RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/blog/why-i-write/?print=1

Some years back I was interviewed by Montreal’s French language daily La Presse concerning the nature and purpose of my writing and teaching. The interviewer, unlike the majority of his colleagues, had acquired a pretty decent familiarity with his subject, a rarity in today’s journalistic profession. I was surprised to learn that he had read some of my translated work, in particular a long essay in which I compared the state of Western civilization to the sinking of the Titanic. Why, he wanted to know, did I continue teaching and persist in writing articles, essays and books if I felt that the future was hopeless and there was little point in the whole enterprise.

Well, I replied, there was the little matter of earning a living. But apart from that desideratum, pedagogy and writing were by no means anomalous or contradictory, since even though I knew the vessel was foundering and could not be saved or hauled back to port for retrofitting, I was intent on helping to keep it afloat for as long as possible. Teaching and writing, I said, were essentially pumping, or bailing. I felt it worthwhile to work to delay the inevitable; better to go down later than sooner.

Things have changed. I quit teaching some time ago, convinced of the uselessness of the profession in the brain-cramped intellectual environment of a nearly defunct civilization. Such plenary impoverishment is daunting and probably irreversible. The canard of “green energy,” the massive “climate change” scam that has co-opted vast segments of the Western public, the relentless advance of blasphemy laws putting a chill on freedom of speech and debate, courts declaring that truth is no defense in cases where offense is given, the campaign against the unborn (abortion on demand) and, in some countries, the elderly (selective euthanasia), the politicized university as a locus of indoctrination rather than learning, the sentimental empowerment of the transgendered and the two-spirited who must be accorded every social benefit as if they represented the quintessence of human progress, the successful feminist war against common manhood, the setting in place of redistributive economics as a form of legalized theft, open-door immigration policies for illegal aliens or members of primitive, antithetical cultures—all these developments are signs of rampant and likely terminal intellectual and social decay.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/is-muslim-brotherhood-in-america?f=puball The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) was founded in Egypt in 1928 and is considered a terrorist organization by many countries, including Islamic countries. Its stated goal  is to instill the Qur’an as the sole religion and political body in the life of every individual and country worldwide.   According to Richard Clarke, former Chief counterterrorism advisor […]

http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/735/a-stone-for-his-slingshot/

Thanks Joan Swirsky!!!

“But these are only words I speak—words to wake up Jews if there are any asleep. He will not lose. No cause that had behind it the sweet and powerful dream of freedom—has ever lost. This dream does not stand on the battlefields alone. It stands in us. There are twenty-eight million Arabs. There are British wealth and British officers—and British military equipment. There are eight hundred thousand Jews—besieged and encircled by this Goliath tonight.A David stands against Goliath. I ask you Jews—buy him a stone for his slingshot.” Ben Hecht….1948

Tucked amid the Ben Hecht Papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago is an undated typescript of 21 pages, with a penciled heading: “Speech at dinner at Slapsy Maxie’s, L.A., financed by Mickey Cohen.” Hecht was, of course, a fabled writer for stage and screen, Mickey Cohen was the notorious Los Angeles gangland boss (recently portrayed by Sean Penn in the movie Gangster Squad), and the speech, which has never before been published, is one of the most riveting and remarkable Jewish fundraising speeches ever delivered. What gives?

The outrageously prolific Hecht—writer of reportage, novels and short stories, Broadway theater and Hollywood movies, and eventually Jewish propaganda—was always attracted to outlaws. The first of his six or seven dozen produced (though not always credited) screenplays was Underworld, a 1927 silent film directed by the Austrian-Jewish immigrant Josef von Sternberg. In his freewheeling autobiography, A Child of the Century, Hecht wrote:

I made up a movie about a Chicago gunman and his moll called Feathers McCoy. As a newspaperman I had learned that nice people—the audience—love criminals . . . It was the first gangster movie to bedazzle the movie fans and there were no lies in it—except for a half-dozen sentimental touches introduced by its director.

Hecht won an Academy Award for Underworld, at the very first awards in 1929. (He was nominated five more times but never won another.) In 1932, he wrote Scarface for Howard Hawks, proudly claiming that “two Capone henchmen” showed up after midnight demanding assurance (which he disingenuously provided) that Scarface was not about “the great gangster.”

http://washingtonexaminer.com/the-false-urgency-of-the-israeli-palestinian-peace-process/article/2545149# Jed Babbin served as a deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration and is a senior fellow of the London Center for Policy Research. Almost lost in the avalanche of news about Russia‘s aggression in the Ukraine is that from President Obama‘s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. […]

Countless circumstances could trigger abrogation of a treaty with Israel http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/6/beres-why-there-can-be-no-lasting-palestinian-demi/print/ With increasing desperation, Secretary of State John F. Kerry hopes to secure success for a long-elusive Middle East peace process. During all of his recent negotiations, the secretary has reiterated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unconditional demand that any Palestinian state be “demilitarized.” While […]

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Barach Obama came to the Presidency with a radical domestic agenda and with little interest, or understanding, of global political matters. While he did assume office at a time of financial crisis, it is important to understand that much of the corrective work had been done by the time he took the oath of office. The TED spread, indicating banks’ ability to lend had narrowed dramatically from where it had been in the fall. The yield on high yield bonds began coming down in November. While we were still in recession, the bottom was only four months away. The patient was still sick, but the crisis was over.

He was elected, he claimed, to institute a liberal program. He had no interest in negotiating with those he had defeated. “I won,” was the way he put it. In the meantime, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel noted that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” An $840 billion stimulus bill was rammed through Congress during the honeymoon period. The Affordable Care Act was passed unilaterally a year later, while Democrats still controlled both chambers. Not one Republican voted for the bill, something that had never before happened with such a consequential piece of legislation. The President didn’t care; he was on a roll.

In terms of his liberal domestic agenda, Mr. Obama never considered what their consequences might mean in the global world. For example, in the energy sector where a combination of horizontal drilling and fracking technologies were changing the role of America in the production of fossil fuels, he chose to go with “green” energy, solar and wind companies. His EPA, catering to deep-pocketed environmentalists, inflicted burdensome regulations, delaying construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline for four years and preventing any drilling on federal lands. We have become the world’s largest producer of natural gas, but that is in spite of Mr. Obama’s policies, not because of them. Had Mr. Obama worked with the industry, instead of against it, we would today have surpassed Russia as the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, and events in Ukraine and Europe might well have unfolded in a way far more pleasant for the West, democracy and the people of Ukraine.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-lost-spring-a-new-book-on-us-mideast-policy?f=puball

This month, my book The Lost Spring: U.S. Policy in the Middle East and Catastrophes to Avoid will be in libraries across America and online. This new book, published by Palgrave-McMillan in New York, is an analysis of the evolution of the Arab Spring and its future. It also addresses other democratic revolutions, upheavals and civil wars in the Middle East, including events in Iran, Turkey, Sudan, and beyond.

In Future Jihad (2005), a book that was selected for the U.S. House of Representatives Summer Readings 2006, I projected the rise of the global Jihadist movement, including its surge in the West. My previously most recent book published in English, The Coming Revolution: Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East (2010), predicted the Arab Spring, its successive waves, and the civil wars it would cause. I projected three cycles before they even happened: the rise of civil societies, the takeover by Islamists, and the comeback of the seculars to push back against the Islamists. And this is the very pattern we witnessed in both Egypt and Tunisia. My book in French, Du Printemps Arabe a l’Automne Islamiste (From the Arab Spring to the Islamist Fall), which was published in November 2013 in Paris and launched at the European Parliament in Brussels, described the global race between Islamists and seculars in the region.

My new book of 2014 is taking analysis and projections even further. It explains why the West and the United States failed to predict the Arab Spring and why they failed to handle it effectively. The book also addresses the direction these upheavals are headed and how to correct U.S. policy before irreparable catastrophe strikes the region. From bloody and expanding civil wars in Syria, Iraq and Libya to the fight against terror in Egypt, Lebanon and Tunisia; from genocide in Sudan, Darfur and beyond to the persecution of Christian and ethnic minorities and the rise of al Qaeda and Hezbollah; so much in the region appears hopeless, but one must also recognize the emergence of reformers, women, minorities and civil societies.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4789/an_indian_immigrant_s_view_leftist_indoctrination_in_europe
An Indian immigrant’s view: Leftist indoctrination in Europe
The Leftwing narrative is running unopposed on European campuses. The institutions of higher learning that once heralded the age of enlightenment are looking more and more like Leftwing, neo-totalitarian Seminaries, and I say that coming from India

While giving finishing touches to his Ph.D. dissertation the Dutch student Jerke de Vries had a seemingly harmless idea. A believing Christian that he was, he decided to thank God in his dissertation acknowledgement.

What seemed like a nice gesture to him, did not sit well with the members of the Dissertation Committee at the University of Wageningen (The Netherlands). They gave him a choice between God and the doctoral title.

He was ordered to blacken the sentence acknowledging God in several hundred printed copies of his dissertation, or face a certain rejection of his thesis.

Apparently in the committee’s view, it is one thing to acknowledge a favorite pub, a regular hang-out or even the local soccer team, like other batch mates, but by mentioning God the student had clearly crossed the norms of acceptability.

Finally, Jerke de Vries did bowed down to the dictates of the committee, but kept his pride by physically removing the entire acknowledgment page from several hundred copies of his dissertation, instead of blackening out the ‘objectionable’ sentence, as the committee had instructed.

What happened last week in a Dutch University is not an isolated case of academic overreach by overzealous members of a committee. Universities throughout Europe and North America are increasingly turning into hostile places, not only for believing Christians, but for anyone holding convictions other than the ones approved by the leftwing establishment.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304554004579421550829470192?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop&mg=reno64-wsj The M-302 rocket is a Syrian-made munition that can launch a 375-pound warhead as far as 125 miles. In a Red Sea raid Wednesday, Israeli naval commandos intercepted a shipment of these rockets that had been loaded on a freighter in the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas and were destined for Gaza. The rockets […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/being-beastly-to-the-germans

I was going to open this column with remarks on the plight of the German Romeike family, who in 2008 fled Germany to the U.S. to escape the prohibition there against homeschooling and the severe penalties, such as harsh financial fines and the removal of children from their homes, for not obeying the state.

But, unexpectedly, and for unknown reasons, the Department of Homeland Security called the organization representing the Romeike family, the Home School Legal Defense Association, and said the Romeikes had been granted permanent asylum status and would not be deported back to Germany.

World War II has been over nearly seventy years, but apparently Germany still has a Nazi law on the books that requires German parents to send their children to state schools. In Germany, your children are not your own, neither to teach nor to claim. They are the state’s. You, the parents, are mere stewards of your children, and if they are not raised to be good, docile citizens, they will be reclaimed by the state and removed from your deleterious influence.

Among other blogs, the Free Republic reported the astounding and unexpected news:

“Today, a Supervisor with the Department of Homeland Security called a member of our legal team to inform us that the Romeike family has been granted “indefinite deferred status”. This means that the Romeikes can stay in the United States permanently (unless they are convicted of a crime, etc.) “This is an incredible victory that can only be credited to our Almighty God.

“We also want to thank those of who spoke up on this issue-including that long ago White House petition. We believe that the public outcry made this possible while God delivered the victory.

Up until yesterday, the issue has been reported in one fundamentally wrong way: that the Romeikes were escaping from “religious persecution.” Todd Starnes of Fox News, for example, feared the worst for the Romeike family after the Supreme Court refused to listen to their appeal, which would have resulted in almost instant deportation of the family back to Germany. On March 3rd, in his article, “Team Obama wins fight to have Christian home-school family deported,” he wrote:

Uwe and Hannelore Romeike came to the United States in 2008 seeking political asylum. They fled their German homeland in the face of religious persecution for homeschooling their children.

They wanted to live in a country where they could raise their children in accordance with their Christian beliefs.

The Romeikes were initially given asylum, but the Obama administration objected – claiming that German laws that outlaw homeschooling do not constitute persecution.”The goal in Germany is for an open, pluralistic society,” the Justice Department wrote in a legal brief last year. “Teaching tolerance to children of all backgrounds helps to develop the ability to interact as a fully functioning citizen in Germany.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear the Romeike’s appeal – paving the way for the Christian family of eight to be deported.

Why didn’t the Justice Department call with the good news, instead of the DHS? What was the motive behind the reversal? That remains unknown, but very likely it was the “negative” publicity of a callous, behemoth government picking on a single family. The federal government isn’t scoring high in the likeability polls, lately.

The issue is not one of mere religious persecution. Certainly the German law accomplishes that, but isn’t it more than just “religious” persecution? It’s more than that. It is the negating of one’s convictions, religious or not, by fiat law backed by government force.

Fundamentally, the Romeike family fled to the U.S. to escape ideological persecution. That their reasons were religious are secondary.