RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303650204579374690004758598#printMode

Last month the Palestinian ambassador to the Czech Republic blew himself up as he tried to open an old booby-trapped embassy safe. When police arrived on the scene, they discovered a cache of unregistered weapons in violation of international law. Surprise.

Then the real shocker: After prevaricating for a couple of weeks, the Palestinian government apologized to the Czechs and promised, according to news accounts, “to take measures to prevent such incidents in the future.”

As far as I know, this is only the second time the Palestinians have officially apologized for anything, ever. The first time, in 1999, Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha, accused Israel of poisoning Palestinian children. Hillary Clinton was there. Palestinian officialdom mumbled its regrets.

In other words, no apology for the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. No apology for the 1973 murder of Cleo Noel, the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, and his deputy, George Moore. No apology for the 1974 massacre of 25 Israelis, including 22 schoolchildren, in Ma’alot. No apology for the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, where 38 Israelis, including 13 children, were killed.

And so on and on—straight to the present. In December, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas posthumously bestowed the “Star of Honor” on Abu Jihad, the mastermind of the Coastal Road attack, as “the model of a true fighter and devoted leader.” Dalal Mughrabi, the Palestinian woman who led the attack itself, had a square named after her in 2011. In August, Mr. Abbas gave a hero’s welcome to Palestinian murderers released from Israeli jails as a goodwill gesture. And Yasser Arafat, who personally ordered the killing of Noel and Moore, is the Palestinian patron saint.

I mention all this as background to two related recent debates. Late last month Scarlett Johansson resigned her role as an Oxfam “Global Ambassador” after the antipoverty group condemned the actress for becoming a pitchwoman for the Israeli company SodaStream. Oxfam wants to boycott Israeli goods made—as SodaStream’s are—inside the West Bank; Ms. Johansson disagrees, citing “a fundamental difference of opinion in regards to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] movement.”

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579363621009670740?mod=WSJ_article_EditorsPicks

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—Ernest Maiden was dumbfounded to learn that he falls through the cracks of the health-care law because in a typical week he earns about $200 from the Happiness and Hair Beauty and Barber Salon.

Like millions of other Americans caught in a mismatch of state and federal rules, the 57-year-old hair stylist doesn’t make enough money to qualify for federal subsidies to buy health insurance. If he earned another $1,300 a year, the government would pay the full cost. Instead, coverage would cost about what he earns.

“It’s a Catch-22,” said Mr. Maiden, an uninsured diabetic. Without help, he said, he must “choose between paying the bills and buying medicine.”
Hair stylist Ernest Maiden doesn’t make enough money to qualify for federal subsidies to buy health insurance but also is ineligible for Medicaid. Bob Miller for The Wall Street Journal

The 2010 health law was meant to cover people in Mr. Maiden’s income bracket by expanding Medicaid to workers earning up to the federal poverty line—about $11,670 for a single person; more for families. People earning as much as four times the poverty line—$46,680 for a single person—can receive federal subsidies.

But the Supreme Court in 2012 struck down the law’s requirement that states expand their Medicaid coverage. Republican elected officials in 24 states, including Alabama, declined the expansion, triggering a coverage gap. Officials said an expansion would add burdensome costs and, in some cases, leave more people dependent on government.

The decision created a gap for Mr. Maiden and others at the lowest income levels who don’t qualify for Medicaid coverage under varying state rules. The upshot is that lower-income people in half the states get no help, while better-off workers elsewhere can buy insurance with taxpayer-funded subsidies.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303650204579375310934336066?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop ‘ObamaCare” is useful shorthand for the Affordable Care Act not least because the law increasingly means whatever President Obama says it does on any given day. His latest lawless rewrite arrived on Monday as the White House decided to delay the law’s employer mandate for another year and in some cases maybe forever. ObamaCare […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/doublethink-in-norway/print/

These people! Over and over, they mock the idea that there exist such things as stealth Islamization and the appeasement thereof, and viciously demonize as bigots, racists, and Islamophobes those who speak frankly of such matters. And over and over, they engage in that very appeasement themselves.

Case in point: Norway. Let’s start by going back to 2009, when Siv Jensen, head of the Progress Party, used the term snikislamisering – “stealth Islamization” – in a speech at her party’s annual convention. Noting that even ambulance crews, firefighters, and police officers didn’t dare to enter certain parts of the heavily Muslim neighborhood of Rosengård in Malmö, Sweden, where sharia law has largely supplanted Swedish law, Jensen warned that there were already unsettling signs of similar developments in Oslo. As examples of stealth Islamization, she cited, among other things, the aggressive clamoring for the accommodation of hijab in the public square and demands for halal food in prisons.

The media and political establishment, of course, reacted with outrage. Pronouncing it “quite simply untrue that any kind of Islamization of Norwegian society is underway,” Per Kristian Foss, a leading Conservative politician, compared Jensen’s attitude toward Islam to pre-World War II anti-Semitism. The editors of Aftenposten agreed: in an editorial headlined “Stealth Accusations,” they accused her of “openly appeal[ing] to xenophobia and to the notion that minorities are taking power.” In the view of Aftenposten‘s editors, the very idea of stealth Islamization was manifestly absurd.

Cut to two years later. On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people – and members of the cultural elite quckly grabbed the opportunity to pile on to the Progress Party and others who’d warned against Islam, saying that they’d helped create the mass murderer. Pushed against the wall, Jensen nonetheless vowed that she would continue to use the term “stealth Islamization.”

Fast forward two more years. The September elections resulted in a Conservative-Progress Party coalition government – and worldwide scare headlines proclaiming that a bigoted, racist, Islamophobic party was about to become a partner in Norway’s government. Consequently, the Progress Party’s second-in-command, Ketil Solvik-Olsen, sought to publicly distance the party from the expression “stealth Islamization,” a term he described as “unfortunate.” When the party’s top man in Oslo, Christian Tybring-Gjedde, insisted on the term’s continuing usefulness (adding that he was opposed to every kind of Islamization, “stealth or not stealth”), he was assailed from almost every direction for using rhetoric that was “polarizing” and “anti-Muslim.” Among those who abhorred the term, it was reported, were leaders of the Christian People’s Party, the home of Norway’s religious right, who view Muslims as fellow “people of faith” deserving of their support and protection.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7333

February 11 marks the culmination of the 10-Day Fajr (Dawn) festivities in Iran, in honor of the victory of the Islamic Revolution 35 years ago. It was on February 1, 1979 that a triumphant Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned home after 14 years of exile, on the heels of the departure of the deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to lead the Iranian people into the Dark Ages.

Not much has changed since then, other than a few shifts in manpower and a concerted effort to acquire nuclear weapons for regional and global hegemonic purposes. One such purpose — in the words of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — was to “wipe Israel off the map.”

Western fantasies to the contrary, this aim did not disappear with the election of Hassan Rouhani to replace Ahmadinejad as the figurehead of the mullah-led regime. Nor did Iran’s November signing of the Joint Plan of Action with the P5+1 (the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France and Germany), which went into effect on January 20, put a dent in its nuclear ambitions.

And there’s nothing like the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution to bring the truth about Iran to the fore. Yet again.

On Friday, Admiral Afshin Rezayee Haddad of Iran’s Northern Navy Fleet told the Fars news agency that Iranian warships were “approaching the United States’ maritime borders, and this move has a message.”

Indeed.

On Saturday, chief imam and presidential puppeteer Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made a speech in which he referred to Western powers as “enemies,” and reiterated that Iran would never compromise on its goals, but needs to be prepared to change its tactics to achieve them. This was Khamenei’s signal to his hard-line critics in parliament that he is only playing the diplomacy game in order to buy time to complete the nuclear program.

He can be believed.

http://spectator.org/print/57742 Sometime before April 16, 2013, one or more people scouted the Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s high-voltage Metcalf substation off Highway 101 near San Jose, California. They went around the unmanned power station at a range of 40-60 yards, marking places from which the transformers’ cooling fins were clearly visible through the chain-link fence […]

http://nsroundtable.org/as-we-see-it/can-war-be-far-behind/ “The main reason the world was so peaceful for over a half-century after World War II was that American military might, both conventional and nuclear, guaranteed the security of allies such as Japan and Germany against all comers. The world was prosperous and safe” (see below). Today, however, President Obama is slashing defense spending […]

Kaddish was chanted and candles were lit to honor the memory of the Israeli Olympic athletes slain at the 1972 Olympics, as the Sochi Jewish community welcomed Israel’s 2014 Olympic participants. http://www.jewishpress.com/news/munich-11-remembered-by-sochi-chabad-israeli-olympic-athletes/2014/02/10/ The Sochi Jewish community embraced the Israeli delegation and other Jewish athletes with a welcome from the Chief Rabbi of Russia, and candles […]

http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/army-of-muhammad-calls-for-mega-jihad-to-create-caliphate/ he Army of Muhammad (Tanzim Jaysh Muhammad), one of the Sunni jihadi organizations operating in Syria and which is named after the prophet of Islam, has just called for the creation of an Islamic, jihadi army of at least 800,000 fighters, composed of all Muslim nationalities, from Europe, Africa, and Asia.  Its stated purpose […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-costs-of-the-environmentalism-cult-2/print/
THE ECONOMIC TOLL OF THE CLIMATEERS IS STAGGERING- NOT ONLY IN CALIFORNIA….PLEASE READ:
Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming is Bankrupting the Western World (New, Revised… by Rael Jean Isaac (Nov 25, 2013)

California is in the third year of a drought, but the problem isn’t a lack of water. The snowfall in the Sierra provides enough to help us ride out the years of drought. All we need to do is store it. But California hasn’t built a new dam in 35 years. Worse than that, every year we dump 1.6 million acre-feet of water––about enough to serve 3.2 million families for a year––into the Pacific Ocean in order to protect an allegedly “endangered” 3-inch bait-fish called the Delta smelt. California’s $45 billion agricultural industry, a global breadbasket that produces nearly half of U.S.-grown fruits, nuts and vegetables, is set to take a huge hit, with hundreds of thousands of acres left fallow and the San Joaquin Valley region’s already sky-high 17% unemployment destined to increase.

Meanwhile President Obama continues to dither on approving the Keystone XL Pipeline from Canada. The latest in a string of environmental impact studies since 2008 has determined that the pipeline poses no threat to the environment. Indeed, it will lessen spills and pollution by transporting oil by pipeline rather than by more risky trains. Nor will abandoning the pipeline reduce carbon emissions, as the 830,000 barrels of oil will simply go someplace else, most likely China, the world’s leader in carbon emissions. What will happen is up to 40 thousand American jobs will not be created, and dependence on imported oil from hostile countries like Venezuela will not be reduced. Meanwhile because the pipeline crosses our border with Canada, Secretary of State John Kerry, a long-time environmentalist scold who as a Senator in 2012 voted against an amendment approving the pipeline, will probably end up making the decision.

These are just two of numerous examples of how environmental policy harms our economic interests. Empowered by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, these policies cost the economy $353 billion a year, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and untold billions more in oil wells left undrilled on federal lands and infrastructure like dams not built because of the numerous pettifogging environmental impact studies that look for risks that are the equivalent of the danger that a man could drown in one-eighth of an inch of water.