RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1809

“In a eulogy for Zionist leader Max Nordau in 1931, Benzion Netanyahu said, “With all the love he had for man and society, and with his active participation in public life, the truth of the matter is that he was lonely. When the people began to diverge from Zionism, again he remained lonely, now among his brothers. His big eye examined the events as they unfolded and he cried out in pain, but his cry was carried only by the wind. I am puzzled by his deep optimism, the optimistic serenity within this volcano of a man. He died in loneliness with a contented face.”

“So wrote Professor Netanyahu, from the bottom of his heart, and it appears that today, as we stand over his own grave, that he had actually delivered his own eulogy back then: “He died in loneliness with a contented face.”

When I learned of the death of Professor Benzion Netanyahu, a great sadness came over me. A great sadness came over Jerusalem.

One hundred and two years of man and spirit have left behind a huge void that, for me, represents the scenes of my childhood and evokes the feeling of my childhood home. In my parents’ house, where my late father toiled, together with Professor Netanyahu and Dr. Abba Ahimeir, on the ambitious endeavor of compiling the Hebrew Encyclopedia, Netanyahu’s name was said with the utmost respect and appreciation. With him gone, a giant in a generation of giants that lived among us, an entire world has disappeared. A world for which he served as a spokesman and a preserver.

http://amilimani.com/2012/05/a-perspective-on-islam/#more-1734 I was born in a Muslim family that did not push religion down the kids’ throats. Yet, religion always cast a big shadow on everything. I just had to deal with it and couldn’t simply set it aside. And Islam, the Shiite Islam was the most pervasive religion around. I went to all kinds […]

http://www.qassam.ps/news-5647-Qaradawi_We_need_to_prepare_for_the_day_of_Israels_Demise.html ِAl Qassam website- Doha- Head of the International union for the Muslim scholars Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradawi renewed his optimistic remarks regarding the demise of Zionist entity and the return of the occupied Jerusalem and Aqsa Mosque for Arabs and Muslims saying:” Zionists would inevitably demise in and out of Palestine and we are in […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3047/rational-iran If the West takes no action, each Iranian target will remain a target: dissident Iranians, Sunnis including the Saudis, European capitals, Americans and American interests, Western-oriented South Americans, Israel and Jews. Russia and China will support Iran with no concern for American disapproval. Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria, Venezuela and Nicaragua will have their patron intact. […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3045/france-elections-decline France is country where the reports of the inevitable failure of the pension systems were presented to successive governments for over 25 years without a decision being proposed or taken. In the main mosques, Imams have been making explicit appeals to vote for François Hollande. An observer from North America trying to analyze the […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/02/the-truth-about-the-apartheid-wall/ I was recently challenged by a polite academic who claimed to be dumbfounded by the fact that I rejected as absurd his use of the term “Apartheid Wall” to refer to Israel’s security barrier fence. He demanded to know why I objected to the term, and what I thought was a more appropriate name […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3044/metropolitan-museum-gertrude-stein

The Metropolitan Museum in New York, in its current exhibit on the collection of Gertrude Stein and her family, has made a decision to suppress the ugly truth about her collaboration with Nazism during the German occupation of France. Anyone walking through this beautiful exhibit of the Stein family’s exquisite tastes in art would learn nothing about Gertrude’s horrendous taste in politics and friends. Stein, a “racial” Jew according to Nazi ideology, managed to survive the Holocaust, while the vast majority of her co-religionists were deported and slaughtered. The exhibit says “remarkably, the two women [Stein and her companion Alice Toklas] survived the war with their possessions intact.” It adds that “Bernard Fay, a close friend…and influential Vichy collaborator is thought to have protected them.” That is an incomplete and distorted account of what actually happened. Stein and Toklas survived the Holocaust for one simple reason: Gertrude Stein was herself a major collaborator with the Vichy regime and a supporter of its pro-Nazi leadership.

According to a new book entitled Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay and the Vichy Dilemma, by Barbara Will, Stein publicly proclaimed her admiration for Hitler during the 1930s, proposing him for a Nobel Peace Prize. In the worst days of the Vichy regime, she volunteered to write an introduction to the speeches of General Phillipe Petain, the Nazi puppet leader who deported thousands of Jews, but who she regarded as a great French hero. She wanted his speeches translated into English, with her introduction, so that Americans would see the virtues of the Vichy regime. In that respect she was like other modernist writers, such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot who proudly proclaimed their pro-Fascist ideology, but Stein’s support for Fascism was more bizarre because she was Jewish.

REILLY: Dangerous illusions about Islamism

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/30/wanted-a-competent-commander-in-chief/

Ideas have consequences, as Richard Weaver famously wrote. If one misconstrues the ideas of the Islamists who are coming to power in the Middle East, one inevitably will misjudge the consequences. Take Reuel Marc Gerecht’s recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “The Islamist Road to Democracy.” In it, Mr. Gerecht, a former CIA hand now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says the Islamists are winning but we shouldn’t worry. The West went through worse and came out democratic. In fact, he says, the Middle East has suffered from Western communist and socialist ideologies, which left Islam as the last refuge. So what did we expect? They will work it out on their own terms. This transition may not be pretty to watch, but in the long run, it will “evolve” organically to real democracy. In fact, Mr. Gerecht says, “[The Islamists] are the key to more democratic, liberal politics in the region.”

Come again? Mr. Gerecht admits his thinking is “counterintuitive,” but it comes closer to missing reality altogether. How do you miss a target this big? Mr. Gerecht’s misplaced optimism is based on two things: misconceptions about the West – particularly the historically unjustified view that upheaval ultimately and necessarily leads to improvement – and a profound misunderstanding of the Islamist Shariah agenda.

Mr. Gerecht thinks we in the West got so tired of killing one another in religious wars that we secularized ourselves and became democratic. The same can happen in Islam, even though “Islam hasn’t seen the sustained barbarism that plagued” Europe. This construction of history is faulty in two ways. This is not the way democracy developed in the West, and the history of Islam is not as sanitary as he implies.

As the outcome of religious wars in other civilizations has shown, alternative pathways to democracy were and are available. Secularism did not, as he suggests, bring forth liberal values – rather, liberal values produced secularism. The idea of freedom of conscience preceded secularism and was based on the very Christianity that he holds accountable for the killing. Also, the conception of a secular state is uniquely Christian.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2111/Karzai-Do-What-I-Say-or-Ill-Have-a-Fit.aspx

More on the outrageous story about Hamid Karzai “banning” Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) from entering Afghanistan last week from Wolf Blitzer at CNN. It wasn’t just SecState Hillary who acted as Client Karzai’s agent. SecDef Panetta was a willing party, too. Of course, in this iteration of events, Karzai’s role isn’t spelled out. In the original Guardian story, Hillary received a call from Karzai and pressed his wishes on to Rohrbacher.

An “obviously I’m upset” Wolf Blitzer got more outrageous details of the story in an interview with Rohrbacher on CNN a few days ago. It seems that once the congressional delegation of six members headed by Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) arrived in Dubai where a US military plane was supposed to fly them to Kabul, Gohmert received a phone call from SecDef Panetta who told him the military plane wouldn’t take off if Rohrbacher was aboard.

The mind reels. Not only does Rohrbacher as a US Representative have every right and responsibility to undertake such a tour of the Afghan battlespace in which the American taxpayer is spending $2 billion every week, he is also a senior of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and chairman of the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. He needs to go.

Not to worry, though. With Panetta’s instructions in mind, Rohrbacher decided he would fly commercial to Kabul.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1805

Iran, The New York Times and Yuval Diskin

Leave it to The New York Times to get in a grand “two-fer” and call it news.

Reporting yesterday on assessments by “officials and outside analysts” that the likelihood of a military conflict with Iran is waning, the newspaper made sure to assert that “a growing divide in Israel between political leaders and military and intelligence officials over the wisdom of attacking Iran has begun to surface.”

According to the nameless sources expressing the good news, “The threat of tighter economic sanctions has prompted the Iranians to try more flexible tactics in their dealings with the United States and other powers, while the revival of direct negotiations has tempered the most inflammatory talk on all sides.”

The “flexible tactics” referred to here involve Iran’s having sent a delegation to the 5+1 summit in Istanbul a couple of weeks ago to “talk” about uranium enrichment, and its willingness to return to the round table in Baghdad this month for further diplo-dialogue.

Indeed, such a loud sigh of relief was heaved in Washington after the summit in Turkey that it could be heard throughout the mosques and the Majlis (Parliament) in Tehran.

U.S. President Barack Obama has been in a bind these days. On the one hand, he cannot afford to alienate Jewish donors, some of whom are concerned that he is a bit too soft on Iran and a tad too tough on Israel. And while in Europe, figures like Gunther Grass are able to get away with saying that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a greater global danger than Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, American-Jewish liberals haven’t gone quite that far yet.

On the other hand, the last thing in the world that Obama wants or intends to do is take actual steps against Iran; nor does he want or intend for Israel to do the dirty work. From the outset of his presidency, Obama has made it clear that his main goal as commander-in-chief is to make Muslims feel good about themselves — and realize what a great friend they have in the White House.

He said as much in Cairo a few months after his inauguration, when he spoke before a Muslim Brotherhood-heavy audience, and used an Arabic form of address used in the Islamic world exclusively between Muslims.

He spelled it out for the head of NASA, whom he instructed to make it the space agency’s key mission to help Muslims feel good about their accomplishments in science and math. Most importantly, he has shown this to be his objective by consistently abandoning allies in the Middle East in favor of radical Islamists.

This is not to say that the U.S. president necessarily wants Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. But this possibility seems less daunting to him in an election year than arousing the ire of the people who determine the price of oil or those who have to pay for it at gas stations. And no ridiculous “energy-saving” schemes he keeps trying to cook up alter that fact.