RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1759

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a YouTube clip is valued at millions. This is why, in a split second, Lt. Col. Shalom Eisner – deputy commander of the Jordan Valley Brigade – turned into a world-renowned anti-hero this week.

Eisner, leading an operation to curb the activities of the “peace activists” who made up last Sunday’s “flytilla,” unwittingly became the latest casualty in the propaganda war against Israel. Caught on camera smashing the butt of his M-16 into the face of a young Danish activist, the IDF officer instantly lost the career he loved, along with the former admiration and respect he had earned as an upstanding commander. Everyone at the top, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Defense Minister Ehud Barak to IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, rushed to distance himself from Eisner, without so much as a “by your leave.”

The investigation into the 60-second incident, the lead-up to which lasted a full two hours, will take place. But whatever its result, Eisner’s reputation has already been broken, like his spirit and one of his fingers.

I am not going to provide a defense of Eisner here, as the facts of the case have yet to emerge in full. But his version of events is utterly plausible, given the history of behavior on the part of “peace activists” toward the IDF, sent in by the government to prevent large-scale violence. This always puts the soldiers in a terrible position, because no matter what they do, they are in jeopardy. Since the goal of such activists is to provoke the military into doing its job, so that it will look bad on film, our Israeli boys in uniform either get clobbered physically (as happened during the flotilla to Gaza in 2010) or get accused of using excessive force. The activists who planned the flights to Israel on Sunday were not going to waste the opportunity to stir up trouble, one way or another. This is why the government did everything in its power to keep them out. But it doesn’t take more than one bop with the butt of one rifle to cause an international scandal focusing on Israeli “atrocities.”

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=266797

As with Peter Beinart, so it is with Friedman. It seems no anti-Israeli accusation is too egregious for them to stoop to.After so many years of being wrong about the Palestinians being ready to make peace with Israel, it is difficult to take New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s Middle East advice columns seriously. But his latest effort in this genre contains some whoppers that got our attention even if they only provide more proof the veteran writer is still hopelessly out of touch with reality. – Jonathan Tobin, Commentary magazine, April 4, 2012

Beinart’s total disregard for reality, his sanctimonious obsession with moral abstractions, is a great obstacle to real reconciliation because it protects the enemies of peace while making impossible demands on those who really want it. – Daniel Doron, The Jerusalem Post, April 15, 2012

Hast thou betrayed my credulous innocence; With vizor’d falsehood and base forgery? – John Milton, Comus, 1634

The latest offerings of ignorance and arrogance from Peter Beinart and Tom Friedman triggered a deluge of well-deserved outrage and an array of caustic critiques of the dubious duo’s duplicitous drivel.

Betrayal of professional integrity

While several commendable ripostes were posted, the first two excerpts above caught my eye as being particularly apt in the way they conveyed the essence of Beinart’s and Friedman’s portrayals of reality – as hopelessly detached from the truth and devoid of context.

Indeed, both men have betrayed their professional integrity by conveying to their readers a picture which is not only wildly distorted and deceptive, but apparently deliberately so.

Both make the dismayed question of the “Lady” in Milton’s 17th-century masque regarding the exploitation of innocent credulity through falsehood and forgery distinctly apposite today.

In last week’s column I pointed out how much of Beinat’s condemnation of Israeli actions was founded on evidence that ranged from the flimsy to the false, and how his inflammatory accusations were based on a selective and slanted presentation of events. This week I will focus on the New York Times’ Friedman.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/20/Dershowitz-prosecution-immoral With ABC News’ release of the George Zimmerman photo showing blood flowing freely from his head, the question becomes whether Angela Corey, the prosecutor in the case, had access to the photo before charging Zimmerman with second-degree murder. The arrest affidavit did not mention the photograph, or the bleeding, gashes, and bruises on Zimmermans’ […]

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2099/Disowning-Birth-Certificates-Disowning-Truth.aspx

Below is this week’s syndicated column: “Is Obama Disowning His Online Birth Certificate?” It takes in the shifting strategy of the Obama defense team in fending off challenges to Obama’s eligibility to appear on presidential primary ballots. Obama’s eligibility is a signal concern for the nation which should be the subject of informed, serious debate on the front pages, on news shows, and also, most important, in the Congress. Such debate is non-existent. Such concern is non-existent, too. It doesn’t seem to matter to the citizenry that a fraudster may be completing one term in the White House while seeking another.

I recently had the occasion to discuss the matter with a very famous American conversative.

Famouse Conservative said to me: Tell me what columns of yours are getting a big response lately.

I had earlier written this column about the Georgia ballot challenge hearing in which President Obama ignored a subpoena for the certified copy of his birth certificate (among other documents). This column elicited a great response from readers, many of whom asked me the same question: why this important story wasn’t being covered in the media.

They’re really interested in this whole eligibility story, I said.

Famous Conservative: I’ll bet they are.

Me: Aren’t you?

FC: No.

Me: No? Why aren’t you?

FC: If this were happening back at the time of the election, maybe.

I told FC this is an election (ding-dong).

FC: Exactly. But this will alienate the people we need to defeat him at the polls.

I made some naive-sounding comment (which I thoroughly subscribe to) about the seeking the truth regardless of the outcome, adding that the truth would likely alienate plenty of people from Obama, too.

Impasse.

http://www.mythsandfacts.org/Conflict/16/EU.htm Europe seeks to play the role of neutral mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet for a host of reasons – most of them self-serving – Europe has demonstrated a clear pro-Arab bias, including insensitivity to Israel ‘s security needs. And it excuses Arab terrorism that no civilized nation would ever tolerate if faced with […]

http://www.investigativeproject.org/3548/al-arian-surfaces-with-self-serving-skype
He’s been on house arrest for nearly four years, but the inability to be in the spotlight may constitute cruel and unusual punishment for Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) operative Sami Al-Arian.
A website called The Islamist posted what it says is the complete text of a statement the former University of South Florida professor and PIJ governing board member made via Skype Wednesday. In it, the man who created and ran the “active arm” of the terrorist group in North America and sheltered its current leader, decries his “persecution” and lamenting the plight of others convicted of supporting terrorist groups such as Hamas and al-Qaida.
The speech marks “my first public address in the U. S. in over nine years,” he says, and comes despite attorneys’ advice not to make public statements. “Nothing short of our very survival as free people living in a free and democratic society is at stake,” he says, casting America as a security state in the wake of 9/11 law enforcement actions.

http://www.ocregister.com/ Unlike the government of the United States, I can’t claim any hands-on experience with Colombian hookers. But I was impressed by the rates charged by Miss Dania Suarez, and even more impressed by the U.S. Secret Service’s response to them.Cartagena’s most famous “escort” costs $800. For purposes of comparison, you can book Elliot Spitzer’s […]

No more Gush Katif! The story of the Friends of Migron. There was a time when I did not understand the ambiguous policy of the government of Israel. Then, I also did not know much about the Jewish pioneering in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. I am a Jew living in the United States. In 2004, […]

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/korol/120420

The Jews created one of the most progressive democracies in the world, most accepting of minorities, yet they’re branded racist by Islamists, themselves severely discriminatory. Jews resettled peacefully in their homeland of 3,000+ years, but are called colonialists by those who seize land by force. Muslims are clearing their land of Christians in astounding numbers and carried out pogroms against Arab Jews, but Israel is accused of ethnic cleansing. Seven million Jews on 1/1,000th of the Mideastern land mass are called imperialist by 1.5 billion Arabs on their previously conquered continent. Iran threatens to obliterate Israel, but the US tells Israel to use restraint and make concessions. Arabs hold Judea and Samaria steadfastly; Russia holds Japanese islands; Communist China rules Tibet, Turkey holds parts of Cyrpus, and Germans live and rule in East Prussia, but Israel is the “occupier.” Human Rights violations are cited against Israel 75% of the time, while genocide continues unabated in Sudan, Congo, and Rwanda, and Arab women are under constant oppression.

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/

What a careful reader will take away from Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father is not only that the president used to eat dog meat, but more importantly, that he identifies with dog-eaters. He wants us to understand that he is one of them. Obama’s most severe critics on the right think of Obama as a socialist, for example, Dinesh D’Souza, or Stanley Kurtz in his exhaustively-researched book Radical-in-Chief. Obama used to attend the annual “Socialist Scholars Conference” in New York, which was a hard-core affair; I went to a couple of them, and they weren’t for the curious. But there is something far more visceral, more existential to the president’s dislike of the United States, and that arises from his early residence in the Third World, and his identification with the people of the Third World whose lives are disrupted by the creative destruction that America has unleashed.

Obama is the son of a Kenyan Muslim father, the stepson of an Indonesian Muslim, and the child, most of all, of an American anthropologist who devoted her career to protecting Indonesian traditional life against the depredations of the global marketplace. Her doctoral dissertation, “Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving against all odds,” celebrated traditional cultures hanging on desperately in the face of the global economic marketplace.

Ms. Dunham was not only a Communist fellow-traveler, but the sort of 1960s woman who (as we used to say) “put her body on the line,” first by marrying two Third World men, and then by spending her career in the Third World. It is no surprise that Obama considers the Third World morally superior to the United States. Consider this description of the Jakarta of his childhood from Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father: “And yet for all that poverty [in the Indonesian marketplace], there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like [the Chicago housing projects] so desperate.” Obama had chances to compare the orderliness and regularity of traditional life with the rough-and-tumble of American capitalism, and chose to identify with the former.