RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The disastrous results in Israel’s election are yet another example of the right cannibalizing itself. It’s not the first time this happened in Israeli political history or American political history or European political history. It’s an ongoing theme whose motto is still, “No enemies to the left.”

What the “mainstream” conservatives fear most of all is a drift to the right. Some of this is the whimper of whipped dogs. Every party to the right of Stalin has had to spend decades fending off accusations that it was the second coming of the Third Reich, the KKK and Genghis Khan. The Pavlovian training has taken hold and every conservative echelon is expert at going into damage control mode when it senses that its own right might do something that would give the left fuel for their accusations.

But there’s another factor at work here. It’s cultural. Mainstream conservatives have become another arm of the urban technocracy. They want many of the same things that liberals do, but with less regulations and more tax shelters. They aren’t interested in major changes, only the minor ones that will keep the system going. Even when they are dedicated reformers, their vision extends no further than a bunch of high tech cities full of immigrants going to universities and then inventing things.

They are competent, rather than imaginative. The left repeatedly outmaneuvers them because the left is always pushing to the left, while they are content to put a chair against the door and wait for those crazy hippies to get off the LSD, cut their hair and give up. But to their surprise the left never does.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/hollywood-blames-guns-americans-blame-hollywood/print/

Ever since the horrific shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, liberals have been on the warpath against so-called “assault weapons.” Never mind that the semi-automatic rifles they have on their hit list are used in fewer murders than hammers and clubs; never mind that handguns are used in the vast majority of killings in this country. Never mind, either, that the state with the lowest rate of gun murder is New Hampshire, which has virtually no gun laws, and the municipality with the highest rate of gun murder is Chicago, which has a bevy of them. Forget all this and remember the party line: guns are the problem, not people.

But the American public disagrees, and does so strongly. Unlike liberal Hollywood, Americans largely blame individuals for their actions. A new poll from NBC/Wall Street Journal, for example, shows that Americans blame the following problems in American life more than the presence of guns with regard to shootings:

“Parents not paying enough attention to what is going on in their children’s lives” (83%);
“Lack of effective treatment for mental illness” (82%);
“The amount of media coverage of mass shootings” (67%);
“Movies, television programs, and video games that portray violence and violent behavior” (62%).

“Assault and military-style firearms being legal to purchase … the availability of high capacity ammunition clips” clocked in at 59%.

In other words, Hollywood’s concept of human nature is directly at odds with that of the American public. They don’t see people as mechanistic tools in the hands of instruments of war. They see them as individual actors shaped by their environment, their personal choices, and their biology. Which is accurate.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/caroline-glick/bye-bye-london/print/ In an interview with Haaretz in November 2010, British novelist Martin Amis said the following about discussions of Israel in his motherland: I live in a mildly anti-Semitic country, and Europe is mildly anti-Semitic, and they hold Israel to a higher moral standard than its neighbors. If you bring up Israel in a public […]

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/stop-the-witch-hunt-against-rep-bachmann-on-the-jamie-glazov-show/

To sign the Freedom Center’s petition to stop the witch-hunt against Rep. Michele Bachmann, click here. And please spread the word about this petition far and wide!

Join The Jamie Glazov Show that aired on Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at 8-9 pm Pacific (11-12 pm EST) on Blog Talk Radio. We discussed the Freedom Center’s new petition: Stop the Witch Hunt Against Rep. Bachmann. We were joined by:

Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of twelve books, including two New York Times bestsellers, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (both Regnery). His latest book is Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins (ISI).

See Robert’s Frontpage article: Vindicated Bachmann Under Attack.

To listen to the program, click here.

Or go to: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radio-jihad/2013/01/23/the-jamie-glazov-show.

P. DAVID HORNIK: THE RIGHT WEAKENED IN ISRAEL- BUT STILL STANDING

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/right-weakened-in-israel-but-still-standing/print/

According to the first exit-poll results for Israel’s elections Tuesday night, Binyamin Netanyahu will almost certainly continue as prime minister. But it may well be with a considerably more patchwork, wobbly coalition than almost all surveys leading up to the elections had projected.

Netanyahu’s own Likud Beiteinu Party—a merger of his original party, Likud, and the Yisrael Beiteinu faction—had plummeted to 31 seats (out of a Knesset of 120). Plummeted, because in the outgoing Knesset the two parties had a total of 42 seats between them. The merger had been celebrated by some as a brilliant move, denounced by others as a blunder of epic proportions. The denouncers won that round.

Also on the right side of the political spectrum, the Habayit Hayehudi faction of the much-celebrated Naftali Bennett—the young, “hip,” nationalist-religious, hi-tech wunderkind whom the world media decided to turn into a Big Story—was showing a disappointing 12 mandates from the Israeli public. But with three other right-wing parties (two of them ultra-religious) totaling 19 seats between them, it still meant the right had a majority of 62.

Which (to repeat, out of a Knesset of 120) is not as slim as it sounds—since the 58 on the other side of the spectrum include 8 seats or so for Arab parties that take an oppositional stance toward Israel as a country and have never been part of any governing coalition.

In other words, among the predominantly Jewish voters, the right wing had won by perhaps 62-50—a considerable margin, yet much less than expected.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/north-africa-is-the-new-afghanistan/print/ When Obama took office four years ago, North Africa wasn’t keeping CIA analysts up at night. There were known trouble spots in the region, but no one thought that it was likely to turn into the next Afghanistan. Then along came the Arab Spring. Egypt, the great regional power, has since fallen into the […]

http://brotherhoodunmasked.net/
Principal researcher: Alyssa Lappen

Alyssa A. Lappen is an investigative journalist who has spent over ten years focusing on issues relating to the Middle East, Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood, including three years as a senior fellow at the American Center for Democracy. Previously she served as a Senior Editor at “Institutional Investor,” “Working Woman,” and “Corporate Finance,” and an Associate Editor at “Forbes.”
ISLAMIC SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA

ISLAMIC SHURA COUNCIL OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

THE MUSLIM PUBLIC AFFAIRS COUNCIL

COUNCIL ON AMERICAN ISLAMIC RELATIONS

COUNCIL ON ISLAMIC EDUCATION

MASJID HAZRAT I ABU BAKR

INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIC RELIEF ORGANIZATION

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ISLAMIC THOUGHT

THE MUSLIM AMERICAN SOCIETY

MINARET OF FREEDOM INSTITUTE

NORTH AMERICAN IMAMS FEDERATION

FIQH COUNCIL OF NORTH AMERICA

ISLAMIC CIRCLE OF NORTH AMERICA

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/01/from_hell_muammar_el-qaddafi_laughs_at_western_liberal_naivete.html

A little over one year ago, Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was brutally murdered by his own people. If he’s able to laugh from the eternal torment of Hell, he must be laughing at all those liberals in America and the West who had gushed about an “Arab Spring” being at hand.

In a revealing article in the New York Times – “Jihadists’ Surge in North Africa Reveals Grim Side of Arab Spring” – Robert F. Worth reports:

“As the uprising closed in around him, the Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi warned that if he fell, chaos and holy war would overtake North Africa. “Bin Laden’s people would come to impose ransoms by land and sea,” he told reporters. “We will go back to the time of Redbeard, of pirates, of Ottomans imposing ransoms on boats.”

In recent days, that unhinged prophecy has acquired a grim new currency. In Mali, French paratroopers arrived this month to battle an advancing force of jihadi fighters who already control an area twice the size of Germany. In Algeria, a one-eyed Islamist bandit organized the brazen takeover of an international gas facility, taking hostages that included more than 40 Americans and Europeans.

He adds:

In a sense, both the hostage crisis in Algeria and the battle raging in Mali are consequences of the fall of Colonel Qaddafi in 2011. Like other strongmen in the region, Colonel Qaddafi had mostly kept in check his country’s various ethnic and tribal factions, either by brutally suppressing them or by co-opting them to fight for his government. He acted as a lid, keeping volatile elements repressed. Once that lid was removed, and the borders that had been enforced by powerful governments became more porous, there was greater freedom for various groups – whether rebels, jihadists or criminals – to join up and make common cause.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/book_review_the_mad_mad_mad_world_of_climatism.html

Rush Limbaugh speaks frequently about the new breed of “low-information” voter in America handing President Obama a second term in the White House. No doubt a disturbing amount of these voters were unaware that Obama’s inauguration on January 21st was a ceremonial re-enactment of the constitutionally required one the day before, and certainly they accepted unquestioningly the line in his ceremonial speech in which he said, “We will respond to the threat of climate change… Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.”

But that particular sentence only stays afloat when no one looks any deeper into it. The most damaging thing that can happen to a politicized thesis such as “climate change” is for more people to actually question it and discover for themselves that it looks like indefensible misinformation. For President Obama and others promoting the idea of man-caused global warming, any kind of plausible opposition to this issue imperils it, so they avoid exploration of critical viewpoints and instead label them as “deniers”. Case closed.

That is the hallmark of far-left agendas. The global warming issue showcases how spectacularly this tactic fails.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2013/01/if-facts-don-t-fit-agenda-hide-em-bbc.html

If The Facts Don’ t Fit The Agenda, Hide ‘Em: The BBC & The Israeli Election

Over at BBCWatch, the Sherlock Holmesian Hadar Sela has posted several must-read posts that analyse in illuminating and depressing detail how Britain’s “national broadcaster” has been covering the Israeli election.

There is the trademark omission of facts that don’t fit Al Beeb’s agenda of emphasisng a supposedly inexorable lurch to the right and the power of rightwing bogeymen, there are errors, there is jejune analysis, there is outsourcing of reportage to a leftist Israeli activist with an axe to grind, and there is manipulative sleight of hand.

There was the doctoring of remarks by the Jerusalem Post’s Gil Hoffman (who slayed the myth of a rightward shift here):

“Donnison’s report also included an interview with the Jerusalem Post’s chief political correspondent Gil Hoffman. Or at least, parts of an interview. For – as Hoffman later explained on Twitter – it seems that some things said in that interview just did not fit in with the BBC agenda.