RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sparksinmyhead.tumblr.com/post/48877315133/the-pretense-of-ignorance
About the author
My name is Eliana Gurfinkiel, I grew up in Paris, live now in Jerusalem and have too many ideas in my head. This blog is an attempt to share them with you. Enjoy!

I learned a great deal about Yitzhak Ben-Zvi a few years ago, while reading “My Father’s Paradise” by Ariel Sabar, a fabulous book on the Kurdish Alyah. He became instantly one of my favorite Zionist figures.

Ben-Zvi’s political profile is well known. He was born in 1884 in the Russian Empire, and immigrated to Eretz-Israel at the age of 23, in 1907. A prominent and very respected leader of the Yishuv in the pre-State era, he was elected twice to the Knesset after 1948, and then succeeded Chaim Weizmann as president of the State in 1952. Up to this day, he is remembered as Israel’s longest-serving president : he served for eleven years until his passing in 1963. He was also a noted scholar : a specialist in the history and sociology of the Oriental Jewish Communities.

Ben Zvi and David Ben Gurion were close friends : they had studied Turkish and law together in Constantinople, then the capital of the Ottoman Empire, before World War One. As close friends, they agreed and disagreed on many issues. One particular controversy was the character and the future of Oriental Jews. Ben Gurion, just like most of the founders of the State, believed into “modernizing” or “westernizing” the Sefardim and the Edoth ha Mizrach – turning them into an Ashkenazi-looking population. Ben Zvi held the opposite view. He saw Oriental Judaism as the remnant of the most authentic Jewish civilization : Judaism as it had been practiced in the land of Israel two thousand years ago. And by implication, as something worthy to be maintained and developed.

What struck me when I got acquainted with that aspect of Ben Zvi’s personality and life was that he needed much courage and intellectual integrity to take such a stand. He did not just give “good marks” to the Sefardim, at a time they were despised and marginalized in the Zionist movement and then in Israel. He actually was humble enough to acknowledge them – the “other Israel” – as superior, in many ways, to his own Israel. Instead of insisting “he knew best”, as a member of the new nation’s elite, he was prepared to question the accepted norms, and to look for new answers.

I have found that same philosophical modesty while reading, last summer, some of Friederich Hayek’s writings. In the famous speech he delivered upon receiving his Nobel Prize in Economy, The Pretence of Knowledge, Hayek develops a similar idea and, whatever the honors bestowed on him, calls for intellectual modesty. In his own words :

“The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2013/04/25/the-public-safety-follies/

Distinguished members of the bar, right and left, cast brickbats my way for labeling as the “Gitmo Bar” their friends – other distinguished members of our self-congratulatory profession –who volunteered their services in order to file lawsuits against the American people on behalf of our jihadist enemies in wartime. Later, when President Obama came to office, the same sort of caterwauling occurred in response to what I thought was the commonsense point that we oughtn’t want counterterrorism policy to be made by members of the Lawyer Left who had volunteered to work for the enemy and had labored assiduously to erode the law-of-war approach to counterterrorism (i.e., the Bush approach) – such lawyers having by then been recruited to serve in top policymaking posts in the Justice Department and throughout the Obama administration.

We have been seeing the wages of government-by-Gitmo Bar for over four years now, but maybe never as starkly as in the last few days.

It has now been reported by Fox’s Megyn Kelly that the FBI’s interrogation of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was short-circuited when the Justice Department arranged for him to be given a presentment hearing in the hospital.

In point of fact, it was not the hearing that caused the suspension of vital intelligence-gathering. It was the Obama Justice Department’s decision over the weekend immediately to file a criminal charge against Tsarnaev. Once that was done, the presentment hearing was inevitable. It is required by Rule 5 of the federal rules of criminal procedure. An arrested person must be brought before the nearest available magistrate. The purpose of the proceeding is to get him out of the clutches of law enforcement, have a neutral judicial officer advise him of what he’s been charged with, make certain that he has counsel assigned, and – most significantly – ensure that he knows he is under no obligation to make statements to the police and that, if he has already made some statements, he may stop.

http://spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=9089&q=8&s=37

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) vigorously condemns the actions of the membership of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), which has just unanimously approved a resolution* which endorses the boycott of Israeli universities, making it the first academic organization in the U.S. to do so.

Most troubling to SPME was the language in the AAAS resolution that targeted Israeli scholars for academic boycott based on their perceived culpability in the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The resolution speciously accuses Israeli institutions of higher education, and the scholars who form those respective intellectual communities, of being responsible for the decisions made by the government of Israel. “. . . Israeli institutions of higher education have not condemned or taken measures to oppose the occupation and racial discrimination against Palestinians in Israel,” the statement reads, “but have, rather, been directly and indirectly complicit in the systematic maintenance of the occupation and of policies and practices that discriminate against Palestinian students and scholars throughout Palestine and in Israel.”

The AAAS past president, Rajini Srikanth, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, claimed that the organization’s proposed academic boycott was a justifiable tactic, similar to boycotts used against South African universities to protest apartheid; since there is no apartheid in Israel, however, the analogy is false and disingenuous.

SPME deplores the AAAS resolution as it is counter to any acceptable academic discourse and is contrary to the search for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Moreover, the boycott is directly in opposition to decades of agreements between Israeli and Arab Palestinians, in which both sides pledged to negotiate a peaceful settlement and a commitment to a two state solution, but only Israel has repeatedly made concessions for peace. Additionally, by focusing exclusively and obsessively on Israel, and not on many other countries in the world where actual human and civil rights abuses exist, the actions of those supporting academic boycotts, as well as calls for divestment, are, according to former Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers, “anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent.”

info@humanrightsvoices.org

Secretary of State John Kerry seems to believe that Iranian elections are just like American ones. In fact, he would describe them as “normal.” At least, that’s what he told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations last Thursday in his first Senate hearing since his confirmation.

Committee chairman Robert Menendez was rightly concerned that in Iran “the centrifuges are spinning, the clock is ticking and they seem to be managing the sanctions that we have so far.” So he asked Secretary Kerry what else the administration was planning to do. Kerry had the following astounding response:

They are two months away from an election. The election is on June 14th and every bit of evidence we have — this very week or next week they declare who their candidates are — and there is an enormous amount of jockeying going on with the obvious normal struggle for attention between hard-liners and people who might want to make an agreement etc. We all know what life is like here in the Senate six months from a presidential election, so you can imagine what it’s like there two months from theirs. And so I think this is a moment for us to be a little patient.

http://q4j-middle-east.com  Mitt Romney was not my pick for Obama’s opponent in the 2012 presidential election. I felt that he didn’t have what it would take to defeat someone who was Santa Claus, Farakhan’s messiah, and master of Chicago politics all rolled up into one candidate.   Please note that I say the above as a […]

http://washingtonexaminer.com/jed-babbin-what-must-be-done-to-prevent-future-bostons/article/2528029

Since 9/11, we have turned ourselves inside out to prevent terror attacks.

We went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. We created the Department of Homeland Security and all its trappings, including the Transportation Security Administration, and told U.S. intelligence agencies to share information among themselves and with the cops.

But it wasn’t our huge security apparatus that prevented Richard Reid from blowing his shoe bomb, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from stuffing explosives in his underwear and so many others, like the would-be Times Square bomber, from killing people by the hundreds.

It was just luck, and the bravery of private citizens on the spot, that blocked those attacks. We weren’t lucky when Nidal Hasan murdered 13 people at Fort Hood while shouting “Allah akbar.”

And now, with the Boston Marathon bombing, it appears our luck has run out. So what do we do now?

There is a lot we can do, but none of it will be done while President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are in charge.

First and most obviously, people such as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving alleged Boston bomber, should be declared enemy combatants and sent to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation, trial and punishment.

It is constitutional and legal to do so, even in the case of American citizens, as the Supreme Court said in 1942 (in Ex Parte Quirin) and again in 2002 (in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld). The White House’s refusal to

do that is purely political, and it is wrong.

It’s wrong because these terrorists aren’t just guilty of criminal acts. They usually know information that can be used to stop other attacks and that can’t be garnered in civilian custody.

They adhere to an Islamist ideology, which is the equivalent of a foreign nation. It requires war with us and deserves to be fought as much as those who adhere to it. To fight that ideology effectively requires us to judge them under the law of war, a different standard from that to which we hold civilians.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2013/04/25/via-train-terror-plot.html

Raed Jaser and Chiheb Esseghaier face charges in connection with alleged Via Rail plot

CBC News has confirmed that Canada tried nine years ago to deport Raed Jaser, one of the two men accused in the Via Rail terror plot, but authorities didn’t proceed and later granted him permanent residency.

Jaser, 35, and Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, have been accused of plotting to derail a Via passenger train in what authorities have called an “al-Qaeda supported” attack.

Jaser arrived with his parents and two siblings at Pearson International Airport on March 28, 1993. They travelled from Germany using fake French documents. When the parents made a claim for refugee protection, Jaser was a dependent minor.

The family was denied refugee status, but appealed.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2486/We-Give-Up.aspx The Western world gasses and sputters and anything else to avoid the obvious: Islam made them do it, You know who I mean, and you know what they did, and you know Islam made them do it, too. But such a concept, obvious as noses on faces, etc., is kept under wraps and strangled […]

http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/04/25/uk-politician-claims-jews-engineered-holocaust-to-guilt-world-into-establishing-israel/

A UK politician has claimed that Jews deliberately murdered each other in the Holocaust as part of a master plan to create Israel.

Anna-Marie Crampton posted the claims on a conspiracy theory website called “Secrets of The Fed.”

According to the website SWNS.com, Crampton wrote:

“Holocaust means a sacrifice by fire. Only the Zionists could sacrifice their own in the gas chambers.

“The Second World Wide War was engineered by the Zionist jews and financed by the banksters to make the general public all over the world to feel so guilty and outraged by the Holocaust that a treaty would be signed to create the State of Israel as we know it today.”

SWNS found other comments on her Facebook page from several months ago that also offer a not-so-subtle view into Cramptom’s noxious mindset.

“The Rothschilds are Zionists..there is a difference between Jews and Zionists. These Psychopaths hide behind and use the Jews.

“It was thanks to them that 6 million Jews were murdered in the War (along with 26 million Russians!),” Crampton wrote.

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7041

When crunch time comes, when the chips are down, when the rubber meets the road – employ the cliché of your choice – Americans can put away their selfish concerns and come together in common cause. Even Congress, our only native criminal class.Deep in the bowels of the Senate and House Office Buildings, secreted away where there will be no distractions, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, have put aside partisan differences to work for the common weal. This particular weal has never had it so good.

The issue at hand transcends taxes, immigration reform, the war on terrorism, even war and peace (if any). The hush-hush conversations, involving House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, are about how to exempt Congress and all the little grunions who attend every need of the congresspersons from . . . Obamacare, the health care monstrosity that we were told would be so good for us.

Discussions started months ago, when it suddenly dawned on these worthies that the Affordable Health Care Act would not be affordable for these highly paid daytime residents of Capitol Hill, and they must be exempt from the requirements that will bankrupt everybody else. Democrats and Republicans alike are aware of the “acute sensitivity” of embracing public hypocrisy with such enthusiasm, and the sticking point is whether Democrats can persuade Speaker Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, to commit hari-kari with them. A source close to the talks tells Politico, the Capitol Hill political daily, “everyone has to hold hands on this and jump, or nothing is going to get done.”

The alternative is to reach deep into savings or borrow the cash to pay for Obamacare in the insurance exchanges, just like everyone else, as mandated by the president’s health-care scheme, and joined with such glee by congressional Democrats, and sanctified by Chief Justice John Roberts. If Congress and its go-fers, the aides who pamper, coddle and on occasion even go to the bathroom for the members, are to be treated like the rest of us, a lot of them will have to retire to K Street’s lobbying shops or go home to find honest work as florists, dog walkers, bicycle mechanics – or rest on the kindness of indulgent kin. “This could lead to a real brain drain,” says one congressional aide, “with the nation losing the counsel and wisdom of many of the best and brightest.” (Brains on the Hill. Who knew?)