RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/12/thats_gratitude_for_you.html

One aspect of the end of the Iraqi War ceremony held in Baghdad that hasn’t gotten a lot of press is that there were no major Iraqi government officials who attended and no Iraqis made any remarks to thank the US for our sacrifices on their behalf.

CNS News:

Fox News Correspondent Jennifer Griffin reports that only a handful of Iraqis were on hand Thursday as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and U.S. military leaders formally ended the Iraq war with a subdued ceremony in Baghdad. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did not attend the ceremony at which the flag of U.S. Forces-Iraq was officially retired.

“You will leave with great pride — lasting pride — secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people to cast tyranny aside and to offer hope for prosperity and peace to this country’s future generations,” Panetta told U.S. troops. But even as a U.S. military band played a medley of patriotic American tunes, the ceremony — televised live in the 5 a.m. EST hour — seemed one-sided without Iraqi participation or even a thank-you.

Almost nine years of fighting in Iraq leaves 4,500 Americans dead and 32,000 wounded, according to the Associated Press tally. The cost to the U.S. — more than $800 billion. But it was worth it, Panetta says:

“We spilled a lot of blood there,” the defense secretary said earlier this week. “But all of that has not been in vain. It’s been to achieve a mission making that country sovereign and independent and able to govern and secure itself.”

The BBC reported that in the city of Falluja on Wednesday, Iraqis burned U.S. flags to celebrate the war’s end. Some Iraqis say the U.S. did not live up to its promise to leave behind a secure and stable Iraq.

Only time will tell if the if we have left behind a “secure and stable” Iraq.

http://phillipsblog.dailymail.co.uk/2011/12/help-stop-this-dangerous-candidate-hes-told-the-truth.html

US presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich (whose Lazarus-like trajectory to the Republican nomination I flagged up here a month ago) has recently demonstrated yet again Melanie’s First Rule of Modern Political Discourse – the more obvious the truth that you utter, the more explosive and abusive the reaction.

For Gingrich said the Palestinian Arabs were ‘an invented people’ – and the world promptly started hurling execrations at him, as if such a statement proved beyond doubt that Gingrich was indeed a dangerously extreme individual who, when it came to political positioning, was just off the graph altogether.

http://times247.com/ Romney’s hardships abroad included living in a ‘palace’ \Read more at: http://times247.com/ Stabenow begged in vain for Corzine cash Washington Examiner Friday, December 16, 2011 Blogs Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., chaired the first Senate panel before which former MF Global CEO Jon Corzine testified this week. She had reasons to scold him — he […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1022

ALSO PLEASE READ:
YORAM ETTINGER: WHO ARE THE PALESTINIANS? http://bit.ly/up8bJm

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the geographic term “Palestine” was predominantly associated – from biblical times until the 1948 establishment of Israel- with the Jewish people, Jewish history and Jewish geography. It was the crux of Jewish national aspirations, the Jewish Homeland.

In 135 AD, Judaea was renamed “Palestina,” by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, following the suppression of the Jewish uprising, in order to eradicate Jewish nationhood and to uproot the inherent Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel. Similarly, Jerusalem was renamed “Aelia Capitolina,” in honor of Aelius Hadrian and the Roman Capitol, in an attempt to obliterate Jewish association with the spiritual and physical core of Judaism.

Since 1949, and increasingly since 1967, the term “Palestine” has been employed, by Israel’s enemies, in order to delegitimize the existence of the Jewish State. In April 1950, Judea and Samaria were renamed “the West Bank”, by the Jordanian occupation, in order to assert Jordanian rule, and expunge Jewish connection to the cradle of Jewish history. Until 1950, all official Ottoman, British and prior records referred to “Judea and Samaria” and not to the “West Bank.”

“Palestine” is a derivative of the Hebrew term “Plishtim” (invaders), the Biblical name of the Philistines, non-Semites from the Greek islands and from Phoenicia, who migrated in the 12th century BCE to Pleshet, along the Mediterranean. The term “Palestine” was established, in the 5th century BC, by the Greek historian, Herodotus, and adopted in 135 AD, by the Roman Empire, in an attempt to erase “Judaea” from human memory.

According to Prof. Bernard Lewis, the icon of Mid-East historians (International History Review, January, 1980), “the earliest attempts at a territorial definition of the country later known as Palestine are in the Bible.” In its attempts to devastate Jewish national aspirations, the Roman Empire attached Palestine to the province of Syria. In 400 AD, Palestine was split into Palestina Prima – with its capital in Caesarea – and Palestina Secunda – with its capital in Bethshean, further diminishing the stature of Jerusalem.

Prof. Lewis notes that the 7th century Arab conquest of Palestine perpetuated the neglect of Jerusalem, while elevating the status of Lydda, Ramla and Tiberias. “In the early medieval Arabic usage, Filastin [Palestine] and Urdunn [Jordan] were sub-districts forming part of the greater geographical entity known as Syria…. Under Roman, Byzantine and Islamic rule, Palestine was politically submerged. It reappeared only under the Crusaders…. the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem….

“Under the successors of Saladin, and still more under the Mamluks, the country was redistributed in new territorial units … with its capital in Damascus…. After the Ottoman conquest in 1516-17, the country was divided into Ottoman administrative districts… subject to the authority of the Governor-General of Damascus….

“[The term Palestine] was no longer used by Muslims, for whom it had never meant more than an administrative sub-district and it had been forgotten even in that limited sense….

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2011/12/16/main-feature/1/the-trouble-with-hitchens

HIS BROTHER PETER JONATHAN HITCHENS IS A MOST HONORABLE MAN. CONDOLENCES AND GRATITUDE FOR DEFYING HIS BROTHER’S SHODDY RECORD ON ISRAEL ARE EXTENDED TO HIM. HITCHENS WAS OFTEN WITTY AND ARTICULATE AND HIS “DISH” ON THE BRITISH ROYALS WAS HILARIOUS. HIS COLUMNS IN VANITY FAIR WERE A PLEASURE TO READ. TOO BAD HE DID NOT LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO HAVE AN EPIPHANY ABOUT ISRAEL AND JEWS AS HE DID ABOUT THE LEFT AND COMMUNISM….RSK

“Indeed, this final point is the essential one, because it goes to the heart of Hitchens’s attitudes toward Judaism. Like Shahak, Hitchens’s vision is of a world in which there will be no more Judaism. One should be honest about what this means: it means the religious, cultural, political, and social extinction of the Jews as Jews. In the world as Hitchens would have it, the Jew would cease to exist.”

When the celebrated columnist and author Christopher Hitchens passed away yesterday at the age of 62, the encomia started pouring in almost immediately. Most of this praise is deserved, as the acumen of Hitchens’s muscular criticism and the wit of his ripostes will be with us for a long time to come.

The praise comes not just for his work, but for his character. Christopher Buckley saw Hitchens, a famous disbeliever—indeed, a crusader against God—as himself possessed of a great soul. Perhaps a Jewish soul: When Buckley encountered the partially Jewish Hitchens at a bar mitzvah, “the word ‘Shalom’ sprang naturally from my lips.”

And there’s the rub. While we are told not to speak ill of the dead, it is no less crucial to have the record of their lives straight. Critics’ personal affection for Hitchens should not obscure the fact that he had a troubling bête noire in Judaism and indulged freely in some of the most barbarous and defamatory stereotypes about the Jewish people. One year ago, Benjamin Kerstein laid bare Hitchens’s views of Judaism, the Jewish people, and the Jewish state in Jewish Ideas Daily. We reprint his essay (originally titled “Christopher Hitchens’s Jewish Problem”) here, in hopes that readers will see the mixed legacy of this most epicurean epikorus for what it is. —The Editors

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http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/12/violent-rioters-and-media-goon.php

On Monday night, hooligans identified with the national religious camp staged three unlawful, and in at least one case violent, protests against the IDF.
First, several dozen people surrounded by hundreds of reporters pretended to set up a new settlement along the border with Jordan. Their aim was to protest Jordan’s opposition to repairing the Mugrabi Bridge through which Jews and Christians alight to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

The second and third protests’ declared aim was to prevent the IDF from carrying out orders to destroy Ramat Gilad, a small enclave of homes in Samaria located on land owned by rancher Moshe Zar and named for his son Gilad who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists in 2001.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=249674
The Palestinians aspiration is not to establish a state of their own but to dismantle a state of others

I think there is an Arab nation. I do not think there is a Palestinian nation. I think it’s a colonialist invention… When were there any Palestinians? …until the 19th century Palestine was the south of greater Syria. – Azmi Bishara, 1994

I think we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community. – Newt Gingrich, 2011

Newt Gingrich is to be warmly commended on his recent statement underscoring the lack of authenticity of Palestinian nationality.

It is rare that someone of such public stature has the courage to give facts precedence over political correctness in his public pronouncements. It certainly has set the proverbial cat among the pigeons, sending analysts and activists scurrying for their history books in feverish search for passages or interpretations of passages that reaffirm or refute Gingrich’s assertion, depending on their political predilections.

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Taliban-cut-nursing-woman-s-breast–asked-others-to-eat-pieces–UN-backed-report/888403

AN E-PAL SENT THIS PITHY COMMENT…
………….just when you think the religion of peace cannot possibly demonstrate more demonic barbarian behavior………………yet, ask Ron Paul and he’ll tell you that they only do these things ‘because we interfere in their regions’…………..[Paul should be exiled to THIS region, for life.]

Pakistani Taliban fighters cut the breasts of a woman who was breastfeeding her child and asked other women to eat the pieces, in a gory incident highlighted in a report on the abuse of women in the militancy-hit tribal belt bordering Afghanistan.

The incident occurred when five militants walked into a house and saw the woman breastfeeding her child, The Express Tribune quoted the report titled ‘Impact of crisis on women and girls in FATA’ as saying.

The report, released by the human rights organisation “Khwendo Kor” (Sisters’ Home in Pashto) with financial support from the UN, is based on case studies of women from the tribal belt living in camps set up in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa for people displaced by militancy.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204553904577102650015518264.html#printMode   One of the most widely photographed acts of President Obama’s first year in office was his symbolic pre-dawn salute to the caskets of U.S. soldiers returning to Dover Air Force Base. In the case of a terrorist named Ali Musa Daqduq, who was released yesterday from U.S. custody in Iraq, the President is […]

http://townhall.com/columnists/dianawest/2011/12/16/iraq_hawks_leave_open_a_door_that_should_be_slammed_shut

Iraq Hawks Leave a Door Open That Should Be Slammed Shut

I wish I could find the perfect label for the depths of denial and the heights of delusion manifested in Frederick and Kimberly Kagan’s latest declarations on Iraq, published this week in The Washington Post as “opinion.”

Even as our troops withdraw after eight fruitless years, the husband-wife team still sees “American core interests” in Iraq, including “ensuring that Iraq contributes to the security of the Middle East, rather than undermining it through state collapse, civil war or the establishment of a sectarian dictatorship.”

Is that all? Ensuring that Iraq doesn’t collapse, enter civil war or establish a sectarian dictatorship requires an indefinite occupation on a colossal scale (why?) or the total transformation of Iraqi Man (read: Muslim Man), which is the Frankensteinian basis of “winning hearts and minds,” the cornerstone of counterinsurgency theory (COIN).

In another epoch, armies of Christian missionaries might have been the force of choice to rework Islamic culture to such an end; then again, Western nations haven’t fared so well in such endeavors. (Remember the Crusades.) COIN-inspired nation-building is the contemporary, secular alternative. Its adherents burn with a blind zeal that admits no cultural difference between the West and Islam, that sees most arrogantly a universal appeal in their own Judeo-Christian-derived values.

The only stumbling block between COIN values and Islamic acceptance, as COIN elites see it, is PR. The sales pitch. Take off those protective, ballistic glasses, soldier. Eat parasite-ridden goat and wreck your digestive system maybe forever, grunt. Smile. Get to know the people. Walk those roads (bang) and see that those wells and bridges are built, those mosques mended, those tribal conflicts settled, and don’t call in fire support when a “kinetic” incident occurs or the “population” will think you don’t trust them. And whatever you do, don’t forget the payola.

But remaking human beings, “re-educating” people to conform to ideological goals, doesn’t ever work out well, whether the policy is enacted through bribery by nation-builders with guns bearing gifts, or?through force by commissars destroying civilization with gulags.

No doubt the Kagans would disagree with my premise. They see no gulf so existential between the West and the Islamic world. In their eyes, it’s an easy-peasy fix when it comes to Iraq, requiring just two conditions. “First,” they write, “Iraq must be able to control, police and defend its territory, airspace and waters. Second, Iraq must preserve and solidify the multiethnic and cross-sectarian political accommodation that was established in 2008 and 2009 but that has been eroding since the formation of the current government.”

Again, is that all? Not only are these beyond Iraqi competence and scope, they aren’t American interests. They are Iraqi interests, if Iraqis care. They are also international interests that global interventionists arbitrarily obsess about, whether in Iraq, Libya or any other hot spot du jour. It is not in America’s interest whether Iraq preserves and solidifies multiethnic and cross-sectarian blah blah blah. It is, however, in the interest of the unreconstructed Iraq Hawks, the COINdinistas, and their political allies because these are the theoretical justifications for their failed missions. In many ways, Obama’s reluctant troop withdrawal, which, last time I looked, fulfilled George W. Bush’s agreement with Iraq, is the best thing that has happened to them. It keeps the fantasy of “if only” alive.

“Neither condition is likely to be met in the coming years,” the Kagans write. Thanks to Obama, they hereby absolve themselves of any and all responsibility for the impossibility of these conditions — the conditions of COIN nation-building — ever being met. They are free. Or so they seem to think.

But maybe there’s a chance to take another whack at things. Noting violations of international agreements by Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the Kagans write: “Responsible nations should insist that Iraq demonstrate its commitment to those obligations. The president should tell Maliki in no uncertain terms that Washington will hold him to account in the international arena if Iraq does not.”

Excuse me, isn’t that where we came in?