RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2001/01/hitchens-200101
Visit to a Small Planet

HITCHENS WROTE THIS EXCELLENT COLUMN IN JANUARY 2001. BOTH AUTHOR AND SUBJECT DIED THIS WEEK…AND I CAN ONLY REGRET THAT HITCHENS’ TRANSFORMATION NEVER INCLUDED RESPECT FOR ISRAEL WHOSE ENEMIES ARE WORSE THAN KIM IL SUNG….RSK
North Koreans worship their dead dictator, Kim Il Sung, and his son the reigning Kim Jong Il, despite the surreal nightmare of famine, isolation, repression, and nuclear peril the dynasty has spawned. In Pyongyang, the author wonders whether mass delusion is the only thing that keeps a people sane.
by Christopher Hitchens

The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as “Fat Man and Little Boy.”) And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It was in January 1968 that the U.S.S. Pueblo strayed into North Korean waters, and was boarded and captured. One sailor was killed; the rest were held for nearly a year before being released. I looked over the spy ship, its radio antennae and surveillance equipment still intact, and found photographs of the captain and crew with their hands on their heads in gestures of abject surrender. Copies of their groveling “confessions,” written in tremulous script, were also on show. So was a humiliating document from the United States government, admitting wrongdoing in the penetration of North Korean waters and petitioning the “D.P.R.K.” (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) for “lenience.” Kim Il Sung (“Fat Man”) was eventually lenient about the men, but not about the ship. Madeleine Albright didn’t ask to see the vessel on her visit last October, during which she described the gruesome, depopulated vistas of Pyongyang as “beautiful.” As I got back onto the wharf, I noticed a refreshment cart, staffed by two women under a frayed umbrella. It didn’t look like much—one of its three wheels was missing and a piece of brick was propping it up—but it was the only such cart I’d see. What toothsome local snacks might the ladies be offering? The choices turned out to be slices of dry bread and cups of warm water.

www.carolineglick.com Why I won’t miss Christopher Hitchens PLEASE READ A HITCHENS COLUMN ON NORTH KOREA’S HOOLIGAN LEADER WHO ALSO DIED THIS WEEK..RSK I have read several appreciations of Hitchens written by conservatives and neo-conservatives who knew him and appreciated his transformation from a man of the left into a man of the right since the […]

Ron Paul’s Newsletter Problem – Yahoo! News
http://news.yahoo.com/ron-pauls-newsletter-problem-185300315.html

RON PAUL IS NOT JUST A CRANKY CURMUDGEON AND GADFLY…HE IS A NASTY AND DANGEROUS BIGOT AND THE IDIOTS WHO MONITOR THE DEBATES JUST GIVE HIM A PASS WHILE THEY HOUND GINGRICH….RSK

Rep. Ron Paul, a leading candidate for president, published a series of monthly newsletters in the 1980s and 1990s, according to a Weekly Standard piece by James Kirchick. He repeats some of information he revealed in a 2008 New Republic piece.

What were the newsletters sent out by Ron Paul?

They went under a variety of names since first published in 1978, two years after Paul was elected to Congress, including “Ron Paul’s Freedom Report,” “Ron Paul Political Report, The Ron Paul Survival Report.” Most of the newsletters were published by a company Paul founded called “Ron Paul and Associates” in 1985 during a hiatus of his congressional career. According to an article in Reason, a tax document from 1993 indicates that the organization had an income of $940 thousand, mainly from sale of the newsletter.

What was published in the various newsletters?

The newsletters did not have a byline but invoked Paul’s name a considerable amount and were written in the first person. The newsletters contained commentary on issues of the day that are presumed to be from Paul’s perspective.

Kirchick has found some of the material in the Paul newsletters to have racially charged contents. In a commentary on the 1992 Los Angeles riots, for example, a “Special Issue on Racial Terrorism” claimed that order was only restored when “blacks lined up for their welfare checks.” Another issue accused Martin Luther King Jr. of seducing underage boys and girls and of beating up his paramours. Yet another issue recounted a story, not backed up by evidence, that suggested that gangs of teenage black girls were roaming the streets of New York and deliberately injecting white women with HIV infected syringes.

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2587/christians-middle-east

FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON THE SYSTEMATIC PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS IN MOSLEM COUNTRIES PLEASE GO TO THE EXCELLENT SITE :

http://www.persecution.org/

Of the eight million people or so living in Israel, around 20% are Arabs—of whom about 7% are Christian. Israel’s Arab Christians, in other words, number only about 110,000 people, living mostly in tight communities in Jerusalem and the Galilee.

For all the solicitous attention paid to them by such international Christian organizations as the World Council of Churches, you would think they were a larger and more important group. Much of the Vatican’s diplomacy—its occasionally adversarial relations with Israel, its Palestinian favoritism, its reluctance to condemn the Islamic dictatorships—derives from its belief that the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East are at risk, and that the best way to defend them is to be seen to side with Arabs against their perceived enemies.

Hard to say the Vatican is wrong about the first part. At the beginning of the twentieth century, large numbers of Christians still lived in their traditional Orthodox and Catholic communities, from the Holy Mountain of Mount Athos all the way around the Mediterranean—through Asia Minor, down the Levant, and across North Africa to Morocco. In 1914, they made up 25% of Ottoman Empire.

The next year the Turks began the systematic part of their slaughter of the Armenians, and the churches of the Middle East have been in catastrophic decline ever since. By 2001, Christians were down to less than 1% of the Turkish population. The recent news out of Egypt—thousands of Coptic Christians fleeing the country since March, with 28 killed and hundreds wounded in Cairo on October 9—is only the latest installment in the ongoing story of the dying of ancient Christianity in the Middle East. The single most dangerous thing in the world to be, right now, is a member of a Christian community in a Muslim country.

The second part of the Vatican’s view of the Middle East, however—the idea that what is left of the Christians can be defended by trying to forge relations with Muslim extremists—has proved dangerously wrong, both as an understanding of the Christians’ situation and as a strategy for helping them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/vaclav-havel-dissident-playwright-and-former-czech-president-dies/2010/09/21/gIQATAeD2O_story.html

Vaclav Havel, a Czech writer who was imprisoned by his country’s communist rulers, only to become a symbol of freedom and his nation’s first president in the post-communist era, died Dec. 18 at his weekend home in the northern Czech Republic. He was 75.

The death was announced by his assistant, Sabina Tancevova, the Associated Press reported. Mr. Havel underwent surgery for lung cancer in 1996 and had suffered from lung ailments in recent months.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/12/18/havel-dissent-communism-democracy/

The death today of Vaclav Havel at the age of 75 reminds us what it truly means to speak up for liberty against tyranny. A playwright who became a symbol of dissent against an evil Soviet empire, Havel spent years in Communist jails for his activities and writings that championed individual freedom. He co-authored the Charter 77 manifesto that gave new life to the cause of human rights in his own country and helped inspire others elsewhere living under the Soviet yoke. Eventually, he helped lead his nation to freedom after the fall of the Berlin Wall and served as the first president of a free Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic after the Slovaks left to form their own nation.

But there is more to be learned from recounting the story of Havel’s sacrifices and triumphs than just a tale of individual heroism. What ought to be remembered about Havel and the “Velvet Revolution” that he led to victory is that it was won by an uncompromising defense of the principle of democracy and individual rights when many unenlightened Western “realists” and liberals made it clear they were more interested in accommodating the Soviets than working to free those suffering under their tyranny. Havel’s struggles also gives us a yardstick by which we can measure the worthiness of contemporary protest movements around the world that now claim the mantle of dissent.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/company-ron-paul-keeps_613474.html

The Republican Jewish Coalition announced this month that congressman Ron Paul would not be among the six guests invited to participate in its Republican Presidential Candidates Forum. “He’s just so far outside of the mainstream of the Republican party and this organization,” said Matt Brooks, executive director of the RJC, adding that the group “rejects his misguided and extreme views.”

Paul’s exclusion caused an uproar, with critics alleging that his stand on Israel had earned the RJC’s ire; an absolutist libertarian, Paul opposes foreign aid to all countries, including the Jewish state. “This seems to me more of an attempt to draw boundaries around acceptable policy discourse than any active concern that President Dr. Ron Paul would be actively anti-Israel or anti-Semitic,” wrote Reason editor Matt Welch. Chris McGreal of the Guardian reported that Paul “was barred because of his views on Israel.” Even Seth Lipsky, editor of the New York Sun and a valiant defender of Israel (and friend and mentor of this writer), opined, “The whole idea of an organization of Jewish Republicans worrying about the mainstream strikes me as a bit contradictory.”

While Paul’s views on Israel certainly place him outside the American, never mind Republican, mainstream, there is an even more elementary reason the RJC was right to exclude him from its event. It is Paul’s lucrative and decades-long promotion of bigotry and conspiracy theories, for which he has yet to account fully, and his continuing espousal of extremist views, that should make him unwelcome at any respectable forum, not only those hosted by Jewish organizations.

http://shmuelkatz.com/wordpress/?p=840&Source=email

“Trying to portray Obama as pro-Israel is not a simple task. From the outset of his tenure in office, Obama has distinguished himself as the most anti-Israel president ever,” Caroline Glick writes in a September op-ed for The Jerusalem Post.

After providing a laundry list of historic presidential firsts against Israel, Glick adds: “Given Obama’s record – to which can be added his fervent support for Turkish Prime Minister and virulent anti-Semite Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his courtship of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and his massive weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and Egypt – it is obvious that any attempt to argue that Obama is pro-Israel cannot be based on substance, or even on tone.”

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/12/18/obama-israel-reform-iran/

As I noted earlier, President Obama’s pitch for the Jewish vote has more to do with his appeal to knee-jerk liberalism on a host of non-Jewish issues than it does with concern for Israel’s welfare. Nevertheless, it is a misnomer to think liberal Jews such as those who cheered Obama Friday at the Reform biennial, don’t care about the Jewish state.

However, their willingness to accept Obama’s claims on the topic says more about their desire not to turn on a Democrat than it says about his virtues. One must ignore much of what has transpired in the last three years in order to believe the president’s claims.

The main element of Obama’s claim is that he has done more for Israel’s security than any of his predecessors. It is true he has done nothing to interfere with the security alliance that has grown since it was initiated during the Reagan administration. Military aid has flowed in large amounts, and for that Obama deserves some credit. But to speak, as he does, as if this relationship was invented by him, is absurd. On Friday, he alluded, as his defenders often do, to the Iron Dome missile defense system the two nations have created. But that project was initiated and funded by the Bush administration. The most we can say of Obama’s involvement is that he chose not to prevent it from being deployed.