RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Narrative of Perpetual Palestinian Victimhood

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2586/palestinian-victimhood-narrative

Shelby Steele, Robert J and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute, member of the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.

The following is excerpted from a speech delivered September 22, 2011 in New York City at the conference “The Perils of Global Intolerance: The UN and Durban III,” sponsored by the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and the Hudson Institute.

The Arab-Israeli conflict, is not really a conflict, it is a war – a war of the Arabs against the Jews. In many ways, this conflict has been a conflict between narratives. We who strongly support Israel have done a poor job in formulating a narrative which will combat the story spun by the other side. We can do better.

The Durban conferences, the request for UN recognition of a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood, and the general animus in the Middle East and elsewhere toward Israel and toward the Jews, what are they really about? Is the Durban conference and the claim that Israel is a racist nation really about reforming the people of Israel and curing them of their racism?

I think their real interest is to situate the Palestinian people within a narrative of victimization. This is their ulterior goal: to see themselves and to have others see them as victims of colonialism, as victims of white supremacy.

Listen to their language; it is the language of colonial oppression. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas claims that Palestinians have been occupied for 63 years. The word oppressed is constant, exploited. In this, there is a poetic truth; like poetic license, in a poetic truth a writer will bend the rules in order to be more effective.

http://times247.com/articles/obama-planning-bypass-of-congress-to-soften-immigration-law

The president is making another bold move against Congress today, this time using his executive power to make changes to an immigration rule. The changes would allow illegal immigrants whose spouses or children are legal US residents to apply for a waiver from some penalties while they seek legal status.

Currently, they are required to return to their home countries before they can ask the US government for a visa to come back to the United States legally. Those visas are often subject to a three-to-10-year ban on returning to the US. …

It is Obama’s third salvo in as many days in his war against GOP members of Congress. Republicans have criticized the administration’s previous immigration policy changes as “backdoor amnesty.” Read the original article at Politico

Read more at: http://times247.com/articles/obama-planning-bypass-of-congress-to-soften-immigration-law

‘We can’t wait’: Obama skirts Congress on immigration
President Obama plans to take executive action to soften immigration policy — without congressional approval. Photo Credit:AP

West: Obama’s military cuts show ‘incompetence’
Rep. Allen West has harsh criticism for President Obama’s proposed military cuts. Photo Credit:AP
Rep. Allen West says the military cuts outlined by President Barack Obama at the Pentagon Thursday show “incompetence” in understanding the nation’s national security needs and the defense strategy is not “coherent.” …

“We’re not talking about a coherent national security strategy — what the president laid out is very dangerous and it really does show incompetence in understanding national security strategy,” West said. … West said the administration cannot take a “one-size-fits-all” approach to the nation’s military needs and operations, and noted the administration’s strategy shows military leaders were probably not consulted in devising the defense cuts.

“I can tell you that is probably the case — I have heard some rumination to that effect,” West said. “The guidance he gave was not oriented towards how we have a strategy to contend with threats across the world — it was more so based on a budget analysis.”

Read more at: http://times247.com/articles/west-obama-s-military-cuts-show-incompetence

www.hebronfund.org Yesterday my wife and I spent Shabbat in Jerusalem with some friends. They made Aliyah a year and a half ago and invited us to spend the day with them in the “Holy City.” After arriving at their apartment in the Kiryat Shmuel neighborhood of Jerusalem, I asked what time they leave the house […]

http://times247.com/articles/real-jobless-rate-stands-at-11-4-percent

One does not need to be a rocket scientist to grasp the fudging the BLS has been doing every month for years now in order to bring the unemployment rate lower: the BLS constantly lowers the labor force participation rate as more and more people “drop out” of the labor force for one reason or another. While there is some floating speculation that this is due to early retirement, this is completely counterfactual when one also considers the overall rise in the general civilian non institutional population. In order to back out this fudge we are redoing an analysis we did first back in August 2010, which shows what the real unemployment rate would be using a realistic labor force participation rate. To get that we used the average rate since 1980, or ever since the great moderation began. As it happens, this long-term average is 65.8% (chart 1). We then apply this participation rate to the civilian noninstitutional population to get what an “implied” labor force number is, and additionally calculate the implied unemployed using this more realistic labor force. We then show the difference between the reported and implied unemployed (chart 2). Finally, we calculate the jobless rate using this new implied data. It won’t surprise anyone that as of December, the real implied unemployment rate was 11.4% (final chart) – basically where it has been ever since 2009 – and at 2.9% delta to reported, represents the widest divergence to reported data since the early 1980s. And because we know this will be the next question, extending this lunacy, America will officially have no unemployed, when the Labor Force Participation rate hits 58.5%, which should be just before the presidential election.
SEE THE CHARTS

http://bigpeace.com/kpatton/2012/01/07/worlds-largest-missile-exercise-soon-to-take-place-with-u-s-troops-inside-israel/

IN 1991 THE PATRIOT MISSILES SENT TO ISRAEL WERE NOT SUCH A BENIGN REWARD FOR ISRAEL. IN FACT, AFTER BEING ATTACKED WITH IRAQI SCUD MISSILES ISRAEL REQUESTED THE “FRIENDLY CRAFT” CODE IN ORDER TO RESPOND DECISIVELY TO IRAQ…AND THE REQUEST WAS TURNED DOWN BY PRESIDENT BUSH, DICK CHENEY AND JAMES BAKER….TO THEIR GREAT SHAME….FEAR OF OFFENDING ARABS INHIBITED THAT ADMINISTRATION….RSK

On January 19th 1991, during the first Gulf War, the United States sent Patriot Missiles and a contingent of U.S. service members into Israel on temporary assignment. This was the least we could have done for Israel, as they vowed not to respond to Saddam’s SCUD attacks which reached deep inside Tel Aviv. Never have U.S. forces found a permanent home inside the Holy Land—until today.

Twenty years later, the United States committed to a permanent presence in Israel. According to Defense News, as of September 21st 2011, the United States deployed a high-powered, high-frequency, transportable X-band radar system to Israel along with a small contingent of support personnel. Designed to detect and track ballistic missiles soon after launch, the AN/TPY-2 Transportable Radar Surveillance/Forward Based X-band Transportable (FBX-T), its ancillary components, and some 120 EUCOM personnel are prepared to defeat any Iranian missile attack. Today, these service members make their home at Israel’s Nevatim Air Base.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/287410/left-s-so-called-empathy-mark-steyn
Lest you doubt that we’re headed for the most vicious election year in memory, consider the determined effort, within ten minutes of his triumph in Iowa, to weirdify Rick Santorum. Discussing the surging senator on Fox News, Alan Colmes mused on some of the “crazy things” he’s said and done.

Santorum has certainly said and done many crazy things, as have most members of America’s political class, but the “crazy thing” Colmes chose to focus on was Santorum’s “taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after childbirth home,” whereupon he “played with it.” My National Review colleague Rich Lowry rightly slapped down Alan on air, and Colmes subsequently apologized, though not before Mrs. Santorum had been reduced to tears by his remarks. Undeterred, Eugene Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post columnist, doubled down on stupid and insisted that Deadbabygate demonstrated how Santorum is “not a little weird, he’s really weird.”

#ad#The short life of Gabriel Santorum would seem a curious priority for political discourse at a time when the Brokest Nation in History is hurtling toward its rendezvous with destiny. But needs must, and victory by any means necessary. In 2008, the Left gleefully mocked Sarah Palin’s live baby. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to a dead one.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/01/looming_destruction_will_jews_ever_learn.html

On the eve of the Second World War, Chaim Weizmann, who was to become Israel’s first president, wrote the following about the persecutions taking place in Nazi Germany:

It would require the eloquence of a Jeremiah to picture the horrors, the human anguish, of this new Destruction and of a new book of Lamentations to depict the present plight of Israel among the nations.

Several decades earlier, Max Nordau, one of the most noted European philosophers of the 19th century, and supporter of Theodore Herzl, once told the great Zionist leader and Jewish patriot, Vladimir Jabotinsky, that “the Jew learns not by way of reason, but from catastrophes. He won’t buy an umbrella merely because he sees clouds in the sky. He waits until he is drenched and catches pneumonia.”

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The decline of the entertainment industry is all around us. Movie ticket sales have dropped sharply even with inflated numbers from IMAX and 3D movies. Network viewership has declined even more dramatically leaving big three letter networks with numbers that look more like cable. Even the music industry is a ghost of its former self.

The entertainment industry has done its best to disguise this state of affairs with glamor and big numbers. More money is invested in bigger budget projects than ever before, and some of those projects yield incredible sales numbers, but the occasional megahit can’t disguise the overall decay of the basic business model as more and more money has to be spent to draw in a declining base. It now costs more to promote a successful movie, show or performer than it takes to produce the creative content. The hundreds of millions of dollars that used to go into product development go into sales now. And the sales look good until you start taking a close look at the big picture and the bottom line. No matter how big the hits are, overall ticket sales are down, television viewership is down and there is no relief in sight.

The industry has blamed the Internet, and while technology has historically played a role in eclipsing and destabilizing technology linked entertainment business models, which movies, television and the music business certainly are, it’s an insufficient explanation. The Internet is a source of creative chaos, but the source of the entertainment industry’s woes come from inside its own gates.

http://www.examiner.com/law-enforcement-in-national/president-obama-s-myopic-view-of-the-muslim-brotherhood?render=print#print

Special thanks to Jeffrey Hochman, a former American police sergeant now living in Israel, for his invaluable help in acquiring intelligence reports regarding terrorist groups.

President Barack Obama’s view of the Muslim Brotherhood is based on his — and his advisors’ — apparent rationale that the Islamist group is reformed and much more like the American and European models of pluralistic societies.

However, experts on Islam and terrorism claim that the Muslim Brotherhood’s — and the radical Salafists — dominance of the Egyptian government, by virtue of its recent parliamentary election victories, will eventually lead to the imposition of Sharia law on Islamic Arabs and jihad against infidels.

“Nothing the Obama administration is trying to do through its aggressive overtures, including recent high-level meetings with Muslim Brotherhood officials, will change that fact. Jihad is embedded in its history, as evidenced by the violent Islamic jihadist organizations such as Hamas that it spawned. And let’s not forget that it was the Muslim Brotherhood that gave Osama bin Laden’s former deputy and current leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, his start,” said attorney and World Net Daily investigative journalist Joseph Klein.

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Belmont—Fishtown-7250

“Worst of all, a growing proportion of the people who run the institutions of our country have never known any other culture. They are the children of upper-middle-class parents, have always lived in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and gone to upper-middle-class schools. Many have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn’t have a college degree, never hunted or fished. They are likely to know that Garrison Keillor’s monologue on Prairie Home Companion is the source of the phrase “all of the children are above average,” but they have never walked on a prairie and never known someone well whose IQ actually was below average.”

READ IT ALL AT THE SITE