RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Leibler-on-settlements-Right-diagnosis-wrong-prescription-336290
To avert disaster, Netanyahu must… seize the moment to develop a coherent and consistent government policy… to commit to intensifying construction in those areas over the Green Line which would unquestionably be retained by Israel. But in isolated settlements primarily located in the disputed territories… a status quo in relation to expansion should be maintained.

– Isi Leibler, Jerusalem Post, December 21

Any territory evacuated by the IDF will become a base for terrorist assault on Israel’s civilian population. Israel’s mistake has always been its willingness to return land acquired in wars of self-defense “for peace,” rather than put forward our national right… to live in the land of Israel.

– Steve of Mevaseret, in a Talkback to Leibler, December 21

Isi Leibler is a columnist of considerable talent. His analyses are perceptive and penetrating, and as a rule I find myself largely in agreement with his assessments of the political events in the Middle East and beyond.

Common misperceptions & misunderstandings

Yet despite my esteem for him and his work – or perhaps, because of it – I feel compelled to take issue with him over his recent column (“It is crucial Netanyahu creates a coherent settlement policy,” December 21).

Let me underscore that I am taking up this matter because the points in dispute are of general relevance for the debate on what Israel’s policy should be with regard to the Palestinian issue, particularly in light of Israel’s tarnished international image.

With all due respect to Leibler, several of the policy prescriptions that he urges Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to adopt reflect misperceptions/misunderstandings prevalent among those who deem themselves “right of center,” i.e. those who reject the Left’s unmitigated concessions but still feel that some durable agreement might be hammered out that will leave certain portions of Judea-Samaria (such as the large settlement blocs) and east Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty.

These misconceptions and misunderstandings are highly detrimental because they perpetuate the illusion that continued efforts will somehow bear fruit and a reasonable pact can be forged to end the conflict with “two states living side-by-side in peace and prosperity.”

Ignoring realities prolongs conflict

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303932504579252770123128660?mod=Opinion_newsreel_2 ‘It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born,” James Joyce wrote famously in his masterpiece “Ulysses.” I recently had such an experience when my office manager—who protects me from the daily insurance grind of referrals and approvals and pre-certifications and blood drawing—was out sick. Thus the veil […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303531204579204201833906182?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

At colleges today, all parties are strongly incentivized to maintain low standards.

The parlous state of American higher education has been widely noted, but the view from the trenches is far more troubling than can be characterized by measured prose. With most students on winter break and colleges largely shut down, the lull presents an opportunity for damage assessment.

The flood of books detailing the problems includes the representative titles “Bad Students, Not Bad Schools” and “The Five Year Party.” To list only the principal faults: Students arrive woefully academically unprepared; students study little, party much and lack any semblance of internalized discipline; pride in work is supplanted by expediency; and the whole enterprise is treated as a system to be gamed in which plagiarism and cheating abound.

The problems stem from two attitudes. Social preoccupations trump the academic part of residential education, which occupies precious little of students’ time or emotions. Second, students’ view of education is strictly instrumental and credentialist. They regard the entire enterprise as a series of hoops they must jump through to obtain their 120 credits, which they blindly view as an automatic licensure for adulthood and a good job, an increasingly problematic belief.

CHECK OUT ZIONISM 101 ON THE REVIVAL OF HEBREW-http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2013/09/11/zionism-101-the-revival-of-hebrew/

“Revival of Hebrew” tells the story of how an ancient language used only for study and prayer once again became the common tongue of the Jewish people. Even the father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, did not think it possible.

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man who did more than any other to make the renaissance of Hebrew possible, wrote:

“It flashed before my eyes like lightning… I heard a strange voice calling within me: ‘The resurrection of Israel and its language in the Land of Our Fathers!’”

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/12/hebrew-in-crisis/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=ef3877e33e-Mosaic_2013_12_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-ef3877e33e-41165129

This past Tuesday was the 156th anniversary of the birth of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who was born on the 21st of the month of Tevet, 5618. Ben-Yehuda is the personality identified with the resurrection of the Hebrew language as a spoken language.

Most notable is the Ben-Yehuda dictionary, with its 16 volumes, which was finished only in 1959 by Naftali Herz Tour Sinai. Ben-Yehuda used the Bible as the basis for his imaginative extensions of the Hebrew language, bringing it up to date with the contemporary needs of his time.

Ben-Yehuda did not have an easy time. He was criticized severely by many, including Bialik, Ahad Ha’am and other Zionist luminaries, who thought that some of his linguistic inventions went too far. The idea that one could resurrect a language was ridiculed by professional linguists. The fact is that Zamenhof’s Esperanto failed where Ben-Yehuda’s Hebrew succeeded.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/12/some-apartheid-state/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=ef3877e33e-Mosaic_2013_12_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-ef3877e33e-41165129
If Israel is an apartheid state, why do so many Africans flock here?

Here is a question for those who accuse Israel of apartheid: Why would an apartheid country attract massive illegal immigration from Africa, and why would Africans put up a huge fight to stay in an apartheid regime? ​As opposed to Eyad El Sarraj, a Palestinian BDS activist who boycotted Israel and yet was treated in Israeli hospitals for his leukemia, those illegal African immigrants did not trespass Israel’s southern border for medical treatment. ​They came to Israel because they know exactly where in the Middle East there is freedom. They know what their fate would be in Arab countries whose language uses the same word (“Abed”) for “slave” and “African” – a reminder of the Arab slave trade in Africa.

The phenomenon of mass illegal immigration from Africa to Israel started reaching large-scale proportions in 2007. Most illegal immigrants came from Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia. By 2012, there were an estimated 60,000 illegal African migrants in Israel (nearly one percent of its total population). Israel managed to put an end to this flood by building a physical barrier on the Egyptian border, but it still has to find a solution for those already here, most of whom live in southern Tel Aviv and in the Red Sea port city of Eilat. The level of crime in those cities has increased exponentially, with residents complaining that their daily life has become an ordeal.

Like every sovereign state, Israel has the right to accept or decline immigration applications, and it has the right to deport illegal migrants. So why doesn’t it do just that?

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6803

The release of the next batch of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails is scheduled to take place some time next week, following a discussion about which 26 murderers with Jewish blood on their hands will be returning to the bosom of their families.

The families of their victims, in contrast, suffered another blow on Thursday, when the High Court of Justice rejected a petition against the move — the third of four such prisoner releases that Israel consented to under the agreement that restarted Israeli-Palestinian discussions.

The only issue that Washington is concerned about, however, is the revelation that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to approve construction tenders for 600 new apartments in Jerusalem and 800 in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). If there’s one thing that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry can’t stand, it’s an inconvenient statement about “expanding Israeli settlements” when he’s in the process of deluding himself and everybody else about an imminent treaty between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

This is ironic for many reasons. First of all, adding housing units to existing neighborhoods does not constitute expansion. The Palestinian leadership knows this very well. It is also aware that the Israeli government doesn’t always follow through on building permits, but has proven to be capable of forcing its citizens to move out of their homes for political purposes. Gaza ended up free of Jews in 2005. PA President Mahmoud Abbas has good reason to hold out for a far greater expulsion of Jews.

Sculpture depicting Soviet soldier raping a pregnant woman sparks outrage
http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/10/25/polish-artist-jerzy-bohdan-szumczyks-monument-to-hate/
Soviet soldiers raped hundreds of thousands of women and girls, as their armies advanced toward Berlin in the closing years of the Second World War. Polish artist Jerzy Bohdan Szumczyk made a sculpture depicting one such incident and, in doing so, has ignited fury in Moscow.
Szumczyk’s sculpture, titled Komm, Frau (Come, woman), shows a soldier, identified as Soviet by his helmet, kneeling between the legs of a pregnant woman while holding a gun in her mouth. Earlier this month, the life-sized piece was placed, without official permission, in the Polish city of Gdansk, next to a Soviet tank commemorating the Soviet liberation of the city from the Nazis in 1945. It was on display for only a few hours before police removed it.

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/dec/24/french-cardinal-speaks-out-they-are-our-brothers/

Is it ever too late to give gratitude? Must there be an anniversary? But time is running out, so every day is an anniversary.

On July 10, 1942, The Roundup of Paris had already begun. On orders from the Gestapo, the French police began knocking on doors and swiftly some 13,000 Jews were whisked to the transit depot Velodrome d’Hiver. They were permitted a blanket, a shirt and a pair of socks in addition to what they were wearing. There was no air-conditioning.

Many were dragged from their homes, their children tagging along, baffled and weeping.

They were told that they were simply being “relocated,” but all were destined for Auschwitz.

But that was Paris, and this was Toulouse – the Free Zone.

http://carolineglick.com/khodorkovsky-and-the-freedom-agenda/

Until his arrest in October 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch and oil executive, was the richest man in Russia. He might have still been the richest man in Russia today if he hadn’t started thinking about politics, and objecting to the fact that under President Vladimir Putin, Russia had abandoned all prospects for democracy.

With his billions, Khodorkovsky had the means to finance a challenge to Putin’s authoritarian rule. His arrest in 2003 and his 10-year imprisonment was ordered and orchestrated by Putin as a means of silencing and destroying the former KGB officer’s only potent challenger for power.

After 10 years behind bars, Khodorkovsky was suddenly released from prison last Friday, immediately after Putin issued him a presidential pardon. He held a press conference in Berlin the next day. There he showed that prison had changed his political thinking. Whereas in 2003, Khodorkovsky thought it was possible to transform Russia into a democracy by simply winning an election, after 10 years behind bars, he recognizes that elections are not enough.

“The Russian problem is not just the president as a person,” he explained. “The problem is that our citizens in the large majority don’t understand that their fate, they have to be responsible for it themselves. They are so happy to delegate it to, say, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and then they will entrust it to somebody else.”

In other words, until the Russian people come to the conclusion that they want liberty, no one can give it to them. They will just replace one dictator with another one. In his words, “If you have a ‘most important person’ in the opposition… you will get another Putin.”

So whereas George Washington was seen as the first among equals, an opposition leader who would succeed Putin, would be more like Robespierre in post-revolutionary France.

Khodorkovsky’s remarks show that you can’t instantly import democracy from abroad. The US defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War. But the Soviet defeat didn’t make the Russians liberal democrats. Until the seeds of democracy are planted in a nation’s hearts and minds, the overthrow of its overlord will make little difference to the aspirations of the people.

Over the past two months, in neighboring Ukraine, we have seen the flipside of Khodorkovsky’s warning. There, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been braving the winter cold to protest President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to ignore the public’s desire to associate with the European Union, rather than with Russia. As the protesters have made clear, they view a closer association with the EU as a means of securing Ukrainian independence from Russia.

For the past two months, Yanukovych has been alternatively assaulting and ignoring the masses rallying in Kiev’s Independence Square. And last week he signed a deal with Russia that paves the way for Ukraine’s incorporation into Russia’s custom’s union, and its effective subordination to the Kremlin.

At this point, the opposition and Yanukovych are deadlocked. According to National Review’s Askold Krushelnyck, the protesters are trying to break the deadlock by turning to the US and the EU for help.

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/dec/26/did-anything/

Amnesia hit me as I sat down to write the official “year in review.” We are talking national and global, not family. So what happened during the past 12 months that is worth remembering? Plenty, I am sure, but most of it eludes me. Was it a good year – 2013 – and if so, congratulations. Obviously I missed the fun.

Or is it true that nothing happened?

If anything happened to improve our lives, please report immediately.

A man named Barack Obama is still president of the United States (and the world). That is easy to remember. But what has he done? Other than give good speeches. This comes to mind: he flirted with Denmark’s lollypop prime minister. Michele was not happy. But Barack was happy. Anything else?

Oh sure. Obamacare. Nobody, except Obama, is happy about this, but that is all people were talking about.

Is that 2013 in a nutshell? I think so.

Nothing happened between the races. Nothing all that bad, and nothing all that good, either. Wait a minute. There was the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case, and this caused friction between the races, especially when people like Al Sharpton chimed in to blame White America.

There was absolutely no racial tension when Dustin Friedland was murdered by African American suspects at The Mall in Short Hills, New Jersey.