RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/08/01/lessons-from-the-red-terror-about-islamist-organizations-an-interview-with-prof-anna-geifman/?print=1

Prof. Anna Geifman’s 2010 book Death Orders examines mass political terrorism in pre-revolutionary Russia as a precedent for today’s Islamist terrorism. Geifman’s study of the Russian communist terror that prepared the 1917 revolution has enormous value for students of contemporary Islamist organizations.

A common sociology links the Russian terrorists and the Islamists: Russia’s “urban populace swelled from around 9 million people in the mid-19th century to about 25 million in 1913, with inhabitants of most major Russian cities increasing four- or five-fold,” leading to a “breakdown of social values.” All of Europe experienced political upheaval associated with urbanization; but, “Less prepared for the advent of modernization, the Russians were vulnerable to an even greater degree,” according to Geifman, “increasingly prone to take an opportunity to release the bottled-up rage, especially when external circumstances stimulated the expression of distress.”

I interviewed Prof. Geifman for PJ Media this week by email. The transcript of our discussion follows.

PJM: In Death Orders, you document the worst epidemic of terrorism in modern history, namely the Red terror in the dozen years that preceded the Bolshevik revolution. Few people are aware of its scope: can you cite a few key facts to set this terror wave in context?

Geifman: Late imperial Russia was one of the birthplaces of modern terrorism, which is a new type of political violence. Subversives and insurrectionists had killed their adversaries as far back as 11th century , of course, but the terror campaign to which I am referring was essentially different from assassinations that had occurred elsewhere. A hallmark of this new kind of terror, which has escalated over the past 100 years, is that its objectives have shifted from the punishment of individual adversaries and the privileged, to indiscriminate cruelty carried out en masse. And it was Russia where we first saw terrorism that expressed modern and political fanaticism, with the intentional use of violence against civilian targets for the sake of ideological purposes.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/raoul-wallenbergs-legacy-for-americas-patriots?f=puball The Colorado movie massacre was a tragedy and the worst mass shooting in US history. It’s still in the news. Every commentator and so-called social science authority has a theory and root cause analysis. Worst of all, people are politicizing the issue. New York Mayor Bloomberg, along with his call for banning super-sized sugary […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/romneys-right-brits-americans-are-joint-heirs-to-anglo-saxon-liberties?f=puball

Americans take justified pride in their successful assimilation of newcomers. Millions have been drawn to their country, from every continent and archipelago, determined to become American.

What do we mean by becoming American? When we break it down, there are three irreducible elements. First, accepting the values encoded in the US Constitution: free speech, the division of powers, religious toleration and so on. Second, understanding the unwritten codes bound up with those values: civic engagement, open competition, private contract. Third, speaking English.

And where do these characteristics have their roots? In Anglo-Saxon civilization. When a Romney aide told this newspaper that the US and Britain shared an ‘Anglo-Saxon heritage’, he or she was stating the obvious. Those Lefties pretending to be upset – the Obama campaign called the remark ‘stunningly offensive’ – know perfectly well that the reference was cultural rather than racial. When the French talk of ‘les anglo-saxons’ or the Spanish of ‘los anglosajones’, they don’t mean Cerdic and Oswine and Æthelstan. They mean people who speak English and believe in small government.

It hardly needs saying that the United States is not genetically Anglo-Saxon. Nor is the United Kingdom: it’s full of people with non-Saxon surnames such as Hannan. And nor, for that matter, is England. Recent DNA tests have confirmed what place-name studies have been insisting with increasing stridency for the past century, namely that the English are descended as much from the pre-fifth century population as from the settlers who came after the departure of Rome’s legions. The notion of mass population displacement comes largely from one later and tendentious source: Gildas’s De Excidio Brittonum. It’s odd, in retrospect, that historians ever took it seriously.

If Anglo-Saxon is of limited value as an ethnic category, though, it is of huge value as a cultural denominator. Until the mid-twentieth century, most historians traced the notions of personal freedom, the rule of law and representative government to the Anglo-Saxon period. A free people, ran the story, governed by a folkright of common law, and ordering their affairs increasingly through popular assemblies – folkmoots – found themselves subjected to feudalism by the Normans.

Nor was the idea confined to historians. Six centuries after the Conquest, during English civil war, parliamentary soldiers told themselves that that they were fighting to ‘throw off the Norman yoke’. The idea of recovering the native liberty of the Anglo-Saxons, suppressed by an alien aristocracy, was very real to them.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/teachers-unions-now-sending-lawyers-after-private-schools

In a move which is somewhat understandable on one level and mind-numbingly stupid on another, The Hayride has learned that the Louisiana Association of Educators is sending demand letters to private schools participating in the Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence program, the state voucher plan, insisting that those schools pull out of the program.

We’ve obtained a copy of one of these letters. The full copy can be found here.

From the letter, an explanation of why the schools are being threatened…

http://news.yahoo.com/hamas-slams-palestinian-visit-alleged-holocaust-233948616.html Barhoum further called Bandak’s visit to Auschwitz, a camp where the Nazis killed 1.5 million people, most of them Jews but also other Polish citizens, during World War Two, as “a marketing of a false Zionist alleged tragedy.” GAZA (Reuters) – The Hamas Islamist group in charge of the Gaza Strip on Wednesday denounced […]

http://news.yahoo.com/sectarian-violence-erupts-egyptian-village-132314864.html

“SECTARIAN VIOLENCE” THAT’S MEDIASPEAK FOR JIHAD AGAINST CHRISTIANS IN SPRINGTIME EGYPT…RSK

CAIRO (AP) — New sectarian violence erupted in a village near Cairo Wednesday following the death of a Muslim man, prompting all the local Christians to flee, church and security officials said.

Tensions flare frequently between Egypt’s majority Muslims and minority Christians, but clashes rarely result in such a flight of an entire Christian community, about 100 families, said Ishak Ibrahim, who monitors religious freedom in Egypt for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR).

The violence in Dahshour, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Cairo, is the first case of sectarian clashes in the weeks since Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood took over as president. The election of an Islamist heightened fears among Egypt’s Christian and other minorities that their rights would be curtailed, and that they might become targets of extremist Muslim attacks.

The deposed regime of Hosni Mubarak kept a tight lid on Islamists. Since his overthrow a year and a half ago, violence against Christians has taken a turn for the worse, including violence by security forces.

About 10 percent of Egypt’s mainly Muslim 82 million people are Christian.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

If you read the newspaper, watch the telly or turn the radio dial to something besides talk or the greatest hits of the 70’s, 80’s and today, then you know that Romney’s international trip was a disaster. How do you know that? Well you know it the same way that Soviet citizens knew that their economy was booming and it would only be a matter of time before the oppressed slaves of capitalism threw off their shackles and bowed their arrogant heads to the hammer and sickle. They read it in the paper.

We read things in the paper too. Not very good or interesting things because the media is currently too lazy and cheap to do good or interesting things.

Modern journalism is indistinguishable from public relations. PR people do not investigate or report, they come up with a narrative, break it down into talking points and then sell it down by the docks. Their narrative is “Our company is great and the other company is bad”. When their company does something wrong, then it’s, “Our company really isn’t responsible for this” and “The other company is much worse than we are.”

When it comes to politics all you really hear from the media anymore is the same lazy spin you can find on corporate press releases. Read the press releases from a squabble between two companies, switch out the names of the companies to, “Obama” and “Romney” and imagine that Obama Inc. owns the media. Now you know everything you need to know about politics.

www.shmuelkatz.com

TOO BAD SHMUEL KATZ NEVER MET ANDREW BOSTOM WHO DETAILED THE CENTURIES OLD ISLAMIC JEW HATRED IN HIS MAGNIFICENT BOOK:
The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History by Andrew G. Bostom and Ibn Warraq (Jun 5, 2008)

Nonie Darwish, an Egyptian who grew up in Gaza and later moved to the U.S. where she converted to Christianity, insists that the problem of Jew-hatred in Islam is fundamental to its belief system. “If Jew-hatred is removed, Islam itself would self-destruct,” she writes in a recent article.

Darwish traces the problem to Mohammed’s relations to the Jews of Medina. He tried to persuade them to accept him as a prophet after his own tribe in Mecca had ridiculed his pretensions. When they rejected him, in Darwish’s words, “Mohammed simply and literally flipped.” As much as he had professed to love them, he now hated them. He engaged in unspeakable slaughter, she writes, ordering “the beheading of 600 to 900 Jewish men of one tribe and took their women and children as slaves.”

That has left Islam, says Darwish, with a major existential problem. “Islam must justify the genocide that Mohammed waged against the Jews. Mohammed and Muslims had two choices: either the Jews are evil subhumans, apes, pigs, and enemies of Allah, a common description of Jews still heard regularly in Middle Eastern mosques today, or Mohammed was a genocidal warlord and not fit to be a prophet of God, a choice that would mean the end of Islam.”

http://sarahhonig.com/2012/08/02/zoabis-incitement/

THIS ISRAELI ARAB MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT IS AN OUTRIGHT TRAITOR…SIMPLY UNTHINKABLE THAT SHE IS TOLERATED BUT A GOOD INDICATION OF PALARAB SENTIMENTS EVEN WHEN THEY PARTAKE OF ISRAEL’S REAL DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOMS….RSK

It sounded quite unthinkable, but Knesset member Haneen Zoabi (Balad) blamed Israel for the recent slaying of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. “Israel is not a victim, not even when civilians are killed,” she declared in an interview with Channel 10.Zoabi elaborated: “Israel’s policy of occupation is at fault. If there was no occupation, no repression and no blockade, then this wouldn’t have happened.”

Her comments failed to rouse furor among the Israeli public, which has grown inured to brazen provocation from Arab MKs bankrolled by Israeli taxpayers. Our local media reported the story, but on the whole abstained from comment.

Zoabi’s rationalization of mass murder went right under the radar of the international community. We need only imagine the ferocious maelstrom had an Israeli parliamentarian dared hint that indiscriminately murdering Palestinian tots, their mothers, fathers and all other Arab civilians is tolerable because they have it coming.

The pandemonium would be nothing less than horrific, as would the bad press tarnishing the Israeli collective.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/312830/culture-does-matter-mitt-romney

During my recent trip to Israel, I had suggested that the choices a society makes about its culture play a role in creating prosperity, and that the significant disparity between Israeli and Palestinian living standards was powerfully influenced by it. In some quarters, that comment became the subject of controversy.

But what exactly accounts for prosperity if not culture? In the case of the United States, it is a particular kind of culture that has made us the greatest economic power in the history of the earth. Many significant features come to mind: our work ethic, our appreciation for education, our willingness to take risks, our commitment to honor and oath, our family orientation, our devotion to a purpose greater than ourselves, our patriotism. But one feature of our culture that propels the American economy stands out above all others: freedom. The American economy is fueled by freedom. Free people and their free enterprises are what drive our economic vitality.

The Founding Fathers wrote that we are endowed by our Creator with the freedom to pursue happiness. In the America they designed, we would have economic freedom, just as we would have political and religious freedom. Here, we would not be limited by the circumstance of birth nor directed by the supposedly informed hand of government. We would be free to pursue happiness as we wish. Economic freedom is the only force that has consistently succeeded in lifting people out of poverty. It is the only principle that has ever created sustained prosperity. It is why our economy rose to rival those of the world’s leading powers — and has long since surpassed them all.

The linkage between freedom and economic development has a universal applicability. One only has to look at the contrast between East and West Germany, and between North and South Korea for the starkest demonstrations of the meaning of freedom and the absence of freedom.

Israel is also a telling example. Like the United States, the state of Israel has a culture that is based upon individual freedom and the rule of law. It is a democracy that has embraced liberty, both political and economic. This embrace has created conditions that have enabled innovators and entrepreneurs to make the desert bloom. In the face of improbable odds, Israel today is a world leader in fields ranging from medicine to information technology.

As the case of Israel makes plain, building a free society is not a simple task. Rather, it is struggle demanding constant courage and sacrifice. Even here in the United States, which from our inception as a nation has been blessed with freedom, we faced monumental challenges in harmonizing our ideals with our institutions. We fought a bloody civil war against slavery and it took a nonviolent civil-rights movement to bring political and social equality to all Americans. In these epic struggles we changed our “culture” and vastly improved it.

I have just returned from a trip abroad. I visited three lands — Israel, Poland, and Great Britain — which are defined by their respective struggles for freedom. I met with some of the greatest heroes of those struggles. I am always glad to return to American soil. On this occasion, I am only strengthened in my conviction that the pursuit of happiness is not an American right alone. Israelis, Palestinians, Poles, Russians, Iranians, Americans, all human beings deserve to enjoy the blessings of a culture of freedom and opportunity.