RUTHFULLY YOURS

Rabbi Herschel Schacter, Chaplain At Buchenwald Liberation, Dies At 95

http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/national-news/rabbi-herschel-schacter-chaplain-buchenwald-liberation-dies-95

Rabbi Herschel Schacter, a national Jewish leader and the only Jewish chaplain present at the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp, died Thursday at the age of 95.

The first rabbi to be ordained by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the founder of Modern Orthodoxy, the resident of Riverdale led the Mosholu Jewish Center in the Bronx for more than 50 years and held leadership roles in numerous national Jewish organizations, including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which he chaired from 1967 to 1969.

A statement from Richard Stone, chair, and Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chair of the Conference, described the rabbi as “an exemplary leader who often spoke of his `deep commitment to Jewish inclusiveness and unity.’”
The rabbi’s son, Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, university professor of Jewish history and Jewish thought and senior scholar at Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future, and daughter, Miriam Schacter, a psychotherapist, recalled: “Our father modeled for us the great importance of caring for other Jews and devoting one’s life and efforts to the Jewish people.”

Rabbi Shmuel Goldin, president of the Rabbinical Council of America, described the senior Rabbi Schacter as “a warm, friendly man and an orator’s orator, someone his colleagues would turn to [for guidance on] speeches and sermons.”

“This is an important article (URL below). The US administration (Eric Holder?) will undoubtedly attempt to remand Homaidan al-Turki to the custody of the Saudi govt., due to Saudi diplomatic pressure. The Saudi King himself offered to personally meet Colorado law enforcement authorities inside Saudi Arabia, to negotiate for his transfer. These efforts must be resisted and the mechanism for doing so is illuminated here.”Janet L.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2296328/Colorado-corrections-chief-shot-dead-answered-door-bell–gunman-loose.html

The Colorado Corrections Department Chief Tom Clements has enough precedents to reject to transfer Homaidan al-Turki to Saudi Custody, for ongoing incarceration in Saudi Arabia, to wit:

1) SEVEN of our GITMO terror-detainees were earlier transferred to Saudi Arabia on the promissory understanding that they would remain under Saudi supervision and be “rehabilitated”. Instead, all seven emigrated to Yemen, where they resumed terror operations against the United States and other nations. It is notable that while Saudi Arabia is a ‘police state’, where a cockroach cannot operate without notice, somehow the world’s worst manage to get out under the radar screen, to operate in Yemen.

2) In 2006 Uthman Ghamdi was released from GITMO to Saudi custody. He emigrated to Yemen, to become a top aid to the late Anwar Awlaki.

3) In 2007 Said Ali al-Shihiri was released from GITMO to Saudi custody. He was officially designated as “rehabilitated” and released. He quickly emigrated to Yemen where he became the #2 leader of ‘AQ in Yemen’.

4) In January 2010 the Pentagon established a policy of refusing to transfer any more GITMO detainees to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. i.e. DOD policy officially acknowledges Saudi Arabia’s official role in promulgating terror.

Also, the Saudis undoubtedly resent the ‘Kuffir’ (non-believers, infidels) implementing justice on an Islamic believer. That is something instantly abhorrent to any Muslim. i.e. there is a basis in Islamic precepts that prohibits Kuffir from passing judgement on, and penalizing, a Muslim believer.

When I was in Saudi, Prince Mansour bin Saud al-Saud (a son of the late King Saud) informed me that the late King Fahad informed all the royal princes they “can do anything they want in foreign countries, except the United States.” He told me that if any Saudi royal misbehaves in the United States, he will lose millions / billions / govt. contracts / access to the King’s Majelis. That was the Saudi King’s policy for the princes, communicated in Majelis. Furthermore, if a prince cannot go to the King’s Majelis, he is shunned by all other princes who will refuse to interact with him, because if they do, they will also lose.

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6668

A late education is better than no education at all, even for a president of the United States. The man who is a mighty legend in his own mind is even showing a little humility. Barack Obama, who usually finds someone else – usually George W. – to blame for every little thing that goes awry, finally admitted this week in Israel that even a synthetic messiah can make mistakes.

“I hope I’m a better president now than when I first came into office,” he told reporters at one stop early in his trip. “I’m absolutely sure that there are a host of things that I could have done that would have been more deft and, you know, would have created better optics.”

Now if he’ll only turn from an obsession with “better optics” to the serious statecraft at hand, we can all breathe a little easier. Not a lot, but a little.

There’s no more crucial place to get a late education than in the Middle East, where graduate schools abound in every nook in the brambles and crannies in the ancient rocks. This is one place where making crucial and momentous decisions on the fly risks not only disasters, but invites catastrophes. This is no place for “a man without a foreign policy,” as one commentator remarked, a man with only naïve aspirations who operates on the notion that a chaotic and perilous world can be changed by “the transformative power of a good speech, but no clear path to achieve anything.”

Perhaps the president burned a little midnight oil just in time. Vali Nasr, who was not so long ago a senior insider at the Obama White House, describes in his forthcoming book, “The Dispensable Nation,” how decisions have sometimes been made. On Afghanistan, for example, he says Obama policy-makers were determined not to make long-reaching strategic decisions but to satisfy shifting public opinion. These policy makers, according to an advance reading of Mr. Nasr’s book, comprised “a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers whose turf was strictly politics.”

Campaign politics Chicago style, where every problem can be solved with a favor or an expertly placed shiv, clearly doesn’t work in the Middle East. President Obama arrived in Jerusalem just when the strategic interests of the United States and the strategic concerns of Israel seemed to be on a collision course. The president has been concerned with spreading clichés and bromides, the prime minister with survival. The photographs of Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, unarmed and smiling, were staged to show everyone that despite their history of hostile relations, they could, too, get along without taking or giving a punch.

Another Tack: Bad Jews = Good story It was a PR windfall for Hamas when 11-months-old-Omar Misharawi was killed by a rocket that hit his family’s home on November 14, 2012 – at the very outset of Operation Pillar of Defense. During that confrontation, thousands of Hamas missiles and mortars rained on Israel. The long-range ones […]

Starting way back when the “peace process” started with the Rogers Plan of 1969 every time an Arab terrorist declared that his group only wanted two thirds of Israelis dead rather than all of them, the appeasers, the pundits, the statesmen all gushed at the “winds of moderation” wafting through the Middle East. Every single American administration then recycled the Rogers plan giving it their own imprimatur….But, it was the same tired old fix it now kit.

The Arabs continually rejected the offer and the “winds of moderation” were dispelled.

Now according to President Obama in Israel we have more wind power:

“Across this region the winds of change bring both promise and peril.”

Promise? Where? What is he talking about? Iran, Egypt, Libya, Syria, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, calls for Jihad and imposed Sharia throughout the Arab world?

And yes he does mention the peril…and what will be his solution? Why a dusted off two-state solution will be the end run of his charm offensive…and I do mean offensive….in Israel.

But will the Israelis fall for it?

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/media-labels-arab-spring-pro-democracy-as-muslim-brotherhood-fulfills-jihadist-vision?f=puball In late December 2010, the Tunisia uprising was sparked by a tragic public suicide-burning of a twenty-something street vender in an act of civil disobedience. Instantaneously, media commentary like wildfire around the world labeled this event “Arab Spring,” branding it the beginning of a struggle for democracy in the region. Correspondents in the tumultuous […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-shocking-interview-with-i-q-rassooli-islam-expert The Iraqi-born native Arabic-speaker who goes by the name “I. Q. Rassooli” has lived in Europe since his university days studying engineering in England. His mind is an inquiring and a questioning one, characteristics not much appreciated among the conformist Muslim community of his origins. And so he stayed in the West and, for […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/if-you-like-your-doctor-you-can-see-him-at-the-same-time-as-12-other-patients/

Welcome to ObamaCare. Making really bad health care affordable and mandatory. If you have any complaints, please see the Obama Voter on your right and collect your mandatory six-thousand dollar birth control at the exit.

In recent years, a growing number of doctors have begun holding group appointments — seeing up to a dozen patients with similar medical concerns all at once. Advocates of the approach say such visits allow doctors to treat more patients, spend more time with them (even if not one-on-one), increase appointment availability and improve health outcomes.

You see this is good news. It allows doctors to spend more time with large numbers of patients with outwardly similar medical problems. This way a doctor can see a dozen patients with stomachaches while trying to guess which one might have cancer. (If he guesses wrong, you die.)

Now there will be more appointments to see doctors as part of large groups. And once the groups hit a 100, there will be even more appointments available. You may even be able to see your doctor in under three months.

Some see group appointments as a way to ease looming physician shortages. According to a study published in December, meeting the country’s health-care needs will require nearly 52,000 additional primary-care physicians by 2025. More than 8,000 of that total will be needed for the more than 27 million people newly insured under the Affordable Care Act.

“With Obamacare, we’re going to get a lot of previously uninsured people coming into the system, and the question will be ‘How are we going to service these people well?’ ” says Edward Noffsinger, who has developed group-visit models and consults with providers on their implementation. With that approach, “doctors can be more efficient and patients can have more time with their doctors.”

Doctors can be more efficient at providing bad medical care while patients can have hardly any time with their doctors, because they’re actually standing in line to get medical exams with 11 strangers in a room while talking over each other about their medical problems.

Suddenly Cuban medicine is looking surprisingly good.

Some of the most successful shared appointments bring together patients with the same chronic condition, such as diabetes or heart disease. For example, in a diabetes group visit, a doctor might ask everyone to remove their shoes so he can examine their feet for sores or signs of infection, among other things.

This is how doctors handled medical problems when visiting Third World countries or distant army bases. But we can now enjoy the same quality of medicine as Sub-Saharan Africa.

Afghanistan: Obama’s “Good War” Failure — on The Glazov Gang »
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/iraq-ten-years-since-removing-saddam-on-the-glazov-gang/

Shant Kenderian, Michael Walsh and Josh Brewster reflect on the president’s catastrophic waste of American lives and treasure.

This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by Shant Kenderian, author of “1001 Nights in Iraq,“ Michael Walsh, author and screenwriter, and Josh Brewster, an NHL hockey broadcaster (hockeytalk.biz). The Gang members discussed Afghanistan: Obama’s “Good War” Failure. The dialogue occurred in Part II and focused on the president’s waste of American lives and treasure. The segment included a discussion on A Republican Second Wind? and the meaning of the appointment of Pope Francis.

Part I dealt with Shant Kenderian’s memoir, 1001 Nights in Iraq and focused on Shant’s shocking story about being an American forced to fight for Saddam against the country he loves. The segment also included a discussion on whether on not we won the Iraq war and whether we should have engaged in it.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/regional-threats-loom-large-over-obamas-israel-trip/

Speculations that President Obama was coming to Israel to keep pursuing a blind obsession with the Palestinian issue appeared, fortunately, unsubstantiated by the time of his press conference with Prime Minister Netanyahu on Wednesday evening.

Both leaders’ words were devoted mainly to the Iranian and Syrian issues; Obama’s own words on the Palestinian matter expressed a lowering of expectations and an acknowledgment that the “solution” he had often stridently pursued during his first term was more elusive than he had thought.

In their three-hour talk before the press conference, Netanyahu was accompanied by his national security adviser Yaakov Amidror and his military attaché Yair Zamir; Obama by his security adviser Tom Donilon and Secretary of State John Kerry. The makeup clearly connotes that security issues were paramount.

A grim preface to Obama’s visit was a statement earlier in the day by Yuval Steinitz—Israel’s finance minister in the previous government, now minister of intelligence and strategic affairs—that chemical weapons had been used in Syria. Steinitz did not claim to know whether it was the regime or rebel forces that had used them. AP reports that a “senior [Israeli] defense official… concurred…[based] on intelligence reports.”

Obama has called the use of chemical weapons in Syria a “red line” possibly prompting U.S. military action. Asked about the matter during the press conference, Obama said the U.S. would investigate whether the weapons were used and that “the Assad regime must understand that they will be held accountable for the use of chemical weapons or their transfer to terrorists.”

Lebanon’s Daily Star had reported two days earlier that Israeli planes had dropped flare bombs in southern Lebanon—a possible response or warning about Syrian weapons making their way into Hizballah’s hands.

Obama, in other words, is entering a war zone, not a playground for peace fantasies. Although his visit to Palestinian Authority headquarters and address to Israeli university students on Thursday may yet hold surprises, indications so far are that he has sobered up about Israel’s neighborhood and the real issues it faces.

More critical yet, of course, than the Syrian crisis is Iran’s ongoing march toward a nuclear bomb. Netanyahu told the assembled reporters: “A nuclear Iran is a grave threat. The U.S. is committed to deal with it, Israel is committed to deal with it. Israel has a right to independently defend itself from any threat.”