RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/north-korea-a-window-into-the-future-on-iran/

Rarely do we get to see the dangerous consequences of appeasing one aggressor unfold at the same time we are appeasing another in exactly the same way. But that’s what we are witnessing today, as our leaders respond to Iran’s push for nuclear weapons with the same appeasement playbook that turned a two-bit failed state like North Korea into a nuclear-armed aggressor.

The chronology of the U.S.’s dealings with three psychotic Kim regimes makes for depressing reading. Start in 1991, when President George Bush Sr. withdrew 100 nuclear weapons from South Korea as part of a deal with Mikhail Gorbachev. That same year South Korea formally abjured the production or use of nuclear weapons, a deal the North cheerfully went along with, fully intending to violate it. The next year the North signed the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and allowed in inspectors. A mere two months later the U.S. had to impose sanctions on two companies in the North involved in developing missiles.

In little more than a year, the pattern of North Korea’s defiance and duplicity, and Western appeasement and inaction, had been set. The North would make an announcement promising to let in inspectors in order to head off sanctions, or threaten to withdraw from the NPT to wring concessions from the West, and then would come the revelation that the North had taken yet another step towards creating a nuclear weapon. Then “bilateral talks” would be announced and conducted, “agreed frameworks” and “moratoriums” signed and touted, promises of suspension of forbidden activities made by the North, “appropriate compensation,” i.e. bribes––like food aid, South Korea’s “sunshine policy” of détente and economic cooperation with the North, “economic normalization,” and free light-water nuclear reactors (!)––for such duplicitous concessions delivered by the West, all followed by more sanctions imposed when the North was caught out lying and cheating.

We know the result of this pas de deux of appeasement. North Korea today possesses several atomic weapons, and is preparing to test a missile that can reach America’s bases on Okinawa and Guam. A Defense Intelligence Agency report stated there was “moderate confidence” that North Korea “has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles.” The next step will be nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching the west coast of the United States. This was the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community in a report from 2001, which warned that before 2015 North Korea would have ICBMs that could reach our shores.

In response to this latest iteration of a decades-long pattern of failure, our new Secretary of State John Kerry has gone on a nostalgia tour marked by toothless threats, diplomatic happy-talk, and pathetic begging of China to rein in its pit-bull client. In Beijing, Kerry told the Chinese that the U.S. would pull back deployment of anti-ballistic missile batteries on Guam and on Aegis cruisers in the waters near North Korea if China would restrain Pyongyang. China responded by warning the U.S. against provoking North Korea. Kerry also offered to negotiate directly with Kim Jong Eun over his nuclear arsenal, sanctions on his nation, and food aid. The offer of talks to Kim will likely go nowhere, judging from his rebuff of South Korea’s offer to talk, calling it a “crafty trick.” Like his father, Kim considers such offers as signs of weakness to be met by an escalation of aggression. Last year, after being offered food aid in exchange for international monitoring of his nuclear program, Kim launched a long-range missile in defiance of a U.N. Security Council resolution.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-lieberman/palestinians-cheer-while-america-mourns/

“It is time for those in the West who sanctimoniously clamor for the creation of a Palestinian state, to take a closer look at the people they are advocating for. People who cheer when civilians are butchered deserve their own asylum, not statehood.”

On April 16, Palestinians in Gaza cheered. They danced in the streets and handed out candy and sweets to motorists and pedestrians alike. They were not however celebrating the inauguration of a new school or the completion of a hospital. Instead, they were celebrating death. On April 16, Palestinians of Gaza celebrated the Boston marathon atrocity. While our first responders were picking up severed limbs and tending to the wounded, Palestinians reveled in Boston’s misery.

The Palestinian reaction to the horrific events in Boston was unsurprising and was in fact quite predictable. After the 9-11 attacks that killed 3,000 people, the Palestinian response was quite similar. Old women were seen shrieking in jubilation while children passed out sweets and men cheered approvingly.

These are Israel’s so-called “peace partners.” These are the people who are demanding that Israel relinquish all the land liberated during the Six-Day War of 1967. And these are the people who want to establish a twenty-third dysfunctional Arab state called “Palestine” alongside Israel’s most vulnerable and populated areas.

April 17, 2013 marks the seventh anniversary of the Rosh Ha’ir suicide bombing in Tel-Aviv that claimed the lives of 11 civilians including Florida resident, 16-year-old Daniel Wultz. Then as now, civilians were targeted and murdered simply because they believed in freedom. Then as now, those who prepared the bombs made sure to pack them with an assortment of shrapnel to inflict maximum bloodletting. And then as now, Palestinian Arabs cheered as they witnessed mothers looking for their missing children and men unable to get up off the floor because of severed limbs. Their perverted culture – a culture that revels in death and destruction – encourages this type of aberrant reaction to the sufferings of others.

The Boston massacre and Rosh Ha’ir Arab homicide attack underscore the fact that the U.S. and Israel are inexorably bound by shared moral values and principles and it is precisely these principles – those which extol freedom and democracy – that infuriate our enemies. The Arab world, deeply suspicious, distrustful, misogynistic and xenophobic, is mired in medieval backwardness. Their hatred of the West, judging by their deviant reaction to the killing of innocents in Boston, New York and Tel-Aviv, is palpable.

It is time for those in the West who sanctimoniously clamor for the creation of a Palestinian state, to take a closer look at the people they are advocating for. People who cheer when civilians are butchered deserve their own asylum, not statehood.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/ignoring-terrorism-is-not-the-answer/ The day before the Marathon Massacre, the New York Times had scored plaudits for running an op-ed by one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards complaining about his hard life in Guantanamo Bay. On April 14th, the paper of broken record paid 150 dollars to an Al Qaeda member for the opportunity to complain about […]

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/6341/features/the-betrayal-of-salonikas-jews/

PRINCE PHILLIP’S MOTHER, WHO MARRIED PRINCE ANDREW OF GREECE IS BURIED IN JERUSALEM, SHE RESOLUTELY REMAINED IN GREECE DURING WORLD WAR 11 DEFIANTLY SHELTERING JEWISH REFUGEES….RSK

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/04/world/prince-philip-s-mother-buried-in-jerusalem.html

ALSO PROMINENT GREEK ORTHODOX CLERGY GAVE SHELTER TO JEWS:

On March 23, 1943, Archbiphop Damaskinos of the National Greek OPrthodox Church along with 27 prominent leaders of cultural, academic and professional organizations wrote a document declaring the unbreakable bonds between Christian Orthodox and Jews. That action was unique in the whole of occupied Europe. The 275 Jews of the island of Zakinthos were protected by the mayor and when the Germans ordered a list of the island’s Jews….He gave them 2 names his own and that of Bishop Christomos. RSK

THE COLUMN BY ANDREW APOSTOLOU

THE Nazis’ mass deportations of Jews from Greece in 1943 and 1944 largely ended the life of a thriving community, one responsible for centuries of important contributions to Jewish culture and to the life of the land in which the community lived. Eighty-six percent of Greece’s prewar Jewish population perished. In Salonika, where 70 percent of Greek Jews lived, the death rate exceeded 90 percent. While the German campaign to kill the Jews is no secret, few in Greece acknowledge that the Germans had the support of Greek administrators and police.

Greece’s political leaders have paved the way for this unwillingness to confront Greek collaboration in the Holocaust. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras recently spoke of the Holocaust as if it happened in Greece by chance and as if Greek non-Jews were utterly uninvolved.

Yet the Germans succeeded in their nefarious work precisely because Greek non-Jews were willing to assist. The German occupiers of Salonika implemented their standard battery of anti-Semitic measures with consistent support from Greek Christian administrators, civil servants, and police. The Germans systematically impoverished, isolated, marked, ghettoized, and then deported the Jews. The number of German officials directly involved in deporting tens of thousands of Salonika Jews to Auschwitz in 1943 was relatively small, because the local Greek authorities cooperated and contributed their own manpower.

Salonika is central to the history of the Holocaust in Greece because it had a Jewish identity that many Greeks wanted to erase. Thousands of Jews fleeing from Spain and Portugal (together, Sepharad in Hebrew) had revived the city in the late 15th century. The Sephardim soon became a majority in Salonika, turning the city, then under Ottoman rule, into a major Jewish religious and cultural center. When Greek troops captured Salonika in 1912, they found a city in which the main language was Ladino, not Greek. Although the Jews were anxious about Greek rule, they adjusted, and the younger generations learned the Greek language. By the eve of World War II, the Jews were no longer a majority of the city’s inhabitants, but they had every reason to believe that they were Greeks and that Greece was their country.

The feeling was not reciprocated by many of Salonika’s Christians, and the arrival of the Germans in 1941 provided them with their opportunity. The character of Salonika had changed in the 1920s after a large influx of Greek Christian refugees from Turkey. The Greek government promoted the city’s Greek identity, even discouraging the use of shop signs in Ladino. The Greek press in the city was often viciously anti-Jewish, inciting a 1931 pogrom that claimed two lives. When the Germans entered Salonika on April 6, 1941, they found a willing cadre of collaborators and a broad section of Greek Christian opinion hostile to the Jews.

http://www.steynonline.com/5506/the-party-of-surrender From RNC honcho Reince Priebus, from the senator from Swing-State Central Rob Portman, and even from the great Charles Murray, the same mournful dirge echoes through the cavernous emptiness of the Republican big tent: Give it up, losers — give it up on illegal immigration, gay marriage, abortion, and maybe Americans under 30, 50, […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The day before the Marathon Massacre, the New York Times had scored plaudits for running an op-ed by one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards complaining about his hard life in Guantanamo Bay.

On April 14th, the paper of broken record paid 150 bucks to an Al Qaeda member for the opportunity to complain about being force fed during his hunger strike. On April 15th the bombs went off.

The attacks of September 11 introduced a dividing line between awareness and disregard. There was the world of September 10 and the world of September 11. In one world the planes passing in the sky were a minor reminder of our technological prowess. In the other, we were at war.

There was no such clear dividing line when September 11 faded from memory and we returned to a September 10 world. Nor is there an exact date for when we will return to an April 14 world in which it is okay to pay a terrorist in exchange for his propaganda. But if the media has its way, that day can’t come soon enough.

A day after the bombings, the New York Times wrote that a decade without terror had come to an end. But the terror had never stopped or paused. The FBI and local law enforcement had gone on breaking up numerous terror plots to the skepticism and ridicule of the media which accused them of violating Muslim civil rights and manufacturing threats.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/a-major-syrian-rebel-group-is-now-officially-part-of-al-qaeda/?print=1 Much recent media attention has focused on a series of statements from top al-Qaeda leaders saying that the powerful Jabhat al-Nusra militia in Syria is a franchise of the al-Qaeda global jihadi network. The statements were made by the top al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Jabhat al […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/345874/seeing-things-clear/page/0/1

As regular readers know, I use this column now and then to jot some notes on a book. These do not constitute a proper book review. But sometimes the notes are worthwhile, I think.

I’d very much like to remark on a book by Bruce Bawer, published last year. This one is The Victims’ Revolution. Bawer, if you don’t know him, is one of our finest literary critics and political analysts. He is also uncommonly brave. He writes about the threat of Islamism to our liberal life here in the West, and he does this writing from Scandinavia, where he lives. (Bawer is an American but has lived in Norway for some years.)
This sort of writing wins him no friends — except among people who value the truth, however upsetting it is.

Bawer has the particular gift of shaming people on the left. He asks them, “Won’t you stick up for your own values? Do you realize what the Islamists intend to do to you, and are doing to you already? Do you not have the courage of your convictions? Do you hate the West more than you hate those who would destroy you?”

Among Bawer’s books is While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within.

This new book, The Victims’ Revolution, has a subtitle: “The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind.” You will hear the echo of Allan Bloom’s classic, The Closing of the American Mind. I remember his telling Bill Buckley what he originally wanted to call it: “Souls without Longing.” Bill said, “Oh, what a marvelous title” (or something like that).

How about “Identity Studies”? Bawer devotes chapters to Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Chicano Studies. A later chapter is titled, “Studies, Studies Everywhere.” So true.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed Jeb Bush. And I noted that he had majored in Latin American Studies. I said to him (something like), “That’s a pretty lefty major, isn’t it?” He said (something like), “Yes. Aren’t all ‘studies’ lefty?”

If a person reads only the preface and the first chapter of Bawer’s book, he has more than gotten his money’s worth — more than. This is a vital, sparkling, and truth-telling book.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323309604578428900867620018.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Opinion Atop the quotable Barack Obama there will be this: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” Everyone clings to something. But when it comes to criticizing unseemly political dependencies, it’s almost always liberals accusing them of clinging to […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323809304578428552342222358.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTTopStories
Senate Scuttles Gun Limits
Expanded Background Checks Fail; Obama Denounces ‘Shameful Day for Washington’

WASHINGTON—The biggest push in nearly two decades to restrict firearms in the U.S., touched off by the emotional response to December’s mass shooting of schoolchildren, collapsed in the Senate on Wednesday, scuttling a major element of President Barack Obama’s second-term agenda.

The centerpiece of a Democrat-led gun-control effort—a plan to expand the system of background checks aimed at detecting buyers ineligible to own guns—failed in a 54-46 vote, six votes shy of the 60 needed to advance. Shortly afterward, the Senate blocked a proposal to ban the manufacture and sale of certain semiautomatic rifles often called assault weapons and ban high-capacity ammunition magazines. It drew 40 votes, with 60 senators opposed.

Mr. Obama denounced the Senate action in the White House Rose Garden, where he was joined by victims of gun violence, including former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D., Ariz.), who was gravely injured in a mass shooting. “This was a pretty shameful day for Washington. But this effort is not over,” the president said.

Supporters of the background-check measure had hoped the co-sponsorship of Sen. Pat Toomey, a conservative Republican from Pennsylvania, would draw in his party colleagues. But only four GOP senators joined 50 of the Senate’s 55 Democrats and independents in support.

Wednesday’s votes showed that little has changed in the politics of gun control in the aftermath of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, which left 20 children and six adult staff members dead at an elementary school, as well as the attacker’s mother. Support for tighter laws is strong among most Democrats, but Republicans and those Democrats from GOP-leaning states proved reluctant to vote to tighten access to firearms.

The Senate isn’t expected to take a final vote on its package of gun-control legislation, in essence leaving the issue tabled. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) took a procedural step Wednesday that would enable lawmakers to return to the bill if dynamics changed.