RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Passover-on-the-battlefields-307584

The US Civil War was a watershed that involved 10,000 Jewish soldiers from all over the nation fighting side by side with their gentile comrades.

“When we gaze back at the American Civil War, and the Jews who struggled to preserve their traditions even amid the gunpowder and cannon-fire, it is an example well worth remembering.”

It was April 24, 1864, at the height of the American Civil War, and in between his duties as an infantryman, young Isaac J. Levy sat down in camp on one of the intermediate days of Passover to write a short letter to his sister back home.

Levy, who served in the 46th Virginia infantry unit, was a soldier in the Confederate army which was battling on behalf of the southern states that sought to secede from the United States.

The war had just entered its fourth year, and it would prove to be the bloodiest conflict in American history. New research published last year in the journal Civil War History by demographic historian J. David Hacker of Binghamton University revealed the death toll may have been as high as 750,000 people.

Levy and his regiment, which included his brother Ezekiel, who served as a captain, were posted at Adams Run, South Carolina, and the fog of war had cast a shadow over his observance of the holiday.

“No doubt you were much surprised on receiving a letter from me addressed to our dear parents dated on the 21st which was the first day of Pesach,” he wrote to his sister Leonora, with the word “Pesach” carefully printed in Hebrew letters. “We were all under the impression in camp that the first day of the festival was the 22nd,” and he had therefore unwittingly failed to observe the holiday’s start on the appropriate day.

But Levy went on to assure her that his brother had purchased matza “sufficient to last us for the week” in the city of Charleston at the cost of two dollars per pound, and that they were “observing the festival in a truly Orthodox style.” Sadly, just four months later, Isaac Levy was killed in the trenches during the Siege of Petersburg on August 21, 1864. He was 21 years old.

On the eve of the Civil War, which began in April 1861, American Jewry numbered an estimated 150,000 people, out of a total population of some 31 million. The overwhelming majority of American Jews at the time were recent arrivals: just a decade earlier, there had been 50,000 Jews living in the United States.

This Passover, Free Us From A Failed Jewish Leadership By Stella Paul Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/archived-articles/../2011/04/this_passover_free_us_from_a_f.html This week is Passover, the season of deliverance, and I’m praying for deliverance from America’s failed Jewish leadership. As Jews confront the most dangerous era since World War II, whom are we stuck with for leaders? A clueless bunch […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3022/riding_the_tiger It was, as far as the Bulgarians were concerned, an open-and-shut case. The bombing of a tourist bus at the Black Sea resort of Burgas last July, which killed five Israelis and the bus driver, had “obvious links” to Lebanon and Hezbollah. The prime suspects are Australian-Lebanese and Canadian-Lebanese dual nationals who had been […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/%20http:/www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/passovers_gift_the_promised_and_undivided_land.html%20 Billions, of the world’s people do not know the meaning of the towering festival of freedom and liberty known as Passover; a festival of spring, recognizing an event that has blessed the world for over 3,300 years. The festival begins on March 25th of this year and falls always on the 15th day of […]

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13047#.UU9TGdEpa0F The “occupation” terminology has lethal results. Giulio Meotti The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book “A New Shoah”, that researched the personal stories of Israel’s terror victims, published by Encounter. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the […]

http://badrachel.blogspot.com/

This lovely verse was occasioned the caterwauling tears of Leon Wieseltier but it evokes all those rats who sob”more in sorrow than in anger” so selectively about the world’s inequities….
On Wieseltierian tears

Oh blithersome couturier of wordifactious spewage,
Your loathsome predilection for effluxicating brewage
Has found its proper gallery in hurricanus sewage.

Oh odious splendiferatious tonguer of all piety,
Ambassador-at-very-large for platitudiniety,
Your prosody’s ontology’s all Sartric nullibiety.

It’s thus we say, with due respect, and many years’ assizing:
Oh, literary colporteur, the words of your devising

Appear to land upon the page without palpable revising.

DANIEL GREENFIELD: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/hamas-calls-obama-jewish-organ-grinders-monkey/

With the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas you get two pieces of racism for the price of one. Even though Obama met with pro-Hamas groups prior to his trip and significantly softened his line on Hamas, treating it like a legitimate government, Hamas does not appear to be eager to reciprocate in kind.

But that’s what you get for trying to appease Islamists. It didn’t work in Iran. It didn’t work in Egypt. It won’t work in Gaza.

The Hamas racist slur was there to promote an article accusing Obama for being a Jewish organ grinder’s monkey for taking a trip to Israel in which he

1. Urged a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program

2. Condemned Israel for building houses

3. Said that Israel has the right to expect Hamas to renounce violence

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“That is the dark side of environmentalism. The most active non-Muslim domestic terrorist group is environmental. The undercurrent of violence finds easy purchase in environmentalism’s creed that the only real problem with the world is people. No amount of turning off the lights is enough. Eventually you come around to having to turn off the people.The Nazis were among the most enthusiastic environmentalists of their day, even the term ‘Ecology’ was coined by Ernst Haeckel, whose racial views served as precursors to Nazi eugenics. But while Nazi environmentalist believed that we were all animals, they insisted that some animals were better than others. Modern environmentalists believe that we are all worse than animals. In their view we are both natural and unnatural. Natural because we come from the ape and unnatural because we are intelligent. We live on the planet, but our intelligence excludes us from ever belonging to it. ”

The incompatibility of productive man with the natural world is a fundamental tenet of the environmental movement. Everything we do is destructive, because of what we are. We are tool builders, inventors and producers. And the environmentalist movement is aimed at convincing us to stop being these things. To turn off the lights, make do with less and march back to the caves with a few clever ad campaigns and a catchy tune.

Forget the World’s Fair, we now have a new way to celebrate human accomplishment. Instead of seeing a vision of the future, we turn off the lights and sit in the dark for an hour.

Earth Hour shows how far we have come from celebrating human accomplishment to celebrating the lack of accomplishment as an accomplishment. For all the pretense of activism, environmentalism celebrates inaction. Don’t build, don’t create and don’t do– are its mandates. Turn off the lights and feel good about how much you aren’t doing right now.

Environmentalism has degenerated into a conviction that all human activity is destructive because the species of man is the greatest threat to the planet and all life on it. Each death, each act of undoing and unmaking, each darkness that is brought about by the cessation of humanity becomes a profoundly environmentalist activity.

Kill yourself and save the planet. Put out the lights, tear down the city and let the earth revert to some imaginary primeval paradise free of all pollution; whether it is the carbon breath of men, dogs and cows or the light pollution of their cities.

Embrace the darkness.

While we take electric light for granted– being able to read and write after dark is a technological achievement that transformed our civilization. Animals are governed by day and night cycles. Artificial light made it possible for us to work independently of the day and night cycle.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/343731/iraq-war-ten-years-later-editors

AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING LIKE JOHNNY ONE NOTE…WE HAD NO CLEAR AGENDA….AND GEORGE BUSH REFUSED TO NAME THE ENEMY GOING SO FAR AS TO EXPUNGE THE WORDS JIHAD, SHARIA AND ISLAM FROM DEFENSE MANUALS…..HE DID NOT LIE ABOUT WMD…HE LIED THAT THE MISSION WAS ACCOMPLISHED…AND HE LEFT OBAMA NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO BUILD ON …..RSK

Ten years ago this week, the United States launched the Iraq War. A decade later, thanks to the mismanagement of the Bush administration, the indifference of the Obama administration, and the inherent difficulties of Iraqi society, it is clear that we expended great blood and treasure for an unsatisfactory outcome.

Saddam Hussein and his regime of torture and mass murder are gone. He started a war by invading a neighbor and sought dominion over the global oil supply. He was an ongoing threat to the region and in flagrant violation of his international commitments. If he no longer had weapons of mass destruction, it wasn’t for lack of trying. He was undermining the strictures that kept him from restarting his weapons programs. Even the harshest critics of the war are loath to admit that their alternative would have left Saddam atop Iraq.

The war was popular at the beginning, supported by the public, by Democrats in Congress, and by many of the liberal and conservative commentators who eventually turned against it.

The notion that Bush “lied” about Saddam’s weapons is itself a dastardly lie. That Saddam had WMD was a matter of bipartisan and international consensus. His presumed possession of these weapons was widely considered intolerable in the context of the September 11 attacks, which taught a bitter lesson in allowing threats to fester. Bush launched the war for good reason, and in its initial phase, it was a rapid and undeniable triumph.

Then things went wrong. We didn’t know enough about the country we had taken over. We underestimated the devastation that had been wrought in Iraqi institutions and civil society by Saddam’s rule. We couldn’t get our act together as bureaucracies crossed signals and pursued rival agendas. We faced a determined Sunni insurgency. With insufficient troops using ill-advised tactics, we couldn’t impose order. The country spun out of control and into a sectarian war that threatened to rip it apart and to give al-Qaeda in Iraq an operating base in the heart of the Arab world.

With the war slipping away, President Bush ordered the surge, an infusion of additional troops to clear and hold territory in keeping with classic counterinsurgency doctrine. Bush acted against the fierce opposition of Democrats and with only the lukewarm support of his own party (with the honorable exception of John McCain, whose advocacy for the surge was his finest moment). Critics predicted the surge’s inevitable failure and the direst consequences. Instead, we dealt al-Qaeda a significant defeat. We won over the Sunni tribes and suppressed the Iranian-backed Shia militias. Violence dropped dramatically. We afforded the Iraqi government enough stability to establish its authority and legitimacy.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/343728/geopolitical-adhd-mark-steyn

SHOCK AND AWE BECAME AW SHUCKS WHEN THE GENERALS McCHRYSTAL AND PETRAEUS INSTITUTED RULES OF ENGAGEMENT BASED ON EXQUISITE SENSITIVITY TO MUSLIM TERROR WHILE PUTTING OUR OWN SOLDIERS’ LIVES AT RISK …IT BECAME A WAR WITHOUT PURPOSE, WITHOUT THE WILL TO DEMAND VICTORY, WITH A RIDICULOUS NOTION THAT DEMOCRACY WAS JUST ONE MORE PURPLE VOTER’S FINGER AWAY IN A REGION INCREASINGLY DOMINATED BY RADICAL JIHADIS….WE STARTED IT BUT LOST THE WILL TO FINISH IT….AND LIKE OTHER UNFINISHED WARS SUCH AS KOREA THE LEGACY WILL BE DISASTROUS…..RSK

Ten years ago, along with three-quarters of the American people, including the men just appointed as President Obama’s secretaries of state and defense, I supported the invasion of Iraq. A decade on, unlike most of the American people, including John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, I’ll stand by that original judgment.

None of us can say what would have happened had Saddam Hussein remained in power. He might now be engaged in a nuclear-arms race with Iran. One or other of his even more psychotic sons, the late Uday or Qusay, could be in power. The Arab Spring might have come to Iraq, and surely even more bloodily than in Syria.

But these are speculations best left to the authors of “alternative histories.” In the real world, how did things turn out?

Three weeks after Operation Shock and Awe began, the early-bird naysayers were already warning of massive humanitarian devastation and civil war. Neither happened. Overcompensating somewhat for all the doom-mongering, I wrote in Britain’s Daily Telegraph that “a year from now Basra will have a lower crime rate than most London boroughs.” Close enough. Major General Andy Salmon, the British commander in southern Iraq, eventually declared of Basra that “on a per capita basis, if you look at the violence statistics, it is less dangerous than Manchester.”

Ten years ago, expert opinion was that Iraq was a phony-baloney entity imposed on the map by distant colonial powers. Joe Biden, you’ll recall, advocated dividing the country into three separate states, which for the Democrats held out the enticing prospect of having three separate quagmires to blame on Bush, but for the Iraqis had little appeal. “As long as you respect its inherently confederal nature,” I argued, “it’ll work fine.” As for the supposedly secessionist Kurds, “they’ll settle for being Scotland or Quebec.” And so it turned out. The Times of London, last week: “Ten Years after Saddam, Iraqi Kurds Have Never Had It So Good.” In Kurdistan as in Quebec, there is a pervasive unsavory tribal cronyism, but on the other hand, unlike Quebec City, Erbil is booming.