RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2166

Last summer, when the social protest tents started popping up on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, I knew I was going to have to absent myself from the festivities — other than to become an observer for the purpose of anthropological, psychological, sociological, cultural and political analysis.

And it really bummed me out not to be able to participate.

I, too, have had a rough time of making a living. I, too, move from rental to rental like a wandering Jewess, as a result of not being able to afford a down payment and a mortgage on a place of my own. I, too, have had to manage living with an overdraft, due to the high cost of everything from cottage cheese to “free” education for my four kids. I, too, have found myself requiring parental subsidies well into adulthood.

I, too, have been a member of the “working poor” — particularly since my former long-time place of employment had a peculiar policy of lowering my salary every few years.

In addition to all of the above, I, too, could really have enjoyed hanging out on the streets of Tel Aviv, painting signs while listening to guitar music. (I’m not big on camping in the wild, but occupying a blanket at the foot of chi-chi cafes and sushi bars would be much to my liking indeed.)

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ Civil disobedience is the act of breaking the law and defying the authorities to do anything about it. So is tyranny. The difference between the two lies in which side of the power equation the breaker is on. When the law is broken, two things happen. Either the law is upheld or the authorities […]

Many, too many, years ago when Shamir was Prime Minister and he was visiting New York, my phone rang at five o’clock in the morning. It was my friend and one of my all time favorite Israelis, Yossi Ben-Aharon who was Chief of Staff. At the suggestion of the late pianist/journalist David Bar-Illan, he asked if I could go to the Hotel Regency right away to help craft a speech for a women’s group for the Prime Minister. My husband was a tad shocked that I was running off to a hotel in the wee hours, but, as always, he understood and blessed anything for the cause of Israel.

When I arrived at the suite, the Prime Minister, surrounded by guards greeted me tersely and told me to get to work…the speech had to be delivered by lunchtime. With Yossi seated nearby to translate to Hebrew, I wrote the usual “light unto nations” spiel scattered with history, legacy, religious and legal rights to all of the land of Israel to please that particular group of women who were religious Zionists. Getting a little wind in my sails, I got slightly pompous and ended with the invocation that Israel and the Arabs “plead the second commanment…..Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself.”

When the Prime Minister read it with Yossi’s translation, he nodded several times as he read. However, when he reached the last line, he slapped the paper and stated gruffly (as translated by Yossi Ben Aharon) “….Love? What love? I don’t want love. I want Israel to be feared and respected.” He struck that passage out and thanked me curtly and stomped out of the room. Yossi Ben Aharon later told me that he read the speech later without the last sentence.

That’s what I loved about the man.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/truth-telling-at-the-u-n-human-rights-council/print/

For decades, serving as a representative for a number of different non-governmental organizations, the British historian David Littman regularly made a noble nuisance of himself before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights Commission, and later the Human Rights Council, in Geneva. His purpose was always the same: to do what little he could to touch the conscience of this at once tragically and farcically wayward agency, to remind it of its own official raison d’être, and to use his bully pulpit to draw the attention of the world to horrific circumstances upon which the Commission, later the Council, refused, for one reason or other, to act. In firm but civilized words, he spoke up, for instance, against the persistence in certain societies of the Jewish blood libel, documented certain societies’ violence against women, and condemned certain societies’ treatment of Christians.

Since the certain societies in question were, more often than not, Islamic ones, Littman routinely ran into trouble with the U.N.’s Muslim mafia. When he pointed out that the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights gave sharia precedence over what he considered universal human rights, he was sharply rebuked and instructed that the “issue of religion” should be raised only with the greatest of “sensitivity.” He wasn’t having it: “certain religious beliefs threaten the universal values of human rights,” he insisted, and went on to lament the “growing phenomenon of cultural relativism” that was making it harder and harder to honestly address a whole host of human-rights issues in a forum that had been founded, after all, to do precisely that.

Littman died on May 20 at age 78. He left a devoted wife, Gisèle, also a historian, and also a fearless, long-time defender of human rights, who is known professionally as Bat Ye’or. He also left an organization, the Human Rights Council, which, with Littman’s passing, lost a formidable and eloquent challenger to its grotesque miscarriage of its duties. And the unfortunate fact is that there is no organization on earth that, given the scale and nature of its putative responsibilities, needs such a challenge. It will be recalled that the reason why the Commission, founded in 1946, was disbanded in 2006 and replaced with the Council was that it had become a farce: its members included major human-rights offenders like Sudan, and it repeatedly found excuses to condemn Israel for relatively minor infractions while systematically ignoring large-scale, truly barbaric violations by Muslim states. The Council was supposed to correct all that; in reality it simply became the Commission under another name. So pointless – indeed, counterproductive – was its existence that the U.S., under George W. Bush, chose to have nothing to do with it, although that decision was reversed under President Obama.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/giulio-meotti/islamists-have-the-keys-to-the-arab-world/print/

It’s possible that in the coming years the Arab masses will revolt against their new Islamic rulers. But today, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafis, the Wahhabis and all the other followers of the Koran have the keys of the Arab world.

The new president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi, is a pious revolutionary whose message has always been very simple: “Islam is the solution.” The real Egyptian people were not the secularists described by hypocritical Western journalists based in Tahrir Square. Instead, they are the people revealed in a recent Pew poll: 54% believe men and women should be segregated in the workplace; 82% believe adulterers should be stoned; 84% believe apostates from Islam should face the death penalty; 77% believe thieves should be flogged or have their hands cut off. That’s why the new Islamic rulers will try to impose the veil on women, ban alcohol and attack the cold peace with Israel. That’s why the most important Arab country will move toward a theocratic anti-Western scenario.

The Muslim Brotherhood isn’t seeking power; they want to change society and the individual in the name of a totalitarian ideology. They have waited 80 years to seize the power, while their worldview was forged in the Arabian desert 1,300 years ago. To become a “Brother,” an Ikhwan, one must pass through eight years of training. It’s like joining Heinrich Himmler’s SS. And like the Hitlerist special forces that were at war with Judaism, cosmopolitism, communism and democracy, the Islamic Brothers are at war with individualism, modernism, consumerism, materialism, tolerance, subjectivism, rationalism, paganism, Judaism and Christianity. Like the SS, the Brothers divide reality into light and darkness, spirit and matter, Islamic and non-Islamic. French philosopher Christian Godin wrote that Islamism is far more dangerous than either Nazism or Communism, since the latter, despite their genocidal follies, presupposed their own preservation. For the Hitlerists, the “inferior race” does not deserve to exist; for the Stalinist, the “enemy of the people” does not merit to continue living; for the Islamist, it is the world itself that does not deserve to exist.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/swingers-of-the-supreme-court/

After Chief Justice Roberts switched his position on ObamaCare, the media has been hailing him as a new swing vote on the Supreme Court. But that would make him just one of many swing vote justices who were appointed by Republican presidents. In the last forty years the majority of Supreme Court Justices were chosen by Republican presidents. Nixon alone nominated four Supreme Court justices and Reagan nominated three. But that did not turn the Supreme Court to the right, as the left claims. Not only have Supreme Court justices nominated by Democratic presidents moved to the left, but those nominated by Republican presidents have also often moved to the left.

When a Republican president chooses a nominee for the Supreme Court, there is at least a 50 percent chance that the nominee will move to the left once on the bench. Of the three justices nominated by Reagan, only one could be considered a reliable conservative voice. Of the two justices nominated by George H.W. Bush, only one, Clarence Thomas, could be considered a reliable conservative voice. It would not be surprising at all if this track record turns out to have held steady with the justices nominated by his son.

The same, however, cannot be said of the two justices nominated by Clinton or those two nominated by Obama. No one would ever accuse Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan of being promiscuous swing votes. Not when Sotomayor has voted with her Clinton administration predecessors 90 percent of the time. The liberal bloc of the Supreme Court has functioned as a steady voice for the left without the ire and accusations that the far more fragile conservative bloc has received for daring to occasionally defend the Constitution.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/iran-preparing-to-down-american-passenger-planes?f=must_reads

A source who served in Iranian intelligence says the Iranian regime is preparing to down Western airliners in case of an attack on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has been preparing for war for some time as the Islamic regime closes in on developing nuclear weapons, says a source who served in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence and has recently defected to a country in Europe.

The source said the regime has taken several measures should war erupt:

* Thirty-two command and control centers have been formed around the country so that the Guards and the Basij can act independently in battle. In case of a breakdown of communication with the central government, their orders are to suppress any uprising from within and confront any potential enemy.
* All political prisoners and all activists within the country are to be slaughtered, as are those Iranian opponents outside the country, to ensure no viable opposition will remain to guide an uprising to overthrow of the regime.
* Thousands of cells have been established in collaboration with Hezbollah to conduct terrorist acts against Israel, America and the West. One specific preparation, as discussed by the Guard commanders, is to target America’s civilian airliners in order to cause terror in the West.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-supreme-courts-declaratory-act?f=must_reads

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, wrote the majority opinion upholding the alleged constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare. Obamacare will compel, under penalty of a monetary payment, all Americans to purchase health insurance. This monetary penalty was never intended by the authors of the ACA to be a revenue-raising impost. It was never intended to be a tax, either, although the Internal Revenue Service was appointed the enforcer of the law and collector of the penalty. Further, proponents of Obamacare argued that Congress had the power to enforce compliance with the law under the Commerce clause of the Constitution, which bestows on Congress the power to “regulate interstate commerce.”

Opponents of the law have argued that Congress does not have the power to force individuals to engage in such commerce. During initial arguments before the Court, the Court rebutted this argument to some extent, dismissing the Solicitor General’s position that an absence from such commerce is no excuse for not complying with the mandates of Obamacare. The “individual mandate” – or the feature of force – became the bête noir of Obamacare.

Chief Justice Roberts, however, side-stepped the whole issue and, as some commentators have observed, “rewrote” the punitive feature of the individual mandate and called it a “tax,” arguing that such a tax is not outside the bounds of Congressional power. In that single act, Chief Justice Roberts, in an act of evasion and moral cowardice, conferred upon Congress the power and authority to tax every human action and commodity.

Violating the Aristotelian law that a thing cannot be A and non-A at the same time, Roberts wrote that the punitive penalty can be treated as a tax. Worse, the Constitution can limit Congress’s powers, and expand them at the same time, as well. He did not recognize the Commerce clause argument advocating compulsory engagement in the commerce of insurance. He recognized, however, Congress’s power to enslave and destroy.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-supreme-court-upholds-obamacare-a-sad-day-for-america The America I love is disappearing from the public scene. When the Supreme Court ruling upheld the constitutionality of ObamaCare, a disturbing and, in my opinion, dangerous precedent has been created, one not different from the “separate but equal” precedent behind Plessy v. Ferguson. A majority court decision confirms the view that there are […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/304646 Given how many more Americans define themselves as conservative than as liberal, let alone than as left, how does one explain the success of left-wing policies? One answer is the appeal of entitlements and a desire to be taken care of. It takes a strong-willed citizen to vote against receiving free benefits. But an […]