RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11293/pub_detail.asp
Just Imagine if the Iron Lady had got the Big Call Wrong
Industrial unrest – here involving miners – was crippling Britain when Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979.

Thatcherism must be understood in the context of the calamity that came before.

I sense that the share price of Margaret Thatcher anecdotes is peaking, so I’m offloading some stock. Ten years ago, the great woman came to lunch with a group of Telegraph writers. Determined not to ask a sententious question about public policy, I instead blurted out: ‘Is there anything worth watching on television at the moment, Lady Thatcher?’

She fixed her fierce blue eyes on me, trying to remember who I was. (On a previous occasion, I had managed to thump her on the elbow while making an expansive point, and she has been wary in my presence ever since.) Then she softened. ‘We enjoy the Sunday evening programmes, dear, especially those stirring Methodist hymns. But we find that even they are becoming a little wishy-washy these days’.

It is often said that Margaret Thatcher had no small talk, but this is another way of saying that she took even the paltriest things very seriously. Applied to television, her earnestness was bathetic. Applied to the rescue of a great country, it was absolutely necessary.

Just as Churchill, a rotten peace-time politician, brought the qualities that were needed to a war, so Margaret Thatcher’s achievement cannot be divorced from the context of her times. During the 1970s, it felt as if Britain was finished. It is already hard to recall the sheer awfulness of that era: the strikes, the power-cuts, the three-day week, the prices and incomes policies, the double-digit inflation. As a 1978 headline in the Wall Street Journal put it: ‘So long, Great Britain, it was nice knowing you’.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11300/pub_detail.asp
U.S. Universities Have Permanent Relationship With Qatar Faculty For Islamic Studies
In the latest development concerning the relationship between U.S. universities and the Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies (QFIS), the QFIS website reveals that six U.S. universities have established a permanent relationship with QFIS. According to a QFIS web page:

Established in 2007, Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies (QFIS) is an international center for Islamic thinking and dialogue. Its aim is to enhance research into Islamic culture and promote the diversity and tolerance of the Islamic Fiqh, or understanding. Learning takes place in an open, intellectual environment and produces a structure of study that will enable future generations of scholars to become experts in Islamic culture and ideology. These graduates will be well-equipped to tackle the challenges facing Muslim communities across the world. QFIS offers programs in: Master of Science in Islamic Finance, Master of Arts in Public Policy in Islam, Master of Arts in Islamic Studies with a specialization in Contemporary Fiqh (Islamic Jurisprudence) and Religion and Contemporary Thought, Master of Science in Urban Design and Architecture in Muslim Societies, Master of Arts in Contemporary Muslim Societies .Postgraduate Diplomas in: Islamic Finance. General Islamic Studies. Public Policy in Islam. Research is a critical component, with six specialized centers providing opportunities for postgraduate students, residents, and visiting scholars to investigate research topics in their field of interest.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11294/pub_detail.asp
A year ago this week, on January 25, 2011, the ground began to crumble under then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s feet. One year later, Mubarak and his sons are in prison, and standing trial.
This week, the final vote tally from Egypt’s parliamentary elections was published. The Islamist parties have won 72 percent of the seats in the lower house.

The photogenic, Western-looking youth from Tahrir Square the Western media were thrilled to dub the Facebook revolutionaries were disgraced at the polls and exposed as an insignificant social and political force.

As for the military junta, it has made its peace with the Muslim Brotherhood. The generals and the jihadists are negotiating a power-sharing agreement. According to details of the agreement that have made their way to the media, the generals will remain the West’s go-to guys for foreign affairs. The Muslim Brotherhood (and its fellow jihadists in the Salafist al-Nour party) will control Egypt’s internal affairs.

http://bigjournalism.com/jpollak/2012/01/24/actually-bob-beckel-botswana-does-have-a-lower-corporate-tax-rate-than-the-u-s/

Actually, Bob Beckel, Botswana Does Have a Lower Corporate Tax Rate than the U.S.
Today, on Fox News Channel’s The Five, liberal panelist Bob Beckel praised President Barack Obama’s efforts at job creation: “One good sign of the economy is there are more manufacturing jobs created in the last two years than the last eight,” he said.

Beckel did acknowledge that American manufacturing was still in a bad state, and lamented that the manufacturing sector “has been bleeding jobs because corporations are going to find cheap labor overseas.”

His conservative colleague, Republican strategist Andrea Tantaros, interjected: “So cut the corporate tax.” Fellow conservative Eric Bolling backed her up–”A hundred percent right, Andrea!”–and added that U.S. corporations pay the highest tax rates in the industrialized world, after Japan recently lowered its rate.

Beckel, on the defensive, retorted: “As much as Botswana?”

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

There was a time when full tables signified prosperity and thick waistlines were considered attractive. The ability to eat one’s fill was what separated the gentry from the peasant making do with a few crusts and salted leftovers. Fat was in because it represented leisure and wealth. Thin meant you were on the road to the poorhouse or to consumption, which meant your body was being consumed, not that you were the one doing the consuming.

Then feudalism went the way of the dodo, agriculture was revolutionized and starvation went extinct in the West. Between the widespread availability of cheap food and social welfare programs covering everything from soup kitchens to food stamps, it became hard to starve. Not only was the availability of food no longer associated with prosperity, but even the poor had begun to eat so well that fat began to carry working class and lower class associations.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/ Britain Gets Rid Of The Press Gang, & More Good News, Naturally “Press TV seems to have disappeared!” came the excited, if incredulous, voice on Friday. “I keep clicking on [Sky digital channel] 515 and there’s nothing there!” Knowing that a serious complaint had been filed with Ofcom about the Iranian satellite propaganda news […]

Ha’aretz’s Blunder Draws Thunder From Down Under

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

The leftwing Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz recently carried this highly tendentious article by Akiva Eldar about Australian Jewry and Israel. Its headline? “Israel is shaming Australian Jews”

I know for a fact that online ripostes, even by well-informed and well-respected Middle East analysts, failed to find their way onto the Comments section. Deliberate suppression on the part of a newspaper which prides itself on its own gift of free speech, no matter how critical it is of the policies of its beleaguered nation? It would seem so.

But unfortunately for the newspaper, and for Eldar, the leadership of Australian Jewry is made of sterner stuff than its lily-livered counterparts in the Mother Country. There are comparatively few “trembling Israelites” in Australian Jewish circles, perhaps because such a large proportion of the Jewish community Down Under is derived from Holocaust survivors and their descendants.

http://news.investors.com/Article/598759/201201241804/college-muslim-chaplains-al-qaida-hamas-background-checks.htm

Homeland Security: To please Muslim-rights groups, more and more colleges are hiring Muslim chaplains, only to watch them radicalize students. Campuses need tougher background checks.

Alarmingly, some chaplains have actively supported al-Qaida and called for violent jihad against “kaffirs,” or infidels. And yet they still have access to students, and remain on the university payroll.

Take Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, Muslim chaplain at Northeastern University in Boston. He has urged Muslims to pick up the “gun and sword” on behalf of recently imprisoned al-Qaida terrorists.

Last month, Faaruuq held a fundraiser for Aafia Siddiqui, a one-time MIT student also known as “Lady al-Qaida,” who’s serving an 86-year prison sentence for opening fire on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

Siddiqui, a senior al-Qaida operative based in Pakistan, was captured with notes about a “mass casualty attack” in the U.S., along with a list of New York landmarks.

“What a brave woman she continues to be, and how much her bravery and her faith and her belief warrants our support at this time,” said Faaruuq, as he encouraged Massachusetts Muslims to help raise $30,000 for her appeal.

“She’s only guilty of defending herself,” he said. In fact, Siddiqui yelled “Death to America” as she fired on soldiers. A federal judge called her actions premeditated.

While ignoring such evidence, the Northeastern chaplain condemned American soldiers as “kaffirs” and exhorted Muslims to “cut through” them with machetes.

“Go out and do your job,” he said, referring to jihad. READ MORE AT SITE

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100131545/greenpeaces-forest-policy-is-unsustainable/ Here is a guest post from one of my environmental heroes, Patrick Moore. The reason he’s an environmental hero is because, unlike so many campaigners in the green movement, he doesn’t believe that in order to save the world its necessary to destroy Western industrial civilisation. I highly recommend his superb book Confessions of […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1253

Last week, on Jan. 19, U.S. President Barack Obama released a video called “America and Israel: An Unbreakable Bond.”

The seven-minute clip is an amalgamation of sound bites from the president’s own speeches, interspersed with statements made by different prominent Israeli leaders, among them Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Its apparent purpose is to refute claims on the part of the Republicans that the Obama administration is anti-Israel. Its true goal is to keep the president’s campaign afloat with Jewish cash.

To achieve this objective, the video features the voices of President Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, and Netanyahu himself waxing poetic about Obama.

It’s a neat trick.