RUTHFULLY YOURS

François will bring the Croissants*

* “croissants” = flaky, buttery, crescent-shaped pastry… “croissance” = growth

Well, that’s settled! Angela will provide the meat and potatoes and François will bring the croissants. From each according to his means, to each according to his needs. Now you understand why Nicolas Sarkozy lost the election. He never thought of that quick fix while running back and forth between Paris and Berlin last winter, even when his wife Carla was in labor. The upshot was Giulia, cooing and growing far from the camera’s eye—we’ve never seen the tiniest image of the former president’s daughter—and French media pissing on Sarkozy for letting Brunhilde Merkel dictate the terms of what has come to be known as the infamous austerity pact. Now the victorious François is transforming France, Europe, and the world. He promised he would go to Berlin, to Washington, to the G8, and let them know “French voters have spoken.” They don’t want austerity. The Greeks don’t want austerity. The Spanish are sick to death of it, the Italians are fed up, the Portuguese are feverish, and those who haven’t caught it yet are terrified of contagion. They want croissance!

French media love François. They hated Nicolas with a vengeance. They made fun of him for being short. Now that President Hollande is the same height it’s not an issue. Le Monde[i] looks on with tender indulgence as the new president, jumping from his provincial sinecure to the highest office, bumbles awkwardly into international meetings like a mistaken identity comic: “… he’s still a bit out of step in the midst of the world leaders. If he hasn’t acquired Barack Obama’s relaxed casual look or the snobbish ease of David Cameron at least he’s not stiff like the austere Angela Merkel.” So what if Hollande misses cues, arrives late for his own press conferences, missed Obama’s opening remarks at the NATO Conference, and the only thing he wants to do ahead of schedule is pull French troops out of Afghanistan? With a flip of the wrist he turned the eurozone from austerity to croissants.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=273124

“Sadly for Israel, US Jews’ experience with their Muslim friends has little practical relevance in terms of policy input or political doctrine. After all, the realities that Israel must contend with to ensure the security of the state and the safety of its citizens is not generated by populations of affable, educated Muslims who have chosen to live in an open, democratic society. The realities it has to deal with are populations that produce societies like those in Sudan and Syria, in Algeria and Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq; that beget organizations such as the Taliban, al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade and Islamic Jihad.”

How could we give permission [for there] to be a state of Islam and a state of Jews? It [the two-state notion] is a kind of apartheid….For the Palestinians and the Israelis, I am sure that the one democratic state will be the only solution

– Badran, Khaled Jaber’s grandfather, April 2012

We need all [of] Palestine… Israel as a Jewish state is a big lie. It’s a big lie. [Israel is] a European colonial imprint…. It’s a matter of time…. They will go away the same way that France went from Algeria and Italy from Libya.

– Falastin, Khaled Jaber’s mother, April 2012.

Readers will, of course, recall that Khaled Jaber was the five-year-old Palestinian boy filmed sobbing at his father’s arrest by Israeli police, and who, according to Peter Beinart, provided much of the impetus for him to write his recent book, The Crisis of Zionism.

Sauce for the gander

It is, of course, true that the Jaber family’s rejectionist political perspectives are neither moral exoneration for any alleged injustices/iniquities in Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, nor definitive proof of universal or wide-spread sentiments of similar enmity among the wider Palestinian population.

However, neither is the Jaber incident – even if one accepts Beinart’s unquestioning and questionable interpretation of what happened – a fair representation of overall Israeli conduct vis-à-vis the Palestinians, any more than the brutal beating of Rodney King by the LAPD is a representative reflection of official US policy vis-à-vis ethnic minorities.

But since Beinart did extrapolate from the Khaled Jaber incident, implying that it is illustrative of the unfair and oppressive burden imposed on the un-enfranchised Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, he should neither be surprised, nor in a position to protest, when others extrapolate from other localized events/expressions to illustrate the imprudence and implausibility of his views.

Inimical icons

Beinart is on record stating that even if he had known the Jaber family’s political beliefs, it would not have changed his decision to feature Khaled’s story in the book’s introduction, saying: “The point I was trying to convey in that story was simply about a small example of the reality of what it means to live as a population that doesn’t have citizenship or the equal rights given by full citizenship and the consequences of that. And that seems to me a reality that is important, irrespective of the political views of the people who are suffering.”

As mentioned earlier, this is not a position that can be dismissed apriori. However, few will deny that it seems more than a little incongruous that the very family through which Beinart chose to convey the pressing need for a two-state arrangement vehemently rejects the admissibility of such an arrangement –irrespective of Israeli policy.

Actually, it’s worse. For it turns out that the Jabers are not a typical Palestinian fellah (peasant) family eking out a meager living from arid lands denied irrigation by iniquitous Israel.

As The Jerusalem Post reported, Badran is a professor at one of Hebron’s two universities – both established in the 1970s under the Israeli administration of the town – prior to which it had no institutions of higher learning.

He is also designated a “senior member” of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine which has been involved in some of the more gruesome terror attacks over the past half century.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2136/Obamas-Eligibility-Saga-Continues-Unreported-The-Dirtiest-Secret-of-All.aspx

Earlier this spring, President Obama’s attorney Alexandra Hill went to court in New Jersey over a challenge to her client’s eligibility to appear on the 2012 presidential primary ballot.

New Jersey citizens, represented by attorney Mario Apuzzo, made two claims: that Barack Obama has not proved he meets the conditions for presidential eligibility (namely, that he is a “natural born citizen”), and that the proof Obama released attesting to his bona fides (an Internet image of his long-form birth certificate) is fraudulent.

Hill’s argument? A presidential candidate has no obligation under New Jersey state law to prove his eligibility, period.

Administrative Law Judge Jeff Masin agreed with Hill and ruled in Obama’s favor. He further asserted that, absent such an obligation, the Internet image of Obama’s birth certificate – the same image Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse investigators believe to be a forgery – is “legally irrelevant.”

The upshot for New Jersey? As the president’s attorney put it, “you could have Mickey Mouse” on the presidential ballot so long as he received the requisite 1,000 petition signatures.

While such exercises may more closely resemble a tax cheat’s search for loopholes than a court ensuring the rectitude of a presidential primary, our elites consider it all a big yawn, something to endure until those awful people (denigrated as “birthers”) go away. This is the dirtiest secret of the great, non-reported Obama eligibility saga: The integrity of our leaders and our Constitution doesn’t matter to those citizens who are actually responsible for upholding it.

On the contrary, there is an unchecked rush to abdicate responsibility – a manifestation of “the death of the grown-up,” as I titled my first book. The following questions, asked last week by the three judges who heard the New Jersey case on appeal [video here], typify the official attitude:

“Why is it incumbent on New Jersey to resolve this issue?”

Subtext: Voters, schmoters.

http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/19912-Black-Illegal-Immigrants-In-Israel.html
Misleading Reporting About Black Illegal Immigrants In Israel

As in so many other cases, international media usually seeks out and features negative news about Israel or exaggerates it or treats it in a biased manner. So, too, on this issue. There is a natural, and commendable, empathy for peoples in dire straits or whose experience, by large stretches of analogy, may be compared to other groups, like Hispanics or Blacks in the US, but that alone does not merit the one-sided coverage of this issue and the lack of facts and context. That lack of context and partial facts has been the case with most of the reporting about African illegal immigrants in Israel.
As in the US, it is difficult to count the number of illegal immigrants, so hard numbers of illegal African immigrants in Israel are estimates. According to Wikipedia, there were about 26-thousand in July 2010 and 55-thousand in January 2012. Estimates of new arrivals are about 1-thousand a month, which would bring the June 2012 number to over 60-thousand. Two-thirds are estimated to be in south Tel Aviv and another 20% in the resort city of Eilat. Some other estimates of illegal African immigrants in Israel are higher. This is a lower percentage of illegal immigrants than in the US, but Israel should not wait until it is as large a problem as here. There are also about 150,000 Black Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Black Ethiopian Jews were brought in by Israel.

http://www.mythsandfacts.org/article_view.asp?articleID=236

The U.S. Administration, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia’s decision to rewrite history by labeling the Territories ‘Occupied Territories,’ the Settlements as an ‘Obstacle to Peace’ and ‘Not Legitimate,’ thus endowing them with an aura of bogus statehood and a false history. The use of these dishonest loaded terms, empowers terrorism and incites Palestinian Arabs with the right to use all measures to expel Israel.

The “Mandate for Palestine” & the Law of War

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, United States President Barack Obama, and the European Union Foreign Affairs Chief Catherine Ashton became victims to the ‘Occupation’ mantra their own organization has repeated over and over in their propaganda campaign to legitimize the Arab position.

Continuous pressure by the “Quartet” (U.S., the European Union, the UN and Russia) to surrender parts of the Land of Israel are contrary to international law as stated in the “Mandate for Palestine” document, that in article 6 firmly call to “encourage … close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.” It also requires, under Article 5 of the Mandate to “seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of the government of any foreign power.”

Any attempt by the World Leaders to negate the Jewish people’s right to Palestine – Eretz-Israel, and to deny them access and control in the area designated for the Jewish people by the League of Nations, is a serious infringement of international law, and as such – illegitimate.

http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2015

Ze’ev Jabotinsky..
Following the outbreak of the Arab revolt in Palestine in 1936, the British formed the Peel Commission of 1936-1937, formally known as the Palestine Royal Commission, to offer recommendations for how to deal with the violence. In 1937 the commission suggested dividing the land into cantons, while leaving the majority of the territory in Arab hands.

The Jewish leadership at the time, headed by Prof. Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett adopted the partition plan, despite the fact that the plan only allotted the Jews about 5,000 square kilometers (1,900 square miles) of the land.

My grandfather, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, resolutely rejected the Jewish leadership’s right to concede any part of the Land of Israel. Because he was forbidden by the British from entering mandate-controlled Palestine, he recorded his objection on a gramophone record which was smuggled in for the Jewish public to hear. That recorded message seems like it could have been written today in response to how the Likud “leaders” voted Wednesday against the outpost arrangement bill.

Here are the words recorded by the head of the Beitar movement, for your consideration: “Do not say, so what if we concede Hebron, Nablus and beyond the Jordan — this concession is not comprised of words devoid of meaning, and everyone will understand this to be the case. Do not underestimate the power of a concession! … Do not underestimate the power of a right, and don’t exaggerate the value of a building that is being built. I, too, respect the construction of a building, but woe upon us if we extract the basis of our right to exist from it. … The Christian hand may not touch our rights — which are eternal and are complete, and shall not be relinquished.”

I too, like my grandfather, respect the prime minister’s declaration that dozens of new homes will be built in Beit El, even though I have difficulty understanding what has prevented him from doing this for more than three years already. But woe upon us if the extra construction becomes the basis for our right to build communities in Judea and Samaria.

http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/19913-Special-Operations-Forces-Organize-Against-Obama.html Special Operations Forces Organize Against Obama My good friend Larry Bailey retired from the Navy in 1990 after a 27-year career as a SEAL, rising to Captain. Captain Bailey’s most significant military assignment was as Commanding Officer of the Naval Special Warfare Center, where all Navy SEALS undergo basic and advanced training. Bailey and […]

http://www.speroforum.com/a/NXBERMKWOH41/72834-Tunisian-Muslims-sever-the-head-of-convert-to-Christianity Appearing on Egyptian television, talk show host Tawfiq Okasha aired a video on his “Egypt Today” show in which jeering local Muslims slit the throat of a convert to Christianity, and then cut off the martyr’s head. The young man refused to recant his Christian beliefs. Islam abhors what it regards as apostasy and […]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479690/

The Journey of Vaan Nguyen(2005)
Hoiami Nguyen never imagined that he will end up so far from his home village of Bong Son in central Vietnam. Political circumstances and the roulette of life have washed him to the shores of Israel. The penniless Vietnamese refugee became a father of 5 Hebrew speaking Israeli daughters. His daughter – Vaan, describes her parents’ ordeal using a razor sharp language in her blog. She feels trapped in circles of identity which will never meet. Caught between her wild and stormy Israeli spirit and the expectations to be modest and obedient Vietnamese at home, there is unbridgeable abyss. When her father returns to his family in Vietnam, Van finds herself absorbed into his tragic story – a cruel tale of loss and survival. Hoimai’s dream of return sends Vaan to look for a brighter future in the new-old country. She joins him in trying to reclaim the lands of the family, in the remote village at the heart of the Vietnamese jungle.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israel-and-the-boat-people/ Sunday marks 35 years since 66 Vietnamese refugees, fleeing the communist takeover of their homeland on a small, leaky boat, found deliverance. They were without food and water, and ships from Panama, Norway and Japan had ignored their distress signals (violating the most basic rule of the sea). They despaired of rescue. Captain Meir […]