RUTHFULLY YOURS

Explosive New Arab Music Video: ‘Strike a Blow at Tel Aviv’
The lyrics pulse with typical Middle Eastern themes of dominance and fear of humiliation.
http://www.jewishpress.com/sections/special-features/israel-at-war-operation-amud-anan/explosive-new-arab-music-video-strike-a-blow-at-tel-aviv/2012/11/19/

Many wars are cemented in our memories by the songs that were about or popularized during the days of battle. The Civil War had the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “Yankee Doodle,” World War I had “Over There,” and for World War II it was The Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” and also “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” Over time, the more popular wartime songs became protest songs. Strong protest songs were ubiquitous during the Vietnam war, expressing the anti-war sentiments, which became especially pervasive during the Vietnam War. Just one example from that era is the Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn,” a riff on Kohelet 3:1-8.

And now we have the Hamas-Israel offensive of 2012. It, too, has inspired a fighting song. This one is both a throwback to the jingoistic style of the earlier wars, but with a pulsing rap beat. Oh, and it practically drips blood.

The first original song to come out of the 2012 Hamas-Israel offensive has a hard rap beat, grainy graphics and a title that delivers the message, without any subtlety: “Strike a Blow at Tel Aviv.”

Thanks to the location and translation services of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), we have access to the lyrics written by the two “West Bank” authors.

The lyrics pulse with typical Middle Eastern themes of dominance and fear of humiliation.

The refrain, “Strike a Blow at Tel Aviv” is repeated early and often, but the hopes expressed are more expansive. In addition to extolling the virtues of grinding Israel into the ground and disdaining the concept of a ceasefire, the musicians take several x-rated swipes at Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

The song also ridicules the Gulf States – the oil-rich Arab countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman – for their stately but meaningless conferences and their reliance upon NATO.

Some of the boasting in the lyrics are fantasies, such as Hamas having downed an Israeli warplane, but the urban legend has already taken off on a life of its own.

Here are excerpts from the lyrics:

We don’t want to truce or solution,
All we want is to STRIKE TEL AVIV.

Here is the breaking news,
We shot down the plane,
And the pilot is missing.

We have downed their airplane,
And filled up their air raid shelters.

My entire people cry out loud,
STRIKE A BLOW AT TEL AVIV.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/333628/west-fights-amid-vote-recount-mayhem-john-fund The characters in the latest example of South Florida’s dysfunctional election system — recall the Bush v. Gore debacle in 2000 — are worthy of a Carl Hiaasen potboiler. Congressman Allen West, an outspoken tea-party favorite whose district was pushed into largely new territory by redistricting, is claiming that massive voter irregularities are robbing […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/da-tagliare/chicago-teachers-strategize-on-how-to-indoctrinate-kids-with-marxism/print/

Chicago Teachers Strategize on How to Indoctrinate Kids with Marxism

In September, the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike, shutting down the Windy City’s schools for 10 days. Many of those same teachers were in attendance on Nov. 10 at the Midwest Marxism Conference held at Northwestern University in Chicago.

The topics of the conference were:

Marxism, Crisis & Resistance
The Meaning of Marxism
The Flint Sit-down Strikes & The Founding of the UAW
From Apartheid Schools to the New Jim Crow: Racism, USA
The Democrats: A Critical History
Russia: A Case Study in Workers Power & Revolution
Socialists & Trade Unions
Class, Race & the Civil Rights movement
Education & Capitalism
Lenin’s Theory of the Revolutionary Party
Marxism & Women’s Liberation
Whose City? Labor, the 1%, and the Democratic Party Machine in Chicago
Imperialism: Why Capitalism Creates War
Detroit, I Do Mind Dying

Among some of the speakers at the conference was Jesse Sharkey, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union. Another speaker who kicked off the conference was Becca Barnes, a Chicago teacher, who refers to American capitalists as capitalistic vampires. Barnes told the crowd:

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/lloyd-billingsley/fbi-to-honor-cair-linked-group/print/ Next April in Washington, FBI director Robert Mueller will give the agency’s community service award to Farrukh Saeed, chairman of SALAM, the Sacramento Area League of Associated Muslims. “SALAM’s openness and commitment to the community as a whole, regardless of faith, makes them a shining example of community leadership,” said FBI special agent Herb […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/a-ground-op-in-gaza/print/ By Sunday night, Day 5 of Operation Pillar of Defense, the question of the hour in Israel was still: ground operation or no? It’s clear by now that Israel’s top decision-making triumvirate of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is genuinely not thrilled about the idea and […]

IT’S REALLY A “TIME OUT” SHARIA STYLE…..RSK

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/saudi-arabia-orders-entire-family-to-be-lashed/print/

Forget Disneyland, it’s well known that Saudi Arabia is really the happiest place on earth. And while you might criticize Saudi Arabia for being a backward totalitarian theocracy that solves all problems with mutilations, lashings or stonings; they do have family values. Proof? Saudi Arabia just sentenced an entire family to be lashed. Nothing says family values like that.

Members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice had tried to rebuke the two daughters at a shopping centre in the capital Riyadh for making indecent acts, seen by shoppers as seductive.

“One of the two girls then took off her gown and head cover and spat at the Commission members. Her sister also spat at them. Their mother later came and threw her shoe at them,” the Saudi Arabic language daily Sabq said.

“When their father came later, he tried to assault those members, swore at them and said to them ‘it’s not your business, we are free to do what we want.”

The paper said the girl who took off her gown was sentenced to five months in prison and 120 lashes while her sister was sentenced to one month in jail and 30 lashes. The mother got two months jail term and ordered lashed 60 times while the father was ordered jailed for one month and lashed 45 times.

If you want to assess just how evil and demented the Saudi religious value system is;

A teenage girl taking off her burka was sentenced to 120 lashes and 5 months in prison. Her father who actually tried to grapple with the religious police is only being sentenced to 1 month and 45 lashes.

In Saudi Arabia, a girl’s face is more of a crime than assaulting the police.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obamas-gaza-war/ The rockets falling on Israel have their origin not just in their Gaza launchers, but in the election results of November. It is no coincidence that the explosions we are seeing now on the evening news began after the election. Like so many in the Middle East, Hamas leaders were holding their breath to […]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/9687187/Not-a-single-penny-more-for-the-EUs-begging-bowl.html
Not a single penny more for the EU’s begging bowl
The demand for a budget increase amid such an abuse of public funds is outrageous, says Boris Johnson

There are decisions in politics that are agonisingly tough. Sometimes you have to wrap a cold towel round your head and try to balance the outcomes. You might even sit down, scratch your chin and write a list of the pros and cons. And sometimes the choice is such a no-brainer that you can’t see how any reasonable person could disagree. That, surely, is the position on the EU budget, and the Commission’s amazing demand for an increase.

When David Cameron goes to the EU summit this week, I have absolutely no doubt that he will veto this package, and not only will he have every sensible person in this country — and in the rest of Europe — cheering him on, he will be right politically, intellectually, morally and on just about every ground that you can imagine. Herman Van Rompuy is asking for an increase in spending by Brussels of between 5 and 6.8 per cent, at a time when the whole of the Community has been enduring cuts in public expenditure.

You will be familiar with what is happening in Greece, where the cataclysmic result of euro membership is that GDP has fallen by 7.2 per cent in one year. Cancer patients are being deprived of drugs; the suicide rate has soared; youth unemployment is stratospheric and much of downtown Athens looks like a war zone after repeated rioting against the “austerity” measures demanded by this very same EU Commission. To a greater or lesser extent, the symptoms of the euro tragedy can now be seen not just in the Mediterranean countries, but even in Germany, where the collapse of export markets in the euro-Zollverein is starting to affect the output of the EU’s most powerful economy.

Here in Britain — the second biggest net contributor to the EU budget — we face continuing pressure on spending of all kinds. Welfare is being capped; we face difficult but necessary reforms of health care; and across the country there will be essential reforms to police and fire services. We have just seen cuts to school sports programmes — which you might have thought were an essential element of a sporting legacy from the 2012 Olympics — and this is the moment when the Commission seriously thinks it can come to the British taxpayer and ask for billions more in subsidy. My message to M Van Rompuy is donnez moi un break, mate.

The people in Brussels must have been out of their tiny minds. It is like giving heroin to an addict. It is like handing an ice cream to the fattest boy in the class, while the rest of the kids are on starvation diets — and then asking them to pay for his treat.
This is a budget so riddled with fraud and malpractice that in 18 years it has never been given a clean bill of health by the European Court of Auditors. Bear in mind, moreover, that this Court is itself an EU institution, with nothing like the resources it needs to invigilate the local politicians, farmers, business people and all-purpose crooks who are in receipt of funding from us all.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/petermullen/100190323/finally-the-bbcs-pro-palestinian-propaganda-machine-has-swung-into-action/

The Rev Dr Peter Mullen is a priest of the Church of England and former Rector of St Michael, Cornhill and St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the City of London. He has written for many publications including the Wall Street Journal.

The BBC has been slipping up recently. No – I don’t mean to refer to unpleasant recollections of Savilegate and McAlpinegate. Let us just leave them conveniently on the Corporation’s CV. Instead I am wondering why it took the BBC so long to get into its full propaganda mode in its reporting of the war between Israel and Hamas. I don’t say there was ever anything distantly approaching even-handedness. You never get that with an ideological pressure group as committed to its own unassailable self-righteousness as the BBC. But at least for the first few days of the war there was the pretence of objectivity.

But true colours will inevitably show themselves and, sure enough, over the weekend the Corporation began to screen its horrific and heart-breaking accounts (with pictures, of course) of the Gazan children slaughtered by the nasty Israelis. What is never explained – because propaganda aims not to explain but to seduce – is the fact that Hamas stores its rockets and high explosives in schools and hospitals, and those leaders who are not so far up the pay scale that they are allotted their personal bunkers are obliged to live in their own houses with their families. And even the most meticulously targeted airstrike cannot distinguish between a terrorist and his three-year-old son when they are sitting in the same front room.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Once upon a time it was the objective of the military to win wars. Now the objective of the military is to avoid incidents.
An incident happens when civilians are killed, prisoners mistreated or some other event that is photographed, videotaped and then flashed around the world. This results in an Incident, capital I, that triggers much artificial soul-searching by the media which spends the next two years beating the incident to death and flogging its corpse across television programs, newspaper articles, books, documentaries and finally, if it’s a big enough incident, a real life movie version that is based on the book, which was based on the article, where the idealistic reporter/lawyer/activist who uncovered the truth about the incident will be played by Matt Damon or George Clooney.

The main objective of the military in most civilized countries is to prevent this chain of articles, programs, books, documentaries, dramatized plays and Matt Damon movies from coming about by making sure that no Incident can ever happen. And the best way to do that is by not fighting. And if the enemy insists on fighting, then he must be fought with razor sharp precision so that no collateral damage takes place. And if someone must die, it had better be our own soldiers, rather than anyone on the other side whose death might be used as an Incident.

Incidentism isn’t derived from a fear of Matt Damon movies, but from the perception that wars are not won on the battlefield, but in the minds of men. And that perception has a good deal to do with the kind of wars we choose to fight.