RUTHFULLY YOURS

For the first time – and never again – the first day of Chanukah will be celebrated on Thanksgiving, the fourth Thursday in November, November 28, 2013. Since the Jewish calendar is based on a 19 year cycle (when a “leap month” is added – seven times – to the shorter Jewish year) and Thanksgiving is part of a 7 year cycle, they coincide every 133 years. However, Thanksgiving was formally adopted by President Lincoln in 1863, and therefore it could not coincide with Chanukah 133 years ago, in 1861. Moreover, due to the moving gap between the Jewish lunar calendar (with 29-30 day months) and the general Gregorian solar calendar, they will not coincide before the year 79,811….

2. David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of the Jewish State, stated: “The struggle of the Maccabees was one of the most dramatic clashes of civilizations in human history, not merely a political-military struggle against foreign oppression…. The meager Jewish people did not assimilate, as did many peoples. The Jewish people prevailed, won, sustained and enhanced their independence and unique civilization…. The Hasmoneans overcame one of the most magnificent spiritual, political and military challenges in Jewish history due to the spirit of the people, rather than the failed spirit of the establishment ….” (Uniqueness and Destiny, pp 20-22, Ben Gurion, IDF Publishing, 1953).

3. Chanukah is the only Jewish holiday that commemorates a Land of Israel
national liberation struggle, unlike Passover (the Exodus from Egypt), Sukkot/Tabernacles and Shavuot/Pentecost (on the way from Egypt to the Land of Israel) and Purim (deliverance of Jews in the Persian Empire). Chanukah is the longest Jewish holiday (8 days) with the most intense element of light (8 consecutive nights of lighting candles).

4. The critical Chanukah developments occurred, mostly, in the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria: Mitzpah (also the Prophet Samuel’s burial site), Beth El (Judah’s first headquarters), Beth Horon (Judah’s victory over Seron), Hadashah (Judah’s victory over Nicanor), Beth Zur (Judah’s victory over Lysias), Ma’aleh Levona (Judah’s victory over Apolonius), Adora’yim (a Maccabean fortress), Elazar and Beit Zachariya (Judah’s first defeat), Ba’al Hatzor (where Judah was defeated and killed) and the Judean Desert. Unified Jerusalem was the Capital of the Maccabees. Thus, Chanukah is not a holiday of “occupied territories;” Chanukah highlights the moral-high-ground of Jews in their ancestral land.

5. Shimon the Maccabee – who succeeded his brothers, Judah and Yonatan –
defied an ultimatum by the Syrian emperor, Antiochus (Book of Maccabees A, Chapter 15, verse 33), who demanded an end to the “occupation” of
Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Gezer and Akron, Shimon declared: “We have not occupied a foreign land; we have not ruled a foreign land; we have liberated the land of our forefathers from foreign occupation.”

6. The name Maccabee (מכבי or מקבי) is a derivative of the Hebrew word Makevet (מקבת), Power Hammer, which described Judah’s tenacious and decisive fighting capabilities. Or, it could be a derivative of the Hebrew verb Cabeh (כבה), to extinguish, which described the fate of Judah’s adversaries. Another source of the name suggests that Maccabee, מכבי, is the Hebrew acronym of “Who could resemble you among Gods, Jehovah” (מי כמוך באלים יי). However, the saga of the Maccabees was written, during ancient times, in Latin, which sometimes pronounces C like a TZ. Hence, Maccabee could be the Latin spelling of the Hebrew word Matzbee, the commander.

Raymond Ibrahim on Obama’s War Crimes Charges – on The Glazov Gang
Egyptian lawyers file formal complaint at the International Criminal Court accusing U.S. president of crimes against humanity.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/raymond-ibrahim-on-obamas-war-crimes-charges-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/364667/scheme-behind-obamacare-fraud-andrew-c-mccarthy
Lies smooth the transition to a fundamental transformation of our health-care system.

Fraud can be so brazen it takes people’s breath away. But for a prosecutor tasked with proving a swindle — or what federal law describes as a “scheme to defraud” — the crucial thing is not so much the fraud. It is the scheme.

To be sure, it is the fraud — the individual false statements, sneaky omissions, and deceptive practices — that grabs our attention. As I’ve recounted in this space, President Obama repeatedly and emphatically vowed, “If you like your health-insurance plan, you can keep your health-insurance plan, period.” The incontrovertible record — disclosures by the Obama administration in the Federal Register, representations by the Obama Justice Department in federal court — proves that Obama’s promises were systematically deceitful. The president’s audacity is bracing, and not just because he lies so casually while looking us in the eye. Obama also insults our intelligence. It is one thing to tuck evidence of falsehood into a few paragraphs on page 34,552 of a dusty governmental journal no one may ever look at. It is quite something else to announce it in a legal brief publicly filed in a case of intense interest to millions of Americans aggrieved by Obamacare’s religious-liberty violations. To be so bold is to say, in effect, “The public is too ignorant and disengaged to catch me, and the press is too deep in my pocket to raise alarms.”

Still, to show that politicians lie is like pointing out that it gets dark at night. The lie, the fraud, does not tell us why they lied in this instance. The fraud does not tell us what the stakes are. To know that, we must understand the scheme — the design.

“First, do no harm” sounds nice, but contrary to legend, it is not part of the Hippocratic Oath, one of the oldest binding documents in history. Hippocrates invoked the medical deities Apollo and Hygeia for physicians to treat the ill to the best of their ability; to respect privacy; to teach the next generation; to guard the ill from harm and injustice; to remember obligations to all infirmed regardless of their soundness of body and mind. This oath is still sacred to the medical profession, and, in general, it is adhered to by physicians throughout the world.

Although FIMA, the International Federation of Islamic Medical Associations states, “Islamic Medicine is defined as the art of practice of medicine in the service of humanity under Islamic guidelines as ordained in the divine book al-Qu’ran and taught by the Prophet Muhammad.” ….and In discussing Islamic medical ethics: “a physician derives his conclusions from rules of Islamic laws (Shar’iah) and Moslem medical ethics.” The site goes on to state their four basic principles: respect for the autonomy of the patient; beneficence; no malfeasance and “distributive justice.”

Oh well that has not come to America yet.

However if you follow the dots on Obamacare, the bureaucrats have taken the hypocritical oath. The irony is that the subsidies for insurance will provide a form of “Medicaid”- the choice will be to pay higher rates or be herded into programs that will send patients back to the bad old days that prompted Medicare- hospital emergency rooms which will turn away most patients except those brought in an ambulance; “triage” where receptionists will decide who gets medical treatment; perfunctory ward care by understaffed and under qualified and under paid staffers; lack of access to costly but critically needed laboratory and high tech diagnostic testing.

Seniors beware! The worst is still to come.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/fact-democrats-and-the-jfk-legend/print/ The mythologizing of John F. Kennedy in the 50 years since his death has verified the adage in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The JFK legend recycled all these years is of a liberal icon, the glamorous martyr whose violent death has validated and sanctified big government, redistributive economic polices, […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/when-obama-said-hes-sorry/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by an All-Star Cast: Ann-Marie Murrell, National Director of PolitiChicks.tv, Basil Hoffman, a Hollywood Actor (“The Artist”) and Monty Morton, a Conservative Entrepreneur.

The Gang gathered to discuss The Haunting Design of ObamaCare, shedding light on the president’s true morbid objectives in implementing his health care plan.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4061/spain-military-islamic-radicals An investigation initiated by the American CIA and FBI in 2009 revealed that at least 100 Islamic extremists had infiltrated the U.S. military, and that some of these individuals had been in touch with Islamic radicals who had infiltrated military units in Spain, as well as Britain, France and Germany. The military is an […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/obamas-poll-panic/?print=1 For the White House, November has been the cruelest month, with increasing worry among Democrats that a year from now could mean another midterm electoral disaster, similar to the results in 2010 when Republicans picked up over 60 House seats to gain control and netted six Senate seats as well. Each day produces a […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/364506/ghosts-november-mark-steyn

Aside from the music, I haven’t anything to say about the Kennedy anniversary I haven’t said on previous anniversaries. A decade ago, I wrote:

History is selective. We remember moments, and, because that moment in Dallas blazes so vividly, everything around it fades to a gray blur. So here, from the archives, is an alternative 40th anniversary from November 1963:

8 a.m. Nov. 2: Troops enter a Catholic church in Saigon and arrest two men. They’re tossed into the back of an armored personnel carrier and driven up the road a little ways to a railroad crossing. The M-113 stops, the pair are riddled with bullets and their mutilated corpses taken to staff HQ for inspection by the army’s commanders. One of the deceased is Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam. The other is Ngo Dinh Nhu, his brother and chief adviser.

Back in the White House, President Kennedy gets the cable and is stunned. When Washington had given tacit approval to the coup, the deal was that Diem was supposed to be offered asylum in the United States. But something had gone wrong. I use “gone wrong” in the debased sense in which a drug deal that turns into a double murder is said to have “gone wrong.”

Kennedy had known Diem for the best part of a decade. If he felt bad about his part in the murder of an ally, he didn’t feel bad for long: Within three weeks, he too was dead. Looked at coolly, there seems something faintly ridiculous about cooing dreamily over the one brief shining moment of a slain head of state who only a month earlier had set in motion the events leading to the slaying of another head of state.

Two presidents died that November, but the mawkish parochialiasm of the Camelot cult has obliterated the fact that the second bore responsibility for the death of the first. No “eternal flame” for Diem, just an unmarked grave. He’s the Mary Jo Kopechne of the autumn of 1963, unhelpful to the myth: “What goes around comes around” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “one brief shining moment.”

Unless you’re a Vietnam scholar, you won’t remember the pros and cons of an anti-Diem coup as argued in Washington through the summer and fall of 1963. They barely made sense at the time, and Kennedy’s bewildered reaction to the Buddhist unrest earlier that year sums up the administration’s grasp of the situation: “Who are these people?” he said. “Why didn’t we know about them before?” “Big Minh,” the general who led the coup, lasted two months before he was overthrown by another general. He moved to Thailand, where the American taxpayer picked up his tab, including for some expensive dental work.

As Ho Chi Minh observed, “I can scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid.” There was certainly a presidential-assassination conspiracy afoot in the US in the fall of 1963. In Washington. But all that drivel about Dallas-the-city-of-right-wing-hate is more flattering to American liberalism’s self-image.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/364568/print If the Republicans can’t fight wars and the Democrats stink at socializing medicine, what good are they? That would not be an altogether unreasonable question for a typical American today. No doubt spokesmen for the respective political parties would offer all sorts of objections to that summation. And many of those objections would be […]