RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://chqdaily.com/2012/07/05/landau-encourages-truthful-just-dialogue-for-peace/

Mary Desmond | Staff Writer

On Independence Day, Yehezkel Landau came to Chautauqua Institution for the first time to tackle the Week Two lecture theme, ”2012: What’s at Stake for the Common Good.”

In the 2 p.m. Interfaith Lecture Wednesday in the Hall of Philosophy, Landau explored the path to, and requirements for, peaceful understanding and dialogue within Israel and the United States, between those two nations, and among them and all the world’s nations.

In a speech titled “Truth, Justice, and Peace: Foundations for a Healthy Society,” Landau elaborated on finding peace and healing, nationally and internationally based on his own experiences as a Jewish man with both U.S. and Israeli citizenship. Landau has experienced both sides of the coin in terms of religious prejudice and preference. In the U.S., he has been part of a religious minority, while in Israel, he has experienced life as part of an empowered majority.

Landau is a faculty associate at the Hartford Seminary. He founded the Open House Center for Jewish-Arab coexistence, located in Ramle, Israel, and was its co-director until 2003. He has written many books on Jewish-Arab-Christian relations, including John Paul II in the Holy Land: In His Own Words.

There are many similarities between Israel and the U.S. Both countries are democratic, multiethnic and multicultural. And right now, both countries are at war, Landau said. Israel is at war with countries that are hostile to its status as a state. Since 2001, the U.S. has been engaged in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In their military operations, both countries have clearly defined their enemies, Landau said.

“Focusing on external enemies whether in Israel or here, rather than on common humanity, and rather than looking within with critical honesty, may be our critical error,” he said.

In his talk, Landau began by focusing on passages from Hebrew works. In the first chapter of Pirkei Avot, a compilation of teachings by sages of the Jewish tradition, two sages called Simon provide three basic tenets for Jews to follow.

“Simon the Righteous, who says on three things the world stands: on Torah study, sacrificial service or worship, acts of love and kindness,” Landau said.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
IF ONLY THERE WAS SOME WAY WE COULD HAVE THE ADVANCED EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM OF SAUDI ARABIA…

“America will never tap into educational innovation and ingenuity without looking at the model that we have in our Madrassas, in our schools where innovation is encouraged. Where the foundation is the Koran,” Rep. Andre Carson (D-Indiana)

It’s a pity that thus far America has not managed to tap into the educational innovation and ingenuity that has made Muslim countries into world leaders in technology and beating women.

If only we had a system of education based on the ravings of a 7th century warlord, then we could truly tap into the best that 7th Century Arabia had to offer the world. Like believing in Djinns and drinking camel urine as a curative.

Oddly, despite the backwardness of our educational system, Saudi and Pakistani students seem to flock here for a higher education. Maybe they feel sorry for us. Or maybe we just have a lot of tall buildings for them to study while taking flight lessons. Who knows.

…SO LONG AS HE DOESN’T GET THROWN UNDER IT

“New Bedford man wins bus ride with President Obama”

With all the prizes and contests where the prize is spending time with O, when are we going to get, “Win Obama’s Job”?

PRISONERS OF VIRTUE

Feudalism is back.

Half the country expects you to work from planting to harvest, at which point they will take their share. If there is not enough from the peasantry this year, the feudal Lords and their retainers will borrow it from future years. You get what is left over. They also expect that you will work the entire year, so the place will not fall apart. Unlike the Medieval days, you are not required to practice for war after the harvest is in. The Lords have plenty of retainers who will do what they’re told.

You are enslaved by your own virtue. They have you convinced there is no way out of this place, without betrayal of your own virtue.

…from a comment at American Digest.

This is a very important point. Combining a First World economy in a country of hundreds of millions with a police state is tricky at best. Building a social consensus on guilt and virtue, and the virtue of guilt, is much more effective. It’s religion without the religion. It’s the faith of social justice that has been embedded in the country for over a century and a half. The long march of progress.

The ideas are rarely expressed as openly as the Harris column above, but they are the same ideas.

We have an eternal moral debt to repay for our prosperity. If we wish to be good people, we must go on paying the debt, rather than walk away from a social justice dependent population that’s underwater.

I BET HE BELIEVES IT NOW…

A Norwegian jihadist thought to have received Al-Qaeda training in Yemen was previously a left-wing radical who refused to believe that Osama Bin Laden’s network carried out the September 11th terrorist attacks

THE SIX STEPS OF AN ISLAMIC COURTSHIP

Step 1. “He told me that he had started liking me and that I should convert to Islam and marry him.”

Step 2. “He started criticizing Christians for not observing the purdah [covering of women] and of following our ‘own brand of religion,’”

Step 3. “He was acting like a mad man. He started cursing my family and even tried to set the house on fire.”

Step 4. “Adnan raped me while his friend filmed the entire incident. They ruined my life completely.”

Step 5. “At first he demanded that I convert to Islam, and only then would he consider forgiving me for refusing his proposal,”

Step 6. “He turned up at my home and showed the film to my parents. He then told my shocked family that they had no other option but to hand me over to him … he told them that he ‘owned’ me now.”

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

A FEW STATISTICS
31% of Americans give Obama positive grade on handling economic issues 36% of Americans, about 80 million people, believe UFO’s exist.
If aliens arrived at their doorstep. 22% of that 36 percent would try to befriend the alien, 15% would run away, 13% would lock their doors, and only 2% would try to inflict bodily harm.
… the other 48 percent would vote him in as President.

OPPOSING COMPULSORY HEALTH INSURANCE PURCHASES IS JUST LIKE SLAVERY

If you oppose ObamaCare, you might as well buy a slave, work him into his old age and then abandon him by the side of the road… or something. No really. Frank Harris III at the Hartford Courant says so.
I’ll skip the part where I fisk his thesis because it’s too easy and it avoids dealing with larger pathology displayed in the article.
Talking about slavery makes folks uncomfortable. It was so long ago, I know. And doggone it Frank, what do you mean doing what you are about to do: proclaim those jilted Republicans as acting out a slave-era legacy in their opposition to the Supreme Court’s ruling that found “Obamacare” constitutional…

Those who had the least suffered the most when it came to health then, just as they do today. Life expectancy for the poor — And who was poorer than a slave? — was far below that of whites. Life expectancy for blacks today remains and has always been lower than whites. Infant mortality is high, too…

It’s 2012 and Republicans seem determined to rally their supporters against health care like the Confederacy rallied its citizens against the North’s efforts to destroy their slave-based way of life.

Let’s unpack the reasoning here.

1. Blacks were slaves then and we didn’t take care of their health.

2. We are still not taking care of their health.

Connecting A to B is the work of a man who on some level still sees black people as slaves who need to be “saved” and “taken care of” because they cannot take care of themselves.

Liberals rarely put forward this formula quite so openly, but it’s at the heart of the old elitist liberalism. Harris is accusing us of being “irresponsible slaveowners”. We aren’t taking care of our black people.

Think about the Emancipation Proclamation, think about Juneteenth and the Fourth of July, and think about the whole rotten assumption that rather than setting everyone free, what we really need is a massive slave state for everyone built on the power of guilt. Think about the contempt for black people who are being treated as if they have no ability to take care of themselves. And think about how pervasive this reasoning is in liberal thinking.

Harris accuses us of protecting a “slave-based way of life”, but who really has the slave-based way of life? Is it the people who want slaves or the people who don’t want slaves? Is it the people who believe that we should be free or the people who believe we should be subservient to the proper authorities who will care for us?

The assumption made by Harris is the same one made by slaveowners, that black people cannot care for themselves. That they must be wards… for their own good. Post-slavery the argument becomes that we must all be wards… for the good of black people.

How much of the welfare state squats on the obscene proposition that black people are unable to take care of themselves?

How much of the misery and troubles of black people in America comes from all the do-gooders who have helped wreck their finances and communities with freebies, subsidies, privileges and leaders who want nothing more than to control where the freebies go?

How many black children have been snatched away from their families to be raised by benevolent white people? How many imported from Africa for the same purpose?

Does it end at our borders? Absolutely not.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2191 Digging up Arafat In addition to having lost cachet, Suha Arafat must be running low on cash. This is not surprising. Parisian haute couture, for which the PLO chief’s widow has always had a taste, does not come cheaply. Nor does her silence, the commodity which has been keeping her in clover since before […]

http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/dem-congressman-wants-u-s-schools-modeled-after-muslim-madrassas/ Dem Congressman wants U.S. schools modeled after Muslim madrassas This sure isn’t America anymore. At least not the America I once knew. In a speech at the Islamic Circle of North America Convention on May 26, 2012, U.S. Congressman André Carson (D-Indiana) told the audience that U. S. schools should be modeled after madrassas […]

http://www.emetonlineblog.com/author/adam-turner/ On July 4, 2012, a 17-year-old Frenchman was the victim of a violent anti-Semitic attack on a train from Lyon to Toulouse. The teenager is a student of Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, where three children and a family were killed by Mohamed Merah on March 19, 2012. A source close to the investigation […]

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/07/05/Paul-Ryan-We-Win-We-Repeal
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), chair of the House Budget Committee–and potential running mate of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney–told Breitbart News this week that the party’s leaders are “absolutely” committed to repealing Obamacare.

“It would have been nice for the Supreme Court to repeal it for us,” he said, “but it’s no harder today than it was the day before the decision. We win, we repeal. It’s just that simple.”

Ryan, speaking exclusively with Breitbart News, added that there was no disagreement about repealing Obamacare among the various Republican leaders, or with the Romney campaign. “Not in any of the meetings I have been having,” he said.

Earlier in the week, conservatives criticized apparently conciliatory postures by the Romney campaign and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). McConnell and Romney have since confirmed their commitment to repealing Obamacare as a first priority after the election.

Asked whether Republicans had a plan ready to replace Obamacare, Ryan pointed to several plans that had already been proposed, including his own and that of Rep.Tom Price (R-GA). While there was common agreement on the need for a “patient-centered” system, Ryan said there were “differences of opinion” on the details of an alternative, particularly on the issue of whether to use tax credits to help people buy insurance.

“I don’t think those differences will be resolved between now and the election,” Ryan said. “There will be a cacophony of ideas.” He explained that Republican leaders would introduce reforms one-by-one, following repeal of Obamacare in the 113th Congress.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1378/criminalising_the_boycott_bullies

At the National Union of Students conference on April 25th, 2012 the Union of Jewish Students stall was defaced. Numerous stickers each bearing the slogan “Boycott Israel” were plastered over the stall. The majority of stickers were deliberately placed on the Star of David symbol, virtually eradicating it so that only the letters UJS could be read with the Star of David no longer properly visible.

How is such an incident to be approached? The fellow traveller (or, better, the useful idiot) would come up with the doped up campus theory that this is simply the manifestation of angst over geo-political concern on the micro-level.

He would probably add some sort of hoary line about this being a demonstration of “freedom of expression” and a legitimate political addition to vital debate through the use of postmodern guerrilla-esque tactics.

The apologist would argue that these are students just being silly students. He would refuse at that point to engage in a justification or discussion of the incident as he would be in full flow about issues and concerns in the Middle East and how this incident should be seen in isolation but in the “context” of much wider problems which all right-minded citizens should be concerned with.

After five minutes he would declare the conversation over without having once tried to understand how upsetting and distressing this incident would have been to Jewish students and the wider Jewish Community.

http://times247.com/

Jobless numbers: A referendum on the president
Bloomberg
Friday, July 6, 2012
News
The monthly jobs report has taken on so much political significance amid voter discontent with the economy that it amounts to a regular “referendum” on the president, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “Once every month the public sees it as a signal of either the competence of the president or his failures.” Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1zpyjsAq1
Presbyterians reject measure to divest from Israel
Associated Press
Thursday, July 5, 2012
News
By a razor-thin margin, the largest Presbyterian group in the United States rejected a proposal Thursday to divest from three companies that do business with Israel. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1zpz2dwOm
Muslim Brotherhood set to lead Libya after vote
The Telegraph
Thursday, July 5, 2012
News
While the elections for Libya’s 200-member National Congress is unlikely to grant a majority to any one faction, the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist allies are confident they can join their counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt at the helm of leadership. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1zpzG6spJ

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18693709

THANKS TO YISRAEL MEDAD WHO ALSO NEVER RESTS WHEN IT COMES TO DEFENDING ISRAEL….RSK

Israeli settlements ‘jeopardising’ Palestinian prosperity
Jeremy Hobbs, Executive Director of Oxfam International: “These discriminatory policies and practices have pushed more Palestinians into poverty and are destroying the prospects for two states living side by side in security and peace”

The economic potential of Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley area of the West Bank is being jeopardised by Israeli settlement activity, a report by the UK charity Oxfam says.

The study suggests Palestinians could generate an extra £1bn ($1.5bn) a year if restrictions to their use of land, water and movements were removed.

It says Palestinians can use only 6% of the land, while settlers control 86%.

Israel criticised the report, saying it had “a clearly political agenda”.