RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.timesofisrael.com/remembering-the-man-who-battled-israels-most-formidable-enemy-the-mosquito/

ISRAEL TURNS 64

The man who battled Israel’s most formidable enemy — the mosquito. Israel Kligler is one of the reasons Israel exists. So why have you never heard of him?

Ninety-two years ago, a diminutive and determined young scientist stepped from a boat onto a “notoriously malarious” patch of Levantine land and into the middle of a losing war against a tiny, deadly enemy ravaging the population. Israel Kligler – university professor, Zionist and public health pioneer – played an outsize role in defeating malaria in Palestine beginning in the 1920s. Countering the mosquito-borne disease was not a minor medical success but a crucial victory that paved the way for the growth of Jewish settlement and the eventual establishment of the State of Israel.

Today, Kligler and his role in Israel’s history have been forgotten. April 25 is a fitting date to remember him: This year, it happens to be both the eve of Israel’s Independence Day and World Malaria Day, marked every year by the UN’s World Health Organization. Thanks in large part to Kligler’s efforts, malaria was eradicated in Israel, but the global battle against the disease has been remarkably unsuccessful: Every year, according to the WHO, malaria infects 216 million people and kills 655,000.

Kligler has a small number of vocal boosters, and they believe his success should both earn him a place in the Zionist pantheon and be studied anew as the world continues to grapple with the disease he confronted nearly a century ago.

Born in what is now Romania in 1888, Kligler moved with his parents to New York City when he was 9. In 1920, having completed a doctorate in public health in New York and research on malaria in South America, he gave up a promising academic career in the US and arrived instead in British-ruled Palestine, committed to putting his scientific knowledge at the service of the Zionist project.

He found a land devastated by malaria. The illness was, a British report said in 1921, “by far the most important disease in Palestine.” Much of the territory Jews had purchased for settlement was in lowlands infested with malaria — that was one of the main reasons it was available — and the disease was decimating the ranks of the Zionist pioneers and the country’s other inhabitants. Some settlements had been abandoned altogether as a result.

One visitor in 1902 remarked that the Turkish soldiers at one border garrison had to be replaced monthly because all would contract malaria in little over a week. A report from 1917, the year the British arrived, noted that Palestine was “notoriously malarious,” and an estimated 90 percent of British soldiers at the town of Beisan — today’s Beit She’an, in the Jordan Valley — were ill within 10 days.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/25/obama-embraces-islam/

“The Islamist parties in Egypt and elsewhere are promoting democracy simply as a means of consolidating their power. They see the process as a ratchet effect, with every gain they make as one more step toward erecting a Shariah-based theocracy. Increased power will not lead – and in fact, never has led – to moderation, but to further demands to implement their blueprint for Koranic rule. The model is the Iranian Revolution, in which a brief period of openness was followed by the ascent of Islamic hard-liners who snuffed out any hint of liberty and executed those who had the nerve to differ.To anyone who believes in the Western concept of freedom, Islamism by its nature cannot be legitimate. The White House needs to answer the question: If Islamism is a legitimate political movement, should it come to America, and if so, how soon?”

The Obama administration is doing its utmost to promote the fortunes of the Islamist parties in Egypt. A State Department official declared that with the rise of these radical groups after the Arab Spring, “people who once might have gone into al Qaeda see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism.” They see this as a victory. The problem is, so do the terrorists.

Last year, the White House began peddling the line that the uprisings in the Middle East were a repudiation of the al Qaeda model of seeking change through terrorism. The argument was that while America opposed violent extremism, the rise of nonviolent radical movements was just fine, and even commendable. Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri quickly dismissed this claim, saying that from the terrorists’ point of view, it didn’t matter whether an Islamist victory came through violence or not. The means were unimportant except as they related to the end state: the imposition of hard-line Shariah-based laws and policies.

From Zawahri’s point of view, it makes no difference whether the caliphate is born of the ballot, bomb or bullet. The important thing is the victory of Islamism, which the White House also seems to endorse.

The notion that there is a legitimate form of Islamism reflects a serious intellectual failing on the part of the Obama administration. President Obama seems to believe the Islamists are legitimized simply by participating in the political process. Some argue that the demands of electoral politics will moderate the Islamist parties, whose members will evolve from stern-eyed theocrats into social reformers. Others believe the only path to modernity is through embracing the Muslim Brotherhood’s barbarous values.

http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/19627-Qualifications-for-the-new-Walter-Duranty-Prize.html
Qualifications for the new Walter Duranty Prize

There’s a new journalism prize, The Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity. PJ Media and The New Criterion will award the Prize annually “for what our readers consider the most egregious example of dishonest reporting for the fiscal year.” The initial judges include Peter Collier, Roger Kimball, Cliff May, Ron Radosh, Glenn Reynolds, Claudia Rosett, and Roger L. Simon. Roger Simon writes, “Since this is a new prize the committee also solicits your suggestions on how we should carry on our work and any other suggestions regarding the Walter Duranty Prize.”
There’s certainly enough expertise on the panel to reach such a choice. I suggest the following criteria:

1. In parallel to the reportage by Walter Duranty, the prize for dishonest reporting should be reporting on a foreign country. Walter Duranty’s infamous whitewashing of the starvation and death of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-3 will be hard to exceed, but there are enough terrible instances of widespread state brutality today that journalists who espouse the state line or distort the facts should be the priority.

http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/5357

The President, The Holocaust & The Redemption of Elie Wiesel
My good friend, Charlie, alerted me to a recent article in the American Thinkerdealing with President Obama’s Holocaust Day tribute. Rather than my reinventing the wheel, let’s begin by reviewing some excerpts from Leo Rennert’s essay…

During the last three years, President Obama did not visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. But today, he did; and promptly gave a self-serving campaign speech for Jewish votes.The president had with him as escort and introducer Elie Wiesel and lavishly praised the Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor for his unrelenting campaign to keep the memory of the Holocaust front and center…

But Wiesel did not reciprocate. Instead, determined to tell truth to power, he admonished Obama for not doing nearly enough to confront Assad’s atrocities in Syria and Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s development of nuclear weapons and threats to wipe Israel off the map.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1784 The utterly irreplaceable There is a saying in Hebrew, usually used in relation to layoffs in the workplace: “Graveyards are full of people who were deemed ‘irreplaceable.’” The idea behind this characteristic tidbit of witty cynicism is that no matter how valuable an employee, there is always someone around who will be capable of […]

http://www.wnd.com/2012/04/meet-the-men-who-dreamed-of-israel/print/

His descriptions of playing on the white-hot sand dunes of pre-state Tel Aviv are mesmerizing. To have seen the still-forming Jewish state in 1920, a short generation after Herzl, must have been sublime.

Benzion Netanyahu was there.

An immigrant from eastern Europe (his father was smart enough to heed the warnings and leave the continent), young Benzion – who of course would go on to raise an iconic family in the state of Israel – saw up close the challenges faced by a growing number of Jews longing for a safe refuge from the millennia-old anti-Semitism that has plagued this peculiar people since biblical days.

Here’s the best part: Benzion is still with us (he just turned 102), and his latest book (you read that correctly) has just been released: “The Founding Fathers of Zionism.”

A collection of profiles of five men who helped promote the idea of statehood for the exiled Jews, “The Founding Fathers of Zionism” has the feel of putting the reader “right there.” In fact, the profiles were mostly written years ago, and Netanyahu’s personal interaction with Ze’ev Jabotinsky puts flesh on the old bones.

Some of the profile subjects are familiar, such as the famous Theodor Herzl. The Austrian Jew spent the last years of his life devoting himself to rallying support for a Jewish state by networking. He predicted the establishment of the state and was very close in his prediction.

Indeed, in his profile of Herzl (as with the others), Netanyahu presents the most nuanced discussion of the challenges facing the Jews in this endeavor – the information in “The Founding Fathers of Zionism” is highly relevant even for those who oppose Israel today.

“With genius simplicity,” Netanyahu writes of Herzl, “he derived his conclusions from the universally known fact that every attempt by the Jews at infiltration had ended in failure because they had never possessed the right of national settlement. Therefore, it was necessary to reverse the order: it was necessary first to secure the right to national settlement, only after which the attempt at immigration will not end in failure. Therefore, before the moment comes when this right is secured, Herzl opposed any infiltration.”

The remaining profiles – of Leo Pinsker, Jabotinsky, Max Nordau and Israel Zangwill – offer each man’s unique perspectives on the difficulties facing Jews in Europe, especially those who saw the rising tidal wave of anti-Semitism. In short, they fairly shouted their warnings that unless the Jews had a state of their own in which they could defend themselves, all would be lost.

Iraq’s Coming Civil War http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/25/iraq%e2%80%99s-coming-civil-war/print/ As the Obama Administration tries to hammer together an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the body count from his disastrous retreat from Iraq is swiftly rising. Last week alone there were fourteen car bombings orchestrated by Al-Qaeda in Iraq, whose goal has always been a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. […]

Jew-Bashing at Universities the New Normal http://pjmedia.com/blog/jew-bashing-at-universities-the-new-normal/?print=1 In February 2010, a student at the University of California, San Diego, left a noose dangling from a bookcase in the school library [1]. Although the noose was directed at no individual student, the obvious racial overtones of this symbol of the Southern lynch mob provoked predictable outrage. […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/blog/

I’d Rather Have Allah Slaughter Me Than See Saudi Women at the Olympic Games

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/blog/#ixzz1t2iWHaHJ
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Allen West: Muslim Brotherhood influencing our national security strategy

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/blog/#ixzz1t2ifdQb1
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
White House Lawyer Clears White House on Secret Service Scandal

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/blog/#ixzz1t2inbrST
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http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/from-aharai-to-afghanistan-remembering-orde-wingate/
A small group gathered Sunday at Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the life and work of British Maj. Gen. Orde Wingate of blessed memory, who is interred there with the Americans with whom he was flying when his plane crashed in Burma in 1945.

Israel and the Jewish War Veterans led the annual commemoration of Wingate, a passionate Zionist and a believer in Jewish military capability long before it was a proven commodity. But it would be unsurprising to find that CIA Director David Petraeus was a Wingate acolyte. His Iraq surge owes much to Wingate’s style of thinking, and the British general might well have lessons for Afghanistan.

Sent to Palestine by the British government in 1936 to put down an Arab insurgency, Wingate was an egalitarian, responsible for the fact that Israeli soldiers don’t salute. He taught the Jews of the Yishuv, as well as his British soldiers, counterinsurgency tactics to defeat marauders who were attacking villages and British installations including the Baghdad-Haifa oil pipeline. Night operations to keep the insurgents off guard; ambushes rather than fixed defense; and living among the people to engender trust and gather intelligence — these were all part of his textbook. Most important, he gave the Jews what remains the battle cry of the IDF: “aharai!” – after me.

Wingate – and especially “aharai” – was a rebuke to the British military hierarchy that sent young soldiers “over the top” in World War I while their officers remained in the trenches. His love of Zion was a rebuke to the British political hierarchy that was uncomfortable with the Mandate to establish a Jewish State in Palestine.