RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/02/foreign_aid_and_american_priorities.html

It is a struggle to decide who, if anyone, has a claim to US foreign aid dollars. It is, after all, money earned by American taxpayers and sent to people who didn’t earn it, at least not in the traditional sense. Should it be used to encourage countries to accept American requirements — or to reward countries that have done so? Should it be only for people who like Americans? That would be a small group. James Lindsay, senior vice president of he Council on Foreign Relations, reminds us, “Gratitude isn’t the primary objective of U.S. foreign aid… Washington doles out aid primarily based on calculations about how to advance U.S. strategic interests.”

If the minimal condition is that American money should advance American interests, it is worth considering money spent on the Palestinian Authority and on Egypt, as well as in support of what remains of the “Arab Spring.”

Palestinians

The US interest is in a negotiated “two-state solution” resulting in a secure Israel and a democratic Palestine. How are the Palestinians doing? Under the leadership of President (though his term expired in 2009) Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority

Hatred versus Occupation By Yonatan Silverman

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/02/hatred_versus_occupation.html

NICE TRY MR. SILVERMAN….BUT THE ARABS DID NOT BETRAY OSLO…..OSLO WAS A BETRAYAL OF ISRAEL BY ISRAEL AND LED TO THE LONGEST SPREE OF TERRORISM AGAINST INNOCENT CIVILIANS IN TEL-AVIV, NETANYA, HAIFA, JERUSALEM…BECAUSE IT WAS A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL….ARAFAT…..AND SHOWED ISRAEL WITH A WEAK HAND READY TO RELINQUISH ITS SAFETY AND LEGACY….RSK

The most rudimentary analysis of the Palestinian Authority’s position on Israel leads to only one conclusion — the most influential element in the Palestinian Authority attitude toward Israel and to the Jewish people is blind hatred. Hatred mobilizes the Palestinians to close the door to peace and to coexistence with Israel.

It was different under the 1993 Oslo Accords. The Oslo Accords came about in response to mutual understanding of political realities and political aspirations, and they put hatred aside. But the Palestinians have betrayed Oslo.

Not recognizing Israel as the Jewish state is only the place where the problem and its manifestations begin. Palestinian media is flooded with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/02/who_truly_deserves_a_state_the_kurds_or_the_palestinians.html There are over twenty Arab states throughout the Middle East and North Africa, but the world demands, in a chorus of barely disguised animosity towards Israel, that yet another Arab state be created within the mere forty miles separating the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan. Israel, a territory no larger than the tiny […]

The Iranian Nuclear Menace: Al Beeb Calls In The Camel Corps

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

Alas! It’s so typical of the BBC that as soon as Foreign Secretary William Hague warns that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to a Cold War in the Middle East even worse than the one which existed between the USSR and the Western powers, it calls in the nay-sayers to undermine the argument.

True, an alternate viewpoint provides the balanced reportage that Al Beeb is obligated by its Charter to provide yet conspicuously lacks, especially regarding the Middle East. But to quote not one but two pundits (in addition to politicians) who contradict Hague weights the scales well away from equilibrium and smacks of deliberate propagandising.

Indeed, Al Beeb has turned for comment to a seemingly archetypal FCO Arabist, former Ambassador to Iran Sir Richard Dalton, who retired from the Diplomatic Service in 2006 and became an associate of Chatham House, specialising in the Middle East and North Africa.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The old totalitarian paradigm was guns or butter. The Soviet Union could provide its people with the basic food groups or it could run a military race to conquer as much of the world as possible. As a totalitarian ideology, it naturally chose the latter.
The modern incarnation of the hammer and sickle, the liberals who took it slow, working from within the system instead of seizing the reins and executing anyone who got in the way, isn’t big on guns. The Clinton and Obama administrations both inflicted massive cuts on the military because it was extraneous to their domestic goals. They didn’t want guns, but they didn’t want butter either. They wanted a third thing.

The Obama Administration is about as interested in creating jobs as the denizens of the Kremlin were in making sure that every Russian family had plenty of milk and butter on the table. Totalitarian ideologies don’t care about individual welfare and they certainly are not interested in individual empowerment. An improved economy would weaken the left, it would undermine its central program of promoting fear and dependence on a social safety net and a rights infrastructure administered by them.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1391

Though Israel always gets caught in the crossfire no matter what the battle, I admit to experiencing bouts of schadenfreude whenever its enemies engage in internecine warfare. I am not, for a change, referring to Fatah-Hamas struggles or Arab Spring strife — though they certainly apply on occasion. Far more enjoyable, I find, is when the hard Left in the West gets entangled in imbroglios born of its own relentless and tiresome idiocies.

A recent case in point is an interview with Norman Finkelstein, conducted by Frank Barat at Imperial College London on Feb. 9. The two rabidly anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian radicals could have been, and indeed were, expected to have a more-than-friendly one-on-one chat, particularly since the topic of “debate” was the boycott/divestment/sanctions (BDS) campaign led by the Palestinian Solidarity Movement.

After all, Barat, like Finkelstein, is a great admirer of Noam Chomsky. Barat, like Finkelstein, considers Israel to be an abomination. And Barat, like Finkelstein, thinks Hamas and Hezbollah have every right to target Israelis with missiles and bombs in “retaliation” for having been targeted first, if not for merely breathing the same air as the rest of the world since 1948.

Police accuse Occupy protesters of targeting elderly. Squatters arrested at homes owned by elderly, infirmed By Jim Redden http://portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=132918808448956400 Police are accusing Occupy Portland protesters of exploiting the elderly by squatting in their houses. According to police, at 11 a.m. on Feb. 9, officers assigned to the North Precinct Neighborhood Response Team , with the […]

http://www.investigativeproject.org/2506/gov-christie-strange-relationship-with-radical

JAN.2011

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s nomination of Sohail Mohammed to be a state judge shows the governor’s tin ear for radical Islam. Not only did he appoint a longtime mouthpiece for radical Islamists to be a judge, but Christie has also turned a blind eye to the activities of one of Mohammed’s clients – radical imam Mohammed Qatanani, head of one of New Jersey’s largest mosques.

Qatanani has a history of Hamas support and was related by marriage to a leading Hamas operative in the West Bank. This fall, Qatanani will return to a New Jersey immigration court, where the Department of Homeland Security is fighting to have him deported. In his initial application for a green card filed in 1999, government lawyers say Qatanani failed to disclose a conviction in an Israeli military court for being a Hamas member and providing support to the terrorist group.

Oddly, Christie – a Republican who was then the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey – sided with Qatanani against DHS, allowing a top lieutenant, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles McKenna, to testify as a character witness at Qatanani’s first immigration trial, and publicly embracing the imam at a Ramadan breakfast at his mosque. Christie later appointed McKenna as New Jersey’s head of homeland security..

http://www.timesofisrael.com/charlie-chaplin-or-israel-thornstein-a-mystery-even-in-modern-times/

LONDON (AP) — They foiled plots and cracked Nazi codes, but Britain’s spies were unable to solve the mystery of Charlie Chaplin’s birth.Although the entertainer is celebrated as one of London’s most famous sons, newly declassified files reveal that Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence service found no records to back up Chaplin’s claim that he was born in the city on April 16, 1889.

Uncertainty about Chaplin’s origins linger to this day — a mystery Chaplin himself may have helped to nurture.

The previously secret file, released Friday by Britain’s National Archives, shows that MI5 investigated the silent film star in the 1950s at the request of US authorities, who had long suspected him of communist sympathies. MI5 historian Christopher Andrew said the FBI’s red-hating chief, J. Edgar Hoover, privately denounced Chaplin as “one of Hollywood’s parlor Bolsheviks.”

To the spies’ surprise, there was no record of the performer’s birth.

http://melaniephillips.com/middle-britains-amoral-drift

An invitation to appear as a Question Time panellist always sees your columnist dusting off her tin helmet, not to say donning full body armour and making her last will and testament.

Its audiences have been known to be less than universally friendly, and never more so than when Israel crops up. Indeed, the words “baying” and “mob” come to mind.

My most recent appearance was three weeks ago in Plymouth. The audience was notably less aggressive than others I have encountered: more benign and “Middle Britain”-ish.