RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=259171
All the assumptions on which Israeli policies were founded have proved groundless; all the concessions, worse than useless.

Syria is not lost. Assad is Western educated and is not a religious man. He can still join a moderate grouping – Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, Haaretz, November 13, 2009

I fear that the appalling brutality we are witnessing in Homs, with heavy weapons firing into civilian neighborhoods, is a grim harbinger of things to come – UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, February 9, 2012

Seen against the backdrop of the carnage being perpetrated across Syria by the Assad regime, the magnitude of the misjudgment made by Gabi Ashkenazi, then the IDF’s chief of staff, is enough to make any self-respecting Israeli cringe with embarrassment.

None so blind

Askhenazi is not the only senior Israeli leader to articulate an appallingly inaccurate assessment of Israel’s adversaries, but in many ways his is a particularly interesting and instructive example. After all, before his appointment as chief of staff, much of his 40-year military career was spent in the IDF’s Northern Command, including as its commander. One must, therefore, presume that a large portion of his time was devoted to evaluating the Syrian threat, and to familiarizing himself with nature of the Syrian military dictatorship.

Just as a followup to yesterday’s item on why Marc H. Ellis, the
fraudulent pseudo-academic anti-Semite at Baylor University, should
get canned.It now turns out that the move at Baylor to fire Ellis has nothing to
do with Ellis’ (lack of) academic credentials or his anti-Semitic
political views.

It has to do with sexual misbehavior. Yes, at this Baptist
University, they do not take kindly to professors manhandling the
females. Groping women may just be another example of the “Prophetic
Ethics” that Ellis always claims he practices. You know, the TIKKUN
version he learned from Mikey Lerner.

The full story was broken by JTA, see this
http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2012/02/10/3091610/why-is-marc-ellis-on-the-outs-at-baylor-university

The initiative to fire Ellis is because of alleged sexual misconduct!!

Meanwhile the radical Left continues to campaign for Ellis – see this
petition to support him and note how the top signature is by Osama bin
Laden: http://www.change.org/petitions/ken-starr-president-of-baylor-university-stop-persecution-against-prof-marc-ellis#

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,816491,00.html

PHILOSOPHER? NOT EXACTLY…..ALWAYS POSING AS THE POSTER BOY FOR PALARAB “MODERATION” HE TAKES A NEW TACK NOW…..LEADING TO A ONE STATE SOLUTION WITH BAND-AIDS COVERING THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF MAKING IT A ONE ARAB STATE SOLUTION……RSK

‘The Pursuit of a Two-State Solution Is a Fantasy’

Prominent Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh believes it is too late for a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict. In a SPIEGEL interview, he outlines his vision for an Israeli-Palestinian confederation and why he mistrusts the new moderate stance taken by the Islamic militant group Hamas.

SPIEGEL: Mr Nusseibeh, in your new book you claim that it is too late for a Palestinian state. Why?

Nusseibeh: You are sitting in my office in Beit Hanina in a place called East Jerusalem. Now, you look to the west from here and you see parts of this Arab neighborhood that are severed from us. If you look to the east over there, you find Pisgat Zeev, an enormous Israeli settlement which is part of Jerusalem. Further east there is Maale Adumim, an even larger settlement of Israelis in what is called East Jerusalem. There is no East Jerusalem any more. East Jerusalem has already become a misnomer. But a Palestinian state without East Jerusalem as its capital is a no-no.

SPIEGEL: Do you want to give up the 1967 borders which have been the basis of all the peace plans?

Nusseibeh: It is extremely hard for the most imaginative of us to see how to work out a redrawing of the map in order to give us, the Palestinians, East Jerusalem as capital. But secondly, there are the Israeli settlers. Can you take away half a million people? No, you cannot. Nothing is impossible, mathematically speaking. But we are talking about politics, and in politics not everything is always possible.

SPIEGEL: So we should admit to ourselves that the two-state solution is dead?

Nusseibeh: Mathematically speaking, a two-state solution is an excellent solution. It causes minimum pain and it is accepted by a majority on both sides. Because of this, we should have brought it into existence a long time ago. But we did not manage to do so.

SPIEGEL: Who is to blame for that?

Nusseibeh: First of all, it took Israel a long time to accept that there is a Palestinian people. It took us, the Palestinians, a long time to accept that we should recognize Israel as a state. The problem is that history runs faster than ideas. By the time the world woke up to the fact that the two-state solution is the best solution, we had hundreds of thousands Israelis living beyond the Green Line (ed’s note: the 1949 Armistice Line that forms the boundary between Israel and the West Bank). There is a growing fanaticism on both sides. Today, the pursuit of a two-state solution looks like the pursuit of something inside a fantasy bubble.

http://sarahhonig.com/2012/02/24/another-tack-lessons-from-the-floating-coffin-another-tack-lessons-from-the-floating-coffin/

“The state the Jews created is threatened with destruction and its population with obliteration. Yet there’s negligible sympathy for Israel and even less practical support to avert tragedy. The Struma’s story is seminal in understanding why the Holocaust was possible and why a second Holocaust cannot be ruled out. More than anything, the Struma powerfully illustrates what happens when Jews rely on others’ goodwill.”

Exactly 70 years ago – on February 24, 1942 – 19-year-old David Stoliar terrifyingly clung to bobbing debris in the Black Sea. At first he heard screams in the frigid waters but the voices died down. It eventually emerged that Stoliar was the sole survivor of the Struma, an un-seaworthy vessel chuck-full of frantic Jewish refugees.

World War II was already in fever pitch. Against the enormity of the then-unfolding Holocaust, the loss at sea of 768 Jewish lives (103 of them babies and children) was at most blithely overlooked as a marginal annotation.

Moreover, although these Jews fled the Nazis, in the pedantic literal sense they weren’t executed by Third Reich henchmen.

This atrocity was the coldblooded handiwork of Great Britain (committed while it combated the Germans but remarkably without compassion for their Jewish victims), supposedly neutral Turkey (whose so-called nonalignment didn’t extend to outcast Jewish refugees), by the Arabs (who were openly and unreservedly Nazism’s avid collaborators and who pressured London into denying endangered Jews asylum in the Jewish homeland) and, finally, by the Russians (who targeted the immobilized sardine can that carried Jews to whom nobody would allow a toehold on terra firma).

The entire world seemed united in signaling Jews how utterly unwanted they were anywhere.

Earlier in the week I posted an item about the “Destroy Israel”conference in Harvard, where one of the speakers there is to be Marc H. Ellis, a pseudo-academic from Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Ellis has pretensions of being a “Jewish theologian,” but is not recognized as such by any Jews. He is in fact a full time basher of Israel, who churns out “liberation theology” mixes of Marxism with anti-Semitism and calls for Israel’s extermination.

It turns out that there is now a move afoot at Baylor to sack Ellis.Evidently the heads of the school have figured out that their”professor” of “Jewish Studies” knows nothing at all about Judaism and is nothing more than a clone of Norman Finkelstein, who has already been fired from HIS school for being a fraud and bigot.

The radical Left is up in arms about this. A pro-Ellis petition was organized by the anti-Jewish Cornell West and is being promoted by such luminaries as Noam Chomsky. The very first endorsement of the petition is by Ilan Pappe. It accuses Baylor of trying to fire Ellis because of Ellis’ vile anti-Israel and pro-terror opinions (and just what would be so bad about that if it were true?). In reality, the initiative against him is because he misrepresents himself as a Jewish theologian and holds a university slot reserved for someone who knows something about Judaism. Ellis is on the board of Tikkun magazine and everything he knows about Judaism and the Bible seems to be things that Mikey Lerner, publisher of Tikkun, has taught him. In other words, neither has ever read the Bible, let alone studied the Talmud.

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=8889

Baylor University’s Anti-Jewish Liberation “Theologian” By: Steven Plaut

FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, May 05, 2005
Marc H. Ellis is university professor and director of the Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University, a Baptist University in Waco, Texas, not ordinarily on anyone’s radar map as a particularly notable institution when it comes to the field of Jewish scholarship. Indeed, theologically Waco is best known for serving as home of the Branch Davidians and the abortive FBI raid on its headquarters. Thus fringe “theologians” seem to feel right at home there. Maybe it has something to do with being home to singer Willie Nelson.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203960804577238990570535210.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
His long record of statements on religious and social issues are of a sort that large sectors of the American public find unpalatable.

These have been good days for Rick Santorum, buoyed as he campaigns by conservative Republicans cheering their newly anointed hope. Still, it will occur to at least some of his supporters that their hope is destined to be short-lived, that their candidate’s particular baggage would sink any presidential candidacy. Especially his.

It’s not only that a certain body of Santorum pronouncements on social issues exists, and that they’re of a sort that large sectors of the American electorate find unpalatable, to put it mildly. Or that he continues to add to them.

By the time Democratic researchers apply themselves to this compendium of Mr. Santorum’s views—in the unlikely event that he becomes the Republican nominee—it’s size will have doubled, at the least. The Republicans have already provided President Obama with high-value gifts this election year, but none nearly as delectable as the prospect of a run against Mr. Santorum.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203918304577240754033762504.html
Newsflash: The Israeli prime minister did not declare on Facebook that he wishes death to 355 million civilians.
An incredible chain of events has recently played out in the Middle East, demonstrating the lengths to which opinion-shapers and politicians in the Arab world will go to demonize Israel.

It all began with a tragic road accident just north of Jerusalem last week. A school bus collided with a truck and flipped over, killing several children and a teacher and wounding dozens. Israeli and Palestinian emergency teams rushed to the scene and cooperated to rescue the surviving children and evacuate the worst injured to hospitals in west Jerusalem.

http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2012/02/24/the_4_billion_obamacare_slush_fund_for_progressives/print

If you like how the Obama administration’s multibillion-dollar “investments” in bankrupt solar companies have turned out, you’ll love the latest federal loan program to nowhere. It’s the Obamacare loyalty rewards program for progressives.

To appease liberal Democrats pushing for the so-called “public option” (the full frontal government takeover of our health care system), the White House settled for the creation of a $6 billion network of nonprofit “CO-OPs” that will “compete” with private insurers. It’s socialized medicine through the side door. House Republicans sliced about $2 billion from the slush fund in last spring’s budget deal and proclaimed the program dead. Hardly.

On Wednesday, the White House trumpeted the release of nearly $700 million in taxpayer-funded low-interest loans for seven CO-OPs in eight states. Administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the fund will pour more money into CO-OP plans nationwide throughout the next year. In 2014, according to Washington bureaucrats, the plans will be offered on the federally approved and federally monitored state health exchange “marketplace.”

Symposium: Russians vs. Vladimir Putin?

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/24/symposium-putin-forever-1/

In this special Frontpage Symposium, we have gathered an All-Star panel to discuss the power of the KGB and the meaning of the new freedom movement in the streets of Russia. This symposium originally ran last week, under the title “Symposium: Putin Forever?,” in our Feb. 17 issue. Due to the panel of titans that gathered and the vital dialogue that occurred, and in light of the events unfolding in Russia, the editors felt it appropriate to rerun this symposium.

Our distinguished guests in this symposium are:

Jim Woolsey, Director of Central Intelligence 1993-95.

Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking official to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. Romania’s Communist president Nicolae Ceausescu was executed at the end of a trial whose accusations came almost word for word out of Pacepa’s book Red Horizons, subsequently republished in 27 countries.

Evgeny Legedin, a street-art painter and political activist from Yekaterinburg. As a coordinator of the youth anti-Putin movement “Oborona” and participant in the democratic movement “Solidarity,” he has organized countless rallies and demonstrations of protest, including the all-Russian campaign for freedom of rallies “Strategy-31.” He is the author of the mock prize “Golden Evsyuk,” the “award” given every year to the worst policemen in Yekaterinburg. In fear for being imprisoned on fabricated criminal charges, he fled Russia on August 16 and reached the UK, where he is seeking political asylum.

Dr. Igor Melcuk, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Montreal and Member of the Royal Society of Canada. He left the Soviet Union in 1977 after being expelled from the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences because he defended Andrei Sakharov​ in a letter published in The New York Times​.

Dr. Gregory Glazov, a Rhodes scholar who is now Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at Immaculate Conception School of Theology, Seton Hall University, USA and Program Coordinator of the Institute for Christian Spirituality’s Great Spiritual Books program which frequently focuses on spiritual writings in Soviet and Nazi prison camps. He is currently completing several manuscripts that include commentaries on The Lord’s Prayer and on The Book of Job, as well as an introduction to Jewish-Catholic relationships, entitled, Brothers in Hope: Models of Judaism in Catholic Perspective (NDU Press), and a translation and commentary on Vladimir Solovyov’s writings on Judaism and Christianity, an interest that bespeaks his spiritual legacy as the son of Russian dissidents, Yuri and Marina Glazov.

Dr. Jay Bergman, a Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University, where he teaches Russian and modern European history. He received his bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University and his M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D from Yale University. He is the author of Vera Zasulich: A Biography, published by Stanford University Press​ ; and articles in Russian intellectual history. He is also on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Scholars, a nationwide organization of professors committed to reasoned scholarship, intellectual diversity, and nondiscrimination in faculty hiring and student admissions. His newest book is Meeting the Demands of Reason: The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov, published by Cornell University Press.

Yuri Yarim-Agaev, a former leading Russian dissident and a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group. Upon arriving in the United States after his forced exile from the Soviet Union, he headed the New York-based Center for Democracy in the USSR.

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a world-renowned and critically-acclaimed author, retired physician (prison doctor and psychiatrist), a contributing editor to City Journal and the author of the new book, Anything Goes.

and

Dr. David Satter, a Rhodes Scholar who is now a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He was Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times of London from 1976 to 1982, during the height of the Soviet totalitarian period and he is the author of Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State and Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union, which is being made into a documentary film. His new book is It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past.

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2878/abbas-peace-process

Abbas’s peace process will only lead to a Palestinian government or state controlled by Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood.

Who says there are no peace talks going on in the Middle East?

The peace process is underway in the Middle East, but not between Israel and the Palestinians. The only peace talks that are taking place these days are between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Abbas has chosen to talk to the enemies of peace who want to destroy Israel and replace it with an Iranian-backed Islamist state. On the one hand, he says he supports the two-state solution. On the other hand, however, he is seeking to form an alliance with all those who are vehemently opposed to the two-state solution.