RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/07/30/romneys-road-trip

At some point, every presidential candidate is bound to take a trip abroad to advertise his foreign policy credentials. Because most candidates don’t want to be accused of criticizing his opponent’s foreign policy abroad, the trips are usually little more than carefully staged photo ops.

Four years ago, during his “foreign policy” trip, Barack Obama donned a skullcap and pushed a written prayer into a nook in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. He hasn’t been back to Israel since, and his enmity toward our only Middle Eastern ally has been demonstrated so often, there is no room here to rehash the evidence.

Mitt Romney’s trip this week was supposed to follow the normal script. Off to London first for the opening of the Olympics, then to Israel and last to Poland, the trip was planned to hit the headlines and Obama’s vulnerabilities. The U.K. is a strong ally, Israel is another (and of greater domestic political importance), and Poland is another that — until Obama came along — held a special regard for us. Poland practically worships Ronald Reagan for his role in winning the Cold War and embracing Poland’s struggle against Soviet oppression. And many Polish-Americans — who may comprise the swing vote in several states — are worried about Obama’s disregard of Poland’s defense.

Britain, as one wag wrote a few days ago, is an easy date for American pols. All a guy has to do is say something nice about the Queen or Churchill, josh them about the lousy weather and say something warm and serious about the “special relationship.” At that point, the Brits conclude that the American candidate is perhaps too unlettered or too much of a cowboy, but all in all a good chap. Then everyone smiles as the candidate climbs back on the aircraft to go to the next stop.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/gaffney073112.php3

Anderson Cooper closed one of five segments of his weeknight CNN show that he recently devoted to attacking principally Rep. Michele Bachmann with a genuflection toward an iconic newsman, Edward R. Murrow. He deployed against her the gauntlet Murrow threw down to Sen. Joseph McCarthy in March 1954: “The line between investigating and persecuting is a [very] fine one.” If anyone has stepped over that line, however, it is Mr. Cooper himself, rather than the Minnesota congresswoman.

Night after night during the week of July 16, the host of “Anderson Cooper 360” failed to meet even the most basic standards of investigative journalism. The irony is that, in his ill-concealed persecution of Mrs. Bachmann, Mr. Cooper has serially engaged in precisely the practices he pillories her and others for using, by his account, to destroy the reputation of a Muslim-American woman named Huma Abedin, the deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Let us count the ways:

* Mr. Cooper insists that Mrs. Bachmann failed to do her homework. He singles her out for most of his criticism, despite the fact that she was but one of five members of Congress to raise concerns not only about Ms. Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, but those of a number of others the Obama administration has enlisted as officials, advisers and liaisons to “the Muslim community.” Yet, Mr. Cooper repeatedly showed his ignorance of the extensive evidence cited by the legislators, even as he mentioned the website where some of it resides: the Center for Security Policy’s online video course at MuslimBrotherhoodInAmerica.com.
* As he accused Mrs. Bachmann of playing fast and loose with the facts, Mr. Cooper repeatedly mischaracterized the nature of the legislators’ request for five federal inspectors general to conduct investigations. He or his echo chamber of exclusively like-minded guests complained that Ms. Abedin is accused of being a “spy” and engaging in “treason” and that she has been subjected to a groundless, bigoted and McCarthyite witch hunt. Several of the reporters and interested parties who added color commentary (sometimes repeatedly) further demeaned Mrs. Bachmann by asserting that she is simply engaging in partisan politics and fundraising for her re-election campaign.

An upscale hotel on a Santa Monica, California, beach is an odd place to be singled out from a crowd and removed because you are Jewish, but that’s what happened to 18 young professionals who are telling their story to a jury in a discrimination trial taking place in Santa Monica Superior Court this week.

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/pakistani-owner-of-swanky-santa-monica-hotel-get-the-expletive-jews-out-of-my-pool/2012/07/30/

Ari Ryan is the grandson of a Ukranian Jew who lost most of his family in the Holocaust and narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Nazis. Ryan’s grandfather moved to Israel in 1942 and served as a captain in the Israel Defense Forces.

Seventy years later Ryan says he got a small taste of what his grandfather lived through, but rather than in the forests of the Ukraine, it took place at an upscale hotel in Santa Monica. Ryan and more than a dozen others have brought a lawsuit alleging anti-Semitic discrimination against them by a multi-millionaire Muslim American hotel owner.

Two years ago Ryan and other twenty- and thirty-something Jews planned to raise money to send children of fallen IDF soldiers to camp with a charity event at the Hotel Shangri-La in Santa Monica, California.

On the morning of July 11, 2010, Ryan and others arrived at the hotel and began setting up Friends of the IDF banners, literature and piles of shirts for the event guests.

But the event was aborted after, according to one employee’s sworn testimony, the hotel’s owner told staff members, “Get the [expletive deleted] Jews out of my pool.” Then the hotel security and other employees began removing the materials and ordering the guests to leave.

http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2012/07/a-tale-of-two-presidential-campaigns.html
Unlike the classic Dickens work, this week presidential campaign was a tale of one city Jerusalem, and the different way it was handled by the two different campaigns, One handled it as if this was the age of foolishness, the other as the age of wisdom. One refused give its position on Israel’s capital publicly; the other stood in front of the panorama of the holy city over his shoulder and pronounced the city Israel’s capital.

During Thursday’s daily press briefing White House Press Secretary Jay Carney wouldn’t answer a simple question.

Reporter: What city does this Administration consider to be the capital of Israel? Jerusalem or Tel Aviv?Jay Carney: Um… I haven’t had that question in a while. Our position has not changed. Can we, uh…Reporter: What is the capital [of Israel]?Jay Carney: You know our position.Reporter: I don’t.Lester Kinsolving, World Net Daily: No, no. She doesn’t know, that’s why she asked.Carney: She does know.Reporter: I don’t.Kinsolving: She does not know. She just said that she does not know. I don’t know.Carney: We have long, lets not call on…Kinsolving: Tel Aviv or Jerusalem?Carney: You know the answer to that. Kinsolving: I don’t know the answer. We don’t know the answer. Could you just give us an answer? What do you recognize? What does the administration recognize?Carney: Our position has not changed.Kinsolving: What position?

Carney then moved on to another question.

Jay Carney refused to outline the President’s position on Jerusalem because the truth would be damaging to the campaign. He was afraid an honest answer would further damage the support for the president’s cash-poor campaign amongst his donors that support Israel.

Mitt Romney chose Tisha B’Av, the day Jews across the world mourn the loss of the Holy Temples in Jerusalem, to make speech in the holy city. With about 400 Israelis in attendance (including his friend of 30 years Prime Minister Netanyahu), and the Temple Mount in the background the GOP candidate declared Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel. Romney didn’t make the announcement as a big splash at an AIPAC convention, but said it almost matter-of-factly near the beginning of his speech:

It is a deeply moving experience to be in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel.

Romney is not the first candidate to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel, nor is the first to talk about moving our Embassy to Jerusalem as he told CNN later in the day.

Recognizing Jerusalem on Tisha B’Av was only Romney’s starting point. Romney was not overtly critical of Obama as he was on foreign soil, but he was critical nevertheless. He drew a clear distinction with the policies of the Obama Administration.

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/07/30/newt-staunchly-defends-bachmann-et-al-on-muslim-brotherhood-influence-peddling/

Newt Staunchly Defends Bachmann et al on Muslim Brotherhood Influence Peddling

Two years ago, July 29, 2010, Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich delivered a singularly astute and courageous address [1]. Reactions to that speech across [2] the [3] political [4] spectrum [5], whether immediate [2] or delayed [6], illustrated the contemporary equivalent of what the greatest historian of Soviet Communist totalitarianism, Robert Conquest [7], appositely characterized as “mindslaughter [8]” — a brilliantly evocative term for delusive Western apologetics regarding the ideology of Communism, and the tangible horrors its Communist votaries inflicted.

What did Newt Gingrich have the temerity to discuss? In defiance of our era’s most rigidly enforced cultural relativist taboo, Mr. Gingrich provided an irrefragably accurate if blunt characterization of the existential threat posed by Islam’s living, self-professed mission: to impose Sharia [9], its totalitarian religio-political “law,” globally.

With vanishingly rare intellectual honesty and resolve, Gingrich described [1] how normative Sharia [9] — antithetical to bedrock Western legal principles — by “divine,” immutable diktat, rejects freedom of conscience, while sanctioning violent jihadism, absurd, misogynistc “rules of evidence” (four male witnesses for rape), barbarous punishments (stoning for adultery), and polygamy:

Sharia in its natural form has principles and punishments totally abhorrent to the Western world, and the underlying basic belief which is that law comes directly from God and is therefore imposed upon humans and no human can change the law without it being an act of apostasy is a fundamental violation of a tradition in the Western system which goes back to Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem and which has evolved in giving us freedom across the planet on a scale we can hardly imagine and which is now directly threatened by those who would impose it.

Moreover, Gingrich warned [1] about efforts — deliberate, or unwitting — to represent Sharia as a benign system:

So let me also be quite clear that the rules are radical and horrific. I think again it’s fascinating that even when people go out and do polling and they say to, for example, Muslims in general, do you believe in Sharia, they don’t then explain what Sharia is. Sharia becomes like would you like to be a Rotarian and it sounds okay.

Gingrich’s unflinching portrayal of the existential threat Sharia represents — whether or not this totalitarian system is imposed by violent, or non-violent means — was accompanied by a clarion call [1] for concrete measures to oppose any Sharia encroachment on the U.S. legal code:

Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence. But in fact they’re both engaged in jihad and they’re both seeking to impose the same end state which is to replace Western civilization with a [radical] imposition of Sharia.

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/fjordman/inside-the-brussels-conference-on-free-speech-and-human-rights/

Editor’s note: Below is a report of the July 9th International Conference for Free Speech and Human Rights, held in Brussels, Belgium. A video compilation of event highlights follows the report.

I had the great pleasure of taking part in the International Conference for Free Speech and Human Rights on July 9, 2012 at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, sponsored by the International Civil Liberties Alliance. Representatives of 18 countries, the majority being from Europe but with the participation of Coptic Christians from Egypt as well as former Muslims, met to discuss the ongoing Islamization of Europe and the Western world and how to preserve our basic civil liberties.

Sabatina James, a young woman who left Islam for Christianity, told the audience her story, about how her family threatened to kill her. She now lives under witness protection. The punishment for leaving Islam is death, according to sharia law.

MEP Magdi Allam, an Egyptian apostate who now lives in Italy, converted to Christianity and was baptized during the 2008 Easter Vigil service in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He, too, spoke at the conference.

Author Alexandre del Valle (photo ©Snaphanen).

We heard Gavin Boby from the Law and Freedom Foundation in Britain, plus such interesting people as Alain Wagner and Alexandre del Valle from France, Conny Axel Meier and Christian Jung from Germany and the Syrian Catholic bishop Father Samuel.

Pére Samuel Bishop in the Syrian-Catholic Church (photo ©Snaphanen).

The courageous Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff from Austria has been prosecuted as a criminal for “hate speech” for pointing out that Islam’s founder Muhammad, according to Islamic texts, had sex with a 9-year-old child, Aisha. She talked about how free speech is currently under pressure in many European countries.

Ned May and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff read the Brussels Declaration (photo ©Snaphanen).

Among the highlights of the conference were the presentation and signing of the 2012 Brussels Declaration, a foundational document to defend freedom of speech and civil liberties, and the presentation of the Defender of Freedom Award by Canadian-born author and political humorist Mark Steyn to Lars Hedegaard, founder of the Danish Free Press Society and the International Free Press Society. Together with Ingrid Carlqvist, President of the newly formed (and desperately needed) Swedish Free Press Society, there was further talk of launching a new newspaper in multiple languages as an alternative to our deeply flawed mainstream media.

Lars Hedegaard and Alain Wagner (photo ©Snaphanen).

I was happy to meet Mark Steyn in person for the first time. He is just as funny in real life as he is in writing. Steyn has a special talent for talking about serious subjects with a humorous twist, which has earned him a large audience in a number of countries.

One of the first things he asked me about was whether I had any socks today. This was obviously a reference to the fact that Norwegian police confiscated some of my socks in August 2011 when they ransacked my flat in response to the Breivik case. I don’t know why they needed my terrorist socks, but it’s always a pleasure to help out the police. They were kind enough to give them back to me after 100 days in police custody. I then posted a photo of some of them at the Gates of Vienna website under the heading “Sock and Awe.”

It was a positive surprise to see how many people showed up. The last time I was in Brussels was for the Counterjihad conference in October 2007, also held at the European Parliament. It took us a few minutes to locate it again, but you know it’s an EU building because it’s big, expensive, ugly and useless. If I had my way, the entire European Parliament would be dismantled and replaced by Gisèle Littman Square, supplemented by the Eurabia Museum for the victims of 1400 years of Islamic Jihad.

A few blocks away, the Berlaymont building houses the headquarters of the European Commission, the unelected government for half a billion people that is systematically dismantling political liberty and democratic accountability from the Black Sea to the North Sea. It, too, deserves to be dismantled.

Some of the same individuals were present at this conference as well, with others missing, and plenty of new faces added since 2007. Among the familiar faces was Nidra Poller, an American author and journalist who has lived in Paris for forty years, writing for major publications such as The Wall Street Journal or The Jerusalem Post.

One of the voices we missed was David Littman, the husband of Gisèle Littman, or Bat Ye’or. One minute of silence was held to honor the memory of David Littman, who died in May 2012 after a protracted illness.

Prof. Hans Jansen (photo ©Snaphanen).

I’ve heard Hans Jansen, retired Professor of Modern Islamic Thought at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, speak several times in the past. He always impresses his audience with his immense knowledge. In his new speech he reminded us that “Sharia includes a large number of provisions about people who are not Muslims. These rules are usually prohibitions that carry severe penalties if violated. These provisions of the Sharia make life unsafe and uncertain for someone who lives under Sharia law and who is not a Muslim. Under Sharia law, someone who is not a Muslim possesses no inalienable rights. If I am wrong here, I will be relieved, and happy to stand corrected and receive your e-mails pointing out why I am wrong. But if I am right, a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay possesses more rights than a Jew or a Christian who lives under Sharia law. Unlike the legal systems of most modern nation states, Sharia law is not subject to democratic supervision. Like international law and rabbinic law, Sharia law is an academic affair: experts discuss and debate the rules until they reach an agreement.”

Professor Jansen emphasized that Islamic sharia law does not emerge from a parliament that acts as legislator, but its rules come into being by being agreed upon by legal experts. Sharia law is in this way somewhat similar to international law as embodied in institutions such as the EU. As international law demonstrates, communities of academic specialists, in their isolation, have a tendency to develop a degree of pedantry that an elected lawgiver could never afford. Up to a point, this is what has happened to sharia.

Allowing sharia, or a part of it, to be the law of the land in a Western nation will diminish the democratic character of that nation. It means giving away legislative power to unelected self-appointed men, who are unknown and anonymous and operate from far-away mosques in Pakistan or Egyp

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/romney-takes-tough-stance-in-israel/ On Sunday Mitt Romney took the fight for the American Jewish (and Evangelical) vote to Israel, a country most American Jews have never visited. His target—a large and convenient one—was Barack Obama’s record of behavior toward the Jewish state. Even so, there’s no possibility that Romney will get most of the Jewish vote in […]

Gingrich: Political ‘elites’ avoiding Islamist issue
Politico
Sunday, July 29, 2012
News
Gingrich: Political ‘elites’ avoiding Islamist issue
The underlying driving force behind this desperate desire to stop unpleasant questions is the elite’s fear that an honest discussion of radical Islamism will spin out of control. They fear if Americans fully understood how serious radical Islamists are, they would demand a more confrontational strategy. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz226MJoni2
Iran seethes as ‘Ramadan of discontent’ unfolds
Los Angeles Times
Monday, July 30, 2012
News
Amid soaring prices, sweltering temperatures and escalating international tensions, a Ramadan of discontent is unfolding in the Islamic Republic. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz226MWVcrS
Mali leader calls for peace talks with Islamists
BBC
Monday, July 30, 2012
News
A
Mali’s interim President Dioncounda Traore has called for talks with militant Islamists who have captured the north. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz226Mj8qET

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/312576

National Review already has endorsed Ted Cruz in the Texas Republican primary contest to run for the Senate seat currently held by Kay Bailey Hutchison. That we now feel it urgently necessary to reiterate that endorsement on the eve of the runoff between Mr. Cruz and his Republican-establishment rival, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, is an indication of The Editors’ belief that this race is a critical opportunity for principled conservatism and that its import reaches well beyond the borders of the Lone Star State.

Mr. Dewhurst is an undistinguished, go-along/get-along creature of the GOP leadership’s seniority-oriented model of politics. He is a student of the school of thought that rallied party operatives behind Indiana’s too-long-lived Richard Lugar when a credible conservative alternative was available in the person of Richard Mourdock. His views — though perhaps not his temperament — would make him an ideal candidate to represent a state such as Maine, where the only other option would be a Democrat to his left. But a strong conservative can win in Texas, and we have one in Ted Cruz.

Given the intensity with which conservatives prefer Mr. Cruz to Texas’s popular lieutenant governor, some Republicans have asked, not unfairly, “What’s so bad about David Dewhurst?” Six months ago, our answer might have been: “Nothing, really, if there weren’t a much better choice available. Ted Cruz is far and away a preferable candidate for conservatives seeking an effective and articulate champion of their ideals.” But much has happened since the early days of this race, and Mr. Dewhurst’s vulgar and dishonest campaign of scorched-earth ad hominem against Mr. Cruz raises serious questions about his judgment and his commitment to conservative values.

He has transformed himself from second-best to flailing embarrassment. He has run campaign ads that are clearly predicated on the notion that Texas conservatives are rubes — ads that treat national conservative groups such as the Club for Growth as out-of-state interlopers, and that attack Cruz for taking on unpopular clients as an attorney.

Consider Mr. Dewhurst’s attack on Cruz for having endorsed a bid by Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) for a leadership position while declining to do the same for Texas’s Senator John Cornyn. The substance of Mr. Dewhurst’s criticism amounts to the fact that Mr. Cruz is more moved by the prospect of advancing conservatives from all 50 states than by the possibility of helping advance the career of a senator who happens to be from Texas. For many Texans, putting principle over politics must appear to be an excellent thing. Senator Cornyn is not a bad man, but he sometimes allows his party loyalties to trump his conservative beliefs — as shown by his steadfast support for the worst Republican senator, Arlen Specter, which lasted right up until the moment that Specter joined the Democrats to try to salvage his political career. Just as the Senate and the republic are better off with the reliable conservative Pat Toomey in the seat once held by the fickle and opportunistic Arlen Specter, Texas and the nation would be better off with the reliable conservative Ted Cruz in the seat held by Senator Hutchison — who, to be fair, is no Arlen Specter, but is no Ted Cruz, either.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443437504577547313612049308.html?mod=hp_opinion The system to review misconduct is rigged so even abusive teachers can stay on the job. By resisting almost any change aimed at improving our public schools, teachers unions have become a ripe target for reformers across the ideological spectrum. Even Hollywood, famously sympathetic to organized labor, has turned on unions with the documentary […]