RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5795

On Thursday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas finally got the chance to address the U.N. General Assembly as the representative of an observer state. Having been provided an actual seat at the event was not the only reason that Abbas was pleased, however.

Over the past few weeks, the PA leader has been despondent watching international attention to his cause eclipsed by Syrian carnage and Iranian overtures. So, when U.S. President Barack Obama catapulted Palestinian statehood back to center stage in his speech on Tuesday — by placing it on a par of importance with a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program — Abbas’ sigh of relief was so deafening that it drowned out the calls for a third intifada emanating from Ramallah.

According to the Gatestone Institute’s Khaled Abu Toameh, it is not only extremist groups such as Hamas that have been beating the war drums; the Palestinian Authority itself is part of the orchestra. “While some PA officials have come out in public in support of escalating ‘popular resistance’ against Israel,” writes Abu Toameh, “others have been telling Palestinians that ‘extremist Jewish gangs are storming and contaminating the Aqsa mosque’ — a reference to routine visits by Jews to the Temple Mount. These are the kind of statements that prompt young Palestinians to take to the streets and throw stones and petrol bombs at Jewish settlers and IDF soldiers.”

Nevertheless, Abbas told the General Assembly, “… As we have repeatedly affirmed, and as we have proven in practice, the State of Palestine, which abides by the United Nations Charter, by international humanitarian law and by the resolutions of international legitimacy, will exercise its role and uphold its responsibilities in the international system in a positive and constructive manner, and in a way that reinforces peace. …”

That Abbas is useless at everything other than lying through his teeth is a given by now; the unemployed and otherwise disgruntled residents of the PA would be the first to say so. This is why their president’s subsequent assertion that “we shall respect all of our commitments” would have caused the rest of us to alternate between yawning and laughing, if innocent lives weren’t at stake. After all, killing Jews is the only commitment that Palestinian leaders have ever honored, especially while engaged in “negotiating peace.”

How Monopoly boards got second world war prisoners out of jail free

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/the-northerner/2013/jan/08/history-monopoly-waddingtons-victor-watson-stalag-prisoners-of-war

Monopoly boards were used by fake charities during the second world war to send maps and messages to prison camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, writes Martin Hickes

That longtime product of Leeds, Monopoly, continues to be a perennial favourite – but during Britain’s darkest hour, it was far from just a game.

A wartime plan hatched between the government and John Waddington’s, who then manufactured the boards and players’ tokens in Wakefield Road, Stourton, saw secret escape maps produced by the company for Allied prisoners of war.

In an especially cunning plan, Monopoly boards were used by fake charities to send the maps and related messages to prison camps in Nazi-occupied Europe. Equipped with the information, numbers of shot-down pilots and other captured servicemen managed to break out and some made their way to neutral countries and back home.

The system was set in place by MI9, a secret government department responsible for helping prisoners of war and liaising with resistance movements in continental Europe. Section Nine of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence in the War Office, to give it its full name, carried out trials of maps printed by Waddingtons on silk, rayon and tissue paper as early as 1940.

Hiding places included cigarette packets and the hollow heels of flying boots, where the flimsy maps did not rustle suspiciously and, in the case of those printed on cloth or mulberry leaf paper, could survive wear and tear and even immersion in water if an aircraft ‘ditched’ in the sea.

Debbie Hall, formerly of the British Library and now at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, has studied the secret history of the silk maps, and the involvement of the famous Yorkshire firm. She says:

In December 1939, MI9, the branch of the secret service responsible for escape and evasion, was set up. It was made clear that it was the duty of all those captured to escape if possible. One man who was behind many of MI9’s most ingenious plans, including the Waddington project, was Christopher Clayton Hutton.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arlene-kushner/abbas-at-the-un-decoding-the-babble/ Mahmoud Abbas – putative president of the Palestinian Authority – addressed the UN General Assembly on Thursday, focusing on the negotiations between the PA and Israel. How eminently reasonable was the tone he attempted to project.  There he stood on the dais, expressing his intention to work hard for peace, even pleading for peace. […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/obama-to-israel-suicide-is-security/print/ “Friends of Israel, including the United States,” President Obama said in his speech to the UN on Tuesday, “must recognize that Israel’s security as a Jewish and democratic state depends upon the realization of a Palestinian state….” Particularly because of its timing, the statement left most Israelis rubbing their eyes. Transportation Minister Israel Katz […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/final-flight-wasp-dorothy-dot-swain-lewis-44-w-5?f=puball

Dorothy “Dot” Swain Lewis passed away on September 9th at the mountain home she built in Fern Valley, Idyllwild, Califonia, twenty one days before her 98th birthday.

Born just outside of Asheville, North Carolina to the respected lawyer John Edward Swain, and his concert pianist wife, Mozelle Stringfield Swain, she was one of 4 children, — her brother Robert S. Swain who served as District Attorney for Buncombe County, and as a Senator in the North Carolina Senate, her brother Jack Swain who as an engineer, helped develop radar during WWII, and is survived by her sister, Betty Turbyfill of Asheville, North Carolina, as well as her only son, Albert Z Lewis Jr. of Arlington, Virginia, grandchildren Yani and Kieren Johanson, and Jennifer Budde, and many cousins, nieces, nephews and their children, located from North Carolina to Alaska to New Zealand.

Her passion was as an artist and teacher, having studied at the New York Art Students League in New York during the 30’s after graduating from Randolph Macon College for Women in 1936, and subsequently, receiving her Masters of Fine Art from Scripps College in the 50s.

Specially chosen and trained in 1942 as one of 10 women in a special class established by legendary pilot Phoebe Omlie, in the runup to WWII, to prove that women could become flight instructors, she trained 4 classes of Navy pilots in the V-5 program, subsequently transferred to instruct trainees in the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program, then joined and served as a WASP, flying various fighters and bombers, including the P-63, B-26, P-40 for engineering, maintenance and training missions. Though promised militarization, the WASP were disbanded in December 1944, and did not receive veteran status until 1977.

After the war, Dot worked as chief flight instructor at the Daytona Beach airport and participated in a number of air shows such as the 1st All Women’s Airshow in Tampa Florida where she performed dangerous aerobatics in a J-3 Cub, remaining an Air Force reservist until honorably discharged in 1957.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/books/yossi-klein-halevis-like-dreamers-focuses-on-1973-war.html?_r=0

“The story’s most significant sections help us grasp how the settlers have driven the nation’s agenda for the past four decades. This has been partly the result of sheer grit by people who shunned personal comfort in the name of playing a role in Jewish history. One of the most important lessons the settlers teach, if you spend time with them in the West Bank or on these pages, is that history is made by those who do not give up — for good and for ill.”

7 Paratroopers and Paths They Took Through an Israel at a Crossroads
Yossi Klein Halevi’s ‘Like Dreamers’ Focuses on 1973 War

Much has been made over the years, and rightly so, of the messianic fervor that swept Israel after its spectacular victory in the 1967 war. The conquest of Sinai from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, all in a biblically epic six days, seemed to religious Israelis — and many secular ones — like a miracle, a sign that God wanted to reunite his people with their promised land. Not long afterward, settlement beyond the 1967 borders began.

Yossi Klein Halevi, in his powerful book “Like Dreamers,” adds an important dimension to this story by focusing on Israel’s near-defeat in the next war, in 1973, as the catalyst for the settler movement and much else that has shaped Israel in the past 40 years. That war was a trauma; a hubristic Labor government made up of secular, European kibbutz veterans was caught unawares by Egyptian and Syrian forces. Nearly 3,000 Israelis died, as did many dreams.

Some saw this as a moment to seize, an opportunity to remove not only the failed leaders but also the entire enterprise of Labor Zionism and to install its competitor, the national religious movement. The kibbutzim, cradle of the nation’s leadership, were waning economically and socially. They could now be replaced in the vanguard by the West Bank settlements. The new power-seekers called themselves Gush Emunim, or bloc of the faithful, and were typified by men like Hanan Porat.

Mr. Porat was badly wounded in battle in 1973. As he lay in his hospital bed, he understood that Israel was at a crossroads and that it was his job to help choose its new direction.

As Mr. Halevi describes the moment: “A plan was forming in Hanan’s mind. A response to despair. A new settlement movement, modeled on the pioneering movements that had built the state. But this time the movement would be led by religious Jews.” It was a movement, Mr. Porat believed, of “those who understood that Zionism was about not refuge but destiny, redemption.”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13877#.UkVeQ0bD-Uk The Global Church ignores the threats to itself from the very Palestinian Arabs it supports, for the sake of Israel-bashing. The World Council of Churches, an ecumenical body which claims to represent 590 million Christians worldwide and based in Switzerland, will sponsor an event supporting the partition and Islamization of Jerusalem. The ”World Week […]

Another Tack: Thanks for the revelations With the Syrian thriller and its spin-off machinations keeping us at the edge of our seats, who had time to at all notice much less care about the volubility of Ramallah’s honchos? Too much distracting din made it difficult to pay much mind to Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority […]

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/a-group-of-jewish-people/88427/

“. . . we condemn the crimes by Nazis in the World War II and regrettably those crimes were committed against many groups, many people, many people were killed including a group of Jewish people. And we condemn their crimes. In general, we condemn the murder and killing of innocent people always. It makes no difference to us. When that person is innocent and is killed, whether he or she was Jewish, or Christian, or Muslim, there’s just no difference in our eyes. We condemn crimes as such. But the argument here is that if the Nazis committed a crime, this does not mean that the price paid for it should be done by other people elsewhere. This should not serve as any justification to push out from their homes a group of people because of what Nazis did.”

* * *

Those are the words of the new president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, as distributed this evening by the Council on Foreign Relations. It sent out a cable boasting that it was Mr. Touhani’s “sole public event during his visit to New York City to address the United Nations General Assembly.” The president used the opportunity make what the Council called a “surprise announcement” of his country’s latest gains in the so-called P5+1 talks, namely an agreement to “jumpstart” the process with the idea of “finalizing” in a year’s time some kind of deal.

The fact is that the mullah’s words are a mockery of history and of the Jews. This is who was killed in Germany and Poland and the rest of Europe — “a group of Jewish people”? And now all of a sudden his regime is opposed to the Holocaust? His country has been supporting, in Hezbollah, an organization that has said it wants every Jew on the planet to come to Israel to save it the trouble of sending agents to kill them in other countries. The idea that Israel is a price to be paid for the Nazi crimes is bizarrely disconnected from the fact that political Zionism was launched a half a century before the Holocaust. And for good reason.

http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=327188 US President Barack Obama’s rapidly changing positions on Syria have produced many odd spectacles. One of odder ones was the sight of hundreds of lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee fanning out on Capitol Hill to lobby members of the House and Senate to support Obama’s plan to launch what Secretary of […]