RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.romirowsky.com/12055/unrwa-the-right-of-return

THE HENRY JACKSON SOCIETY

Chair: Good evening everyone. I am Louise Ellman MP, and on behalf of the Henry Jackson Society, I would like to welcome you to this meeting here in the House of Commons. I would like to extend a particular welcome to our guest speaker this evening, Asaf Romirowsky, an adjunct scholar of the Foundation for Defence of Democracies and the Middle East Forum. The topic of our discussion this evening is UNRWA and the Palestinian refugees; a look at the role of UNRWA in relations to the refugees and its role in trying to attain progress towards peace for both Israelis and Palestinians. Asaf, I hand it over to you. And I hope that once you finish speaking to us you will be able to answer some questions.

Asaf: Good evening, it is a pleasure to be here. I would like to thank the MP and the Henry Jackson Society for inviting me and giving me this opportunity to speak to you. UNRWA has been the focus of my research for over the past 15 years, and I have worked on these topics in Washington and in Jerusalem. I have come to certain research conclusions about UNRWA at large and about what it is that UNRWA actually does. If you look at the history of refugees around the world, since World War 2, there have been about 165 million refugees worldwide. All have been assimilated with the exception of one nationality; that is the Palestinians. In 1949 two organisations were created. One of them was UNRWA, which stands for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and the other a few months later is an organisation called the UNHCR which is UN High Commissioner for Refugees. UNRWA was created as an organisation that was solely devoted to the Palestinian refugees and it was defined by nature as a temporary organisation because the belief was that the Palestinian refugee situation was a temporary situation that would be resolved within a few months -years’ time as a result of how the Palestinian refugees came about.

The topic of how the refugees came about is not something that I will go into in great detail tonight, but if people want to talk about how they came about and the actual numbers, we can talk about that.

What is important to understand vis-à-vis the definition of a refugee is that it is unique to the category of Palestinian refugees. UNRWA actually defines a Palestinian refugee as anybody who was in the mandatory area of Palestine between 1946 and 1948 and his descendants. The hereditary aspect of Palestinian refugees is unique to the Palestinian cause. In comparison, in the UNHCR you can only be a refugee for one generation after which time you do not have the refugee status anymore. If you take that into consideration, the main difference between the two entities over the past 64 years is that in UNHCR you can see a decline of refugees (the idea that the people would be assimilated and the numbers would go down), whereas in UNRWA there is actually an inflation of numbers, which is why we have today (the numbers are fluctuating) between 5-6 million refugees worldwide. I have also in my research seen numbers extending to 11-12 million refugees worldwide. Up until now, UNRWA defined the hereditary status only according to the father but now there has been a move to include the mother as well.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/07/no_buyers_remorse_for_dershowitz_over_obama.html

AT THE RISK OF PERSEVERATING….DERSHOWITZ IS REMORSELESS….HE BEGINS ALMOST EVERY SPEECH BY DECLARING THAT HE STILL BELIEVES IN THE TWO STATE (DIS)SOLUTION OF ISRAEL….AND THEN CONTINUES WITH HIS USUAL PIETIES AND PREENING…RSK

What happened to Alan Dershowitz? He has changed hius tune about President Obama. Dershowitz who was a key supporter of Obama in 2008 recently has written that, in almost four years in office, Obama has turned out to be a:

pragmatic, centrist liberal who has managed…to bring us the first important healthcare legislation in recent history, appointed excellent justices to the Supreme Court, supported women’s rights, eliminated the ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ policy, maintained the wall of separation between church and state, kept up an effective war against terrorism and generally made [Dershowitz] proud to be an American who cast [a] vote for [Obama].

This is in stark contrast to his comments in February of 2012 during a Newsmax interview, when Dershowitz stated he hope[s] Obama is not remembered in history as the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st century, the person who didn’t see the greatest evil, didn’t recognize the greatest evil of the 20th century, as Chamberlain did not.” During this interview, Dershowitz maintained that “[t]he true test of Obama’s support for Israel will come over Iran” which poses an “existential threat, not only to Israel’s existence, but to America’s safety.” Additionally, Obama’s ties with the left-wing website, George Soros-backed Media Matters were problematic for Dershowitz who denounced Media Matters as a “vicious organization.” Yet, Dershowitz was “not sure how much Obama [knew] about the website’s views.”

On May 8, 2012, Jack Gillum of the Huffington Post stated that “the growing list of financial supporters now includes George Soros, who has pledged $2 million to political groups supporting President Barack Obama’s re-election[.]”

On April 17, 2012 Cliff Kincaid of Canada Free Press highlighted “[n]ewly recently released tax documents” that “reveal how billionaire…George Soros expanded his U.S. based empire by using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the Obama stimulus. Soros and Obama worked hand-in-glove through the stimulus.”

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4147 The Democrats have a Jewish problem, and his name is Barack Obama. Reluctantly, many Jews, loyal Democrats by birth and tradition, have concluded that he’s not The One they thought he was. With even greater reluctance, the White House has concluded that their Jewish problem is real, growing, and they better do something about […]

Escape From Sharia — on The Glazov Gang
by Frontpagemag.com
Amani Mustafa, Anni Cyrus and Nonie Darwish testify how they broke free from the chains of Islam.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/how-islam-ruined-my-life-on-the-glazov-gang-2-1-1/

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3223/the-call-for-july-30-2012-why-all-players-are David Samuels, Pepe Escobar and David Goldman Key takeaways No-one will win in Syria because none of the external actors wants any side to win – except for the Obama administration, which is ineffectual. There is only one leader who really supports the Muslim Brotherhood, and that’s Barack Obama. The Saudis, Turks, and others […]

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/07/30/romneys-road-trip

At some point, every presidential candidate is bound to take a trip abroad to advertise his foreign policy credentials. Because most candidates don’t want to be accused of criticizing his opponent’s foreign policy abroad, the trips are usually little more than carefully staged photo ops.

Four years ago, during his “foreign policy” trip, Barack Obama donned a skullcap and pushed a written prayer into a nook in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. He hasn’t been back to Israel since, and his enmity toward our only Middle Eastern ally has been demonstrated so often, there is no room here to rehash the evidence.

Mitt Romney’s trip this week was supposed to follow the normal script. Off to London first for the opening of the Olympics, then to Israel and last to Poland, the trip was planned to hit the headlines and Obama’s vulnerabilities. The U.K. is a strong ally, Israel is another (and of greater domestic political importance), and Poland is another that — until Obama came along — held a special regard for us. Poland practically worships Ronald Reagan for his role in winning the Cold War and embracing Poland’s struggle against Soviet oppression. And many Polish-Americans — who may comprise the swing vote in several states — are worried about Obama’s disregard of Poland’s defense.

Britain, as one wag wrote a few days ago, is an easy date for American pols. All a guy has to do is say something nice about the Queen or Churchill, josh them about the lousy weather and say something warm and serious about the “special relationship.” At that point, the Brits conclude that the American candidate is perhaps too unlettered or too much of a cowboy, but all in all a good chap. Then everyone smiles as the candidate climbs back on the aircraft to go to the next stop.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/gaffney073112.php3

Anderson Cooper closed one of five segments of his weeknight CNN show that he recently devoted to attacking principally Rep. Michele Bachmann with a genuflection toward an iconic newsman, Edward R. Murrow. He deployed against her the gauntlet Murrow threw down to Sen. Joseph McCarthy in March 1954: “The line between investigating and persecuting is a [very] fine one.” If anyone has stepped over that line, however, it is Mr. Cooper himself, rather than the Minnesota congresswoman.

Night after night during the week of July 16, the host of “Anderson Cooper 360” failed to meet even the most basic standards of investigative journalism. The irony is that, in his ill-concealed persecution of Mrs. Bachmann, Mr. Cooper has serially engaged in precisely the practices he pillories her and others for using, by his account, to destroy the reputation of a Muslim-American woman named Huma Abedin, the deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Let us count the ways:

* Mr. Cooper insists that Mrs. Bachmann failed to do her homework. He singles her out for most of his criticism, despite the fact that she was but one of five members of Congress to raise concerns not only about Ms. Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, but those of a number of others the Obama administration has enlisted as officials, advisers and liaisons to “the Muslim community.” Yet, Mr. Cooper repeatedly showed his ignorance of the extensive evidence cited by the legislators, even as he mentioned the website where some of it resides: the Center for Security Policy’s online video course at MuslimBrotherhoodInAmerica.com.
* As he accused Mrs. Bachmann of playing fast and loose with the facts, Mr. Cooper repeatedly mischaracterized the nature of the legislators’ request for five federal inspectors general to conduct investigations. He or his echo chamber of exclusively like-minded guests complained that Ms. Abedin is accused of being a “spy” and engaging in “treason” and that she has been subjected to a groundless, bigoted and McCarthyite witch hunt. Several of the reporters and interested parties who added color commentary (sometimes repeatedly) further demeaned Mrs. Bachmann by asserting that she is simply engaging in partisan politics and fundraising for her re-election campaign.

An upscale hotel on a Santa Monica, California, beach is an odd place to be singled out from a crowd and removed because you are Jewish, but that’s what happened to 18 young professionals who are telling their story to a jury in a discrimination trial taking place in Santa Monica Superior Court this week.

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/pakistani-owner-of-swanky-santa-monica-hotel-get-the-expletive-jews-out-of-my-pool/2012/07/30/

Ari Ryan is the grandson of a Ukranian Jew who lost most of his family in the Holocaust and narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Nazis. Ryan’s grandfather moved to Israel in 1942 and served as a captain in the Israel Defense Forces.

Seventy years later Ryan says he got a small taste of what his grandfather lived through, but rather than in the forests of the Ukraine, it took place at an upscale hotel in Santa Monica. Ryan and more than a dozen others have brought a lawsuit alleging anti-Semitic discrimination against them by a multi-millionaire Muslim American hotel owner.

Two years ago Ryan and other twenty- and thirty-something Jews planned to raise money to send children of fallen IDF soldiers to camp with a charity event at the Hotel Shangri-La in Santa Monica, California.

On the morning of July 11, 2010, Ryan and others arrived at the hotel and began setting up Friends of the IDF banners, literature and piles of shirts for the event guests.

But the event was aborted after, according to one employee’s sworn testimony, the hotel’s owner told staff members, “Get the [expletive deleted] Jews out of my pool.” Then the hotel security and other employees began removing the materials and ordering the guests to leave.

http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2012/07/a-tale-of-two-presidential-campaigns.html
Unlike the classic Dickens work, this week presidential campaign was a tale of one city Jerusalem, and the different way it was handled by the two different campaigns, One handled it as if this was the age of foolishness, the other as the age of wisdom. One refused give its position on Israel’s capital publicly; the other stood in front of the panorama of the holy city over his shoulder and pronounced the city Israel’s capital.

During Thursday’s daily press briefing White House Press Secretary Jay Carney wouldn’t answer a simple question.

Reporter: What city does this Administration consider to be the capital of Israel? Jerusalem or Tel Aviv?Jay Carney: Um… I haven’t had that question in a while. Our position has not changed. Can we, uh…Reporter: What is the capital [of Israel]?Jay Carney: You know our position.Reporter: I don’t.Lester Kinsolving, World Net Daily: No, no. She doesn’t know, that’s why she asked.Carney: She does know.Reporter: I don’t.Kinsolving: She does not know. She just said that she does not know. I don’t know.Carney: We have long, lets not call on…Kinsolving: Tel Aviv or Jerusalem?Carney: You know the answer to that. Kinsolving: I don’t know the answer. We don’t know the answer. Could you just give us an answer? What do you recognize? What does the administration recognize?Carney: Our position has not changed.Kinsolving: What position?

Carney then moved on to another question.

Jay Carney refused to outline the President’s position on Jerusalem because the truth would be damaging to the campaign. He was afraid an honest answer would further damage the support for the president’s cash-poor campaign amongst his donors that support Israel.

Mitt Romney chose Tisha B’Av, the day Jews across the world mourn the loss of the Holy Temples in Jerusalem, to make speech in the holy city. With about 400 Israelis in attendance (including his friend of 30 years Prime Minister Netanyahu), and the Temple Mount in the background the GOP candidate declared Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel. Romney didn’t make the announcement as a big splash at an AIPAC convention, but said it almost matter-of-factly near the beginning of his speech:

It is a deeply moving experience to be in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel.

Romney is not the first candidate to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel, nor is the first to talk about moving our Embassy to Jerusalem as he told CNN later in the day.

Recognizing Jerusalem on Tisha B’Av was only Romney’s starting point. Romney was not overtly critical of Obama as he was on foreign soil, but he was critical nevertheless. He drew a clear distinction with the policies of the Obama Administration.

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/07/30/newt-staunchly-defends-bachmann-et-al-on-muslim-brotherhood-influence-peddling/

Newt Staunchly Defends Bachmann et al on Muslim Brotherhood Influence Peddling

Two years ago, July 29, 2010, Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich delivered a singularly astute and courageous address [1]. Reactions to that speech across [2] the [3] political [4] spectrum [5], whether immediate [2] or delayed [6], illustrated the contemporary equivalent of what the greatest historian of Soviet Communist totalitarianism, Robert Conquest [7], appositely characterized as “mindslaughter [8]” — a brilliantly evocative term for delusive Western apologetics regarding the ideology of Communism, and the tangible horrors its Communist votaries inflicted.

What did Newt Gingrich have the temerity to discuss? In defiance of our era’s most rigidly enforced cultural relativist taboo, Mr. Gingrich provided an irrefragably accurate if blunt characterization of the existential threat posed by Islam’s living, self-professed mission: to impose Sharia [9], its totalitarian religio-political “law,” globally.

With vanishingly rare intellectual honesty and resolve, Gingrich described [1] how normative Sharia [9] — antithetical to bedrock Western legal principles — by “divine,” immutable diktat, rejects freedom of conscience, while sanctioning violent jihadism, absurd, misogynistc “rules of evidence” (four male witnesses for rape), barbarous punishments (stoning for adultery), and polygamy:

Sharia in its natural form has principles and punishments totally abhorrent to the Western world, and the underlying basic belief which is that law comes directly from God and is therefore imposed upon humans and no human can change the law without it being an act of apostasy is a fundamental violation of a tradition in the Western system which goes back to Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem and which has evolved in giving us freedom across the planet on a scale we can hardly imagine and which is now directly threatened by those who would impose it.

Moreover, Gingrich warned [1] about efforts — deliberate, or unwitting — to represent Sharia as a benign system:

So let me also be quite clear that the rules are radical and horrific. I think again it’s fascinating that even when people go out and do polling and they say to, for example, Muslims in general, do you believe in Sharia, they don’t then explain what Sharia is. Sharia becomes like would you like to be a Rotarian and it sounds okay.

Gingrich’s unflinching portrayal of the existential threat Sharia represents — whether or not this totalitarian system is imposed by violent, or non-violent means — was accompanied by a clarion call [1] for concrete measures to oppose any Sharia encroachment on the U.S. legal code:

Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence. But in fact they’re both engaged in jihad and they’re both seeking to impose the same end state which is to replace Western civilization with a [radical] imposition of Sharia.