RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2770/palestinian-hero

Mahmoud Abu Rahma is perhaps one of the bravest Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Because of his courage, he has been stabbed several times in various parts of his body.

This is what happens under Hamas and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority governments to anyone who dares to speak out against torture and assaults on innocent civilians and freedom of speech.

Abu Rahma’s “crime” is that he dared to publish an article strongly criticizing Palestinian armed groups as well as the Hamas and Palestinian Authority governments for human rights violations and the use of civilians as human shields in the war against Israel.

In the Palestinian territories, human rights activists and journalists are permitted to criticize only Israel. Those who do not toe the official line find themselves either behind bars or in the hospital. The attack on Abu Rahma was intended to deter others from endorsing his critical approach.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=254384
Why a failed policy of appeasement prevails and why the Right keeps winning elections but never gets into power.
I am absolutely astounded to find so many of your “luminaries” in the universities who are teaching the [youth] that Israel was basically born in sin. Quite a lot of the [anti-Israel] animosity in the [international] media is fed by organizations such as the Haaretz newspaper. It is coming out from Israel academics. This cuts ground from under the feet of those who tell the truth. Somebody should be putting the truth into the public domain, and the government of Israel has not done this for many years – British columnist Melanie Phillips, IBA TV, 2011.

In the first part of this analysis, the reasons for Israel’s feeble performance in the conduct of public diplomacy and in countering its accelerating international delegitimization were investigated. The causes were traced to a lack of resolve to prevail among those charged with the conduct of Israeli diplomatic strategy.

To recap briefly
This lack of will to win is reflected in the hopelessly inadequate resources allotted for the fight for Israel’s image and is rooted in large measure in the worldview of dominant civil society elites in the media, academia and legal establishment.

Their positions of unelected power and privilege, together with the nature of their personal and professional interests, provide these elites with the ability and the motivation to impose on the elected politicians – no matter what their electoral platform – an agenda that reflects their own unequivocally “PC” (Palestinian-compliant) perspective on the conflict.

Inevitably, this is an agenda that militates strongly – both implicitly and explicitly – towards endorsement of the Palestinian narrative, at the expense of the Zionist one.

Deprived of material resources and motivational drive, Israel’s public diplomacy is doomed to anemic, ineffectual failure.

Perplexing political paradox
For those skeptical as to the validity of this analysis, the following astounding facts regarding Israel’s political history may prove illuminating.

From 1977, when the Likud first came to power on a platform of “Greater Israel,” to 2005, when the Likud withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in stark contradiction to its electoral pledges, there were 28 years. For 20 of these years, the prime minister came from the ranks of the Likud.

Soros Firsters Bash Israel Posted By Daniel Greenfield

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/18/soros-firsters-bash-israel/

When the far left took on the far right’s habit of referring to Jews who don’t support their drive for the destruction of Israel as “Israel Firsters” they forgot one important thing. To accuse someone else of being unpatriotic, you have to be able to assert your own patriotism. To accuse someone else of dual loyalty, you first have to be loyal to the United States.

The Muslim bloggers at the Center for American Progress, an Obama Administration think tank funded by George Soros, a Nazi collaborating billionaire, along with a secret list of other rogue titans, have no such credibility, not because they are Muslim, but because they have a long record of undermining and attacking American national defense and national security. The Soros Shadow Party may use the name “American” in organizations such as the Center for American Progress or the New America Foundation but those groups are invariably Anti-American.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/288510 Ron Paul knows even less about the history of our enemies than he does about their proper treatment under the Constitution. He actually interrupted Monday night’s Republican candidates’ debate so he could interject the following: I would like to point out one thing about the Taliban. The Taliban used to be our allies when […]

http://bigpeace.com/cjohnson/2012/01/19/obama-kills-keystone-xl-pipeline-pleases-radicals-imperils-americas-energy-security-and-harms-economic-growth/

In ruling against the Keystone XL today, President Barack Obama has finally cast his lot with the environmentalists who fund his campaign over the blue-collar workers who need jobs in crucial swing states. He has made America more reliant on OPEC oil rather than Canadian sources and hurt the relationship with our neighbor to the north, America’s largest trading partner, as it pushes her into the arms of the energy rapacious Chinese. Canadian Resource Minister Joe Oliver was “obviously disappointed” in Obama’s State Department decision and will need to diversify its energy exports.

Republicans forced a showdown with Obama over the pipeline when they tied a decision on the pipeline to the short-term raiding of Social Security funds. The House passed a provision that would give TransCanada, the company spearheading the project, a permit to build in sixty days if Obama continued to tarry. His State Department rejected the permit earlier today.

http://bigpeace.com/jpollak/2012/01/19/israeli-diplomat-walks-out-on-left-wing-jewish-group/

The Jewish Week reports that a speech last week by Stuart Appelbaum, president of the left-wing Jewish Labor Committee, prompted Israel’s deputy consul general to walk out of its gala dinner after Appelbaum criticized Israel in blunt, undiplomatic terms.

Though Appelbaum also noted “new expressions of contempt for Israel within the Arab world,” he launched a vitriolic attack on the government of Benjamin Netanyahu:

…[S]adly, Israel is cursed with a right-wing coalition government that’s regularly giving credence to it.

We all know Benjamin Netanyahu talks a good game about a two-state solution, but, at the very same time, his administration continues to shamelessly promote the construction of illegal settlements on the West Bank – a policy that no severely impedes negotiations…
Netanyahu’s right-wing supporters in this country have pulled out the stops to slander the president as some kind of enemy of Israel.
They hope that if they repeat that lie long and loud enough that some Jews might actually fall for it … enough, maybe, to flip Florida against President Obama this fall.
Who would they replace him with? Maybe a guy like Rick Santorum – a man who said that allowing Palestinians to have their own country on the West Bank would be like the U.S. giving Texas back to Mexico.
[Which, come to think of it, may not be that bad of an idea.]

Haditha: Where Are They (the Accusers) Now? DIANA WEST
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11257/pub_detail.asp
Seven of the eight Marines charged over the 2007 Haditha massacre have been cleared. What has happened to those who first accused the Marines of killing Iraqi civilians?
Finally, the last “Haditha” trial is in progress, and, thanks to Nat Helms at Defend Our Marines, everything you need or want to know about the proceedings, the witnesses, the facts about the case of SSGT Frank D. Wuterich, the last of the Marine Mohicans, is here.

America: The Center-Right Nation Yoram Ettinger

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11255/pub_detail.asp

Recent public opinion polls reaffirm that the US is a center-right nation. So what do the polls tell us about contemporary America, and which particular factors shape its attitudes

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11254/pub_detail.asp

U.S. May Release Senior Taliban Terrorists

Steve Emerson

Five leading Taliban terrorists, currently held in Guantanamo Bay, could soon be freed as part of a peace agreement with the Afghan Taliban leadership.
Leftists, Islamists to March on Jerusalem
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11260/pub_detail.asp

The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report

European leftists who are opposed to the existence of Israel, together with known Muslim Brotherhood ideologues, are organizing a mass global march upon Jerusalem.

Candidates and Combatants By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/288506

Monday night’s debate featured an exchange between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum regarding the treatment of American citizens who join with our jihadist enemies to make war against our country. Watching it, I got the impression that Santorum was trying to suggest a wedge between himself and Romney where I don’t think there is one — and perhaps making a play for voters who have been spun up by Ron Paul’s spurious claims about the recently enacted National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). (I addressed those claims in an exchange with the congressman’s son, Sen. Rand Paul, a few weeks back — see here and here).

The answers by both Romney and Santorum to the question posed seemed a bit confused — not really wrong, but incomplete. That is to be expected when candidates are given just a few seconds to address complex issues.

Romney was asked whether he would have signed the NDAA, as President Obama recently did. The matter is controversial because Paul, like much of the Left, claims it is unconstitutional: it provides for indefinite detention of American citizens if they are found to be enemy combatants. Romney replied that he would have signed the bill, correctly implying that, as the courts have held, American citizens may be detained under the laws of war if they join the enemy during wartime.

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2767/islam-oic-thought-police

On December 19, 2011, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution condemning the negative stereotyping and stigmatization of people based on their religion, and urged member states to take effective measures towards addressing and combating “such incidents.” This resolution, based on an initiative from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), was supported by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who hosted a closed-door three-day meeting – apparently one of many in a series called the “Istanbul Process”– in Washington D.C. with OIC representatives to discuss ways to implement the resolution.

What might sound like a step toward “tolerance,” however, is in reality an assault on freedom of speech: a UN-endorsed violation of human rights, co-sponsored by the US, and prompted by the OIC, an organization of 57 Muslim nations, most of which hold the world’s worst records on freedom of speech.

The OIC initiative for a UN resolution against “defamation of religion” is not new; the OIC has been promoting it for the last 13 years despite earlier opposition from Western countries. What changed recently was dropping the word “defamation of religion” and stressing “freedom of speech”– something about which Secretary of State Clinton seems to be enthusiastic.

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2768/germany-islamic-centers

One of the oldest universities in Germany has opened the country’s first taxpayer-funded department of Islamic theology.

The Center for Islamic Theology at the University of Tübingen was inaugurated on January 16 and is the first of four planned Islamic university centers in Germany.

The German government claims that by controlling the curriculum, the school, which is to train Muslim imams and Islamic religion teachers, will function as an antidote to “hate preachers.”

Most imams currently in Germany are from Turkey and many of them do not speak German.

German Education Minister Annette Schavan, who attended the opening ceremony, said the Islamic center was a “milestone for integration” for the 4.3 million Muslims who now live in Germany.

But the idea has been fiercely criticized by those who worry the school will become a gateway for Islamists who will introduce a hardline brand of Islam into the German university system.