RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/britain-is-shackled-to-the-corpse-of-europe

Europe’s economic problems are about to get a whole lot worse. For the past three years, governments have tried, however ineffectually, to tackle the debt crisis. Now, though, in country after country, voters are demanding precisely the high-tax and high-spend policies which caused the recession in the first place.

Yesterday’s elections in France and Greece were the first of what will surely be many advances by the populist Left. In both places, candidates were elbowing each other aside during the campaign to demand more intervention and an end to cuts.

The new French President is an unapologetic Socialist of the kind we haven’t known in this country since Michael Foot. François Hollande wants wealth taxes, stimulus spending and a massive expansion of the state payroll.

He understands that this might lead to dismay in the international markets, but he has an answer to that: he will create a French credit ratings agency which, unlike the American ones, will tell him what he wants to hear.

Hollande summarises his programme as ‘growth, not austerity’. Gosh. Who knew it was so easy? Why has no one thought of that before?

The truth, of course, is that France has already pushed tax-and-spend to its limits. The government accounts for an extraordinary 56 per cent of the economy, and the French budget was last in balance in 1974. If state expenditure really had a stimulus effect, France would be the wealthiest country in Europe.

Yet every one of the ten presidential candidates there demanded even greater state intervention. Nicolas Sarkozy promised to make France ‘stronger than the markets’. Three of the other contenders were Trotskyists and one was a Green.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/299782

Ismail Belghar, a 36-year-old Muslim man living in Australia, assaulted, abducted, and nearly killed his sister-in-law. The victim, a 25-year-old Moroccan named Canan Kokden, had dared to take her older sister, Mrs. B, to the beach without Belghar’s permission. This heinous effrontery was amplified, Belghar later recounted for police, when Mrs. B thereupon “displayed her body,” sustaining the shoulder sunburn that tipped him off.

To Australians, this may have been, well, just a day at the beach. For Belghar, though, it was an “abhorrent” offense against sharia, Islam’s legal code and comprehensive societal framework.

The telltale burn is also starting to show on the West’s shoulders, our courts of law. Australia has not changed Belghar, but the Belghars are changing Australia.

Innately, Islam is not moderate — just ask Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, who rejects as “ugly and offensive” the very term “moderate Islam.” Instead, Islam can be moderated, but only by a culture that is self-confident and self-assertive. Alas, that is no longer Western culture. So, the more Muslims immigrate, the less the West is moderating Islam. It is Islam that leaves its mark.

In the usual endearing family way, Belghar telephoned his sister-in-law to convey that he was a tad rankled: “You slut, how dare you take my wife to the beach!” Afterwards, happening upon Ms. Kokden at a shopping mall in New South Wales, he angrily confronted her, slapped her face, and dragged her to the railing of an over-ground parking lot. As he seemed ready to hurl her to the traffic below, her brother (Kokden’s chaperone at the mall) finally stirred himself to intervene, tackling the assailant. Belghar was charged with attempted murder, among other crimes.

http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/5536

“On April 1,1983, a twenty one year old senior at Columbia University named Barack Obama attended the “Socialist Scholars Conference” in New York City’s Cooper Union, which had been touted as a meeting “In honor of Karl Marx’s centennial (1818-1883).” This conference became the catalyst for Obama’s future political agenda. Thus begins Stanley Kurtz’s dazzling and meticulously researched book “Radical- In- Chief-Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.”The opening remarks of the 1983 Conference were tellingly delivered by City University’s radical professor Frances Fox Piven, described by the author as “…preeminent theorist, strategist, and historian of community organizing, with a keen sense of the roots of community organizing in America’s early communist and socialist movements.” RSK

In 1966, two Columbia University sociologists, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, collaborated on a theory to end poverty in the United States. This theory, today, is referred to as the “Cloward-Piven Strategy.” People who are familiar with the likes of Saul Alinsky and William Ayers are familiar with the strategy, as are the full complement of the Progressive Movement. In a nutshell, the underlying principle of the Cloward-Piven Strategy is to so overload the entitlement system – to add so many to the entitlement rolls, that the country’s economic system collapses, unleashing chaos and violence in the streets, thus affecting radical Leftist political change in government. Up until recently this theory has been just that, a theory, and a theory that anarchists and Progressives have salivated over for their want of execution. But today, we are seeing the fruits of the Cloward-Piven Strategy played out to success in Greece and several other financial destitute countries in Europe.

To briefly summarize the Cloward-Piven Strategy, I turn to Richard Poe who wrote an article of the same name, which is featured at DiscoverTheNetworks.org.

Mr. Poe observes that Mr. Cloward and Ms. Piven sought (and “seeks,” in the case of Ms. Piven) to facilitate the fall of Capitalism by “overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.” Mr. Poe explained that Cloward and Piven saw the so-called “ruling class” as using entitlements to “weaken the poor”; to make the poor dependent on government, thus “dousing the fires of rebellion,” following the “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” theory.

In a 1970 New York Times interview, Cloward is quoted as saying that poor people can only advance when “the rest of society is afraid of them.” He then theorized that activists should refrain from demanding that government provide more for the poverty stricken and, instead, should strive to pack as many people on the welfare (read: entitlement) rolls as possible, creating a demand that could not be met, facilitating the destruction of the welfare system and massive financial crisis. As a byproduct, rebellion would be ignited amongst the people; chaos would rule the streets and governments would be damaged beyond repair, many falling to history making it possible for new radicals to assume the roles of oligarchs, ushering in new systems of government and the dismantling of the Capitalist system in particular.

Bernard Lewis: A Stand-Up Guy Who Fell Down

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2011/08/09/bernard-lewis-pied-piper-of-islamic-confusion/

I HAVE GREAT REGARD FOR HIS ACUMEN AND KNOWLEDGE…HOWEVER, IT HIS HIS SUPPORT OF CAMP DAVID, OSLO, GAZA, WYE, ROAD MAP THAT IS SO DISTURBING AS WELL AS HIS PROMOTION OF THE MYTH OF AN ERA OF GREAT COMITY BETWEEN ARABS/MOSLEMS AND JEWS….THE ERA CONSISTED OF A FEW BURPS AND BUMPS IN HISTORY ALL PRECEDED AND FOLLOWED BY UNRELENTING HATRED OF JEWS SINCE THE TIME OF THE PROPHET…. IT WAS NOT ALWAYS SO WITH LEWIS….READ THIS SHORT ESSAY…..RSK

The unapologetic Lewis viewed Islam as unrelentingly autocratic, with a conception of freedom, “hurriyya,”—perfect slavery to an autocratic Allah and his sharia—antithetical to the uniquely Western notion of individual liberty. In short, for Lewis, Islam was a totalitarianism, analogous to Communism—a direct analogy he in fact made. Quoth Lewis, circa 1954:

I turn now from the accidental to the essential factors, to those deriving from the very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought. The first of these is the authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition….Many attempts have been made to show that Islam and democracy are identical-attempts usually based on a misunderstanding of Islam or democracy or both. This sort of argument expresses a need of the up- rooted Muslim intellectual who is no longer satisfied with or capable of understanding traditional Islamic values, and who tries to justify, or rather, re-state, his inherited faith in terms of the fashionable ideology of the day. It is an example of the romantic and apologetic presentation of Islam that is a recognized phase in the reaction of Muslim thought to the impact of the West….

Without ever offering any coherent intervening historical or doctrinal explanations, “The Islam is Autocratic Totalitarianism Lewis,” five decades later, Lewis suddenly morphs into to “The Evangelical Democratist Lewis,” epitomized by his rather unhinged essay, from 2006, “Bring Them Freedom Or They Destroy Us.”

As noted here,

Lewis then [in the 1950s] was both unapologetic and pellucid in identifying the intractable obstacle to such efforts at democratization—Islam itself. ..Lewis’s volte-face on the merits of experiments in “Islamic democracy,” has been accompanied by his equally troubling intellectual legacy regarding three other critical subject areas: the institution of jihad, the chronic impact of the Sharia (Islamic law) on non-Muslims vanquished by jihad, and sacralized Islamic Jew-hatred.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=269521

SHAME ON GORDIS FOR THE PUSILLANIMOUS RESPONSE ABOUT GAZA AS A MODEL FOR ISRAELI WILLINGNESS TO COMPROMISE:

“Yet for some reason, Gordis, who recently penned a rather telling riposte of Beinart’s book in this paper, chose to be largely non-confrontational and to avoid assertively challenging either the credibility of Beinart’s sources or the cogency of his arguments.Although he began making an excellent opening point – that essentially there is “nothing Israel can do to end the conflict – not even land for peace” – he ended up severely undermining his case, declaring that he had no real disagreement with Beinart on most issues and that basically they shared the same vision for Israel – even if they differed on how to attain it. Acknowledging a priori that your adversary’s case is essentially valid is not a recommended strategy for winning arguments.
Perhaps most disturbing was his reassuring Beinart he too had many reservations about the settlements and that “many are going to have to get bulldozed.”

“We have shown in Gaza,” continued Gordis, trying to convince Beinart that settlements are not a real obstacle to a viable Palestinian state, “that we know how bulldoze when we need to bulldoze.”
That is not the lesson of the 2005 Gaza disengagement. The real lesson is that even if we do bulldoze, it is of no avail. It is pity that Gordis chose not drive this home.

Into the Fray: Last week’s exchange in NY was disappointing – more for what was not said rather than what was.

“I wish you all, the parents and the entire tribe of settlers… restorers of the Jewish settlement in Hebron… great blessing and joy in raising your son. Bringing your son into the covenant of the Patriarch Abraham, in the city of Abraham after 40 years separation from it, has a special symbolic significance. It bears testimony to our continuous connection to this place, to which we have returned never to leave.”

– Yigal Allon, January 29, 1969

These sentiments, conveyed in a congratulatory letter from the Labor Party’s iconic moderate, to a family in Kiryat Arba, the Jewish neighborhood adjacent to Hebron, on the occasion of the first brit ceremony in the community, underscores how decoupled from historical fact and political context the discourse on the Palestinian issue has become.

Allon, who commanded the Palmah in the War of Independence, served as deputy prime minister, education minister and foreign minister under Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin.

He was arguably the first mainstream politician to explicitly propose making far-reaching territorial concessions in Judea and Samaria, in what came to be known as the Allon Plan. Yet even he, the archetypical “pragmatic” secular Zionist, understood the profound significance of Hebron for the Jewish people, its heritage and its nationhood.

Relativity of ‘radicalism’

It is instructive to keep this in mind when assessing last week’s debate between Peter Beinart and Daniel Gordis at Columbia University, sparked by the publication of Beinart’s book The Crisis of Zionism.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/10/documents-withheld-in-gsa-scandal/print/

The watchdog agency for the General Services Administration is declining to release hundreds of thousands of documents about travel fraud investigations, saying the disclosure could interfere with ongoing law enforcement proceedings.

The Washington Times had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking copies of final reports for all travel fraud probes since 2007, as well as information about a highly publicized audit of lavish spending for a GSA conference in Las Vegas.

In a letter explaining the decision to withhold many of the records, an attorney for the Office of the Inspector General for the GSA noted that “over [800,000] documents are being withheld.” The letter said releasing the records could “interfere with ongoing enforcement proceedings.”

Since the conference audit was already released, the decision to keep the records from public view provides further evidence that criminal charges could come next in the 2010 GSA conference scandal.

Inspector General Brian Miller already has recommended a criminal probe as accusations of bribery and kickbacks emerged following his report on the conference. And the GSA official who planned the conference, Jeffrey Neely, invoked his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination at a congressional hearing last month.

Issued last month, the inspector general’s report on the more than $800,000 Western Region Conference sparked bipartisan outrage on Capitol Hill and the ouster of GSA’s top official, Martha Johnson.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1871 The rise of rape Sexual abuse of women, in one form or another, appears to be on the rise in Israel. As is always the case with crimes of this nature, it is difficult to tell whether the phenomenon is actually increasing, or whether it is being taken more seriously than before and therefore […]

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks List of Islamic Terror Attacks For the Past 30 Days Date Country City Killed Injured Description 2012.05.10 Afghanistan Paktika 4 5 Four others are left dead when six Shahid suicide bombers attack a government building. 2012.05.10 Syria Damascus 55 372 Two Religion of Peace suicide bombers detonate during the morning rush hour, sending at […]

http://times247.com/

Evidence of al Qaeda in Syria mounts
Ynet
Friday, May 11, 2012
News
Evidence of al Qaeda in Syria mounts
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters that U.S. intelligence indicates “an al-Qaeda presence in Syria,” but said the extent of its activity was unclear. “Frankly we need to continue to do everything we can to determine what kind of influence they’re trying to exert there,” Panetta said. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uYbeuasu
Astronauts ask NASA to cool it on warming
National Review Online
Friday, May 11, 2012
News
Astronauts ask NASA to cool it on warming
Veterans of America’s space program are among the 49 retired NASA employees who recently asked the agency to halt what they consider its unscientific advocacy of climate alarmism. Read more…
Pirates seize oil tanker off Oman coast
BBC
Friday, May 11, 2012
News
Pirates seize oil tanker off Oman coast
A Greek-owned oil tanker has been hijacked by pirates in the Arabian Sea. About 200 people are currently thought to be held as hostages on vessels seized by the pirates. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uYbnvtRG

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/11/egyptian-actress-under-fire-for-playing-mother-teresa/
WHO IS HANAN TORK?
http://213.158.162.45/~egyptian/index.php?action=news&id=17696&title=%E2%80%98Let’s%20build%20Egypt%E2%80%99%20launched%20in%20US
‘Let’s build Egypt’ launched in US
The Egyptian Gazette Online
Saturday, April 30, 2011 04:16:13 PM
WASHINGTON – Egypt’s Ambassador in the US Sameh Shokri took part in the ‘Let’s build Egypt’ campaign on Friday night in Virginia, with the participation of Goodwill Ambassador Egyptian actress Hanan Tork, her compatriot, preacher Moustafa Hosni, and some American and Egyptian VIPs, the official Middle East News Agency (MENA) reports.

Hanan Tork, a popular actress in the Middle East of Egyptian origins, who recently took to the hijab and retired from acting, has returned to the silver screen—to much criticism and threats from the same Muslims who formerly praised her for donning the veil. According to Al Sawt, the actress is under “vicious attack” for accepting to play the role of Mother Teresa, the Catholic nun who, for 45 years, dedicated her life to the poor, sick, orphaned, and dying.