RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/why-is-the-world-different

An enraged madman kills a dozen people and injures many others in a carefully planned mass murder in an Aurora Colorado movie theater. What can one possibly say? So desensitized by stories of brutality on the nightly news, my emotions are muted. It seems to me that on first blush the nation is becoming more coarse, more susceptible to the inner beast, that evil lurking in the hearts of men.

Was there a time of innocence? Perhaps not, but surely there was a time not so long ago when people helped their neighbors, left their doors unlocked and didn’t listen to rap songs that encourage rape and the killing of cops. A dark cloud has moved over the culture that avoids any taboos. It pushes past normative standards so that violence through video games and television programming is in the cultural ambiance.

The world is different with an emotional apocalypse seemingly in our midst each day. Nightly news is filled with horror stories; the more lurid, the more likely it will be aired. Audiences are told “If you are squeamish, you shouldn’t watch the next few scenes.” For many this is cultural catnip. Push that envelope to new and more extreme positions and then contend that the issue is guns. Surely even Mayor Bloomberg, the arch defender of gun control, must realize a gun in the hands of St. Francis is not a weapon. Guns don’t fire on their own; someone must pull that trigger.

The one word that won’t be employed in all the accounts of mass murder is “evil.” We rationalize. The fiend must have had a relational set-back. His parents mistreated him. School officials took his scholarship away. Who knows? The one thing we do know is “evil” will not cross the lips of the talking heads. After all, we are now all psychologists seeking fundamental answers for the inexplicable.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/if-bibi-could-vote-in-november

Recently on FOX News Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu adroitly sidestepped host Chris Wallace’s question about Israel’s interest in the upcoming American presidential election. And rightly so. Whatever the outcome of the election here in the United States, the long-standing relationship Israel maintains with this country is of singular importance that has a direct bearing on Israel’s safety and security. And while the values and principles shared by the people of both countries will continue to be all important, it doesn’t mean that Israelis don’t have a preference, but that preference might be better for the sake of the long term relationship remain unstated. The hypothetical question then of how Bibi Netanyahu might vote if he were a US voter is one that’s interesting to ponder for in effect, it is a question that also speaks to how the Israeli polity feels about the United States at this point in time.

I have not talked to the Prime Minister about this, but in my years of serving him as his Chief of Staff, I feel that there are some of the issues that would particularly resonate with him if he were focused on a personal vote instead of being charged with a national mandate. The fact is that Obama Administration policies developed and implemented over the past three years have raised serious doubts about the direction and depth of the this Administration’s commitment to Israel. Here are some which I think are notable, warrant concern and might have a bearing on how Bibi and most Israelis feel about the Presidential campaign here.

* Two weeks ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Egypt and listened to the new Egyptian Foreign Minister declare his belief that the Camp David Accords of 1978 conferred upon Palestinians something he called a “right to have their own state on the land that was – the pre-June 4, 1967, borders with Jerusalem as its capital”. There is no such provision in those documents and Secretary Clinton, as a party to those agreements, ought not have let those comments stand without comment. It is hard to believe that a Kissinger, or Eagleburger or Shultz or Powell, or Rice would have allowed those assertions stand unremarked.
* The Obama Administration just convened its very own “Global Counterterrorism Forum” and invited 29 nations to meet on this subject, but Israel was not one of them. Bowing to Turkey’s insistence to exclude Israel from the conference, the US further insulted Israel by not even mentioning her as a victim of terrorist violence in her representative’s prepared remarks. U.S. Undersecretary of State, Maria Otero, failed to mention Israel as a country that has experienced terrorism while reading a long list of other nations that did. This was a US sponsored event, not a UN one where behavior of this type is expected as a matter of course.
* The Obama defense budget for Fiscal Year 2013, excludes funding for the promised US-Israeli initiative “Iron Dome”, a jointly built missile defense shield designed to secure Israel from Iranian missiles. This despite the platitudes spoken by both Obama and Clinton in the weeks leading up to the budget submission that the U.S. budget would continue to ensure Israel’s ability to defend herself. This brings into question the long-standing predisposition of the United States to guarantee Israel’s qualitative military edge in the region.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/312684

At a time when good news is rarer than a mohel in Mecca, few things are as encouraging as 31 teenagers here. Nearly all are low-income blacks and Hispanics in Harlem. Most live in single-parent households. The soft bigotry of low expectations might allow each to surrender, snarl at society, and settle for a life on the dole — or perhaps an even tougher spot on the American periphery.

Instead, 100 percent of these students graduated from local high schools in June (three-quarters of them from government-school campuses). Across America, only 72 percent of high-school seniors graduated, while that number is just 65.5 percent in New York City’s government schools. Among these high-caliber kids, 98 percent will enter college, versus 68.3 percent of U.S. high-school graduates and 71 percent of Big Apple grads. These 31 youths were admitted to 105 different four-year colleges, 25 of which will welcome them soon.

These include, among others, Columbia, Fordham, Haverford, Howard, Middlebury, and Temple. These students collectively scored $2.3 million in merit-based college scholarships, averaging some $74,000 each.

Too good to be true?

Actually, this is routine at the Harlem Educational Activities Fund, a privately financed, non-profit supplemental-learning organization founded in 1989. (For further statistics on how HEAF matches up, click here.) HEAF’s philosophy is: “No excuses. Every child can learn.” It works its magic after school and on weekends, providing enrichment, encouragement, mentoring, and other guidance to some 30 to 50 boys and girls annually, starting in sixth grade. HEAF selects students via grades, test scores, on-site writing exercises, and interviews with children and parents.

HEAF’s extracurricular efforts train students to thrive in the world beyond Harlem.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ Romney has landed in Jerusalem and Obama is threatening to visit Israel in his second term. This seems like good news for Americans, but presidential and pre-presidential visits are often bad news for Israelis. Romney’s trip itinerary covering the UK, Israel and Poland is a clever road map critique of Obama’s foreign policy. Kerry […]

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

Move over, Jayson Blair and Steven Glass, here comes Jonah Lehrer joining the pantheon of fabulists and plagiarists. The New Yorker magazine published quotes from Bob Dylan he made up, among other problems.

Funny how it is always the most prestigious liberal publications who generate these frauds.

I despise David Remnick, a snob and Israel-hater (who was abusive to Jack Cashill on Milt Rosenberg show). I hope this takes him down a peg. his book on Obama sold very few copies.

In a statement, the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, said: “This is a terrifically sad situation, but, in the end, what is most important is the integrity of what we publish and what we stand for.”

Once upon a time, The New Yorker was renowned for fact checking.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304388004577533092169060420.html?KEYWORDS=HAVA+NAGILA
At Some Happy Events, ‘Hava Nagila’ Isn’t Invited Standard Tune at Jewish Celebrations Faces a Backlash; Like a Knish?

WHEN I WAS A KID, MY PRANKSTER BROTHER TOLD ME IT WAS A SONG ABOUT CUBA…..RSK

CEDARHURST, N.Y.—When newlyweds Bryan Salamon and Rachel Itzkowitz entered the ballroom of Temple Beth El earlier this month, the band struck up a raucous rendition of the hora, a traditional Jewish folk dance.
‘Hava Nagila’ is a favorite at Jewish weddings, engagement parties, bar mitzvahs and any special occasion where there is dancing and music. But you don’t have to be Jewish to celebrate with the song — in fact it’s one of the most popular party tunes in recorded history. WSJ’s Lucette Lagnado reports.

For 45 minutes, the Neshoma Orchestra—whose slogan is “Your Soul Source for Jewish Music”—performed 15 Hebrew dance hits as hundreds of guests surrounded the couple, hoisting the bride high on a chair and dancing around the two in ecstatic circles.

Noticeably absent from the gleeful medley? The best known Jewish wedding song of them all: “Hava Nagila.”

“‘Hava Nagila’ at a wedding is like pouring sour milk on cereal,” said Naomi Salamon, the groom’s mother. “You won’t hear it in the next set or the set after that,” vowed her husband, Michael.

“Hava Nagila,” Hebrew for “Let Us Rejoice,” has been a staple of Jewish—and some non-Jewish—celebrations for decades. The song often accompanies the hora, a traditional dance-in-the-round that is performed at weddings, bar mitzvahs, engagement parties and other joyful occasions.

As American Jews assimilated, “Hava Nagila,” with its dizzying tune that incorporates major and minor modes, became one of the last cultural touchstones of the past. Even the most secular Jews craved it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444860104577558810814674928.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

IN A NUTSHELL: “Obama is nostalgic for the Jewish state’s socialist past. Romney admires its capitalist future.”

“Mr. Romney’s attitude toward Israel seems to come from a different place. He admires the country as much for where it’s going as for where it has come from. And he’s not prepared to give Palestinians an automatic pass for their failure to do something with the political and economic opportunities they’ve been given. Israeli success, in his mind, is earned—and so is Palestinian failure.”

Mitt Romney infuriated Palestinians during his visit to Israel on the weekend by calling Jerusalem “the capital of Israel.” He then added insult to injury by noting—in the context of a discussion of “culture”—the “dramatically stark difference in economic vitality” between Israelis and Palestinians. A Palestinian official called the remark “racist.”

I’m beginning to warm to Mitt.

We live in a time when being pro-Israel has become a key test of a candidate’s presidential fitness, and rightly so. George W. Bush passed that test on a helicopter ride over Israel with Ariel Sharon in 1999. Barack Obama tried to do the same when he paid homage to the besieged Israeli town of Sderot in 2008.

By contrast, Jimmy Carter thinks Israel is a virtual apartheid state, which is just the sort of thought that makes Carter Carter. To be anti-Israel doesn’t absolutely, positively, make you an anti-Semite. But it does mark you out as something between a moron and a crank.

President Obama has yet to do anything toward Israel that would put him in the Carter league—quite. But give him a second term. Perhaps his performance so far has been only an overture.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444405804577559442776203150.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

GONE WITH THE WIND

Mitt Romney isn’t famous for taking political risks, so it was notable and welcome on Monday when he came out against subsidies for wind power. If that doesn’t sound like stop-the-presses news, remember that Republicans aren’t really as implacably opposed to energy handouts as both Democrats and Republicans want the public to believe.

So from the top: The wind industry more or less exists at the pleasure of politics, specifically because of a federal subsidy known as the production tax credit that provides developers with a 2.2-cent writeoff for every kilowatt hour of electricity they produce. In effect, the credit means that wind’s energy competitors are taxed at a higher rate. This annual $1.6 billion special advantage has hung around for a decade but lapses at the end of the year, and Washington is now debating an extension.

Holding fast on this deadline ought to be an easy call for Republicans, who say they want to make the tax code fairer and get the government out of picking energy winners and losers in particular. But a sizeable cheering section within the GOP wants to maintain the status quo.

Why isn’t imprisoned Iranian pastor Youcef Nadarkhani known to activists, politicians and citizens in the West?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304388004577531031387938506.html?KEYWORDS=CHRISTIANS+IGNORE+PLIGHT+OF+CHRISTIANS+IN++COUNTRIES

This month the Christian pastor Youcef Nadarkhani marked his 1,000th day of incarceration in Lakan, a notorious prison in northern Iran. Charged with the crime of apostasy, Mr. Nadarkhani faces a death sentence for refusing to recant the Christian faith he embraced as a child. He embodies piety and represents millions more suffering from repression—but his story is barely known.

Mr. Nadarkhani’s courage and the tenacity of his supporters, many of them ordinary churchgoers who have crowded Twitter and other social media to alert the world to his plight, bring to mind the great human-rights campaigns of recent years: the fight against apartheid in South Africa, or the movement to assist Soviet Jews seeking to emigrate from behind the Iron Curtain. As Nelson Mandela represented the opposition to South African racism, and Anatoly Sharansky exemplified the just demands of Soviet Jews, so Mr. Nadarkhani symbolizes the emergency that church leaders say is facing 100 million Christians around the world.

Yet Mr. Nadarkhani has almost none of the name recognition that Messrs. Mandela and Sharansky had. Despite the increasing ferocity with which Christians are targeted—church bombings in Nigeria, discrimination in Egypt (where Christians have been imprisoned for building or repairing churches), beheadings in Somalia—Americans remain largely unaware of how bad the situation has become, particularly in the Islamic world and in communist countries like China and North Korea.

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.