RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/291188/tyrants-best-friend-roger-bate

FORMERLY RHODESIA THE BREADBASKET OF AFRICA…IS NOW ZIMBABWE A BASKETCASE OF FAMINE AND POVERTY. TYRANT MUGABE WAS HAILED AS THE POSTER CHILD OF ONE MAN, ONE VOTE MOVEMENT IN AFRICA….RSK

Only Mugabe and his friends benefit from Zimbabwe’s diamond wealth

Stellenbosch, South Africa — Superficially, Zimbabwe is in much better shape than it was just a few years ago. Hotels are full of foreign businessmen, and luxury vehicles seem ubiquitous in the capital, Harare. Henry Ncube, a local street cleaner, has never seen as many new cars. But Mr. Ncube, 33 and married with two children, is not happy: “I only have this job part time, things are only a bit better for my family [since 2008] and I still can’t afford school” (for my children).

Mr. Ncube has reason for pessimism. Zimbabwe’s growth is being fueled almost entirely by the diamond trade, which benefits only the political elite and their friends. Zimbabwe, which has had all sorts of political problems over the past three decades, is now also succumbing to the resource curse too.

It is important to put things into perspective. In 2008, the economy was in tatters, neither rule of law nor stable money existed, and violence was to be found in every politically sensitive constituency. After ruling party ZANU-PF and its leader, Robert Mugabe, had lost and stolen yet another election, the future looked dire. But, in early 2009, ZANU-PF and the opposition MDC party signed a power sharing deal. Inflation was controlled by dollarizing the economy, and, with one of the world’s largest diamond finds in the east of the country, the possibilities looked bright.

Sentencing the Underwear Bomber

Posted By Robert Spencer

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/17/poverty-still-doesn%e2%80%99t-cause-terrorism/print/

On Monday, Former U.S. President Bill Clinton ascribed the recent jihad violence in Nigeria to poverty. Referring obliquely to the attacks that the jihadist group Boko Haram (Western education is Sin) has carried out, Clinton ascribed them to the large disparity between the rich and the poor in Nigeria: “You can’t just have this level of inequality persist. That’s what’s fueling all this stuff.” Then on Thursday, the son of one of Nigeria’s richest men was sentenced to life in prison for an attempt to commit jihad mass murder in a jetliner.

Bravo for life’s little ironies.

The idea that poverty causes terrorism is a familiar assumption on both the Left and the Right; it is, ultimately, the guiding assumption behind the U.S. military’s making itself busy in Afghanistan building roads, schools and hospitals. The fond belief is that a sufficient amount of money will transform Kabul into Kansas City, and then all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Ten years of American blood and treasure squandered in Afghanistan should have put paid to this fantasy long ago, but of course it hasn’t.

Haaretz: Israel’s Anti-Semitic Rag Posted By P. David Hornik

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/17/israel%e2%80%99s-anti-semitic-rag/print/

THANK YOU DAVID HORNIK WHO WRITES FROM ISRAEL….I REFER TO IT AS AL-HA-ARETZ….RSK

Haaretz, Israel’s left-wing daily, used to be Israel’s newspaper of record and comparable to the New York Times, read also by those who differed from its line. Today Haaretz is read by less than 6 percent of Israelis, overwhelmingly composed of the country’s left-wing “elite.” Haaretz comes in far behind successful newcomer, right-of-center Israel Hayom at 38% and left-of-center Yediot Aharonot at 36%.

Haaretz’s English website, however, gets a very high Alexa ranking—around the 3900th most popular website in the world and currently neck-and-neck with the centrist Jerusalem Post’s site. Indeed, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu allegedly called (his office later denied it) Haaretz and the New York Times Israel’s “two main enemies” and said:

Why Multiculturalism Is Racism Posted By Phyllis Chesler

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/why-multiculturalism-is-racism/

“The worm inside the doctrine of multiculturalism is the lie that all cultures are worthy of equal respect and equally embracing of individual freedom and democracy. The concerted assault by the Islamists on the essential and life-affirming values based on individual rights and freedom is proof of this lie.”

Dr. Salim Mansur’s new book Delectable Lie: A Liberal Repudiation of Multiculturalism [1] has been positively reviewed and endorsed by a handful of mainly conservative reviewers and distinguished intellectuals.

In my opinion, the book has been underestimated. It is a real gem. And, despite a recent spate of other important books on this subject, including Ibn Warraq’s Why the West Is Best [2], Mansur’s work is unique. Mansur gives us very valuable information about the history of multiculturalism in Canada, which is important because Canada — where Mansur lives, writes, and teaches — may well be the very first Western democracy to have legally enshrined this policy. We learn, up close, what that policy has done.

In 1971, in an era of “identity politics” rising, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau passed the multiculturalism policy. In 1988 it was further enshrined as the Canadian Multiculturalism Act. Mansur observes:

Explicit in this idea of multiculturalism was the officially sanctioned view that all cultures are of equal merit and deserving of equal respect.

In addition, Mansur explains and connects a number of important things that no one has previously done — at least, not all in one place.

A Syllabus for the ‘Occupy’ Movement Conservatives are wrong to deride college courses on the anti-Wall Street protests. Here’s a lesson plan and possible reading list. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204883304577223020110788672.html?mod=opinion_newsreel Schools from New York’s Columbia to Chicago’s Roosevelt University are offering courses on the “Occupy” movement. This has inspired some derision from the right, but I think that […]

The War on Wyden For daring to work on Medicare reform with Republican Paul Ryan, the Democratic senator from Oregon is lambasted by keepers of the liberal flame.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204880404577227682039248376.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

Mitt Romney has had a tough week, Newt Gingrich a tough month, Barack Obama a tough three years. But hey, they could be Ron Wyden.

Ticked off by Washington’s failure to tackle big problems? Spare a moment for Oregon’s senior senator. Mr. Wyden is the Democrat who in December had the audacity to team up with House Republican Paul Ryan on a proposal to reform and strengthen Medicare—the entitlement that is pushing the country, and seniors, off a cliff. As bipartisan exercises go, this was big, thoughtful, promising.

It was also a complete anathema to a Democratic establishment that is ideologically opposed to change, and cynically intent on using Mediscare to beat Republicans in 2012. Mr. Wyden, as a result, is taking a beating from his own.

“Ron Wyden, Useful Idiot,” railed New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “Is Ron Wyden trying to get Mitt Romney elected?” fumed the Nation magazine. Ron Zerban, a Democrat running for Mr. Ryan’s seat, accused Mr. Wyden of giving the GOP cover and proclaimed him no longer a “Democrat.”

From Bad to Worse in Egypt
The repression of civil society is far worse than anything seen under Hosni Mubarak.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204792404577227171522318732.html

Egypt’s military rulers have spent the last several months provoking U.S. and European ire with their crackdown on civil-society groups. Last week they managed to ratchet up the diplomatic crisis further, by preventing a British aid worker from leaving the country on the eve of a visit by Martin Depsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Meanwhile, Egypt’s minister for international cooperation, Fayza Abul Naga, continues to accuse my organization, Freedom House, and other international groups of trying to “create a state of chaos and work to maintain it in Egypt.” All this comes more than a month after Egyptian authorities shut down the Cairo offices of 10 Egyptian and foreign civil-society groups, including those of Freedom House.

The ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has decided to ignore mounting U.S. and European criticism and escalate its crackdown. Following a politically motivated investigation, 43 people, including 19 Americans and six Europeans, are about to face criminal charges for their work supporting a democratic transition in Egypt.

The impending charges are part of a larger assault on civil society led by Ms. Naga and other holdov

Michael Devolin is a Canadian writer and new contributor to the Israeli Advocate….

Doctor Michael Phelps once said, “The trouble with heart disease is that the first symptom is often hard to deal with: sudden death.” Likewise it is difficult for Israel to deal with what is always the first symptom of war with her Muslim neighbors: their intended genocide of every living Jew residing in the Middle East. Iran’s “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently had his “strategy specialist” Alireza Forghani compose a document declaring that it would be a “jurisprudential justification” for the Iranian military to wipe out the nation of Israel and all its Jewish inhabitants.

Aside from even touching on the subject of Islamic-incited, anti-Jewish hatred and genocide as being somehow connected to any type of “jurisprudential” philosophy other than the various kill-the-Jews themes found in the Koran, one has to wonder at how the Jews of Israel, especially women and children, go about their daily business after hearing the news that their Persian neighbors are keen to stomp their guts into the sand.

Logistics of an Israeli Strike on Iran: An Informed View from Germany Posted By David P. Goldman

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/02/17/logistics-of-an-israeli-strike-on-iran-an-informed-view-from-germany/

There are plenty of analysts who deal with the logistics of nuclear weapons and their interdiction in the abstract, and a very few who have dealt with the matter as an existential issue. Apart from the Israelis, for whom Iranian nuclear capability represents an existential threat, the list is short. The German defense expert Hans Rühle headed the Policy Planning Staff of Germany’s Defense Ministry during the 1980s, when the US installed the medium-range Pershing missiles in Germany and undercut Russia’s military advantage in the European theater. A nuclear exchange with Russia remained a live possibility in those days; after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the high water mark for strategic risk during the Cold War came in 1983, when then-Soviet premier Andropov declared a nuclear alert, ostensibly in response to NATO’s “Able Archer” exercise, but really as an attempt to panic the Germans.

Hans Rühle was one of the toughest and most perspicacious analysts in those heady ways. Today he evaluates Israel’s capacity to knock out Iran’s nuclear program in an essay in the German conservative daily Die Welt. It is worth reading (for non-German speakers, there’s Google Translate).

Rühle is highly confident that Israel could knock out Iran’s nuclear program for a decade or more with about 25 of its 87 F-15 fighter-bombers and a smaller number of its F-16′s. Each of the F-15′s would carry two of the GBU-28 bunker busters, with the F-16′s armed with smaller bombs. Rühle writes

There are 25 to 30 installations in Iran which are exclusively or predominately dedicated to the nuclear program. Six of them are targets of the first rank: the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, the conversion works in Isfahan, the heavy water reactor in Arak, the weapons and munitions production facility in Parchin, the uranium enrichment facility in Fordow, and the Bushehr light water reactor.

The location, nature, and defenses as well as (with some limitations) the type of installed anti-aircraft systems are extensively known.

-http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2032/Did-Saudi-Prince-Buy-Fox-News-Silence.aspx–

Have you heard about the 23-year-old Saudi journalist who tweeted an imaginary conversation with Muhammad? It went something like this: He loved Muhammad, he hated Muhammad, he couldn’t understand Muhammad, he wasn’t going to pray for Muhammad. If this isn’t exactly a disquisition on faith and doubt a la “The Brothers Karamazov,” remember, we’re just talking Twitter.

If you haven’t heard of this young man, whose name is Hamza Kashgari, it could be because you’re watching too much Fox News. As of this writing, almost a week after the Kashgari story broke, I haven’t found a single story about it at the Fox News website. (You try.) Meanwhile, CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC and CNN have all reported the Kashgari story, clueing in their viewers on how far totalitarian Islam, Saudi style, will go to exert its control over the human spirit. But not Fox.