RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304527504579172030037107074?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

A U.N. panel hears good advice from a prison survivor.

A United Nations commission is finally investigating human rights in North Korea, and last week it opened a window on the gruesome facts it is discovering.

The commission has traveled to several countries to hear the testimony of North Korean exiles and experts who follow the Hermit Kingdom. On Monday in New York, Michael Kirby, the retired Australian judge who is leading the probe, said the evidence points to “large-scale patterns of systematic and gross human-rights violations” in North Korea.

One first-person account was delivered in Washington on Wednesday by Jo Jin-hye. The young woman described how most of her family had died of starvation in North Korea, including an infant brother who succumbed in her arms. An elder sister went to China, where the family believed she was sold as a bride to a man in another part of the country.

Ms. Jo fled with her mother and a younger sister to China, where they were arrested by Chinese police and repatriated to North Korea. She was taken to a detention center, where guards wearing boots “stomped on my bare feet.” She testified that she observed guards place a plastic bag over the head of another detainee: “They did this several times until he confessed.” His crime? Like Ms. Jo, he had left North Korea without permission.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303482504579177651057373802?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEAD

TopClimate-change alarmists warn us about coming food shortages. They said the same in 1968.

Warming is becoming a major problem. “A change in our climate,” writes one deservedly famous American naturalist, “is taking place very sensibly.” Snowfall, he notes, has become “less frequent and less deep.” Rivers that once “seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now.”

And it’s having an especially worrisome effect on the food supply: “This change has produced an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold, in the spring of the year, which is very fatal to fruits.”

That isn’t a leaked excerpt from the latest report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but it may as well be. Last week, Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise of the website No Frakking Consensus posted a draft of a forthcoming IPCC report on the alleged effects climate change will have on food production.

“With or without adaptation,” the report warns, “climate change will reduce median yields by 0 to 2% per decade for the rest of the century, as compared to a baseline without climate change. These projected impacts will occur in the context of rising crop demand, projected to increase by 14% per decade until 2050.”

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4045/allies-adversaries-self-defense

Critics of those who defend the free world from its adversaries accuse governments and security forces of wiretapping public figures, including friendly governments, and of conducting drone-executed targeted killings as an accepted form of warfare.

But is anyone looking at who, exactly, is criticizing the Western world’s actions that defend it against terrorism? Do they really believe that terrorism can be successfully fought without violence? Criticism, even if justified, can sabotage a just battle and people’s right to self-defense.

According to the Arabic proverb, “If you honor and respect a noble man, he will become your friend, but if you honor and respect a villain, he will rise up against you.”

One view of diplomacy, deemed misguided by leaders such as Churchill, is to abandon one’s friends and court one’s enemies in the assumption that the friend is yours and will not abandon you. The United States deserted the Shah for the Ayatollah’s Revolutionary Guards; it abandoned Mubarak for the Muslim Brotherhood Islamist Mohamed Morsi, and it has abandoned Iraq and Afghanistan to domestic chaos, growing terrorism and the approaching Islamist takeover.

Now, voices from the West and the Middle East have suggested that the status of the United States may be in jeopardy in countries where it previously had influence, such as Egypt.

The U.S. is withholding funding from the new Sisi regime, which may be the only chance of keeping Egypt from slipping back into the religious autocracy of the Muslim Brotherhood. America explained that its decision to cut funding to Egypt was due to lack of democratic process in Sisi’s advancement to power. Ironically, however, America has weakened the defenses of the world against violent Islamism, which can be defined as a militant political version of Islam, that outspokenly desires to take over the Arab-Muslim countries and turn them into a united base from which to bring Islam to the rest of the world. This goal, according to the Islamists, can be accomplished through irhab, or terrorism, with the eventual aim of converting everyone to Islam, using force if necessary. As it is written in the Noble Qur’an, Al-Anfal 8:60, “Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war to strike fear into (the hearts of) the enemies of Allah, and your enemies…” Neutralizing the fight against Islamism in the name of democracy and pluralism sounds like justifying theft and drug dealing in the name of freedom to earn a living.

Neutralizing the fight against religious autocracies and the terrorists they sponsor exposes to attack the right to life, the democratic institutions and the freedom that every citizen of the Western world enjoys, and that others, lately from North Africa, have risked, and often lost, their lives on broken-down boats in the hope of enjoying as well.

http://www.romirowsky.com/13990/aaup-and-bds

In 1915, John Dewey of Columbia University and Arthur Lovejoy of Johns Hopkins University came together with other educators to establish the American Association of University Professors, an organization designed to preserve academic freedom and professional values.

The association’s 1915 Declaration of Principles set the guidelines for the foundation of what academic freedom should be stating that, “the freedom of the academic teacher entail[s] certain correlative obligations … . The university teacher … should, if he is fit for his position, be a person of a fair and judicial mind; he should, in dealing with such subjects, set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators … and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves.”

Today, however, academic freedom is incorrectly equated with unrestricted faculty free speech and the “correlative obligations” or presenting “divergent opinions” have been swept away. As the late Gary Tobin put it, “Academic freedom has evolved from protection against political influence to job security — an employment contract rather than an intellectual contract.”

Nowhere is this more true than in the case of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel and Israeli academics.

Here academics have taken the lead in attempting to condemn and restrict access to an entire country through vilification, through lies and exaggeration, and by efforts to restrict the free speech of others.

The latest edition of the Journal of Academic Freedom — the AAUP’s flagship journal — edited by Ashley Dawson, who takes this to fairly Orwellian new heights with an entire issue devoted to the BDS campaign against Israel. This is hardly mitigated by a passing statement from the journal’s editor that, “in view of the association’s longstanding commitment to the free exchange of ideas, we oppose academic boycotts.”

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/59010?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=5b03143d19-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d8f503f036-5b03143d19-291109133

Monday, November 4th, marks the 34th anniversary of Iran’s seizure of U.S. diplomats in 1979. To this day Iran’s slogan has been “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

If Barack Obama told me “I have your back”, I would spend a lot of time looking over my shoulder. His promises to Israel are dirt, worthless, and duplicitous in the extreme. Taken together, they have ensured that Israel will attack some of Iran’s facilities that are striving to make it a nuclear power with nuclear weapons.

An article in the October 31 edition of The Jerusalem Post, “White House official confirms Israeli attack on Syrian missile site” is just one example of the steps the Obama administration has taken to seriously undermine Israel’s security and hasten Iran’s ability to make good on its promise to “wipe it from the map.”

According to the article, an “anonymous US administration official” responded to a CNN inquiry that Israel had conducted air raids against a Syrian missile base near the port city of Latakia where “missiles and related equipment” were stored “out of concern that they would be transferred to Hezbollah.” Tellingly, the reporter noted that “It is unclear why the U.S. would leak such information as it could increase the pressure on Syria to retaliate against Israel.”

Monday, November 4th, marks the 34th anniversary of Iran’s seizure of U.S. diplomats in 1979. To this day Iran’s slogan has been “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

http://www.haaretz.com/misc/writers/seth-lipsky-1.554773
JFK, the forgotten Zionist
We could use a conservative, ardently Israel-supporting Democrat like JFK today, when his party has retreated so far from his vision.

The hottest book on John F. Kennedy, as the 50th anniversary of his assassination approaches, turns out to be a biography making the case that the 35th president of America was a conservative — and also an ardent ally of Israel.

“JFK, Conservative” was written by Ira Stoll, a friend and long-time colleague who was managing editor of both the Forward and the New York Sun. I read the book with special interest because even during my own transition to the conservative cause I’ve often described myself as an admirer of JFK’s political views.

Some years ago, the Chicago Tribune quoted me as calling myself a “Kennedy liberal.” I wrote its editor to clarify “that the Kennedy in question was JFK — i.e., I am a hawk on Vietnam, want an activist foreign policy, support the gold standard, favor supply-side tax cuts and believe in aggressive federal support for civil rights short of quotas.”

Had Stoll’s book been at hand, I might have included a reference to a speech the future president gave on June 14, 1947. It was the speech in which JFK announced his conviction that a “just solution [in the Middle East] requires the establishment of a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth in Palestine, the opening of the doors of Palestine to Jewish immigration, and the removal of land restrictions, so that those members of the people of Israel who desire to do so may work out their destiny under their chosen leaders in the land of Israel.”

Who owns history?

Some would say those who win the struggle, others would say whoever claims it. The trouble with history is human nature. Even the best history cannot escape its powerful gravitational pull–the human nature of its principal actors, its writers, and its readers. If one doubts this, there is no better example than the history of the last several months of the Great War–from March 1918, to November.

We are approaching the one hundredth anniversary of the signing of the armistice between the Allied Powers and Germany at five a.m. on the morning of November 11, 1918 in the iconic railway car as it stood in the chilly darkness of the forest of Compiègne. It may be illuminating to review from today’s perspective the rapidly fading but dramatic and highly important events leading to that morning.

The United States Congress declared war on the Central Powers on April 6, 1917, after the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in February and went on to sink seven American ships. At the time our army was pathetically undermanned, consisting of around a hundred thousand men and ranked 16th or 17th in the world. But by the summer of 1918 four million American soldiers were in training and on their way to the Western Front. However, they were not yet ready to meet the onslaught of what the German High Command believed would be their tie-breaking offensive, finally forcing the Allies to beg for a negotiated peace.

On the whole, the military situation of the Central Powers at the beginning of 1918 was not at all bad. With the help of Lenin and the Bolsheviks they had forced the Imperial Russian Army out of the war, had easily conquered and occupied thousands of square miles of Russian territory, and forced the Bolsheviks to sign the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, ending the war on the Eastern front for the Germans and thus releasing thousands of men to fight the Allies on the still stalemated Western Front. From their point of view the Germans had at least won half of the war.

http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2013/11/04/maybe-pain-will-teach-you-millenials-not-to-vote-for-your-own-serfdom-n1733722/page/full

You Millenials voted for Obama by a margin of 28 percent, which will make it a lot easier for me to accept the benefits you will be paying for. We warned you that liberalism was a scam designed to take the fruits of your labor and transfer it to us, the older, established generation. Oh, and also to the couch-dwelling, Democrat-voting losers who live off of food stamps and order junk from QVC with their Obamaphones.

You didn’t listen to us. Maybe you’ll listen to pain.

I have been told that being hard on you Millennials will turn you against conservatism, that I should offer you a positive, hopeful message that avoids the touchy problem of your manifest stupidity.

No. There’s no sugar-coating it – your votes for Democrats have ensured that you are the first generation in American history that will fail to exceed what their parents attained. Embracing liberalism was a stupid thing to do, done for the stupidest of reasons, and I will now let you subsidize my affluent lifestyle without a shred of guilt.

I’m a 48 year old trial lawyer living on the coast in California – I should have “Hope and Change” tattooed on my glutes. I’d have an excuse to be lib-curious, but you Millennials? Why do you support an ideology that pillages you to pay-off Democrat constituencies? Your time in the indoctrination factories of academia trained you in a form of “critical thinking” that is neither. Somehow, you came to embrace the bizarre notion that conservatives are psychotic Jesus freaks who want to Footloosisze America into a land of mandatory Sunday school and no dancing.

But liberals, in contrast, are nice. Obama is cool. You chose petty fascism with a smile. Not a lot of thought went into it. Facts, evidence – these were mere distractions from the feelings-based validation that came from rejecting us wicked conservatives.

What did you get? The chance to be forced to buy health insurance you don’t want at inflated rates so my rates can be lower. You get to pay more out of your monthly barista take – liberalism ensured that the tanked job market foreclosed a real career – so that I get to pay less out of my lawyer checks. Thanks, suckers.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/deal-with-the-devil/

On November 3, 1944, Adolf Hitler’s deputy, Reichsfuhrer SS and General Plenipotentiary of Nazi Germany Heinrich Himmler, was traveling on a German military train from Breslau to Vienna. Sitting with him was his longtime friend, Dr. Jean-Marie Musy, the former president of the Swiss Confederation.

Their conversation that day set in process a remarkable saga that led to thousands — and possibly even tens of thousands — of European Jews being saved from Nazi extermination. It ranks as one of the more extraordinary stories of the war, and yet it is an all but unpublicized one.

Musy had known Himmler since the 1930s and had been the publisher of a pro-German newspaper, La Jeune Suisse. During that period he had worked to reduce the prominence of Jews in economic and public life. But by 1944, he had reversed his position, stopped his publication, and decided that the Nazis were criminals and murderers. Unbeknown to Himmler, Musy had gone so far as to switch his loyalties and become an emissary of the Irgun, the Revisionist Zionist movement.

Unsurprisingly, the Irgun’s route to Musy, and via him to Himmler, was a convoluted one. It originated with Dr. Reuben Hecht, who worked as an Irgun representative in Zurich. Hecht forged a close relationship with the American consul general there, Samuel Edison Woods, and persuaded him to embrace Zionism. Woods, in turn, introduced Hecht to Yitzchak and Recha Sternbuch, an Orthodox Jewish couple who ran the Swiss branch of the Emergency Rescue Committee (Va’ad ha-Hatzalah) of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis. They established contacts with the Papal Nuncio to Switzerland and gradually gained influence with the broader Swiss diplomatic community. And in September 1944, they came into contact with Musy, recruited him to the Zionist cause and, astoundingly, proved able to negotiate with Himmler through him.

A 1974 conference at Yad Vashem, and the resulting documentation, indicated that these negotiations ultimately saved the lives of many thousands of Jews. As World War II was drawing to a close, Hitler ordered the extermination of all remaining Jews in Nazi death camps throughout Europe. But under pressure from Musy, Himmler — the monstrous architect of the Holocaust, now seeking to save his own skin and that of his comrades rather than go down with the ship as Hitler intended to do — countermanded the Fuhrer’s order.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/11/03/the-anti-zionist-civil-war-on-the-left-max-blumenthal/

“The only argument that means anything in the post-Oslo era is between those who stand with Israel’s right to exist and those who oppose it.”

Some in the pro-Israel community are having a good chuckle at the feud that has erupted between Jewish left-wingers in the past couple of weeks. But rather than laughing, those who care not only about Israel but also the direction of the conversation about Israel in the post-Oslo era and what it portends for the future should be concerned.

The exchange between the anti-Zionist Max Blumenthal and his antagonists among the ranks of left-wingers who are often critical of Israel but defend its existence shows how pointless much of the debate that has been carried on between the left and the right about borders and settlements has been. As risible as the arguments put forward by Blumenthal trashing Israelis as “non-indigenous” interlopers in the Arab world who must be made to surrender their sovereignty, culture, and homes may be, they represent the cutting edge of left-wing thought that has come to dominate European discussions of the Middle East.

The dustup centers on Goliath, a new anti-Israel screed by Blumenthal, the son of Clinton administration figure Sidney Blumenthal, published by Nation Books. But to Blumenthal’s chagrin, the magazine (which is no stranger to anti-Zionist articles) allowed columnist Eric Alterman to write about it in The Nation. Alterman is himself a fierce and often obnoxious critic of Israel and defenders of Israel, and has been a major promoter of the myth that the pro-Israel community has been seeking to silence the Jewish state’s critics. Yet Blumenthal’s book was so appalling that Alterman took it apart in the magazine that spawned it. Calling it “The ‘I Hate Israel’ Handbook,” Alterman scored it for its frequent comparisons of the Jews with the Nazis and its complete absence of any acknowledgement of the Muslim and Arab war to destroy Israel. As Alterman wrote in a subsequent blog post, “It is no exaggeration to say that this book could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed).”