RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sarahhonig.com/2014/01/17/another-tack-pernicious-wishful-thinking/

It was all too easy to engage in wishful thinking and assume that the Germans would stick to the plan they had announced. The Germans had succeeded in dividing the Jews of the ghetto into two groups – those destined for deportation, and those hoping to evade the danger.

Moshe Arens, Flags over the Warsaw Ghetto.

With obvious name changes, the same dichotomy of orientations can be ascribed to the citizens of the sovereign Jewish state, here and now.

There are those among us who serially find it “all too easy to engage in wishful thinking” and assume that the Arabs would honor their announced commitment to peace.

Despite all the ill-will and treachery with which each and every one of our existentially risky concessions had been repaid, the Arabs had succeeded in dividing the Jews of Israel into two groups – those destined to suffer and those trusting that they would evade the danger.

Doubtless, the above analogy is sure to stir up scorn and righteous indignation. The self-appointed guardians of other people’s consciences cannot but be scandalized to the core. The overbearing priests of our political correctness disdain historical parallels, especially those that hark back to the darkest days of the Jewish past – with the glaring exception of parallels they themselves draw in the service of spiteful taunts.

But, as the old adage goes, anyone who doesn’t learn from history is doomed to relive it. Of course, there are no absolute replicas of what was. Circumstances and protagonists inevitably differ. But overall directions, processes and mindsets – as well as their derivatives and consequences – may well be spine-chillingly similar.

In Warsaw of 1942 desperate Jews made concessions in blood. Powerless, they passively sacrificed thousands of lives in hope that they would thereby buy respite. In today’s Israel, hardly desperate Jews clamor to make hazardous territorial concessions in the hope that they’d thereby buy peace or at least a respite.

http://washingtonjewishweek.com/illegitimacy-clouds-kerrys-mideast-effort/
Eric Rozenman is Washington director of CAMERA, the Boston-based 65,000-member Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. CAMERA is a news media watch-dog; it takes no position on negotiated Arab-Israeli agreements. Any opinions expressed above are solely those of the writer.

Illegitimacy hangs like smog over Secretary of State John Kerry’s obsessive-compulsive Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. Even assuming he succeeds in brokering a onelegged peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority administering the West Bank, it will not:

• Affect the Gaza Strip, where half the Palestinian Arabs in the disputed territories live. Gaza is ruled by Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood derivative that violently ousted the Fatah-led P.A. Its charter is genocidal regarding not only Israel but also Jews in general.

• Legally bind successors of P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas’ term expired in 2009. That of the virtually defunct Palestinian Legislative Council also ended. Abbas, 78 and lacking an obvious successor, exercises unfounded authority through decree. A subsequent president or council may discount any agreement of his.

http://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/canadas-consummate-support-israel/

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Canada’s weighty backing of Israel is comprehensive, giving expression to moral principles. Ottawa defends Israel, consistently before any other country in the world. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his team undoubtedly will be warmly welcomed in Jerusalem next week as valuable allies and trusted friends.

Under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen J. Harper, who is to visit Israel next week, Canada has emerged as Israel’s staunchest ally in the world. The record shows that Canada’s support for Israel is comprehensive and weighty. It is frequently a step ahead of the rest of the world, setting a principled, pro-Israel example.

The Israeli government deeply respects and appreciates Canada’s backing, and holds Prime Minister Harper in the highest regard.
The First to Defend Israel

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4134/echr-uk

The new president of the ECHR, Judge Dean Spielmann, threatened in June 2013 that if Britain did not adhere to European human rights laws, it could face being ejected from the European Union altogether.

Britain’s Lord Judge told the BBC that Judge Spielmann was claiming too much power for a body of unelected judges whose rulings could not be challenged. “This is a court which is not answerable to anybody,” he said. “My own view is: stop here.”

“The process by which democracies decline is…subtle… What happens is that they are slowly drained of what makes them democratic, by a process of internal decay and mounting indifference….” — Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption

An ever-expanding list of controversial rulings issued by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) are fueling accusations that unelected judges at the pan-European court are usurping the judicial sovereignty of individual European nation states.

The Strasbourg-based ECHR enforces the European Convention on Human Rights and its jurisdiction is compulsory and binding for all 47 member states of the Council of Europe.

WATCH: Israel Hayom Insider on Ariel Sharon’s legacyhttp://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=14761 How will Israelis remember the late former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon? • Was he a war hero or a man of peace? • Moderator Danielle Roth speaks with Israel Hayom editor Steve Ganot and columnist Ruthie Blum about Sharon’s legacy and character. Israelis from all walks of […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/robert-gates-revelations-confirm-horowitzs-party-of-defeat-on-the-glazov-gang/

On this special episode of The Glazov Gang, Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director and Editor-in-Chief of PolitiChicks.tv, filled in for Jamie and interviewed Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, Daniel Greenfield, who runs the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.Ann-Marie and Daniel discussed How American Soldiers Died For a War Obama Didn’t Believe In. The dialogue occurred in Part I and focused on the shameful deception behind the president’s “good war” in Afghanistan.

Israel’s predicament today is the work of Rabin and Sharon; two generals turned prime ministers who launched ambitious ventures and died leaving them unfinished and their nation in twilight. Rabin’s peace process destroyed Israeli national security and revitalized terrorism as a force in political affairs. Had he lived, he might have turned away from it. The idea had been thrust on him by the fringe left and he had grasped it as a hedge against the political oblivion of a leftist party that had lost credibility in a new Israel no longer dominated by the Socialist vision of cooperatives and bureaucracies.

That door was shut permanently by Rabin’s death and Sharon’s rise to power was made possible by the terrorist fallout from the peace process. Israelis had attempted to make earlier course corrections by voting for Netanyahu over Peres, but Netanyahu, proved unable to change the course of the nation. And so, after Barak’s disastrous retreat from Lebanon, Sharon’s hour came.

There had only been two politically acceptable options in Israel for dealing with terrorism; negotiated appeasement or holding the line. The latter meant making occasional forays after a terrorist atrocity into the territories under Palestinian Authority control, arresting a few wanted terrorists and then pulling back, and hoping the public would be satisfied.

Voters expected Sharon to go further. And he did.

Even though President Obama always said that Afghanistan was the good war that we should fight, his true intention was to withdraw from Afghanistan. This has been confirmed in Robert Gates’ new memoir, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,” in which the former Secretary of Defense demonstrates that Obama does not believe in his own strategy regarding the Afghan war and that the president always just wanted to extricate America out of the conflict.

Forcing America out of Afghanistan was what all Arab and Islamic countries have hoped to achieve. Muslims have zero tolerance for infidel foreigners on Muslim land, even if the land is being used as a base by al-Qaeda for terrorism. That is Islamic logic.

Obama appears to be unsettled and torn in his decision-making process; a dangerous characteristic for any leader. That is probably the reason why his Affordable Care Act was a disaster — because, with Obama, there is often a gap between what he wants and what he does. We are told over and over again that Obamacare was the president’s signature legislation, but could it be that Obamacare is just like the president’s Afghan strategy, in which Obama says one thing, but does not really have his heart in his words?

What exactly is Obama’s true passion?

A signature legislation should take the full attention of the president in terms of crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. It is what every president oversees at every step to avoid any embarrassment, especially if such legislation was passed without a single vote from the opposing party. Even though health care has always been central to the agenda of the Democratic Party, it does not appear to be number one on Obama’s mind because he totally relied on others to create and oversee Obamacare. However, he did appear very invested in it and rushed it through Congress by totally relying on Nancy Pelosi, who was the one who appeared to have true passion for it. Obama gave her total authority even to make ridiculous statements like “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Obamacare served to keep Obama’s core supporters happy and hypnotized. Even though Obamacare has turned out to be a disaster, Obama’s supporters have never publicly acknowledged how Obama has failed them with such a defective product.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/mcchrystal-tocqueville-and-the-koran-the-postmodern-coinage-of-a-failed-policy/

McChrystal, Tocqueville, and the Koran: The Postmodern ‘COINage’ of a Failed Policy

References to the Koran are all-but-missing from “COIN,” our counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. In contrast, 150 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville knew better.

Just over nine months ago, on September 20, 2009, the Department of Defense released a declassified version of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s assessment of the war in Afghanistan. The Washington Post published a version of this report with minor deletions of material that officials maintained could compromise future operations, rather than a copy of the document marked “confidential.” Although Gen. McChrystal’s counterinsurgency (COIN)-based analysis, “updated” for the Afghanistan theater, at least mentioned the “Koran” (a word omitted entirely from the December 2006 COIN manual co-authored by Gen. David Petraeus), the Koran’s motivational relevance — consistent with a over a millennium of jihadism within Afghanistan (or “Ghazni”) — was completely misrepresented. Negating doctrinal and historical realities, past and present, McChrystal’s uninformed, panglossian Koranic gloss rationalized an ostensibly “more forceful” strategy:

whereby INS [insurgents] are exposed continually for their cultural and religious violations, anti-Islamic and indiscriminate use of violence and terror, and by concentrating on their vulnerabilities. These include their causing of the majority of civilian casualties, attacks on education, development projects, and government institutions, and flagrant contravention of the principles of the Koran. These vulnerabilities must be expressed in a manner that exploits the cultural and ideological separation of the INS from the vast majority of the Afghan population. (emphasis added)

McChrystal’s superficial, bowdlerized pieties on the Koran, and Petraeus’ complete neglect of this foundational Islamic text, contrast starkly with the contemplative, firsthand observations on the Koran (and Islam) made by Alexis de Tocqueville. Shortly after his return from America, Tocqueville studied North African Islamic culture and history — which included an analysis of the Koran (“Notes on the Koran,” March, 1838) — and made two visits to Algeria (in 1841, and 1846), becoming one of the foremost experts on these matters, while serving as a French parliamentarian.

Over at Real Clear Politics, Robert Tracinski muses on the degradation of “global warming” into “a textbook case of pseudo-science”:

One of the famous characteristics of pseudo-science is that it is “unfalsifiable.” That is, the theory is constructed in such a way that there is no evidence that could possibly refute it. The classic example is Freudian psychoanalysis, which tells you that you have an Oedipus Complex, and if you deny it, that’s just proof that you’re repressing it…

“Climate-change” theory is similarly irrefutable:

So sea water is freezing because it is melting.

Note that there is never any pause to acknowledge that maybe scientists should investigate the hypothesis that warming isn’t as big or inevitable as they have predicted. No, it’s on to the next ad hoc rationalization. That’s the basic pattern: an unproven theory reinforces itself in the face of contradictory evidence by generating additional unproven theories.

A relatively small number of us find Big Climate’s pretzel-like exertions hilarious and ridiculous. But should we be allowed to do so? To those who believe in his magical “hockey stick”, the fake Nobel Laureate Dr Michael Mann’s current legal battles are the result of “denialists” denying him the freedom to practice his “science”. But look at the actual court cases and a different picture emerges. First, Mann’s case before the Virginia Supreme Court:

A conservative advocacy group, the American Tradition Institute, filed the initial request for documents, and the University was apparently inclined to agree to much of the request until Mann, the American Association of University Professors, and other groups urged them not to.