RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Settlements-and-the-future-of-Zionism-335606

Controversy over “Israeli occupation,” “unilateral withdrawal” and the destruction of Jewish communities is not just about territory and the rights of Jews. It exposes a basic struggle between Zionism and post-/anti-Zionism.

Jews who live in Judea and Samaria, like those who lived in the Gaza Strip, represent an ideology whose roots are not only in modern Zionism, but in a deep attachment to Jewish history, Judaism and the Land of Israel. This ideology opposes the concept of Israel as a pluralistic, secular “nation of its citizens” like those in Europe.

This clash is inevitable and raises fundamental questions: What is Zionism? To whom does the Land of Israel belong, legally and historically? Do Jews need a state at all? Does Israel’s survival depend on establishing another Arab Palestinian state? It is not only a dispute about sovereignty and who controls land, but about what Israel represents as a society and a culture.

Deeply rooted in the fear that Israel will be wiped out, suggestions to abandon traditional Zionist ideals reflect a survivalist mentality.

Campaigns to boycott and delegitimize Israel are increasing fueled by Jew-hatred and Arab funding. In the face of this onslaught, calls to abandon the settlement movement and promoting the “inevitability” of another Palestinian state hardly seem irrational.

But it’s neither “the occupation” nor “Israeli apartheid” (Jewish racism) that makes Jew-haters so angry; it’s whether Israel as a country that defines itself as Jewish should exist.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/08/fitzgerald-the-point-of-cnns-religious-fundamentalism-series.html

OVER AT JIHAD WATCH HUGH FITZGERALD WROTE ABOUT MS AMANPOUR’S FORAYS INTO HISTORY IN 2007….RSK
Fitzgerald: The point of CNN’s religious fundamentalism series

Christiane Amanpour has at least one parent who was part of what one would have hoped to describe as the intelligent secular ancien regime. They were the people pushed out by Khomeini and his epigones, and therefore, one would have thought, comprehending the nature of Islam. Well, it turns out that not everyone who has fled Iran quite has that necessary understanding. Some like to pretend that Khomeini is a sport, when the real sport was the Shah and his father, in their de-emphasis on Islam, their emphasis on the pre-Islamic past of Iran, and their willingness to limit the power of the mullahs — and, above all, to give the non-Muslims of Iran, the Christians, Jews, and Baha’is, reasonable security and even something akin to legal equality.

But Amanpour does not realize that. Nor, in her aggressive climb through the media ranks, has she stopped to study Islam. She has not stopped to find out what happened to the Zoroastrians or what happens to them in Iran today. She has not stopped to find out why, even in the 20th century, a Jew could be killed for going out in the rain (where a drop might ricochet off him and hit an innocent Muslim with this raindrop of najis-ness, thus contaminating him).

She might, that is, have begun with the history of Islam in Iran and considered the treatment of non-Muslims, and how Shah Abbas II overnight ordered the conversion of all the Jews and Armenians in an Iranian city (possibly Tabriz), and why the real, as opposed to the Iranian exile’s dreamy fictional history of Iran, is full of such episodes. She might have gotten hold of E. J. Browne’s work on Persian literature, and studied Hafiz and Sa’adi. She might have read Omar Khayyam, and come to realize just how un-Islamic he was. She might have read the Shahnameh of Firdowsi, and seen how his literary talent was put to work preventing the linguistic and cultural imperialism of the Arabs from successfully coming to damage and then overwhelm the Iranian culture. She might have done a special program on Islam as a vehicle of Arab cultural and linguistic imperialism, and used Iran as an example of one place where it did not succeed as it did elsewhere.

Oh, there are many things that raw-boned massive Christiane Amanpour might have done, if she had allowed herself the leisure to think, and be something more than one more media star, one more mere reporter incapable of making sense of what she reports on.

http://blog.camera.org/archives/2013/12/cnns_amanpour_smears_israel_at_1.html CNN’s Amanpour Smears Israel at Mandela Memorial Service   During coverage of the December 10 memorial service for the former South African president, Nelson Mandela, held in Johannesburg, frequent Israel basher and CNN (Cable News Network) personality, Christiane Amanpour reminiscing about Mandela, drew what she thought was a key lesson from Mandela’s leadership applicable to an intractable conflict […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4102/geneva-iran-islamic-bomb On the day when the “interim agreements” were ratified in Geneva, November 24 2013, the Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, was photographed smiling. He had good reason to be pleased; not since the Munich Agreement in 1938 have Western leaders given so much for so little. As Bret Stephens wrote in the […]

http://carolineglick.com/the-left-against-zion/

In the 1960s, the American Left embraced the anti-Vietnam War movement as its cri de coeur.

In the 1970s, the Left’s foreign policy focus shifted to calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament by the US and its Western allies.

In the 1980s, supporting the Sandinista Communists’ takeover of Nicaragua became the catechism of the Left.

In the 1990s, the war on global capitalism – that is, the anti-globalization movement – captivated the passions of US Leftists from coast to coast.

In the 2000s, it was again, the anti-war movement. This time the Left rioted and demonstrated against the war in Iraq.

And in this decade, the main foreign policy issue that galvanizes the passions and energies of the committed American Left is the movement to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist.

This week has been a big one for the anti-Israel movement. In the space of a few days, two quasi academic organizations – the American Studies Association and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association – have launched boycotts against Israeli universities. Their boycotts follow a similar one announced in April by the Asian Studies Association.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14265 It is ghetto-like thinking that leads Israel’s government ministers to seriously advocate uprooting Jewish towns and villages in the Jews’ ancestral homeland in order to curry favor with Arab potentates and US coteries. Claude Lanzmann is a great filmaker. His new movie, “The Last of the Unjust”, tells the incredible story of Benjamin Murmelstein, the […]

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14254#.UrNxnDaA2Uk Aruitz Sheva’s Mark Langfan made news when he re-publicized the Joint Chief of Staff memo from 1967. Arutz Sheva publicized it the first time in 2009 and it is just as crucial a read today. The US Joint Chiefs were not interested in Jewish patrimony or Biblical history. They were solely concerned with the […]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/18/prevention-of-school-massacre-shoots-down-argument/

CENTENNIAL, Colo. — It’s a stark fact that is fueling an already intense debate about gun rights in this state: It was an armed deputy who stopped the Arapahoe High School gunman last week from unleashing a deadly massacre, not the expansive new gun control laws approved by Colorado Democrats in March in reaction to two mass shootings.

That is the increasingly inescapable takeaway as details emerge from the school shooting Friday, when the 18-year-old gunman injured another student at random before turning the gun on himself in the school library as the armed deputy was closing in on him.

“The gun control laws didn’t make a difference,” said state Sen. Greg Brophy, a Republican who is seeking his party’s nomination for governor next year. “What made a difference was a person in the building who was armed and who rushed to end the threat.”

Even Gov. John Hickenlooper, the Democrat who signed three gun control bills in March at considerable political risk, acknowledged on CBS‘ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the laws “in this specific case aren’t going to make a difference at all.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/17/coburn-wasted-feds-pay-collect-human-urine/

Facebook, the hot technology company that is earning more than $1 billion in revenue, won’t pay any taxes on its income this year and instead probably will get a major refund from federal taxpayers, according to Sen. Tom Coburn’s annual roundup of wasteful spending.

Among the nearly $30 billion of unnecessary spending that the Oklahoma Republican identified in this year’s “Wastebook” were taxpayer dollars going to buy human urine, to purchase crystal goblets at the State Department, and to pay $18,000 apiece to “pillownauts” — people whom NASA recruited to lie on a bed for two straight months.

The book was released Tuesday morning, minutes before Mr. Coburn and fellow senators took a key test vote on a budget agreement that will boost spending in 2014, going back on a 2011 deal that was supposed to limit discretionary spending to less than $1 trillion.

“This report speaks volumes about why the American people have lost confidence in government,” Mr. Coburn said. “The truth is, is we’d much rather borrow money than cut spending. That’s the truth. And the American people have a right to expect much more from us than that.”

His 177-page, meticulously footnoted report contains dozens of projects he said showed “stupid” judgment on the part of the bureaucrats who authorized them, and the members of Congress who let the spending continue without reining it in.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/17/editorial-navigating-the-swindle/

When a cousin so distant that nobody in the family has ever heard of him sends an email to ask for your bank information so he can transfer a big inheritance, nearly everyone knows by now that he’s not actually a relative, and there is no inheritance. The FBI and other police agencies try to put such thieves behind bars. The Obama administration hands them a check and calls them “navigators.”

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued a report Monday confirming the findings of a group called Project Veritas, which caught Obamacare navigators on tape encouraging fraud. Armed with millions in federal funding, navigators were hired to boost the lagging enrollment numbers for the president’s health care scheme. So far, five navigators have been fired for telling applicants to lie about their income and health history to win freebies and subsidies they don’t deserve.

Polls show that a large majority of Americans would rather stick with the doctor and health plan they have than enlist in the one-size-fits-all Obamacare. Democrats suspected this might happen, so they hatched the subscheme to pay “community organizers” to boost enrollment figures — not necessarily the actual enrollment, just the figures. Navigators don’t have to know anything about insurance or medicine, and they usually have only five or so hours of training, or less. They might be ex-cons, since there are no background checks. Only skill in the art of the hustle is needed.