RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2013/12/21/military-rorce-only-remaining-option-to-stop-iranian-nukes-morton-klein-and-daniel-mandel/
Iran is unlikely to take seriously any red line Obama might lay down now on building nuclear weapons.
The interim nuclear agreement between the P5+1 and Iran is a disaster. US President Barack Obama has said that this deal dramatically reduces the likelihood of war. Ironically, it increases it. It certainly dramatically increases the likelihood that Iran will develop nuclear weapons.

The Geneva interim agreement permits Iran to retain intact all the essential elements of its nuclear weapons program:

Continued construction of its Arak plutonium plant;

Continued uranium enrichment to 5% (which, with 18,000 centrifuges, can enable swift enrichment to weapons-grade level, allowing Iran to become a break-out nuclear state in a matter of months);

Its intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) programs (which, according to US intelligence, will enable Iran to strike the US itself by 2015); its enriched uranium stocks (Iran being simply required to reduce them to an oxide which can be restored in weeks to weapons-grade uranium).

The interim agreement also grants Iran substantial sanctions relief totaling some $20 billion; not the $6-7 billion originally forecast by the Administration.

Thus, the P5+1 opted for an interim agreement which lets Iran off the sanctions hook. If we could not obtain a final agreement with Iran that terminates its nuclear weapons program when international sanctions are at their height, how likely are we to obtain a final agreement that accomplishes that, now that sanctions have been relaxed?

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/175317#.UrSJnpuA2M9
Former MK Professor Aryeh Eldad, head of the Professors for a Strong Israel organization, said Wednesday that if the Israeli government wants to blame someone for the constant boycotts of the Jewish state, it should look in the mirror.
Speaking to Arutz Sheva, Eldad said the Israeli government, by agreeing to participate in the European Union’s “Horizon 2020” scientific project despite its guidelines boycotting Judea and Samaria, was creating a snowball effect that encouraged others to boycott Israel as well.
According to Eldad, the compromise reached between Israel and the EU, which stipulates that the EU will note that it does not recognize Israeli activities over the 1949 Armistice line, led to other boycotts such as the one by the American Studies Association (ASA) that was announced this week.
The American boycott is “in part the fruit of the Israeli surrender and the signing of the Horizon 2020 agreement with the European Union, in which Israel actually recognized the demand of the EU not to support settlement activity,” said Eldad, adding, “From there the way to continued boycotts against Israel was very short.”
He proceeded to slam the opposition for its failure to speak out against the Horizon 2020 agreement.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/12/20/the-iran-foray-of-the-asa/#.UrTWYb2huEE.email Critics of the Israel boycott resolutionof the American Studies Association (ASA) sometimes ask why the ASA doesn’t also boycott Chinese or Iranian universities. (I make the double-standard argument myself, in apost today at Foreign Policy.) Even the president of the ASA, Curtis Marez, admits that Israel’s neighbors have worse human rights records, but adds that “one has to start […]

A version of this column is scheduled for publication Dec. 23, 2013 at worldtribune.com and at http:yeoldecrabb.com

The Obama Administration’s foreign policy begins to look like that tightly wound ball of crocheting thread which the kitten has been playing with for several hours and is now finally completely unraveling. How innocent the kitty is may be a question in the eye of the beholder. But the disarray is so vast as to be unfathomable:

Iran

The agreement not to reach agreement on a six-months pact for adjusting U.S. and Western interests with Iran, which Pres. Obama said only had a 50-50 chance, is falling apart even before it officially begins. Sources from inside the never very effective UN International Atomic Energy Commission say the agreement cannot be policed or enforced. The $10 billion in additional oil exports it permts the Mullahs in Iran will help bail them out of crisis economic situation while they continue to hurl threats at the world and call for an end to all sanctions. The Administration after giving Tehran relief by not instituting penalties against new violations of the existing sanctions regime, has now reserved itself. But Pres. Obama opposes bipartisan Senate and House members pushing legislation for new sanctions if and when the short-term agreement collapses. All sides admit/claim that Iran’s search for enriched uranium and nuclear weapons and a delivery system is going forward without hindrance during the truce period.

Israel

Ignoring the fact Secretary John Kerry’s negotiations mandate is only dealing with one of the three Palestinian elements – the PLO on the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan – new obstacles have arise. Kerry has thrown over bitterly and long time negotiated U.S.-Israeli guidelines for its security if a Palestinian state comes into being. So he has inadvertently manufactured a new crisis over Israel’s continued presence in the Jordan Valley. With growing threats from Iran-armed officially designated terrorists, Hezbollah in the Lebanon north and Hamas in the Gaza south, armed by Iran, no Israeli government is going to accede to any major concessions on their eastern flank with an always fragile Jordan now facing new difficulties with hundreds of millions of Syrian refugees.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=64788
ORIGINALLY cast as a conservative, Naftali Bennett, Israel’s young Minister for the Economy, is discarding or destroying shibboleths in a way the country’s establishment finds disconcerting but voters love.

He is eagerly “going east” in search of new trade and investment partners instead of focusing on the country’s older European and US business roots.

It is in that role that he has been travelling in Australia after visiting Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country. His first two overseas visits were to China and India.

He is also pushing two new groups to participate for the first time in Israel’s economy in a significant way: Arab women and the ultra-Orthodox.

Now aged 41, he was born in Israel and, like a succession of political leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, he served in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit.

When he was 26, he left the military and co-founded Cyota, an anti-fraud software company that was sold eight years ago for $145 million.

He says: “When you log online to your bank, our software makes sure who you are,” with 70 per cent of Western bank transactions incorporating Cyota.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=64785 http://acdemocracy.org/ In the Arab-Islamic Political Culture rumors are an integral part of social activity that quickly become absolute truth that cannot be challenged. It has to do with exaggerations, flights of fancy and especially, in a society that believes in conspiracies… every date is important, remembering everything and forgiving nothing. This is a society wherein […]

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-fray-Infuriating-insidious-immoral-335612
With gathering momentum a new approach—egregious and evil—is emerging as latest endeavor to breathe life into rapidly expiring feasibility of so-called “two-state-solution”.
[We need] to create a continuous stretch of new settlements; to bolster Jerusalem and the surrounding hills, from the north, east, south and west, by means of the establishment of townships, suburbs and villages – Ma’aleh Adumin, Ofra, Gilo, Bet El, Givon – to ensure that the capital and its flanks are secured, and underpinned by urban and rural settlements. These settlements will be connected to the Coastal Plain and Jordan Valley by new lateral axis roads; the settlements along the Jordan River are intended to establish the Jordan River as [Israel’s] de facto security border; however it is the settlements on the western slopes of the hills of Samaria and Judea which will deliver us from the curse of Israel’s “narrow waist.” – Shimon Peres, Tomorrow is Now, 1977.

I wish you all, the parents and the entire tribe of settlers…restorers of the Jewish settlement in Hebron… great blessing and joy in raising your son. Bringing your son into the covenant of the Patriarch Abraham, in the city of Abraham after 40 years separation from it, has special symbolic significance.
It bears testimony to our continuous connection to this place, to which we have returned never to leave. – Yigal Allon, January 29, 1969.

A person who, with intent that any area be removed from the sovereignty of the state or placed under the sovereignty of a foreign state, commits an act calculated to bring this about, is liable to life imprisonment or the death penalty. – Section 97(b) of the current Penal Code in Israel – under “Treason.”

There are ever-increasing signs that something infuriating, insidious and immoral is beginning to surface in the political debate in Israel – particularly in regard to policy on “settlements” and “settlers.” Accordingly, I would ask you to keep these excerpts in mind while reading the rest of this column.

Their full significance will become clear in its final section.

Orwellian conversion of vice into virtue
With gathering momentum a new approach – one that is egregious and evil – is emerging as the latest endeavor to breathe life into the rapidly expiring feasibility of the so-called “two-state solution.” It involves a macabre attempt to transform vice into virtue, and virtue into vice.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/comrade-isaac-and-sir-isaiah/print/

It is hard to find two more strikingly different intellectual personalities than the author of Trotsky’s classic biography and one of the “Russian Thinkers.” Comrade Isaac (Deutscher), as he was called by like-minded left-wing thinkers, was enamored with grandiose Hegelian-Marxist generalization and worshipped great men (a category in which he included Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky). Sir Isaiah (Berlin) was by nature skeptical, suspicious of utopianism, abhorred radicalism of any shade, and valued, more than anything else, the sense of reality. Deutscher was committed to monistic determinism, Berlin cherished agonistic pluralism.

During the Cold War years, these two thinkers, both born in the Russian empire to Jewish families with long rabbinical traditions, both émigrés (at different ages, to be sure) to England, both magnetized by Russian culture, came to embody incompatible visions of politics, history, and morality.

One important distinction needs to be made from the very outset: whereas Deutscher joined the underground Polish Communist Party in the 1920s, Berlin was never a member of a Leninist sect. True, comrade Isaac broke with the Stalinists and became an independent Marxist, an influential journalist and an acclaimed historian, but he never jettisoned a romanticized vision of early Bolshevism as a fountain of revolutionary hope. He admired intransigence, arduous pursuit of an ultimate revolutionary dream meant to fulfill a secret plan of History. For Berlin, this was nonsense. He abhorred any grandiose teleology and admired Alexander Herzen, a Russian thinker who opposed reckless radicalism. Like Herzen, in many respects his intellectual hero, Berlin refused to believe that history (not capitalized) develops in accordance with an esoteric libretto. Whereas he acknowledged, without sharing, Karl Marx’s philosophical insights, he regarded Lenin not only as a delusional Jacobin, but also as the founder of a despicable totalitarian experiment.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-is-too-smart-to-fail/print/ We all know that George W. Bush was a moron. And we all know that Obama is a genius. We have been told by Valerie Jarrett, by his media lapdogs and even by the great man himself that he is just too smart to do his job. And it’s reasonable that a genius would […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/swedens-march-into-oblivion/print/ Sweden is self-destructing, and more and more people are writing about it – but, with very few exceptions, still not in the mainstream Swedish media, where denial continues to reign supreme. Indeed, even as concerned observers abroad (especially in neighboring Denmark and Norway, where the elites still look to their larger neighbor as a […]