RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/winston-churchill-father-of-the-anglosphere?f=must_reads

In many conservative circles, particularly in the United States, Winston Churchill is beyond criticism. Mention his errors – the Gallipoli debacle, the return to gold at the pre-1914 rate, the contracting out of domestic policy to the Left after 1940, the second premiership – and you provoke a Bateman cartoon scene.

Fair enough. Winnie got the big calls right. His popularity on the other side of the Atlantic is appropriate, for he is perhaps the supreme Anglosphere politician – apostle, champion, exemplar and historian of English-speaking unity.

What makes the Anglosphere special? I’m taken with Mark Steyn’s observation that the list of countries on the right side in both the world wars and the cold war is short, but it contains the main English-speaking democracies. What made them all pile in? Was it linguistic solidarity, anidentification with kith-and-kin? Yes, partly. But that’s not all it was. Those mighty struggles were not simply ethnic conflicts, bloodier versions of the Hutu-Tutsi wars. The Anglosphere peoples believed, because their institutions had taught them to believe, that individual liberty, limited government and the rule of law were worth preserving – with force of arms if necessary.

Churchill played a brave role in all three great twentieth century conflicts, fighting in the first, leading the democracies to victory in the second and defining the third. The transition from victorious leader to Cold Warrior can be traced to one speech, delivered on 5 March 1946 at Fulton, Missouri. That speech, the subject of a newly published book by Philip White, is remembered for this sentence:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

White conjures atmosphere beautifully. Here is a detailed account of the place where the speech was given, and the timbre of the times. The USSR, so recently an ally, had occupied the countries for which Britain had gone to war in the first place, and any hope that the United Nations would be a guarantor of a peaceful post-fascist world had been dashed.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/only-if-the-wind-is-blowing I’ll bet you didn’t know that June 15th is Global Wind Day. Wind is part of the Earth’s atmosphere and, depending on whether it is blowing gently or strongly, there isn’t a darn thing anyone can do about it. Except for measuring its velocity and direction, wind like clouds remains largely a mystery to […]

The Washington Times http://www.danielpipes.org/11436/syria-intervention As the Syrian government makes increasingly desperate and vicious efforts to keep power, pleas for military intervention, more or less on the Libyan model, have become more insistent. This course is morally attractive, to be sure. But should Western states follow this counsel? I believe not. Those calls to action fall […]

A BDS Call for Disarmament in the Middle East

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/13/a-bds-call-for-disarmament-in-the-middle-east/print/

Editor’s note: The article below is written by Dr. Richard Cravatts, the author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews, a book published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. To order a copy, click here.

The eleventh-hour June 5th vote by Arizona State University’s student government to divest holdings in targeted companies that supply military equipment to Israel is part of a troubling trend that exposes dangerous radicalism on campuses by BDS proponents, disguised as an effort to achieve social justice for the Palestinians. In May, for instance, the student government at University of Massachusetts, Boston voted on a similar resolution to demand “that the UMass Foundation, Inc. divest its funds from Boeing Company and other entities that perpetuate and profit from war crimes and/or human rights violations,” those illegal acts, naturally, being perpetrated by Israel.

In November of 2011, the New York University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, in the same ideological vein, submitted an “Open Letter to TIAA-CREF CEO and President Roger W. Ferguson from NYU Faculty and Staff,” signed by over 70 members of the NYU community, which had as its purpose “to pressure TIAA-CREF into divesting its holdings in 5 key companies which profit from the illegal Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians.” The effort signaled a shift in the tactics of the BDS movement away from simply boycotting academics, theatre groups, or humus, and instead attempting to strip Israel of its ability to defend itself, militarily, from those foes who are clearly more concerned with the extirpation of the Jewish state than they are with Palestinian human rights and nationhood.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/13/christiane-amanpour%e2%80%99s-lovefest-with-castro%e2%80%99s-daughter/print/ Given the media’s neurotic hyper-sensitivity to the most microscopic hint of white on black racism here’s a question: When would a black human rights activist who was jailed and tortured by a lily-white regime for the crime of quoting Martin Luther King be totally ignored by this same media while he testified to a […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/13/the-obama-administration%e2%80%99s-genocide-denial/print/

Suppose that there was a country where Muslims were being massacred every month and mosques and imams were being targeted and destroyed. Could anyone imagine the Obama Administration choosing to remain silent in the face of such atrocities?

A mob attack on Muslims in Burma immediately resulted in a condemnation from the State Department and a call for its government to make more concessions to Muslims. But a car bombing and shooting attack on two churches in Nigeria have not been similarly commented on by the State Department, sending the message that Muslim life is precious, but Christian life is cheap. The Muslim dead of Burma are sacred, but the Christian dead of Nigeria are only more dead infidels.

Boko Haram, the Islamic terrorist organization responsible for both attacks, has yet to be declared a terrorist organization by the State Department, despite having carried out religiously motivated bombings and shootings that have killed over a thousand people in the last few years alone. These numbers begin to approach the level of murders carried out by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Botching Fast and Furious

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/302642

Texas senator John Cornyn recently joined the growing number of Republicans who’ve called on Attorney General Eric Holder to resign. And a week from today, the House Oversight Committee will convene to consider pursuing a contempt-of-Congress citation against Holder. If the committee decides to proceed, the entire House will vote on the matter.

Holder has no intention of resigning, especially on the say-so of Republicans — but the attorney general has much to answer for, and Republicans should continue to make the case that he is wholly inadequate to his position and operating in bad faith.

Holder oversaw the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives during a time in which it ran Operation Fast and Furious — a program in which ATF agents deliberately allowed drug cartels to traffic more than 1,000 guns into Mexico and made no attempt to track the weapons as they changed hands. Two of the guns were found at the scene of a Border Patrol agent’s murder. Many more have turned up at other crime scenes, and as even Holder has admitted, the fallout from Fast and Furious will continue for “years to come.” Documents that were obtained by the Oversight Committee via leaks — in particular, wiretap applications — suggest that several high-ranking officials within the Justice Department knew that guns were being allowed to “walk.”

The Justice Department has conceded that Fast and Furious was a terrible idea and vowed to prevent its reoccurrence, but beyond that, Holder has spent more than a year refusing to come clean about the operation. In February of 2011, his department outrageously denied that gunwalking had even occurred, a statement it waited until December to retract. When the Oversight Committee requested various documents throughout 2011, Holder often waited months to provide them. Just last week, in congressional testimony, Holder asserted that the words “Fast and Furious,” found in a wiretap application along with references to gunwalking, do not refer to Fast and Furious.

Meet the Radical DOJ Lawyer Suing Florida to Keep Foreigners on Voter Rolls http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/06/12/meet-the-radical-doj-lawyer-keeping-foreigners-on-florida-voter-rolls/?print=1 The DOJ filed a complaint against Florida today to stop Florida from removing ineligible non-citizens from the voter rolls. (Yesterday DOJ, disgracing long-established tradition, leaked this impending news to a sycophantic blogger.) Florida has already discovered noncitizens who voted illegally in […]

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/
Force-Feeding British Schoolchildren Poison About Israel
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has a paid secretariat and a network of some 40 branches in the UK plus affiliated groups. Sinisterly, it includes the entire land of Israel on its logo.

Among its current links is the London Palestine Place fest (Palestine Place, incidentally, was the purpose-built and deliberately-named nineteenth century headquarters of a notorious London missionary society that existed for the sole purpose of converting Jews to Christianity!)

In its own words, which I take from its leaflet entitled “Palestine-Israel: The Basic Facts”, the PSC

“produces publications for its members and the general public and disseminates information through its website; lobbies the media, institutions, the British government and local MPS; organises public meetings, film shows, conferences, debates, boycott events. pickets and demonstrations at local, national and international levels; promotes relations between British and Palestinian oranisations and communities”

It’s promoted BDS with gusto since 2001, not least by picketing supermarkets selling Israeli goods, button-holing passers-by, and thrusting anti-Israel propaganda at them. “This is an excellent way to start up a discussion with the general public,” one member is quoted as saying. “You start with imported avocados and end up with the Fourth Geneva Convention!”

In my experience, there’s always a wad of Israel-demonising leaflets on hand at such demos. But what is not as generally known as it might be (for it’s not usually among the material distributed at pickets and rallies) is that in 2009 the PSC produced a particularly pernicious piece of propaganda aimed at poisoning impressionable teenage minds against Israel.

This pernicious piece of propaganda is called “Teachers Pack on Palestine” and a leaflet describing it was given to me hot off the press when, at a PSC-sponsored Israel-demonising exhibition of children’s drawings from Gaza, I was mistaken for a schoolteacher.

“Exploring Palestine through Citizenship” the leaflet (its punctuation leaving much to be desired) thus enthusiastically thrust at me begins. It continues (the non- italicised words in square brackets consist of my asides):

“PSC, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and CAABU, the Council for Arab-British Understanding have put together an excellent online educational resource designed to introduce secondary school students to Palestine. They are mainly geared towards the Citizenship Curriculum, but can be used in English, Media, History and Geography lessons.

1) Forced to leave home
After brainstorming what they would take from their homes if they had to flee at short notice, students will do short role-plays based on fleeing home.
[I guess these role models, Jews fleeing their homes in Jerusalem under the gaze of Arab troops, are kept under wraps]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1303/why_the_shafilea_ahmed_trial_should_be_the_final_nail_in_the_coffin_of_multiculturalism

“To paraphrase Roger Scruton – it must be known that no matter what culture one hails from, individuals must accept rules, customs and procedures that may be alien to their old way of life. This is not an injustice. As immigrants come into the country in order to gain, it is therefore reasonable to remind them that there is also a cost – and that cost is one’s cultural norms that are reprehensible in Western civilization.In this country we have a great tradition and history of enlightened values of pluralism from the great Greek and Christian philosophers, such as Hobbes, Locke and Mill, who were able to say with authority and conviction which culture, society and method of existence was best. It is high time that we openly believe in such values too – and put the final nail in multiculturalism’s coffin.”

‘A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns; but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of the others are his own affairs’

– John Stuart Mill On Liberty

‘Some cultures are admirable, others are vile’.

– Brian Barry Culture and Equality

Multiculturalism is often mistaken for Jeremy Waldron’s theory of cultural cosmopolitanism – the insouciance notion that one can associate oneself with many different cultures. For example, an individual may study Ancient Greek, eat Chinese cuisine, wear Italian designer clothes, listen to Mozart played by Australian aborigines, read French surrealist poetry, and so on.

However, multiculturalism is a political philosophy that allows for the creation of multiple identities, and challenges the totems of a nation-state’s existing culture.

Thus, those who advocate multiculturalism are advocating the resistance of homogenization and assimilation of Western enlightened values and norms – such as the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, freedoms of expression and conscience, modernity, equality and secularization – values that often have little resonance within the Muslim world.

Instead, multiculturalists endorse what has been described by the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, as the ‘politics of recognition’ – the notion that public policy should be based on the concept of one’s identity and difference, rather than equal citizenship.

This means everyone is recognised by the law for their individual unique identity. As multiculturalism respects how one individual understands themselves and the world around them – their culture can thus essentially excuse any action, and it is us who must relinquish the space in which their cultures can flourish.

Such cultural actions can include ‘forced marriages’, ‘honour attacks’, or even in some extreme cases, ‘honour killing’. Indeed, ‘honour killings’ are so commonplace that it is estimated worldwide over 20,000 women are slaughtered each year.

In 2010 alone, 2,823 ‘honour attacks’ had been reported in the UK. Although, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) estimated there were most likely another 500 honour attacks that were not covered in the survey.

The attacks are typically carried out in the West when family members adopt the cultural norms of Western society – such as dressing in Western attire, dating someone of a different culture, sex before marriage, and quite often the refusal of an arranged marriage.

This has resulted in ‘honour attacks’ that range from kidnapping, mutilation, beatings, acid attacks, and in some extreme cases, murder. Unsurprisingly, such crimes typically happen in concentrated, built up immigrant areas in the UK – mainly of Middle Eastern, and South Asian ancestry.