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Ruth King

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israel Approves Legislation Retroactively Legalizing Settlements No immediate reaction from Trump administration, which initially indicated it wouldn’t pressure Israel to cease settlement expansion By Nancy Shekter-Porat

By on February 7th, 2017

TEL AVIV—Israel’s parliament on Monday approved legislation that retroactively legalizes thousands of Jewish settler homes in the occupied West Bank, a step likely to spark legal challenges and draw international condemnation.

The passage of the bill by a vote of 60-52 in Israel’s 120-seat parliament follows a string of pro-settler steps taken by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since Donald Trump took office as U.S. president.

While Israeli critics of the legislation vowed to go to court, Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the ruling coalition’s Jewish Home Party who co-wrote the bill, hailed the vote as a milestone in the country’s history.

“On this day, the State of Israel decided that developing and advancing settlements in Judea and Samaria is in Israel’s interest,” he said, using the biblical names for the West Bank. “Now we will continue to apply sovereignty and continue to build and develop settlements in all parts of the country.”

Mr. Netanyahu wasn’t present in parliament for the vote: He was returning to Israel from London, where he met U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May earlier in the day for talks on alleged threats posed by Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and bilateral trade.

There was no immediate reaction from the Trump administration, which initially indicated it wouldn’t pressure Israel to cease settlement expansion, reversing the position of its predecessor. In a statement on Friday, however, the White House said Israel’s settlement construction “may not be helpful.”

Mr. Netanyahu is scheduled to visit the White House Feb. 15 for talks with President Trump.

Deputy Minister in the Ministry of Defense, Eli Ben-Dahan (front) and other Israeli lawmakers gesture as they attend a vote on a bill at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in Jerusalem Monday. Photo: ammar awad/Reuters

Under the legislation approved late Monday, Israeli authorities are allowed to declare as government property the private Palestinian land upon which the formerly illegal enclaves were built. The measure calls for the Palestinian owners of the land to be compensated with money or alternative plots of land. CONTINUE AT SITE

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BOOKS Comments turned off

George Eliot Knew a Thing or Two About 21st-Century Politics She wrote ‘Middlemarch’ in 1872 and set it in the 1830s. It’s eerily familiar.By Allysia Finley

By on February 7th, 2017

What can a Victorian-era novel depicting provincial English society teach us about modern politics? For starters, the more politics change, the more they stay the same.
George Eliot’s opus “Middlemarch” (1872), set in a small English town in the early 1830s, isn’t on most high school or college core reading lists. It should be. The novel’s vexing political questions foreshadow the debates taking place today.

“Middlemarch” unfolds against the backdrop of rapid industrialization and a rising middle class. At the time, only the landed aristocracy could vote. Due to urban migration—there was no redistricting to account for population shifts—cities were underrepresented. Meanwhile, the gentry controlled sparsely populated “rotten” boroughs whose voters were under their thumb.

In the novel, political agitators recruit the wealthy landlord Arthur Brooke to run for Parliament on a program of democratic reform. Eliot portrays Mr. Brooke as a frontman for the populist movement and observes that “the very men who profess to be for him would bring another member out of the bag at the right moment.”

Democratic activists choose him because he’s an empty vessel: “Mr. Brooke’s mind, if it had the burthen of remembering any train of thought, would let it drop, run away in search of it, and not easily come back again.” He’s flawed in other ways: Mr. Brooke’s opponents disparage him as “a damned bad landlord” who is “currying favor with a low set.” They make hay out of his poor treatment of tenants.

Mr. Brooke buys a newspaper, the Pioneer, and installs Will Ladislaw, a political activist, as editor to promote his campaign. Eliot describes the Pioneer as a “valuable property which did not pay.” Newspaper readership in those days was also segregated politically: “It’s no use your puffing Brooke as a reforming landlord, Ladislaw: they only pick the more holes in his coat in the [competing rag] ‘Trumpet,’ ” Tertius Lydgate tells his friend. Mr. Ladislaw retorts: “No matter; those who read the ‘Pioneer’ don’t read the ‘Trumpet’ . . . Do you suppose the public reads with a view to its own conversion?”

Dr. Lydgate is a young physician who aims to revolutionize the practice of medicine, which “chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs.” Doctors made their money by writing prescriptions, especially for opiates. Dr. Lydgate favors a holistic treatment-and-payment model over physicians “making out long bills for draughts, boluses, and mixtures.”

However, the doctor doubts whether laws promulgated by self-interested politicians will accomplish anything in the way of reform. “That is the way with you political writers,” Dr. Lydgate tells his friend, “crying up a measure as if it were a universal cure, and crying up men who are a part of the very disease that wants curing. . . . You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The ObamaCare Cleanup Begins Early executive action can improve short-term insurance markets.

By on February 7th, 2017

All of a sudden the press is filled with stories about Republicans supposedly retreating from their promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare. Liberals are claiming vindication and conservatives are getting nervous, but the stampede to declare failure is premature. The orderly transition to a more stable and affordable health-care system is merely beginning.

As with much else in the Donald Trump era, people should avoid rushing to conclusions. Too much significance is attributed to Republicans adding the word “repair” to their vocabulary, as if this represents a policy change. The insurance markets really do need repair, and doing nothing isn’t realistic amid ObamaCare’s downward spiral.

Likewise, the GOP retreat in Philadelphia last month was contentious, according to leaked audio, but debating the merits of different ideas is how political parties form a strategy. Republicans now recognize that they can’t blame President Obama for insurance disruptions, even if his Administration caused them. They also increasingly understand that they’ve been handed an armed bomb and need to be careful and serious when defusing it.

The exchanges are ailing and fragile—beset by high and rising premiums and a wave of insurer exits. The Health and Human Services Department announced Friday that final enrollment on the federal exchanges for 2017 dropped by about 400,000 from last year. “In spite of the best intentions of Washington and the industry, the intended goals of the ACA have not been achieved. Millions of Americans remain uninsured, and still lack access to affordable health care,” Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said on an investor call, expressing the business consensus.

Uncertainty is inevitably priced into premiums, and benefits and rates for 2018 started to be designed and set months ago. They’ll be approved by regulators in the spring, so Mr. Trump’s HHS nominees, Tom Price and Seema Verma, need to move fast to bring more predictability to the markets.

One of the President’s first acts was to sign an executive order to “waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay” rules that burden individuals, states and business in order to “create a more free and open health-care market.” The specifics are waiting in an HHS proposed rule about “market stabilization” now under review by the White House budget office.

This rule likely includes short-term measures to deregulate ObamaCare’s most onerous provisions. Technical reforms could be immediately reflected in lower premiums. These include relaxing the essential benefits mandate or the price controls that limit how much rates can vary from person to person. The Obama HHS turned the individual mandate into swiss cheese, creating “special enrollment periods” that allow people to dip in and out of insurance at will. Ensuring continuous coverage may be a priority.

Another useful interim change to reduce gaming would be to shorten the ObamaCare “grace period,” a 90-day window that requires insurers to cover consumers who aren’t paying their premiums. A McKinsey study found one of five exchange enrollees stop paying at some point during the year, and half of them re-enrolled in the same plan the next year, availing themselves of three months of “free” coverage.

Congress could also help stabilize the exchanges by suspending the 10-year $145 billion tax on the insurance industry. The costs will be passed on to consumers in higher rates, which is why Congress and the Obama White House agreed to a one-year suspension for 2017. Oliver Wyman estimates that another delay would offer immediate premium relief of 3% for 2018. This would buy some goodwill amid debates about who owes who what in various ObamaCare reimbursement programs.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

It’s Britain, So the Anti-Semitism Is More Refined Cutting and pasting the old prejudice of Jews as infanticidal global masterminds onto Israel. Brendan O’Neill ( Aug. 15, 2014)

By on February 7th, 2017

While browsing this morning I came across this pithy column from Brendan O’Neill still so relevant today….rsk

Britain’s leftists are patting themselves on the back for having resisted the lure of anti-Semitism. Sure, there were some ugly incidents in the U.K. during the Gaza conflict in recent weeks, including the smashing of a Belfast synagogue’s window and the pasting of a sign saying “Child Murderers” on a synagogue in Surrey. But for the most part, Britain’s anti-Israel protesters trill, we avoided the orgies of Jew-hate that stained protests about Gaza in Paris, Berlin and other European cities.

I don’t buy that Britain is an oasis of prejudice-free anti-Zionism in a European desert of anti-Semitic sentiment. Rather, Brits have simply proven themselves more adept than their Continental counterparts at dolling up their prejudices as political stands. In Britain, the meshing of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, the expression of ancient prejudices in the seemingly legitimate guise of opposing Israel, is more accomplished than it is in other European countries. Britain isn’t free of anti-Semitism—we’re just better than our cousins on the Continent at expressing that poisonous outlook in a more coded, clever way.

What has been most striking about the British response to the Gaza conflict is the extent to which all the things that were once said about Jews are now said about Israel. Everywhere, from the spittle-flecked newspaper commentary to angry street protests, the old view of Jews as infanticidal masterminds of global affairs has been cut-and-pasted onto Israel.

Consider the constant branding of Israelis as “child murderers.” The belief that Israel takes perverse pleasure in killing children is widespread. It was seen in the big London demonstrations where protesters waved placards featuring caricatured Israeli politicians saying “I love killing women and children.” It could be heard in claims by the U.K.-based group Save the Children that Israel launched a “war on children.” It was most explicitly expressed in the Independent newspaper last week when a columnist described Israel as a “child murdering community” and wondered how long it would be before Israeli politicians hold a “Child Murderer Pride” festival.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Fading U.S. Influence In Asia By Herbert London President, London Center for Policy Research

By on February 7th, 2017

If one requires any evidence that the United States is a fading power, the recent events in the South China Sea offer ample evidence. Two Chinese fighter jets intercepted U.S. military reconnaissance aircraft and, to add to the humiliation rebuked the Obama administration for any surveillance near China. The incident took place in international airspace on what has been described as a “routine U.S. patrol.” This latest encounter comes on the heels of another interception in which Chinese jets mimicked an all-out attack on a U.S. naval vessel that sailed close to a disputed reef. These are merely two recent war like actions by the Chinese in a series of interception since 2014.

China now claims most of the South China Sea through which $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes each year. The Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei all have claims of one kind or another in the Chinese created perimeter and all of these nations depend on the U.S. to enforce those claims. Washington has accused Beijing of militarizing the region, but China responds with a shrug suggesting that there are diplomatic channels available for the resolution of disputes.

The weakness of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific and the China Sea is apparent. New naval vessels – desperately needed to relieve the demands on the existing force – are not in production and with sequestration, are not likely to be in production. There are an insufficient number of Aegis equipped ships to provide an acceptable level of sea-based protection. And after several incidents in which there hasn’t been a military response, Chinese officials believe the U.S. has acquiesced in their regional domination.

Moreover, and quite tellingly, the nations that have claims on islands in the South China Sea, have either dropped their protests or softened their language. There is the growing realization the U.S. is not prepared to protect island claims or even protect freedom of the seas.

The president elect of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, explained, “America would never die for us. If America cared, if would have sent its aircraft carriers and missile frigates the moment China started reclaiming land in contested territory, but no such thing happened… America is afraid to go to war. We’re better off making friends with China.” This is a sentiment resonating throughout the continent.

Chinese sorties against the U.S. are not a casus belli, even as they have increased regional tension and have exposed the U.S. as an ill-prepared protector of Asian allies. Having eviscerated national naval strength, there isn’t much the U.S. can do except express our dismay at the U.N. and in bilateral talks.

The Chinese installation of DF-21 “carrier killer” surface to ship missile, and its current iteration, has a range of 2500 miles. Of significant concern is the Russian air defense, the S-500 anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems that are likely to neutralize the effectiveness of the F-35 stealth fighter before it becomes operational, which the Chinese claim to have acquired. These technical breakthroughs give the U.S. Navy pause; while not dispositive they are factors that militate against activism.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

EDWARD CLINE: DRUNKEN SAILORS

By on February 6th, 2017

What will we do with a drunken sailor? (Irish Rovers, with lyrics)

There are two sets of drunken sailors who are the subjects here: Angela Merkel and her cronies and her soused immigration policies that are destroying Europe; and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which not only is seriously considering appointing a rabid, recalcitrant Muslim as its next chairman, but has also pledged as a party to scuttle or block President Trump’s whole agenda and his cabinet nominees.

Both sets presume to lead their countries to an era of peace and “tolerance” and multicultural “harmony.”

There is a third set of drunken sailors, with which Merkel and the DNC have collaborated in their inebriated binges, the Mainstream Media (MSM).

Merkel is determined to continue her nation-destroying open-immigration policies which have saturated Germany with Muslim welfare parasites, criminals, and jihadis posing as “refugees,” and faces stiff opposition from newly invigorated “right wing” parties. Even her immigration allies are having second thoughts about the practical political consequences. The Democratic National Committee, on the other hand, is still reeling drunkenly over Trump’s election and its having lost the 2016 presidential contest, which, if it had managed to get Hillary Clinton elected, would have foisted on the country an America hater arguably worse than Barack Obama. Looking favorably at Keith Ellison, this is a desperate attempt to elevate the DNC to a position of influence, to become “relevant.”

Shave their bellies with a rusty razor? Put them in bed with the captain’s daughter (the cat o’ nine tails)? Put them in an asylum seeker’s longboat until they’re sober, or drowned? Way hay and up she rises!

The DNC and Merkel: Binge partners.

The MSM has an open bar.

Merkel has put her foot down. She is not back-pedaling on her destructive immigration policy. Germans be damned. They’ve just got to get used to the rapes, the spiraling crime rate, and shouldering additional welfare state burdens. It’s their altruist duty, don’t you know? Breitbart London reported on February 29th:
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has refused to back down over her open borders migration policy, saying in a televised interview that there is “no point in believing that I can solve the problem through the unilateral closure of borders.”

“I have no plan B,” she added.

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GANGSTER ISLAM: THE PROBLEM EUROPE IGNORES BY TIMON DIAS

By on February 6th, 2017

The Dutch-Moroccan rapper Ismo stating: “I believe nothing blindly except the Quran” “I hate the Jews even more than the Nazis” and “I won’t shake hands with faggots” / screenshot YT

For over a decade, Europe’s struggle to successfully integrate its Muslim population has been evident. But throughout the years a new and distinctly European phenomenon arose, which is as significant as it is underreported: Gangster Islam. It entails the conflation of the seemingly a-religious street culture of youths from a Muslim background on the one hand, and elements of the Islamic religion on the other.

The German publication Der Spiegel once very briefly touched on the matter, a Danish documentary highlighted Islamic extremists recruiting gang members from a Muslim background, and a Dutch terrorism expert pointed out how Syrian returnees were more likely to live a life of crime in order to finance the jihad, than to actually commit a terror attack.

One would think that after having spent millions of euros on interreligious dialogues, cultural sensitivity trainings and moral diversity classes, Europe’s social scientists would have punctured the surface by now. But a fundamental discussion on how and why street culture and religion conflate, and what the implications of this new hybrid culture are, seems thus far to have been shied away from.

The analyses that have been made conclude gang members and jihadist mostly resemble one another in their tendency towards and fascination for violence. However, the resemblances between seemingly a-religious street youths from a Muslim background and Islamists, are actually more numerous and more fundamental. Their main parallels are:

1- Both harbour subversive intentions toward their European host societies

2- Both primarily identify themselves as Muslim

3- Both are vocal in their hatred for Jews

4- Both glorify violence

In the exploration of these parallels, “street youth from a Muslim background” will henceforth be referred to simply as “youths“.

– Subversive intentions –

Islamists have a historic and highly detailed system of beliefs dictating not to integrate into host societies, and when possible to subvert that social fabric by missionary work (Dawah) and/or violence.

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The French Inquisition France’s New Dreyfus Trial, a Jihad against the Truth by Yves Mamou

By on February 6th, 2017

“It is a shame to deny this taboo, namely that in the Arab families in France, and everyone knows it but nobody wants to say it, anti-Semitism is sucked with mother’s milk.” — George Bensoussan, historian of Moroccan heritage, on trial for saying that.

“When parents shout at their children, when they want to reprimand them, they call them Jews. Yes. All Arab families know this. It is monumental hypocrisy not to see that this anti-Semitism begins as a domestic one. ” — Smaïn Laacher, French-Algerian professor of sociology.

This witch-hunt against Bensoussan is symptomatic of the state of free speech today in France. Intellectual intimidation is the rule. Complaints are filed against everyone not saying that Muslims are the main victim of racism in France.

In December 2016, Pascal Bruckner, a writer and philosopher, was also brought to court for saying: “We need to make the record of collaborators of Charlie Hebdo’s murderers.” He named the people in France who had instilled a climate of hatred against Charlie.

Muslims, especially young Muslims, as the new revolutionary labor class. It did not matter that most of them were not working: they were “victims”.

“Anti-racist vigilance became a gag rule… Anti-racist organizations are in the denial of ‘Muslim racism.'” — Alain Finkielkraut, philosopher and academic.

An important red line in France has just been crossed. In true dhimmi fashion, in a move reminiscent of both the Inquisition and the Dreyfus Trial, all of France’s so-called “anti-racist” organizations have joined a jihad against free speech and against truth.

On January 25, 2017, France’s “anti-racist” organizations — all of them, even the Jewish LICRA (International League against Racism and anti-Semitism) — joined the Islamist CCIF (Collective against Islamophobia) in court against Georges Bensoussan, a highly regarded Jewish historian of Moroccan extraction, and an expert on the history of Jews in Arab countries.

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Quebec: The Crisis of the West by Giulio Meotti

By on February 6th, 2017

Quebec, like the entire West, is facing an existential demographic and religious crisis.

Quebec’s death spiral is explicitly linked with the calls for increased immigration. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who put an end to the military campaign against the Islamic State, just called on Muslim migrants to come to his country.

Resistance to Quebec’s dramatic collapse of Christianity does not necessarily require a new embrace of an old Catholicism, but it certainly does need a sane rediscovery of what a Western democracy should be. That includes an appreciation of Western identity and Judeo-Christian values — everything Trudeau’s government and much of Europe apparently refuse to accept.

Welcome to Quebec, with its flavor of an old French province, with its beautiful landscapes, where streets are named after Catholic saints, and where a gunman just murdered six people in a local mosque.

Violence can be the consequence of societal convulsions, as in the 2011 massacre on Norway’s island of Utoya, in a country that prided itself of being ultra-secularized, and part of the global “good society”. Quebec, also, like the entire West, is facing an existential demographic and religious crisis.

George Weigel, writing in the American publication, First Things recently called Quebec “Catholicism’s Empty Quarter”. “There is no more religiously arid place,” he wrote, “between the North Pole and Tierra del Fuego; there may be no more religiously arid place on the planet”.

Sandro Magister, one of Italy’s most prominent journalists on Catholic affairs, wrote, “while Rome talks, Quebec has already been lost”.

Quebec’s Catholic buildings are empty; the clergy is aging. Today, inside the Church of Saint-Jude in Montreal, personal fitness trainers take the place of Catholic priests. The Théatre Paradoxe in Montreal now sits where the church of Notre-Dame-du-Perpétuel-Secours was before it shut. The former Christian nave is now used for concerts and conferences, while Christian hymns on Sundays are replaced by disco shows.

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The Choices Palestinians Make by Dexter Van Zile

By on February 6th, 2017

The notion that the Israeli pilot is the only one who has any responsibility for the child’s death is simply false. A lot of bad choices were made — by Palestinians — prior to the death of the young child and Atef Abu Saif knows it; he just can’t — or will not — address these choices, at least not in this text.

The reality that Saif will not confront in his book [The Drone Eats With Me] is that Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip, bears a huge measure of responsibility for the suffering he documents. Hamas has repeatedly started wars that it cannot win against a country that cannot afford to lose.

During these conflicts, it has launched rockets from schoolyards and has used hospitals as command centers for its leaders, putting civilians on both sides of the conflict at risk. When children are killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza, Hamas puts their bodies on display to demonize Israel, and writers such as Saif assist in this tactic.

During the war in 2008–2009, Hamas… used cement and other building materials allowed into the Gaza Strip—ostensibly for the benefit of Palestinian civilians—in order to construct tunnels that could penetrate Israel and serve as a means to kidnap Israeli soldiers and civilians.

During its 2012 fight with Israel, Hamas leaders declared that killing Jews is a religious obligation. Hamas promotes a genocidal organization that seeks Israel’s destruction and yet Saif does not speak a word about this lethal ideology or actions before or during the 2014 war.

Honesty requires that the deaths of these Palestinian children serve to drive — not obstruct — the conversation toward Palestinian abilities and responsibility.

On and on he goes in an emotionally powerful but intellectually dishonest lament. Saif simply cannot come to grips with the responsibility Palestinian leaders have for the suffering in the areas they govern.

This is exactly what Saif’s condescending patrons and boosters in the West are looking for — narratives that allow them to embrace and broadcast baseless hatred for the Jewish state in the name of human rights.

Westerners who feast on this narrative do not help the Palestinians, but hurt them, by responding to the misdeeds of Palestinian elites with condescending pats on the head instead of the rebukes they warrant.

After returning from an awful weekend trip with a Christian youth group, I told my mother I wanted to stop going to church in the next town over and worship where we lived. “Nobody likes me over there,” I said. Her response was direct and brutal: “Maybe they are not the problem. Maybe it is you.”

It was a shock. Mothers are not supposed to talk that way to their 11-year-old sons (so I thought). In the years since, I have tried, with varying degrees of success, when in a difficult position, to look at the role I played in creating the circumstances I find myself in.

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