RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304459804577285882739791266.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

In “The Crisis of Zionism,” a former editor of the staunchly pro-Israel New Republic now urges sanctions to force the country to change its West Bank policy.

Bookstore shoppers who spy “The Crisis of Zionism” on a shelf could be excused for assuming that the book is an up-to-the-minute work about Zionism’s biggest crisis: the one brewing in Iranian uranium-enrichment facilities. But Peter Beinart is more interested in threats to Israel, or to the idea of Israel, supposedly coming from the Jewish state itself.

Mr. Beinart is not one of those Jews who flee their heritage and then seem to spend the rest of their lives harping at those who stayed behind. He attends synagogue and sends his children to Jewish schools—these are his “credentials,” he says. He doesn’t want to sever ties with the Jewish community; he simply wants the community to embrace his way of thinking.

Here is what he thinks: Israel is an oppressive, apartheid-type state. Its failure to attain peace with the Palestinians can be blamed on the actions of—in no particular order—Israel’s leaders, American-Jewish organizations and Orthodox Jews (bigots to a man, in his telling). Because of these bad actors, Mr. Beinart warns, the “liberal Zionist dream”—a Jewish state built on liberal ideals—risks demise. He focuses in particular on the West Bank, the area captured in 1967 by Israel from Jordan in the Six-Day War. “If Israel ceases being a democratic Jewish state,” he writes, “it is less likely to be because Arab armies invade the West Bank than because Israel permanently occupies it.”

The book’s theme is a rehash not only of shopworn complaints about Israel but also of Mr. Beinart’s own complaints about Israel—”The Crisis of Zionism” grew out of an essay that he wrote in 2010 for the New York Review of Books. That piece drew attention mostly for its novelty: A Jewish former editor of the staunchly pro-Israel New Republic magazine was attacking the Jewish state. Two years later, the novelty is gone.

The challenge for Israel’s critics is to reconcile the evil state they describe with the reality of a country that treats its Arab citizens well—far better, in fact, than most Arab countries treat their own. Israeli-Arabs, for example, enjoy the right to vote, sit in parliament, and have state-funded schools and religious courts.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577291352882984274.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Global Warming Models Are Wrong Again The observed response of the climate to more CO2 is not in good agreement with predictions. During a fundraiser in Atlanta earlier this month, President Obama is reported to have said: “It gets you a little nervous about what is happening to global temperatures. When it is 75 […]

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/03/26/obama-grovels-taliban-laughs Over the course of the past three years, President Obama has done his steady best to appease the Taliban into submission. A small synopsis of what he’s done includes the meekness he projected via his U.S. apology tour to the Middle East in 2009; his announcement shortly thereafter that U.S. troops will be out […]

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/03/26/NY-legislators-hoodie A group of New York state legislators, mostly black and Hispanic, donned hooded sweatshirts while in the legislative chambers to signal support for the family of Trayvon Martin, the teenager shot in Florida by George Zimmerman. As the Times Union reported: Several of those who spoke to reporters said the killing reflected a law […]

A Sydneysider’s Visit To The West Bank
http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/
As the usual assortment of strange bedfellows prepare for imminent Israel-bashing events in Sydney – I’m delighted to present the following guest post. It’s by Sydneysider Shirlee Finn, who also took the photos, and is entitled “My Visit To The West Bank”:

I had a day to remember on March 13th, when Ari Briggs took me on a memorable and exhilarating drive into the West Bank.

Ari is an expat Australian living in Israel. He is the International Director of Regavim. Regavim is working hard to track and remove illegal housing on government land and is being successful.

Regavim is a non-profit-making, non-governmental organisation concerned with preventing the illegal confiscation of Israel’s national land resources, with protecting nature, and with preventing environmental damage. By monitoring the way officialdom deals with these matters, Regavim ensures conformity to responsible administrative norms.

Ari and three friends picked me up at Modi’in, from where we headed east on road 443 to Jerusalem.
This is the second main road to Jerusalem and goes through liberated territory from Modi’in to Jerusalem.
We skirted around Jerusalem and passed through Atarot and Balanda, where we saw the eastern entrance to Ramallah to our left.

We then skirted along the separation barrier, until we reached Bet Hanina in Jerusalem, where we headed north on road 60, via the Pisgat Zeev/Hizme checkpoint. Going through checkpoints is somewhat disconcerting, but most necessary. Continuing on Road 60 we passed Migron, in the northern West Bank. It is located some 14 kilometres north of Jerusalem. We passed Bet El, Ofra and at Shilo we went east past Shvut Rachel, some 45 kms north of Jerusalem towards the Jordan Valley and the Allon Road.

The road is named after Yigal Allon, who drafted the “ Allon Plan” shortly after the Six-Day War in June 1967. The broad aim of the plan was to annex most of the Jordan Valley, from the river to the eastern slopes of the West Bank hill ridge, East Jerusalem and the Etzion bloc to Israel. At the same time, the heavily populated areas of the West Bank hill country, together with a corridor that included Jericho, would be offered to Jordan.

King Hussein rejected it.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1028/another_mad_mehdi_hasan_howler_on_iran_israel_and_the_bomb?print=true Senior New Statesman editor Mehdi Hasan again displays more laugh-out-loud ignorance of foreign affairs, this time in the Guardian Anyone who followed the debate on Iran and the bomb between the New Statesman’s Mehdi Hasan and Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) will remember Hasan making perhaps the stupidest mistake to have appeared in a […]

Honor Killings Grow in the West: Islam’s Gruesome Gallery

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/03/27/honor-killings-grow-in-the-west-islams-gruesome-gallery/

As Islamic honor killings continue to rise in the West and on U.S. territory, our media and higher literary culture remain completely silent about them.While our own president gets personally involved in the Trayvon Martin case, joining the race hustlers that have set out to convict George Zimmerman based on narrative, not evidence, the world is waiting for him to breathe one word on behalf of Islamic honor killings victims.

In this context, the editors of Frontpage believe it is an important time to rerun Honor Killings Grow in the West: Islam’s Gruesome Gallery compiled by modern day freedom fighter Pamela Geller, the editor of Atlas Shrugs.

Below we provide a link to the gallery. We also run Frontpage editor’s recent speech in Orange County on behalf of Islamic honor killing victims, in which he explains the Left’s callous and heartless indifference to the suffering of Islamic women under Islamic gender apartheid.

We encourage all of our readers to get involved in bringing attention to the terrible suffering of Muslim women under Islamic gender apartheid and to call out the Left on its shameful effort to push Islam’s victims into invisibility.

To view Islam’s Gruesome Gallery, click here.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2969/europe-islamic-future In country after European country, the post-modern charade of the bliss of multiculturalism — the idea that all cultures are equal and can coexist peacefully side-by-side in any given country, and that Muslim immigrants should be allowed to keep their cultural traditions rather than integrate into wider European society — is unravelling. Consider just […]

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/03/25/c-holland-taylor-taqiyya-tantawi-and-topo-gigio/ C. Holland Taylor, Taqiyya, Tantawi, …and Topo Gigio Friday, 3/16/12, Diana West [4] wrote an illuminating, trenchant commentary on the ill-advised press release [5] issued that same day by Dr. Mohammed Z. Jasser et al of the American Islamic Leadership Council (AILC). West excoriated [4] Jasser’s/AILC’s immoral equivalence between the Breivik massacre and the […]

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/03/26/beat-my-wife-please-mainstream-muslim-misogyny-in-north-america-too/

YESTERDAY “THE FIVE AT FIVE” A TAD MORE CONSERVATIVE BUT EQUALLY SOPHOMORIC FOX NEWS VERSION OF “THE VIEW” JUST BARELY SKIMMED OVER THIS NEWS WITH WORRY THAT IT MAY BE INSULTING TO THE RELIGION OF PEACE….WITH ONLY KIMBERLEY GUILFOYLE MENTIONING THE KORANIC GENESIS OF THIS ABUSE OF WOMEN…..RSK

“Beat My Wife—Please!”–Mainstream Muslim Misogyny in North America, Too?

The late comedian-violinist Henny Youngman’s emblematic one-liner was “Take my wife—please!” Now an Islamic Bookstore in Toronto, Canada was discovered [2] selling, Gift For Muslim Couple [3], which promotes a brutal variant on Youngman’s comedic theme. Illustrating the medieval obscurantist, yet tragically persistent canons of authoritative, mainstream Islam, to this day, the book’s [3] misogynistic [4] Weltanschauung could be aptly summed up as, “Beat my wife—please!”

Touted as the definitive Muslim primer on “how to run the institution of marriage successfully,” Gift For Muslim Couple [3] was written by Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanwi (d. 1943)—known as “Sage of the Ummah [5]”—a prolific (pre-partition) Indian scholar of Islam’s foundational texts (i.e., Koran and hadith), and Islamic jurisprudence. Upon reading this Muslim guide to matrimonial bliss, penned by a mainstream Muslim legist widely recognized for the profundity of his understanding of Islamic doctrine, one learns, from a Daily Telegraph report [4],