mediterranean.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ The BBC’s Panorama series has gone undercover at Sharia councils where Islamic law is doled out in the state within a state within the multicultural bureaucracy to discover that the dispensers of Islamic law have failed abused women. Failing abused women is the nice genteel way that lefties use to mean that the judicial […]

http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104476
Mrs. Thatcher was a remarkable woman and leader, but hagiographies are not a replacement for some disappointing aspects of her leadership…..rsk

Prime Minister, one aspect of your policy is particularly disturbing to the Jewish community, that which seems to make Britain the leading advocate of the Arab case against Israel. Knowing your past admiration for Israel, where do you personally stand now?

I’m not an advocate for any particular cause of any particular country. I am an advocate, have always been an advocate, of fair dealing between countries, and an advocate of steadily trying to improve the democratic rights of people, because I believe passionately in a free society. Because of that, I have stood in the middle of Damascus and said, “I will not see the PLO.”

Because of that, I have said frequently in the House to the PLO, “if you demand self-determination for yourself and the right to live within secure borders, you cannot deny those same things to other peoples.” Because of that, I have said “I uphold international law. Once we go away from that we shall not know where we are.”

So if any country is an aggressor, an unprovoked aggressor on another, I will condemn that country whatever that country is, and against whomsoever it operates. I believe firmly in fair dealing and fair principles, the right of each country to live at peace and security within its own borders.

You have described the Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear plant as a grave breach of international law.

Most certainly it is.

But surely the fact that the Iraqis are in a self-confessed state of war with Israel, have never even signed an armistice with her, let alone a peace treaty, puts the Israeli raid in a different light?

Well, hardly. Are you saying that, while there have been absolutely no aggressive attacks between Iraq and Israel for what, many years, something like that, yet all of a sudden it’s right to go in and bomb? No. If anyone had done that to Israel, my goodness me, I should have been the first person to be up in arms about it. Is Israel saying now that she is at open war with Iraq?

But should Israel have waited until she was attacked?

Is Israel or any other country saying that because some other country happens to start up a nuclear plant, that warrants a bombing attack by another country? What sort of international anarchy is that?

Can you not appreciate how worried the people of Israel must feel when they are surrounded by those who don’t recognise her—the PLO, Syria and others? Israel has to be in a state of preparedness—do you appreciate that?

You can always be in a state of preparedness. We are in this country. Every country has the right to defend herself, every country in the world.

If we are not going to live by a system of international law, we are going to live by international anarchy. Then no people anywhere in the world are safe. That is why we do struggle hard to try to get a Middle Eastern settlement. It is why I openly say and condemn the PLO for not recognising the right of Israel to exist. I openly condemn them for terrorism—but don’t you see, if I openly condemn the PLO for terrorism, I have to condemn everyone for the use of violence and terrorism. They will say to me, “You condemn us for terrorism, but now look, there has been an attack on another country by bombing.”

But Israel doesn’t want to wait to be bombed.

You cannot be selective in your defence of law—you cannot say, “I like that law, I will uphold that one, I will not uphold the other.” Is anyone saying that because any country has a nuclear installation, that another country is justified to bomb that nuclear installation? Of course not. As a matter of fact, Israel and Iraq belong to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

But they are still at war with Israel …

Are you saying that Israel and Iraq are in open war with one another, although, Mr Modlyn , there have been no hostilities for many years? Look, I do beg of you, never espouse the cause of violence; if you do, then you are saying, other people are entitled to be violent against your own people. I would never say that. I try to stop it wherever it happens.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3649/back-to-jahiliyya Jahiliyya: The “state of ignorance of Divine guidance” — how Muslims refer to the pre-Islamic era. For years the sheiks of the Islamist movements have been promising us that “Islam is the Solution.” The sad fact is that it is the sheikhs of the radical Islamist movements of the global jihad — the Muslim […]