RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/12/rewarding-aggression/

Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, reports that Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian legislator and member of the PLO’s Executive Committee, has told Tony Blair, former British prime minister and currently representative of the Middle East Quartet, that unless Israel stops its objectionable behavior the Palestinians won’t return to negotiations.

She was referring to two meetings that were held in Amman this month between an Israeli and a Palestinian negotiator. All accounts agree that the talks were held to appease Quartet pressure and haven’t yielded anything. Whereas Israel expresses an ongoing willingness to keep trying, PA president Mahmoud Abbas has said that if Israel does not submit to Palestinian preconditions by January 26 “all options will be open”—by which he means finalizing a deal with Hamas and Islamic Jihad leading to “popular resistance.”

What Israel has to do, Ashrawi told Blair, is stop settlement activity and precommit to the 1967 borders. She complained: “With its stepped-up illegal settlement campaign and continued efforts to create facts on the ground, Israel is undermining any and all efforts to stimulate peace.”

Obama’s Enviro-Racketeering Posted By Rich Trzupek

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/12/obamas-enviro-racketeering/

ALSO PLEASE READ:
How the EPA is Ruining American Industry Interview with Rich Trzupek, author of “Regulators Gone Wild”Rael Jean Isaac

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10596/pub_detail.asp

As I have noted on more than one occasion, in recent years the United States EPA has been acting more and more like a revenue-generating arm of the government than an agency that’s actually interested in protecting human health and the environment. A recent story published in the New York Times amply illustrates the point: fuel suppliers are being fined for failing to add a “green fuel” – cellulosic ethanol – that doesn’t actually exist into their gasoline blends.

Cellulosic ethanol has long been a particularly prized panacea among environmental groups. As any moonshiner knows, conventional ethanol has long been produced by fermenting naturally grown sugars. These sugars are readily available and relatively easy to get at in corn for example, which is why ethanol production plants commonly use corn as their feedstock. However, even Al Gore eventually realized that it was rather idiotic to take millions of acres of farmland out of food and feed production in order to “grow” a fuel that (in many gases) actually ends up on the deficit side of the energy ledger. Cellulosic ethanol theoretically addresses those concerns.

Compromise Impossible Posted By Daniel Greenfield

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/12/compromise-impossible/

The Western doctrine of non-violence depends on the willingness to compromise. To resolve any conflict by sitting down at a table, finding points of agreement and then working through the rest. The ruthless killing fields of the twentieth century have not shaken that eternal faith in a diplomatic solution, rather they have only strengthened it. But what happens when a compromise is genuinely impossible?

The commitment to non-violence depends on the assumption that while small numbers of fanatics might seek war, the vast majority of people do not. And even if they do want war, they want a humane war, not a genocidal war of extermination. Therefore even when such wars are fought, they do not reflect the will of the people, only that of a small group of fanatics.

That such a manifestly absurd belief that flies in the face of human history could be so widely held among the decision makers of the world’s dominant civilizations is itself apt testimony to the decline and fall of those civilizations. Nevertheless this belief remains unshakeable.

Atrocities are attributed to a dictator and a few of his cronies. Remove the dictator, roll in the voting booths and then we need make war no more. But the rise of Islamic terrorism presents an explosive challenge to that worldview. There is no Hitler or Stalin of Islam. No small group holding power on which everything can be blamed. In the age of terrorism, it is the ordinary Muslim who acts as the killer. Who sheds his guise of humanity and kills.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11210/pub_detail.asp
I love Canada. I love Canadians. I like very much what their government is doing. I have great faith in their future. And if it weren’t for their winters, I’d go and live there like a shot. Weird, huh?

Well it’s certainly weird enough for those of us old enough to remember Canada in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties when it was little more than an embarrassing liberal-lefty joke. Sure we still remembered the suffering and courage of those plucky Canucks from Vimy Ridge to Dieppe to the Low Countries, but that spirit appeared long since to have vanished under the noisome regime of Pierre Trudeau and his grisly communitarian successors. Canada was like a pale imitation of the US with all the worst aspects of European Socialism and political correctness tacked on to it.

But suddenly – sorry South Park – but Canada-is-cr*p jokes just aren’t funny any more because they lack the key ingredient of truth.

And the truth is that right now, of all the great Western nations Canada is probably the only one left still standing up for the values that made the West great. What better evidence of this could there be than the glorious news that Stephen Harper’s Conservative administration has declared war on the anti-growth, anti-energy, hair-shirt eco-loons who are trying to destroy the Canadian economy? (Mega H/T Benny Peiser at GWPF)

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1769/pub_detail.asp

1. The Shocking List of Gitmo Detainees Obama Plans to Release in Deal with Taliban…WaPo: “Don’t let these Taliban leaders loose”

2. VIDEO: Defending Israel’s Biblical Heartland
3. VIDEO: Bill Whittle: Facing the Arithmetic…What we are doing…can NOT continue
4. The Feds are Partnering with U.S. Colleges to Provide Women from Muslim Counties with a “World-Class” Education
5. VIDEO: Pump Shock! Gas Up 12 Cents in Three Weeks
6. How the UN Achieves Sustainable Peacekeeper Rape
7. VIDEO: Tim Tebow Could Teach DC a Lesson in Character, Rep. West Says
8. FUTURE SHOCK College for today’s newborns could cost as much as $422,000
9. VIDEO: VIDEO: NewsBusters Satire: Who says Conservatives have no sense of humor? (1-10-12)

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11213/pub_detail.asp
A spike has recently occurred in Muslim-American terrorism in the USA. For example, on January 9, 2012, a US-naturalized Kosovar Muslim terrorist was arrested in Florida, while plotting to bomb night clubs in Tampa – a hotbed of Muslim Brotherhood activities and organizations. In December, 2011, the DEA arrested 30 Tampa used-car dealers involved in a Hezbollah drug money laundering. Tampa is the home base of the US Central Command, located at nearby MacDill Air Force Base. In November, 2011, an Al-Qaeda American sympathizer was arrested, in New York, for conspiring to bomb police stations and post offices. This wave of terrorism follows the June, 2010 arrest of eight Muslim terrorists in North Carolina, the May, 2010 foiled Times Square car bombing, the November, 2009 massacre of thirteen soldiers at Ft. Hood, etc.

It has been suggested that Islamic rage and terrorism is triggered by US policies toward Muslim nations. However, The surge in anti-US Islamic terrorism, and the proliferation of Islamic terrorist sleeper cells and training camps in the US and Canada, occur in spite of the US-led bombing of Serbia, which yielded independence to the Muslim-dominated Bosnia and Kosovo, and despite the mega-billion dollar US assistance to the Mujahideen, which ended Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Moreover, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who opposed the war in Iraq and supported Palestinian demands, was inaugurated in June 2007, and was greeted by three Muslim terrorists-engineered car bombs in London and Glasgow. Notwithstanding the generous US foreign aid to Arab countries and to the Palestinian Authority, and irrespective of President Carter’s betrayal of the Shah< of Iran which facilitated the rise to power of Khomeini, the US is increasingly referred to as “the enemy of Allah” and “a modern day Crusader.” According to the leading historian of Islam, Prof. Bernard Lewis, Islam stipulates that “the duty of God's soldiers is to dispatch God's enemies as quickly as possible to the place where God will chastise them—that is to say, the afterlife.”

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.”