RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11215/pub_detail.asp
In August 2011, a Marietta, Ga. 7th grade teacher gave a three-page homework lesson from InspirEd Educators Inc. of Roswell, Ga. to students to help them discuss pros and cons of school uniforms. “Women in the West do not have the protection of the Sharia as we do,” declared a letter from a Saudi wife named Ahlima. “If our marriage has problems, my husband can take another wife rather than divorce me, and I would still be cared for.” She’s glad that Saudi women “have the Sharia.” When parents objected to the assignment’s pro-Islam stance, the school district changed the curriculum.

In 2010, Act for America compiled research from former assistant education secretary Diane Ravitch, American Textbook Council and Textbook League on how 38 public school texts handled Islam; last month, Christian Action Network launched a national campaign warning of bias.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

We made three fundamental mistakes in our dealings with Islam. First, we assumed that the only politically acceptable answer was also the right answer. This is the most common mistake that politicians make.

Second, we established a construct of a moderate and extreme Islam that reflected how we saw it from the outside. This construct had no theological relationship to any actual belief or movement within Islam. Had we made the division into modern and fundamentalist, we would at least have been using words that meant something. Instead we used moderate and extreme in a military sense to mean hostile and friendly or neutral. But as a Vietnam era president and military command should have known, in a guerrilla war not everyone who isn’t shooting at you is friendly or even neutral.

Our construct was black and white with few shades of gray. But the Muslim world is all shades of gray. The absolute choice we wanted them to make, “you’re either with us or with the terrorists”, was foreign to their culture and their way of life. Multiple layers of contradictory relationships and alliances are the norm in the region. You expect to betray and be betrayed, much as you expect to cheat and be cheated while bartering for a carpet at the souk. In a region where coalitions of Fascists, Communists and Islamists are doable, contradictions don’t exist, all alliances are expedient and built on an expected betrayal. The rise of Islam itself was built on broken peace treaties. So it is no wonder then that in response to Bush’s call, they chose both us and the terrorists. Appeasing America and the Islamists at the same time was their version of the politically safe middle ground, the path of least resistance and the only acceptable option.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4174273,00.html
Israel, the pistol nation Op-ed: World can’t accept Zionism’s greatest transformation: Militarization of the Jew
For visitors, it’s the most enduring impression: Guns are omnipresent, tucked inside belts, slung over soldiers’ backs, clutched chest-high at checkpoints. From cafes in Tel Aviv to settlements on rocky hillsides in Judea and Samaria, Jews carry the guns.

Israel as pistol nation literally obsesses the rest of the world. It has nothing to do with the myth-soaked heroism familiar to Europeans from the propaganda of fascism and Stalinism. It’s the admirable construction of the homo israelianus: equal but combative.

In Israel, war and democracy have made an unusual marriage to create a Jew fit to survive in continuous sacrifice. It is not about gargantuan deeds by superhuman champions; it is family-and home-oriented, and rather intimate in tone.

The militarization of the Jew, which is the burden and the salvation at the same time, has been the most dramatic psychological transformation of the Zionist revolution. Where once Jews were mocked for being “cowards” and “parasites,” today they are condemned by the world for being “aggressors.”

The guns made possible Israel’s miracle: Israeli citizens live an average of 80 years, just like in the placid Norway; no other industrialized country does it better, especially for a nation that doesn’t have natural resources and has a population roughly half of Belgium’s.

Israel is one of the leading countries with companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange; it has the highest production of scientific publications per capita in the world, more museums per capita and the highest proportion of university graduates and PhDs in the world.

Great intimacy with death

Even Israeli humanistic preachers of “normality” and of being a “nation like all other nations” know that the Jewish oasis in the desert was made possible by the fact that Israel was “armed to the teeth,” as anti-Israel literary critic George Steiner once said. Even Diaspora Jews, from London’s Golders Green to Toronto’s Forest Hill, can enjoy quiet nights because they know that every Israeli fence is guarded by armed Jews and that Israel’s sky is sealed by its Air Force and by the Dimona nuclear plant.

1. For years Israel has sat back while a sort of “Palestinian Right
of Return” was being implemented under everyone’s noses. It consisted
of Arab citizens of Israel’s marrying Palestinians from the West Bank,
Gaza or elsewhere and demanding that their spouses be granted Israeli
citizenship. Some of the marriages are fictional, like “Green Card
Weddings” in the US. Many others are multiple wives for Moslems,
especially Bedouins. No one ever stopped the Israeli partner from
going to live with the spouse in the spouse’s location outside
Israel’s Green Line!

The Israeli Left has long demanded that any spouse of any Israeli Arab
citizen be granted automatic residence rights and citizenship in
Israel. It goes without saying that spouses do NOT get automatic
citizenship in most other countries just because they marry a citizen.
(This includes the US.) The Left represents any reluctance to grant
automatic citizenship as a violation of human rights, especially the
“right to marry.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/12/paychecks-for-pedophiles/

The Greek government does not cease to beg the EU and international
institutions for spare change in order to help the country dig itself
out of its debt debacle. But, as it turns out, the Greek government
evidently really has too much spare budgetary funds, money it is
desperate to find a way to waste.

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2751/america-suicidal-space-diplomacy

It looks as if Obama appointees may be attempting to make an end run around the US Senate’s constitutional duty to ratify treaties and to impose a arms control treaty on the US military in the guise of a “space code of conduct. ” Given the choice between arms control agreements and US military superiority, some political appointees at the Defense and State departments may decide to go go for an agreement. Can this administration, then, be trusted to protect America’s military space systems in an era when space is where the next great war will in all likelihood be fought?

America, more than any other nation, depends on satellites. Our military depends on the Global Positioning Systems [GPS], where troops and materiel are and where they are going. It needs satellites for communication, and satellites of various kinds to see what is happening on the surface of the Earth. The civilian economy depends on communications satellites, on GPS and on remote sensors for almost everything: electronic funds transfers, weather forecasting, pollution monitoring and most importantly to keep hundreds of millions of Americans connected with each other wherever they are.

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2752/germany-silence-islam-criticism German authorities have officially confirmed that they are monitoring German-language Internet websites that are critical of Muslim immigration and the Islamization of Europe. According to Manfred Murck, director of the Hamburg branch of the German domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), his organization is studying whether German citizens who criticize Muslims and […]

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1999/How-Dumb-Do-They-Think-We-Are-Really-Dumb.aspx Ever wonder how Taliban “re-integration” in Afghanistan works? The Stars and Stripes reports on one case, which started after a tribal elder with (an “oyster-grey beard”) paid a call on the US military at an Afghan government center. “We would like Zareef to be released,” he said. “We do not think the military should […]

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1998/Uncle-Sam-Plays-Three-Card-Mohammed-and-Guess-Who-Wins.aspx

The Wall Street Journal reports:

JANI KHEL, Afghanistan—In the American war against the Taliban, on whose side are the Afghan police? For many U.S. soldiers serving in the insurgent heartland, the answer is: both.

“They smile to our face when we’re here, giving them money and building them buildings,” says U.S. Army Capt. Cory Brown, a provost marshal officer helping to oversee Afghan security forces here in volatile Paktika province. “But they’ve given insurgents money, food and even rides in Afghan police cars.”

Worse, he says, some policemen are also suspected of selling their U.S.-provided weapons to the Taliban.

The rest of the story lies behind a subscription wall, but it’s not necessary to read more. Anyone could write the rest. In fact, it writes itself, another iteration of the relationship between the US and the Islamic world in which a culture steeped in the expectations derived from Thou Shalt Not Lie meets a culture authorized to lie to advance, protect, and burnish Islam a matter of Islamic law. Guess who wins every time?

http://gibson.house.gov/

Chris Gibson grew up in Columbia County in the town of Kinderhook. He was the Point Guard and Co-Captain of Ichabod Crane’s High School Basketball Team and went on to graduate magna cum laude with a BA in History from Siena College while earning a ROTC Commission there.

Over the course of his 24 year Army career, Chris rose to the rank of Colonel and deployed seven times. They included four combat tours to Iraq, and separate deployments to Kosovo, the Southwestern US for a counter-drug operation, and most recently – just prior to his retirement – Haiti where he commanded the 82nd Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team (BCT) during the opening month of that humanitarian relief operation. The Secretary of the Army awarded the BCT the Superior Unit Award for their actions in Haiti.

Other key assignments included tours teaching American Politics at the United States Military Academy at West Point, serving as a Congressional Fellow with US Representative Jerry Lewis (R-CA), the Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, and completing a Hoover National Security Affairs Fellowship at Stanford University. Chris was also the Distinguished Honor Graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College.

In Congress, Chris serves on the House Armed Services Committee (Subcommittees on Readiness and Emerging Threats and Capabilities), the House Agriculture Committee (Subcommittees on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry and General Farm Commodities and Risk Management), and the Republican Policy Committee.

Among his military decorations are 2 Legions of Merit, 4 Bronze Star Medals, the Purple Heart, the Combat Infantryman’s Badge with Star, the Master Parachutist Badge and the Ranger Tab. For their actions in Mosul in support of the first national election in the new Iraq, his Battalion Task Force earned the Valorous Unit Award. For their actions in Tal Afar during the 2nd and 3rd national elections in Iraq his Battalion and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment were recognized for excellence by President George W. Bush and earned a 2nd Valorous Unit Award.

Chris holds an MPA and PhD in Government from Cornell University and is the author of Securing the State, a book on national security decision-making published in 2008. Chris has been married to Mary Jo, a NYS Licensed Clinical Social Worker, for over 15 years and they have three children: Katie (14), Maggie (12) and Connor (10). Their home is in Kinderhook where Chris is active in several civic organizations including the American Legion, VFW, NRA, the Knights of Columbus and St. John’s Church of Valatie.