RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6203

On Monday night, Channel 10 Arab affairs commentator Zvi Yehezkeli reported that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas made a rare reference to the U.S.-brokered peace talks under way between the PA and Israel.

Until now, Abbas has been tight-lipped about the hush-hush two-state solution discussions in which his negotiating team is ostensibly invested. And though he has made an effort to come off as more moderate than his terrorist predecessor, Yasser Arafat, he occasionally lets his true ill intentions slip. On Monday, as always, he did this in Arabic. After all, he could not risk being too upfront with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry scheduled to arrive in Israel on Tuesday.

What Abu Mazen told his cronies in the Fatah Revolutionary Committee was that the negotiations are significantly deadlocked. No surprise there. But the words to follow are noteworthy. “The situation,” he said, “is liable to be explosive.”

According to Yehezkeli, the phrase Abbas used in Arabic can also be interpreted as “the situation is explosive.”

Translations aside, Abbas was not merely being careless, linguistically or otherwise. He was effectually giving a green light for an eruption of violence against Israelis. This is something he has been doing indirectly, through the PA-controlled media. But saying it outright is unusual for him, since he always tries to remain above the fanatical fray by hiding behind his tailored suit and silk tie.

It is a wardrobe choice that has worked well where fooling the West is concerned. But it is not the only reason that Washington is putting Jerusalem on a par with Ramallah. More importantly, U.S. President Barack Obama wants his State Department to do something — anything — to smooth over its miserable foreign policy failures across the globe. Though the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is and will remain unresolved until the entire region reforms and accepts the Jewish state in its midst, it is nevertheless an easy target for American pressure. This is because Israel is always anxious to cooperate with Uncle Sam; and the P

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/jews-and-christians-play-the-interfaith-kumbaya?f=must_reads The first chapter of the Koran, Al Fatiha, is recited at the start of Muslim prayer rituals at five different times of the day for a total of 17 recitations daily.  The Al Fatiha entreats Muslims to follow the straight path – obedience to Allah and his messenger Mohammed – and not the path […]

The news that Hillary Clinton has earned what the Washington Post characterized as“close to $500,000” for two recent speeches to Goldman Sachs is generating a certain amount of excitement.

An editorial in the Washington Examiner reports that “some critics now raise questions about the propriety of a Wall Street firm that depends in so many ways upon political influence to maintain its financial health paying such egregiously large speaking fees to the potential next Oval Office occupant, especially someone who has little or no experience with financial products or entrepreneurship.”

Neither Goldman Sachs nor Mrs. Clinton has disclosed in detail the contents of the speeches. But the image of Mrs. Clinton — or, for that matter, her husband Bill — as somehow naïve or innocent in matters of finance or business is enough to bring a smile to the lips of anyone who remembers the Clinton back story.

This is the same Hillary Clinton, after all, who made nearly $100,000 in ten months of 1978 and 1979 trading cattle and hog futures, gains she explained improbably by saying she had diligently read the Wall Street Journal.

It is the same Hillary Clinton who served between 1986 and 1992 as a member of the corporate board of directors of Walmart. That was during that Arkansas-based retailer’s phenomenal growth, at a time when it had a non-union, low-cost workforce similar to the one that troubles left-wing activists today.

Bill Clinton, meanwhile, collected a post-presidential $12 million from a partnership he had with Ron Burkle and what the Wall Street Journal described as “Dubai Investment Group (YGP) Ltd., an entity that was part of the business empire of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai.” That’s on top of the $106 million that Mr. Clinton has earned in speaking fees since leaving the White House, which itself comes on top of his reported $15 million book advance.

Meanwhile, the New Republic, in a long feature on how former Bill Clinton aide Douglas Band parlayed his Clinton ties into a personal fortune and a 200-employee corporate advisory firm, can quote an anonymous “Clinton friend” claiming that Mr. Clinton“doesn’t care about money.”

That’s the Clinton trick — making lots of money while appearing not to care about making money or even to know much about business. It’s a feat, an illusion.

And if Goldman Sachs can manage to learn from the Clintons how to convey the appearance of global do-gooders while at the same time generating this sort of cash-flow, then whatever speaking fee the firm paid Mrs. Clinton will be worth every penny.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Goldman tried to capture some of that Clinton image magic. The firm paid Gene Sperling, who had served as an economic policy aide in the Clinton administration, a reported $887,727 in 2008 for “advice on charitable giving.” At that rate, a half-million for Hillary is a bargain for Goldman Sachs.

To be sure, Goldman’s mission of serving clients and shareholders is different from the Clinton mission, if she runs for president, of serving the public. But just as Goldman clients may sometimes wonder if their interests or the firm’s come first, Americans may sometimes wonder if their interests or the Clintons’ own come first. Sometimes the interests are aligned, but when they aren’t, watch out.

In 2000, prominent psychotherapist, Madeleine Albright, clinked cocktails with Supreme Tyrant Kim Jong pere and opined that “he is not insane” just “insecure.”

On February 26, 2008, many thousands of forced starvations, tortures and execution of dissidents later, conductor Lorin Maazel, a “wunderkind” who conducted great orchestras before he was potty trained led the New York Philharmonic in a concert in Pyongyang, North Korea, at the invitation of the North Korean government of mass murderer Kim Jong Il. John Deak, a bassist gushed “I’m not going to make any statements about what’s going to change. Things happen slowly. But I do know that the most profound connection was made with the Korean people tonight.” (those who had been fed…not the thousands who were deliberately starved or tortured)

Many mass killings and nuclear threats later, in 2013 Sean Penn, Dennis Rodman, Puff Daddy and Matt Damon trekked to North Korea to buddy with Kim Jr. who carries on the legacy of Supreme Daddy. Rodman pronounced him “a friend for life.”

Just this April, Ambassador Christopher R. Hill, Dean, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver; former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs; and former US Ambassador to Iraq, South Korea, Poland, and Macedonia -opined “For now, we must get on “the same page of music” with our allies, be seen as a positive force in the region, and work on China to pressure its North Korean allies to abandon their nuclear programs. ”

Wow! that is just brilliant!!! That must be why Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice made Chris Hill her policy adviser on North Korea, where he promoted continued aid and concessions, for North Korean lying, tyranny, arms to Syria, nuclear proliferation and material help to Iran.

Just so you know the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, where Hill is dean is named for Madeleine Albright’s father, a former Czechoslovak diplomat and political scientist, whose astute daughter was shocked, simply shocked to learn that he was Jewish almost a decade after his death.

Read more about Chris Hill and the sorry state of American policy in confronting the human tragedy and the threat from North Korea in http://freekorea.us/2012/07/16/reminder-condi-rices-north-korea-fiasco/

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/10/27/the-ten-worst-purveyors-of-antisemitism-worldwide-6-the-jobbik-party/?print=1

I think now is the time to tally up how many people of Jewish ancestry there are here, and especially in the Hungarian parliament and the Hungarian government, who, indeed, pose a national security risk for Hungary.

Those words were spoken in the Hungarian parliament on November 27, 2012, by Márton Gyöngyösi, an MP of the neo-Nazi Jobbik Party.

As The Economist noted at the time:

Lists have a terrible resonance for Hungary’s Jews. When the Nazis invaded in March 1944 they used the lists of members of the Jewish community to organise one of the swiftest and most efficient episodes of the Holocaust. With the ready assistance of Hungarian officials and the Gendarmerie 430,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz in a few weeks, most to their deaths. On some days the gas chambers and crematoria processed more than 1,000 people an hour.

Yet the government of the ruling conservative Fidesz Party only gave what The Economist called a “lacklustre response.” True, Gyöngyösi’s words sparked a protest demonstration in front of parliament on December 2 with speeches from politicians across the spectrum. Yet it took Fidesz prime minister Viktor Orbán until December 3 to finally say in parliament that Gyöngyösi’s statement was “unworthy of Hungary”—hardly a stinging condemnation.

And the reason for such gingerness is that Jobbik—now Hungary’s third largest party, having won 17 percent of the vote in the 2010 elections—is too popular. Politicians, particularly on the conservative side of the spectrum, compete for its votes and don’t want to denounce it too sharply.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/middle-east-is-double-dealt/?print=1

Boo-hoo, Middle East

About every day or so, a throat-clearing Middle East pundit weighs in to warn us of the Obama’s administration’s dereliction of traditional American engagement. They rightly lament “lead from behind” in Libya. After Benghazi, Libya has turned into something like Somalia. Far more are dying there from sectarian chaos than during the latter years of the hated Moammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship.

The Sunni reactionary establishment of the Gulf is right to deplore Obama’s incoherent flip-flop-flips in Egypt and Syria. The oil lords logically conclude that a directionless president will do nothing to stop Iran’s race to get a bomb — and all the subsequent Middle East WMD catch-ups to match it.

Even Obama’s pet Turkey seems confused that its favorite administration is now nowhere to be seen. The Iraqis were given a fresh start after the surge and hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. aid — and still claimed that they wanted the U.S. out. Obama gladly called their hand. Now, left to themselves, they are reverting to the pre-surge violence, whining about security and sectarianism — and back asking us for even more money. Rule One: never bluff an isolationist to yank all his forces from your country.

After twelve years, it is clear that triple-dealing President Hamid Karzai never made the reforms in Afghanistan that he promised. Now he will soon be on his own too, as Kabul comes to resemble [1] the disaster of Saigon, 1975. He is correct in lamenting U.S. withdrawal, and yet about the most unsympathetic of the many unattractive dependents American has acquired in the Middle East.

Visitors from an alien planet might conclude of the region that Saddams come and go. Arab Springs and Cedar and Green Revolutions rise and fall. Socialists and fascists, Islamists and Baathists all wax and wane. All the while, the Middle East — statist, authoritarian, anti-democratic, religiously intolerant, tribal, misogynist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and exploitive — stays mostly the same and so in a way earns the wide varieties of awful government that it suffers from.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/363051/hillarys-odyssey-victor-davis-hanson

From Senator Clinton’s tergiversations on Iraq to Secretary Clinton’s lies on Benghazi

Hillary Clinton is no doubt a talented speaker. She recently went into what the left wing sees as the heart of darkness of the American 1 percent at Goldman Sachs, purportedly gave two brief chats, and walked away with a reported $400,000 in fees. Such compensation is almost as profitable as Hillary’s long-ago cattle-future trading, in which as a talented rookie speculator she beat one-in-several-million odds by parlaying an original $1,000 investment into a $100,000 profit.

That Goldman’s shenanigans were central to the 2008 housing and financial meltdown — and were empowered, in part, by Bill Clinton’s own prior twofer of deregulating Wall Street and appointing to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae greedy, though liberal, incompetents of the likes of James Johnson, Franklin Raines, and Jamie Gorelick — apparently meant nothing to Hillary.

Her current frenetic speaking career is consistent with the ethics that allowed Anthony Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, to freelance as a six-figure private “consultant” while simultaneously working as Hillary’s aide and representing the U.S. State Department. With the Clintons, government service is never quite inseparable from private lucre. The more public anguish is voiced over fairness, and the more loudly the undue influence of big money over big government is criticized, the more both are drawn to just that. The Clintons must think of Wall Street the way the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart used to talk of “the Devil” — a dark force that nonetheless always alights on their shoulders, improperly but successfully seducing them.

Soon Hillary may even outpace Bill in speaking fees, especially after she finishes up her private-equity rounds at places like KKR and the Carlyle Group and follows his footsteps abroad. So much for the revolving door, influence peddling, and all the other Obama reform blather we’ve been saturated with since 2008. I don’t think we are going to see any Occupy Wall Street protesters break into mahogany-paneled rooms to decry Hillary’s post-public-service profiting, doing so little work for so much money from a firm that did so much damage to so many.

In Hillary’s defense, she is not doing anything differently from the host of other former Obama hope-and-change reformist influence peddlers, from Peter Orszag and Larry Summers to Robert Gibbs and Anita Dunn. Her efforts are just more lucrative. Of course, revolving high-finance politics is a bipartisan habit. Yet when one tries to simultaneously pose as an egalitarian, the additional smell of hypocrisy is overwhelming.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/giles-udy/british-labor-and-the-gulag/print/

The British Left today presents itself as the defender of minorities and the vulnerable. Not so long ago, though, the British Labor Government’s enthusiasm for Soviet Communism led it to support the regime’s persecution of peasants and religious believers. When hundreds of thousands died in the Gulag, or ended up slave laborers in the camps, they preferred to turn a blind eye to their Russian comrades’ crimes.

The Labor Party welcomed the Russian Revolution of October 1917: C.T. Cramp, the railwaymen’s leader and Labor Chairman, proclaimed in 1924, ‘Capitalism has got to be smashed as it is smashed in Russia. Those of us who are revolutionaries are determined to do it.’

Throughout the 1920s a succession of squabbles and disagreements between Labor and British and Soviet Communists failed to dim Labor enthusiasm for what Fenner Brockway, soon to be a Labor Member of Parliament (MP) and a future peer, called the ‘heroic achievements in building up the Workers’ State’.

In May 1927 a police raid on the Soviet trade mission in London uncovered stolen military documents, and the Conservative Government expelled the entire Soviet trade and diplomatic missions. Labor MPs were outraged. In the House Commons, James Maxton MP, a leading Labor MP, left the House in no doubt about where his allegiance lay: ‘My sympathies are absolutely with the ultimate aims and objects of the Russian Soviet Government.’

A.J. Cook, the miners’ leader, whose union had received over £250,000 ($11m today) from the Soviets during the General Strike, expressed similar sentiments, this time adding a hint of menace: ‘I am proud of Russia, and I owe more allegiance to Russian workers than to Mr Baldwin (the Conservative Prime Minister) and his government. The Labor Party and the trade union movement is out to do what Russia has done. It is not for me to say just how it will be accomplished, for the necessities of the moment will decide what action we shall take to achieve that end, but undoubtedly it will be accomplished.’

Labor MPs responded to the expulsions by hosting a lunch in the Soviets’ honor in the House of Commons, presided over the President of the British trade union movement. A few days later an official Labor delegation went to Victoria Railway Station to bid them farewell. At its head was Arthur Henderson, twice party leader, who would be in office two years later as Foreign Secretary (minister) in a new Labor Government.

By 1929, the year that Labor won the British general election, Stalin was setting about formalizing the Soviet penal system into what has now become known as the Gulag and brought in punitive new measures to eradicate religion, nationalize agriculture and neutralize the countryside as a base for future counter-revolution.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/to-lie-for-obamacare-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s episode of The Glazov Gang was joined by titans Mell Flynn, a Hollywood actress and the president of the Hollywood Congress of Republicans, Kai Chen, a former basketball star on the Chinese national team and the author of One in a Billion, and Monty Morton, a Conservative Entrepreneur and walking Encyclopedia of Economics.

The Gang gathered to discuss Sean Penn’s Call for Ted Cruz and Tea Party Members to be Institutionalized. The discussion occurred in Part II (starting at the 14:25 mark) and focused on how the Left has learned well from the Soviet regime’s incarceration of political dissidents in mental asylums. The dialogue was preceded by an analysis of The Disaster of “Access” in ObamaCare, What The $17 Trillion Debt Really Means and Mao’s Kitchen in Los Angeles:

Part II:

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-american-iron-curtain/

In March 1946, Winston Churchill told a Missouri audience, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia.”

Today a new iron curtain is descending. It encloses the small Missouri town where Churchill gave his speech and all the great capitals of a great nation. Behind the iron curtain lie New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and countless others.

It covers a million streets and hundreds of millions of people. Its shadow passes over stores and factories, homes and schools. It is not a physical wall. There are no border guards with rifles to shoot those wanting to leave.

It is a wall of words, of laws, regulations and mandates. The 2012 Federal Register had 78,961 pages. There are 11 million words of ObamaCare regulations alone. With so many regulations, everyone violates a few of them without even knowing it. Assemble all the millions of them together and you have a great wall that would dwarf anything in China

The American iron curtain is still made out of paper, but in time it will be made out of cement and iron. Tyrannies begin with paper, but end with metal. The state begins by imposing bureaucracy on a free people and ends by imposing tyranny on them. When they will not obey the paper, it resorts to steel, iron and lead.

Four decades after Churchill invoked the Iron Curtain, in his Evil Empire speech Reagan named the Soviet enemy as those who “preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, predict its eventual domination of all peoples of the Earth.”

“They are the focus of evil in the modern world,” he said.

That is the struggle now before us.

Conservatives have lost the ability to lay out the stakes in the clear and simple language of a Churchill or a Reagan, to let the people know that they are not choosing between politicians, but choosing whether they will be able to have the car of their choice, the doctor of their choice, the meal of their choice and the book of their choice.