RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ Election Coverage 2048 – Al-CNN
As the election of 2048 approaches, the candidates from both parties continue to exchange strong views on the issues that affect the lives of Americans. The Party of Democracy and Justice (Hezb-Al-Dimukratie-Wa’al Adalah) continues to maintain that the election will come down to social justice issues.

“With 34 percent unemployment and the price of goat so far out of range of most working families that they have been forced to switch to chicken, it is time that our opponents stopped dodging the issues and took a serious look at the economic consequences of their policies,” Bashar Mohammed Hussein Al-Hamdani, said during a campaign stop at a HalalBurger in Peoria, Illinois.

However the ruling Freedom and Religion Party (Hezb Al-Hurriyah Wa’al Allah) denounced this as class warfare. Still preoccupied with the ongoing occupation of the Netherlands and Greece, the party has taken criticism for ignoring the economic problems of the United States while being preoccupied with waging foreign wars in the name of Islam.

Nevertheless President Mohammed Al-Thani, fresh off a pilgrimage from Mecca, vigorously defended his record while conducting a photo op at a San Diego Madrassa. “The Freedom and Religion Party believes in creating opportunities, rather than offering hand outs. Our subjugation of infidel nations has opened up new territories to be dominated by the believers and our vigorous drive for national morality has revived the family unit as an economic force. Our program of heavily fining women who go out with their naked hair exposed and raising the Jizya tax on the People of the Book has also raised billions of dollars that will go toward repaying the nation 93 trillion dollar debt.”

http://townhall.com/columnists/humbertofontova/2012/02/02/mrs_tom_brady_models_massmurderer/print

“Given the tenor of “higher” education nowadays, an Ivy League degree in any of the social “sciences” would have probably made her into a lifetime cheerleader for Che-wear. So I offer the following more as missionary than as heckler”

At the São Paulo fashion show on July 15, 2002 supermodel Gisele Bundchen catwalked wearing a glamorous bikini consisting entirely of faces of Che Guevara, who rarely bathed and constantly reeked of “boiled liver” and “rotting fish” according to his early comrades and surviving victims.

Granted, the future Mrs Tom Brady probably thought the cool, long-haired image clinging to her bosom and buttocks that day depicted Pink Floyd’s lead guitarist, or perhaps The Door’s lead singer, freshly-bathed and redolent of Guerlain–but still.

Gisele Bundchen, the world’s highest paid model and champion of “female empowerment” comes across as a genuinely decent person, devoted mom, and sincere philanthropist. Given her childhood in Brazil, her social circles today, and the educational qualities of the mainstream media, expecting her to have a clue about her Bikini icon that day seems unfair if not preposterous. Chris Matthews, after all, admitted that he learned much about the Cuban Revolution from The Godfather II. Time magazine, after all, hailed Che Guevara– co-founder of a regime that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s, murdered more of them than pre-war Hitler’s, and craved to ignite a nuclear war– as “Hero and Icon of the Century” alongside Mother Teresa.

http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2012/02/03/jim_moran_racist_pig/print

Congressman Jim Moran is an old white Democrat from Virginia who thinks he can judge whether we minority conservatives are acting sufficiently non-white enough. Moran’s an inveterate bully, a brawler, a crook and a bigot. And not one of his civility-preaching liberal colleagues has the courage to call him out.

Responding on cable news to GOP Rep. Allen West’s blunt criticisms of President Obama this week, Moran derided the retired U.S. Army colonel, who is black, as “not representative of the African-American community.” Moran then launched into the kind of tired race-traitor tirade I’ve heard from progressives of pallor for more than 20 years.

How dare we “people of color” stray from the left’s ideological plantation? If we choose personal responsibility over entitlement, capitalism over statism or self-determination over identity politics, presumptuous white liberals appoint themselves spokespeople for our forefathers and deciders of our true destinies.

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2814/fatah-young-leadership Fatah leaders in the West Bank announced this week that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is their only candidate for the presidential election expected to take place in May 2012. The announcement enraged several disillusioned Fatah officials, some of whom called on the 76-year-old Abbas not to seek re-election so as to pave the […]

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2811/italy-mosque-wars The southern Italian island of Sicily is about to become the proud new owner of a multi-million euro mega-mosque. The mosque, to be built in the medieval town of Salemi in southwestern Sicily, is being paid for by the oil-rich Persian Gulf Emirate of Qatar. Supporters of the mosque hope it will become a […]

http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/90030/heroine-stupor/?all=1
Heroine Stupor Wanted Women, a new joint biography of two Muslim women, refuses to distinguish between an al-Qaida terrorist and a feminist intellectual

There are occasionally some books that are so deeply unpleasant, indeed repulsive, that one feels like washing one’s hands after reading them. Dripping with unremitting bias, and utterly missing the big picture, such books leave one despairing of the moral vacuum in which they were written. Such a work is the American journalist Deborah Scroggins’ new book Wanted Women, which explicitly seeks to draw a parallel between the lives of two women she presents as “mirror images” in the war against terror: the Pakistani-born convicted Islamist terrorist Aafia Siddiqui and the Somali-born campaigner for Muslim women’s rights, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

One understands immediately why Siddiqui might justify the term “Wanted” in the book’s title: She featured on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list in May 2004. Yet the only way in which the word applies to Hirsi Ali is that since a fatwa was pronounced upon her after the murder of her friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the same year, Islamic fundamentalists have wanted to murder her. It is precisely this loose, facile equation of a lawful, constitutional, democratic entity such as the FBI with vicious murderers like van Gogh’s killer Mohammed Bouyeri, who beheaded the filmmaker one November morning in Amsterdam, that makes this book so thoroughly objectionable. Besides a couple of mea culpa sentences that are clearly inserted for pro forma reasons, Scroggins’ entire leitmotif drips with despicable moral equivalism. She even devotes alternate chapters to each woman throughout the book.

ttp://news.yahoo.com/protesters-throw-shoes-un-chief-gaza-090023203.html

Protesters threw shoes at UN chief Ban Ki-moon as he entered Gaza on Thursday, condemning Israel’s blockade and Ban’s refusal to meet the families of Palestinian prisoners.

Ban’s convoy came under assault from about 50 protesters as it crossed into the Hamas-controlled Palestinian territory only hours after eight rockets were fired into southern Israel from Gaza.

The protesters threw sand and stones, or tried to hit the cars with chairs and blocks of wood. They toted pictures of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel and placards reading “Ban Ki-moon enough bias for Israel.”

More demonstrations awaited Ban, on his third visit to Gaza since Israel’s three week war with Hamas in early 2008.

At a UN-run housing project in the Khan Younis district, about 25 youths shouted slogans and held banners saying “We demand a trial for Israel’s leaders.”

Local civil groups and businessmen boycotted a planned lunch with the UN leader because relatives of some of the 5,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails were not allowed to attend.

A statement signed by Gaza rights activists and businessmen said they had “received an unjustified negative response” that Ban would not meet the relatives.

The group noted how he had met with the family of an Israeli soldier who was captured by Gaza militants in 2006 and held incommunicado for five years. The Palestinian Liberation Organization apologised for the protests however.

Ban later said he had been warned in advance there would be demonstrators. “I try to understand their concerns. I know that many people in Gaza are frustrated. It is understandable and natural,” he told reporters travelling with him.

He also released a statement saying he was “concerned about the situation of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails” and had raised conditions with Israel’s prisons minister.

Ban discussed Gaza with Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak at a dinner before leaving Israel, a UN spokesman said. Ban “urged the defence minister to take further steps to improve conditions in Gaza.”

Israel limits imports and exports from the territory, citing security concerns and the need to deny access to weapons and money to Hamas, which it considers a terrorist organisation.

But much of the international community, including the United Nations, believes the restrictions unfairly harm the 450,000 population.

“Israel has taken some measures to ease the closure. More must be done,” Ban told Palestinians in Khan Younis.

“I am pressing hard for policy changes so that the United Nations can do its essential work,” he added, calling for Gaza to be able to trade “without restrictions.”

Balancing his comments, Ban also condemned the firing of rockets into Israel which he called “unacceptable”.

“People from Gaza must stop firing rockets onto the Israeli side,” he told the news conference in Khan Yunis. Back in Israel, he visited a school near the Gaza frontier where one student was killed by a rocket in 2008.

Ban’s noisy trip to Gaza was part of a tour of Israel and the Palestinian territories intended to convince the two sides to hold new meetings on ways to kick-start direct negotiations. He also went to Jordan which has hosted five unofficial meetings in recent weeks.

The UN leader warned that time is running out for a peace settlement in a speech to a security conference at Herzliya, near Tel Aviv.

“Negotiations will go nowhere without a shared sense of urgency and a genuine determination to succeed,” he told an audience which included Barak and top officials and academics.

“The Palestinians must engage, seriously, on security. Israel must engage, seriously, on territory.”

With the Jordan contacts showing no signs of ending the freeze on full negotiations since September 2010, Ban has this week urged Israel to make “goodwill gestures” to tempt the Palestinians back to talks.

Amid reports that the international community wants Israel to take confidence-building measures, US envoy to the Middle East, David Hale, held talks with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Thursay. No details of their discussions were released.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0201-milken-award-20120201,0,5485383.story

“After the hoopla died down, Rustin retreated to his second-floor classroom, where posters of the rapper Tupac Shakur and revolutionary Che Guevara adorned the walls.”

Surprised Pasadena teacher receives national honor.At a student achievement assembly he helped organize at Muir High School, Manuel Rustin is stunned to learn that the Milken Family Foundation chairman had come to present the Milken Educator Award.
Manuel Rustin sat among the audience Tuesday in the crowded auditorium at John Muir High School in Pasadena, enjoying the student achievement assembly he helped organize.Speakers, including state Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, lauded the students for their academic gains, cheerleaders performed and the ROTC led the crowd in a flag salute. Then an elaborate ruse was revealed.Rustin was presented with the Milken Educator Award, an honor given to 39 teachers nationwide this year that comes with a $25,000 prize. The award, presented by the Milken Family Foundation, was created in 1987 to motivate talented teachers in a profession that doesn’t typically come with lavish financial rewards.

As his name was called, Rustin bowed his head. Students surrounding him jumped to their feet. The teacher emerged from the crowd, the only collar-and-tie in a mass of hoodies and jackets.

He took a seat on the stage, absorbing the moment.

Big-Government Republicans By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/289905

Forget the fratricidal warfare between two establishment soldiers so harmonious on substance that their contest, inevitably, has descended into a poisonous, personal food-fight. The problem is not the GOP infighting. The problem is the GOP. Republicans are simply not interested in limiting government or addressing our death spiral of spending.

My weekend column was about the dog-and-pony show that congressional Republicans just put on to snow you into thinking they oppose the $2.4 trillion debt-ceiling increase they actually approved only six months ago. Now, get ready for House Republicans to unveil their $260 billion transportation bill.

The federal government should not be in the transportation business at all. A federal role was rationalized in the mid-Fifties to finance the construction of interstate highways. As National Review’s editors observed in 2005, that project was completed in the early Eighties, at which time the fuel tax that funded it should have been repealed and the upkeep of highways left to the states. “Instead,” they wrote, “Congress morphed the program into a slush fund for some of its most indefensible pork-barrel spending.”

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,812208-2,00.html

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama was once the darling of American neo-conservatives. In a SPIEGEL interview, the author of “The End of History” explains why he now believes that the excesses of capitalism are a threat to democracy and asks why there is no “Tea Party on the left.”

SPIEGEL: Professor Fukuyama, you are best known for your essay “The End of History,” in which you declared that, after the demise of the Soviet Union, liberal democracy had emerged as the triumphant global model. Now, your latest research claims that the flaws of capitalism and globalization could endanger this democratic model. How do you explain this shift?

Fukuyama: Capitalism is the wrong word to use here, because there is not a viable alternative to capitalism.What we are really talking about is just economic growth and the development of modern economic societies. A combination of factors is beginning to challenge their progress in the United States. We have had a lot of technological change that substituted for low-skill labor and made many people in Western democracies lose their jobs.SPIEGEL: Which is why countries such as the United States or Britain wanted to turn themselves into “service-oriented” economies.

Fukuyama: We have unthinkingly embraced a certain version of globalization that assumed we had to move very quickly into this post-industrial, post-manufacturing world. Doing so, we forgot that the whole reason real socialism never took off in the US was the fact that the modern economy seemed to produce middle-class societies in which the bulk of the population could enjoy a middle-class status. They worked in industries that were abolished in our countries and transferred to countries like China.