RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/334112

Rupert Murdoch and I have had our differences over many years, and especially during my recent legal travails, but I must join with him entirely in his recent tweeted complaint that most American media outlets that are controlled by Jews seem to be reflexively, or at least habitually, anti-Israel. For mentioning this notorious fact, Murdoch was lambasted by the usual suspects, led by the New York Times, upon whose franchise as the premier quality newspaper of the world’s greatest market Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is steadily encroaching. My sometime colleagues at the Daily Beast, whose grievances against Murdoch are profound and not unreasonable, even suggested that there was room here for a regulatory intervention. I understand the temptation to attack Murdoch, but this was seriously uncalled for. And yet, Murdoch actually apologized for his tweet. He did use some indelicate language, but to illustrate his pro-Israeli views.

From my long-sought sanctuary outside the United States, I urge that we all in the West, including the most febrile interveners on all sides of the dispute over the status of Israel, face a few facts. Apart from the founding members and permanent Security Council countries of the United Nations (the U.S., the U.K., France, and the former Soviet Union and Nationalist China), no state has a higher claim of legitimacy than Israel. All the other members of the U.N. were admitted, at the outset or subsequently, but Israel was created by the U.N. as a Jewish state, on the motion of Stalin’s ambassador, seconded by President Truman’s.

In 1917, as Russia fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks and Germany turned her full force on to the Western Front at the climax of World War I and before the U.S. was fully mobilized, Britain promised that when it evicted Turkey from what is now Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, it would make Palestine a “homeland for the Jews” without compromising the rights of the non-Jews there, effectively selling the same real estate simultaneously to two separate and opposed buyers. If the Arab powers had accepted the U.N. demarcation of Palestine in 1948, an Israel of extremely modest borders would have been born and would today remain confined to those borders. Israel expanded beyond its original boundaries only because the Arab powers attacked Israel and the U.N. demarcation unsuccessfully in 1948. The endless caterwauling about the 1967 borders is rubbish. The Arabs had those borders and could have kept them if they had not carefully planned an aggressive sneak attack on Israel and lost the war that resulted. Originating and defending against aggression, and losing and winning wars, do not create identical rights and interchangeable moral positions.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/334328/no-palestinian-statehood-brett-d-schaefer The U.N. General Assembly is expected to vote today on a proposal to elevate the status of the Palestinian Authority. The PA is currently a permanent-observer “entity.” It is seeking to become a permanent-observer “non-member state.” Last year, the Obama administration blocked the PA’s bid for full U.N. membership by threatening to use the […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“A foreign policy is assertive. It seeks to gain things, rather than to minimize losing things. It is not as concerned with the feelings of the world, as it is with the feelings of its own citizens. To the question of what it wants, it does not answer with the time-honored response of Miss America contestants, to make the world a better place, but rather it answers to make America better, bigger, richer and stronger. That answer is not idealistic, it is realistic. It is how other countries expect us to think and it is how they react no matter how altruistic our policies may be.American foreign policy needs goals and horizons to gain definition. It needs to want something more than a way to avert the next big explosion or to feed the hungry people of Warlordistan to have a foreign policy that is based on substance, rather than cobwebs of fears and dreams. It needs to stand not for a better world, but for a better, stronger and richer America.”

The United States of America has a State Department, it has row after row of people who speak badly every language from Arabic to Swahili badly, and it has rich donors who take on the task of acting as ambassadors to some foreign country every four to eight years. There are think-tanks, actual tanks and institutes dedicated to turning out papers on foreign policy. And despite all this, or perhaps because of all this, the country still has no foreign policy.

Now the word “incompetent” is code word for racism? Oh puleez! What have we come to?

Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., told CNN on Tuesday that some Republican claims that Rice is “incompetent” may be racial in nature.

“These are code words,” Clyburn said, adding that “these kinds of terms that those of us — especially those of us who were born and raised in the South — we’ve been hearing these little words and phrases all of our lives and we get insulted by them.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324205404578147360260072602.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

This is the most violated saying in American public life:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Martin Luther King Jr.’s acclaimed call in 1963 for a colorblind society has been displaced, at least in our politics, by an obsession with racial categories. That is the meaning of racialization.

It may be over four decades since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, but whenever America votes today, the exit polls can’t move fast enough to divide voters by the color of their skin. Mere moments after the 2012 exit polls were released, a conventional wisdom congealed across the media that the Republican Party was “too white.”

Let us posit that this subject wouldn’t have been raised if the bottom hadn’t fallen out of the GOP’s share of the Hispanic vote. When George W. Bush attracted 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2004, there was no cry that the Republican Party was “too white.” The GOP’s problem with Hispanics today is a tangle of issues involving the law, labor and assimilation that is hardly reducible to the accusation that the party is too white.

In virtually every instance, the idea that the Republican Party is “too white” is dropped with almost no discussion of what exactly that means. The phrase is being pinned like a scarlet “W” on anyone who didn’t vote for the Democrats’ nominee. It’s a you-know-what-we-mean denunciation. Its only meaning is racial.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324469304578145881558310020.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

The would-be secretary of state’s record on Iran, Israel, human rights and more.

Several Republican senators continue to oppose the possible nomination of Susan Rice, currently the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to be secretary of state in President Obama’s second term. Their opposition stems largely from Ms. Rice’s repeated insistence, five days after terrorists murdered four Americans at a U.S. facility in Libya, that the slaughter stemmed from spontaneous Muslim rage over an amateur video. Sen. John McCain at one point called Ms. Rice “unfit” for the job.

To assess fitness, one might look at those who served previously as secretary of state. More than one has said or done foolish things, or served without notable distinction.

In 1929, Henry Stimson dismantled the nation’s only cryptographic facility, located in the State Department, with the airy observation that gentlemen don’t read one another’s mail. (He sobered up by World War II, when as secretary of war he oversaw a robust code-breaking effort.) More recently, Clinton administration Secretary of State Warren Christopher diminished the office by making several futile pilgrimages to Syria, where he once waited on his airplane for over half an hour in Damascus before being told that Syrian dictator Hafez Assad was too busy to see him. Assad calculated correctly that the slap would be cost-free.

By this modest standard, some might find that Susan Rice is fit. But moral fitness is also relevant, and it is in that category that the Benghazi episode is relevant.

The president has said that Ms. Rice should not be criticized because she “had nothing to do with Benghazi” and so couldn’t have known better when she gave her false account. According to Mr. Obama (and to her), she simply repeated talking points provided by an amorphous and anonymous “intelligence community.”

But Ms. Rice did know at least a couple of things. She knew that she had nothing to do with Benghazi. She knew that after the attack the president insisted that U.S. leaders not “shoot first and aim later” but rather “make sure that the statements that you make are backed up by the facts.” She knew that the video story line was questionable, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) and administration officials had already suggested publicly that the attack was al Qaeda-related. And she knew that the president had a political interest in asserting that al Qaeda wasn’t successfully attacking senior American officials but was instead “on the run,” as he maintained on the campaign trail.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/11/28/seven-egyptian-christians-sentenced-to-death-for-anti-islam-film/ An Egyptian court convicted in absentia Wednesday seven Egyptian Coptic Christians and a Florida-based American pastor, sentencing them to death on charges linked to an anti-Islam film that had sparked riots in parts of the Muslim world. The case was seen as largely symbolic because the defendants, most of whom live in the United […]

Israel’s Friends in Gaza Hamas was quick to declare victory in the latest conflict with Israel. A closer look at the price it paid in terms of personnel and equipment shows that its bravado was false. But the fact that Israel was able to destroy so many installations, weapons teams, smuggling tunnels, and high-ranking personnel, […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/washington-post-goes-full-bigot/?print=1 Hello. My name is Bob, and I’m a racist. I know this because the editorial board of the Washington Post said so. While I’m too young to have used water cannons on civil rights protesters, and couldn’t tell you where the local Klan meets (or if there even is one), I have this troubling […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/militant_socialism_in_america.html

Despite his “colossal economic failures” and a national debt “above $16 trillion” Barack Obama was given a second term. It is not because the conservative message was wrong; it is because Obama is a master of marketing his message. Seductive and false advertising as well as outright bribery marked this man’s first term and will certainly be the hallmark of his second.

He mesmerized a misinformed or ill-informed public, convincing them that his promises would result in a piece of the pie for them. Thus, currently, “…more than half the population — 50 percent plus one — is dependent upon government benefits. For the past four years, the Obama administration has created a Franco-German welfare state whose sole purpose is to forge a majority political coalition wedded to the Democratic Party.” The explosion of food stamps, the bailouts — all translated into an ‘I got mine, not gonna’ worry about anybody else’ mentality that has ruptured this country into two camps. There are those who pay and there are those who expect the payment without any effort on their part. As David Limbaugh has written in Crimes Against Liberty, “in his monomania for socialism, Obama will brook no challenge” (388).

Which is why the 1952 piece by Elia Kazan titled “Where I Stand” needs to see the light of day again. Kazan wrote it following his appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) in 1952. It is particularly instructive as we now enter the new world of Obama socialism.

Kazan notes that

Communist activities confront the people of this country with an unprecedented and exceptionally tough problem. That is, how to protect ourselves from a dangerous and alien conspiracy and still keep the free, open, healthy way of life that gives us self-respect.

The facts I have are 16 years out of date, but they supply a small piece of background to the graver picture of communism today.

I was taken in by the Hard Times version of the communists’ recruiting technique. They claimed to have a cure for depressions…. I joined the Party late in the summer of 1934. I got out a year and a half later.

I have no spy stories to tell because I saw no spies. Nor did I understand, at that time, any opposition between American and Russian national interest. It was not even clear to me in 1936 that the American Communist Party was abjectly taking its order from the Kremlin.

What I learned was the minimum that anyone must learn who puts his head into the noose of Party ‘discipline.’ The Communists automatically violated the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed. They attempted to control thought and suppress personal opinion. They tried to dictate personal conduct. They habitually distorted and disregarded and violated the truth. All this was crudely opposite to their claims of ‘democracy’ and the ‘scientific approach.’

To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste, but it is bitter and unforgettable.

Why did I not tell this story sooner? I was …held back by a piece of specious reasoning …which goes like this. ‘You may hate the Communists, but you must not attack them or expose them, because if you do you are attacking the right to hold unpopular opinions and you are joining the people who attack civil liberties.’

I have thought soberly about this. It is, simply, a lie. Secrecy serves the Communists. At the other pole, it serves to silence…voices… [who] have allowed themselves to become associated with or silenced by the Communists.

It also left me with the passionate conviction that we must never let the Communists get away with the pretense that they stand for the very things which they kill in their own countries.

I am talking about free speech, a free press, the rights of property… and above all, individual rights. I value peace, too, when it is not bought at the price of fundamental decencies.