RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2012/01/is-israeli-society-unraveling.php
On balance, Israeli society is extremely healthy.
Unemployment is at record lows. At a time of global recession, the Israeli economy is growing steadily.

Israeli Jewish women have the highest fertility rate in the Western world with an average of three children per woman. Education levels have risen dramatically across the board over the past decade with dozens of private colleges opening their doors to more and more sectors of the population.

Israel’s diverse Jewish population is becoming more integrated. Sephardic and Ashkenazi intermarriage has long been a norm. Secular Jews are becoming more religious. A new educational trend that received significant media attention in recent months involves secular parents who send their children to national religious schools to ensure that they receive strong educational grounding in Judaism.

And as secular Jews become more religious, both the national religious and ultra-Orthodox sectors are becoming increasingly integrated in nonreligious neighborhoods and institutions. Ultra-Orthodox conscription rates have increased seven-fold in the past four years. In 2010, 50 percent of ultra-Orthodox male high school graduates were conscripted.

The IDF assesses that by 2015, the rate of conscription will rise to 65%.

While this is still below the general conscription rate of 75% among male 18-year-olds, the rapid rise in ultra-Orthodox military service is a revolutionary development for the sector.

With military service comes entrée to the job market. The trail towards employment integration was blazed by ultra-Orthodox women. Over the past decade, ultra-Orthodox women have matriculated en masse in vocational schools that have trained them in hi-tech and other marketable professions and so enabled them to raise their families out of poverty.

These ultra-Orthodox women, who are now being followed by their IDF veteran husbands, are part of a general trend that has seen women fully integrated in almost every sector of society and the economy. The fact that women make up the senior leadership echelons in both business and government is not a fluke. Rather it is a product of the largely egalitarian nature of Israeli society.

The Coming Collapse of the European Union

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2722/european-union-collapse

How could so many clever people get it so wrong? The question was recently asked by the British politician Daniel Hannan in an article on the collapse of the euro; in the coming months, the same question will be asked more and more often about Europe itself.

Europe as it has been built may appear at best a huge error, and at worst a crime against the spirit of liberty that was supposed to be the initial source of inspiration for the whole edifice.

The idea that it is possible to build a society based on abstract principles — without considering historical, social and economic realities, as if its members were infinitely malleable – has often led to disaster; this time is no different.

The formation of this error began in the aftermath of World War II. Looking at the ruins left by Nazism and Fascism, politicians from various European countries fabricated a project meant to erase all past mistakes committed on the continent. They only repeated the mistakes.

OBAMA’S PAEAN TO HIMSELF (WITH APOLOGIES TO COLE PORTER’ BRILLIANT LYRICS) http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/de-lovely/yourethetop.htm At words poetic, I’m so pathetic That I always have found it best, Instead of getting ’em off my chest, To let ’em rest unexpressed, I hate parading my serenading As I’ll probably miss a bar, But if this ditty is not so […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/02/staten-island-jihadist-rats-out-big-roster-of-jihad-plotters/

Staten Island Jihadist Blows Lid Off Plotter Network Posted By Robert Spencer

Abdel Hameed Shehadeh wanted to join the U.S. Army so that he could turn and kill American soldiers. Instead, he has exposed a jihad network of impressive proportions that, if his assertions are true, should end the rush toward politically correct self-deception in the way law enforcement officials approach the problem of jihad terrorism in the United States.

The criminal complaint against him says that he “and several other individuals” were being charged “in connection with a plot to travel overseas and wage violent jihad against the United States and other coalition military forces.” Shehadeh had planned to wage this jihad from within the U.S. military: in 2008, he went to a recruiting station in Times Square and attempted to join the Army, so that he could, according to law enforcement officials, get training that he could use “to fight beside fellow Muslims against their enemies, including United States military forces.”

But things didn’t work out that way. Shehadeh got caught, and quickly began cooperating with authorities. He gave FBI agents a lengthy interview that fills a 22-page report that his lawyers are now trying to deep-six: although Shehadeh gave the interview in an attempt to get a better deal for himself, he quickly started worrying about “how much I incriminated myself,” and so now wants the report suppressed.

Postcard From Islamic London Posted By Ben Shapiro

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/02/postcard-from-islamic-london/

I’ve been spending my Christmas vacation with my wife in Rome and London. We arrived in London on Christmas Eve. It’s truly an amazing city – everywhere you look, there’s history, from the Tower of London to the Churchill Museum. But everywhere you look, there is a more ominous presence: Islam.

Now, no less a personage than Prime Minister David Cameron has already admitted that the integration of Muslims into British society has failed dramatically. In February 2011, Cameron stated,

Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream. We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values.

That failure of integration is clear from the get-go. There are official signs translated into Arabic for those who do not wish to speak or read English. The chatter of Islamic languages is as prevalent as the mother tongue. The hijab is omnipresent.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/02/is-the-west-doomed/print/

At the beginning of a new year, it’s hard to avoid the question: where are we going? What will our future be like? Does America, does freedom, does Western civilization even have a future?

I date my career as a professional writer to an op-ed I published in the Los Angeles Times in the early 1980s. I was a graduate student in English and was also teaching undergraduate composition courses. One of the challenges I faced in the classroom was this: when, in a search for possible topics for my students to write about, I brought up things that I thought of as falling under the category of general knowledge, I found over and over again that most of my students didn’t know what I was talking about. They didn’t know history. Their knowledge of politics, geography, art, and literature was, at best, extremely spotty.

Yes, a few of them were very well informed about some sport or other, or about this or that singer or rock group or actor or TV show, but there was not much overlap between one kid’s knowledge and another’s. There was, in fact, hardly any knowledge that they all shared – and these were students at what was considered a pretty decent college. So I wrote a piece about it.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/02/ron-pauls-soros-defense-plan/

It was recently observed that Ron Paul was to the left of Obama on national security and the best evidence for that statement can be found when one year ago Ron Paul joined forces with Barney Frank on a proposal to gut national defense via a panel of experts, quite a few of whom were tied to George Soros.

In July 2010, Barney Frank and Ron Paul co-authored a Huffington Post article rolling out their Sustainable Defense Task Force. The Task Force “consisting of experts on military expenditures that span the ideological spectrum” would recommend a trillion dollars in defense cuts. The experts, however, didn’t quite “span the ideological spectrum” — more like float under it.

The panel of experts who would decide how to best gut national defense featured such independent thinkers as William D. Hartung of the New America Foundation. Hartung’s main expertise was appearing in “Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire.”

Then there was Lawrence J. Kolb of the Center for American Progress and Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies. If you want to know what the Center, the Foundation and the Institute all have in common, it’s Hungarian and smells like stale cabbage and the death of nations.

The rather creepy Institute for Policy Studies issued a paper proposing that Obama act as king and rule through executive orders. The New American Foundation is not only backed by Soros but has his son on its leadership council. The Center for American Progress is run by the co-chair of Obama’s transition team and is, for all intents and purposes, the think tank of the White House. All three are Soros funded.

But it doesn’t end there. Also on the panel was Christopher Hellman of the National Priorities Project (NPP). If you are wondering what the NPP is, it’s a think tank whose objective is to “influence national spending priorities.” And if you’re in the mood for a double, Miriam Pemberton is also on the board of the NPP. The man behind the curtain at NPP? None other than our favorite Hungarian James Bond villain.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/fake_fake_fake_fake.html
Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake! By S. Fred Singer

In discussing the recent release of some 5,000 Climategate e-mails, blogger Anthony Watts uses the clever headline “They are real — and they’re spectacular.” He credits Jerry Seinfeld as the source. Following his example, I choose the headline “Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake!” — also taken from a Seinfeld episode — in discussing the surface temperatures generally reported for the latter part of the 20th century; they form the science basis for prosperity-killing international climate policy.

Here I am using the word “fake” as an adjective, and not as a verb. I mean to say that the scientific conclusions derived from such temperatures are not real, but I don’t imply that the values themselves have been purposefully altered or adjusted. We simply don’t have any information to support such an accusation.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/us_delusional_about_arab_spring_iran_insists.html

The Arab Spring is turning into an American Winter, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, believes. Countries from Tunisia and Egypt to Yemen and Bahrain, he insists, are struggling to overthrow ties to the West and embrace Islamist movements, which in the end will look to Iran for leadership.

And the leadership Iran would provide in such a scenario could bring on Armageddon as it amasses nuclear weapons in its quest for Islamic world domination.

“The developments currently unfolding in the world are different than those of the past since they are anti-U.S. and popular in nature,” Khamenei said recently, according to MehrNews, the mouthpiece of the Islamic regime in Iran. “Some assume that the United States is stage-managing these developments behind the scenes, but it is sheer delusion. … Today what we hear in the Arab streets are the same slogans that the Islamic nation of Iran has been saying for the past 30 years.” he said.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/1/decker-five-questions-rick-perry/?page=all#pagebreak

-Gov. Rick Perry is a candidate for the Republican nomination for president. He has been elected governor three times and served the remainder of George W. Bush’s second term when the latter became the 43rd president of the United States, making Mr. Perry the longest-serving chief executive in Texas history. He also has been lieutenant governor, a three-term state representative and was the Texas Agriculture Commissioner for two terms. Mr. Perry’s life of public service began when he was a pilot in the Air Force from 1972-77. You can find out more about his campaign at: www.rickperry.org.

Decker: What would tax reform look like in a Perry administration?

Perry: Like virtually everything else in Washington, our tax code is broken and must be completely overhauled. The centerpiece of my Cut, Balance & Grow plan is a 20 percent flat tax for individuals and employers. My plan gives every American the opportunity to throw out the current tax code and replace it with a flat tax that is simple enough to file on a postcard. It also cuts taxes on employers and provides strong incentives to use foreign profits to create jobs and build factories here at home. That’s just a quick thumbnail sketch.