RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sarahhonig.com/2012/09/23/rekindling-rushdie/

As the world braces for more outbreaks of Muslim vengeance for perceived religious insults, there are new twists in author Salman Rushdie’s saga, which in 1989 brought fanatic Islamism’s intolerance to the Free World’s attention.

Iran’s ayatollahs seized upon Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses to launch a global campaign to silence freedom of expression and to have whatever is put out in the public domain effectively submit to Islamic censorship.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini published a fatwa, a death sentence, against Rushdie, who was forced to live in hiding for almost a decade at a great price to his family and his personal well-being.

The harrowing episode also cost the lives of the book’s Japanese translator and of a Muslim dissident in Belgium who dared take issue with the ayatollahs’ threats against Rushdie.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2012/09/22/the-aarps-2-8-billion-reasons-for-supporting-obamacares-cuts-to-medicare/
Avik Roy Contributor
UNKNOWING SENIORS ARE NOW BEING HERDED INTO AARP’S GROUP PLANS THAT CUT SERVICES, LIMIT CHOICE AND ACCESS TO LAB TESTS….AND THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING….RSK
As you know if you’ve been reading this blog, Obamacare cuts $716 billion from Medicare in order to pay for its $1.9 trillion expansion of coverage to low-income Americans. It’s one of the reasons why seniors are more opposed to the new health law than any other age group. So why is it that the group that purports to speak for seniors, the American Association of Retired Persons, so strongly supports a law that most seniors oppose? According to an explosive new reportfrom Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), it’s because those very same Medicare cuts will give the AARP a windfall of $1 billion in insurance profits, and preserve another $1.8 billion that AARP already generates from its business interests.
Here’s how it works. AARP isn’t your every-day citizens’ advocacy group. The AARP is also one of the largest private health insurers in America. In 2011, the AARP generated $458 million in royalty fees from so-called “Medigap” plans, nearly twice the $266 million the lobby receives in membership dues.

Medigap plans are private insurance plans that seniors buy to cover the things that traditional, government-run Medicare doesn’t, like catastrophic coverage. Medigap plans also help seniors eliminate the co-pays and deductibles that are designed to restrain wasteful Medicare spending.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3360/kosovo-peace-tv

Here we go again desperately looking for moderates in the Moslem world. The creation and independence of Kosovo is another foothold for jihadists….Kosovo is historically a part of Serbia…..rsk

A moderate interpretation of Islam and a respect for people who believe in other religions – for which Kosovo Muslims are known – may have persuaded agitators that Kosovo was in need of an “Islamic revival” of the kind Wahhabis, Deobandis and other extremists apparently deem necessary for the global Muslim community. The “Rahma (Mercy)” charity, operating out of Bolton and Leicester in the UK, and following the radical Deobandi sect that inspired the Taliban, wires funds there.

Peace TV, an enterprise directed from India, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai by a fu­­ndamentalist Islamist preacher, Zakir Naik, has established a 12-hour daily program in Kosovo, a country 90% Muslim.

The entry into Kosovo of Naik’s Peace TV, broadcasting each day in Albanian from 9:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., appears to be an element in a novel campaign by South Asian Islamists to establish a foothold among Europe’s indigenous Balkan Muslims. Peace TV’s message is hard-line Wahhabism, which insults, in aggressive terms, spiritual Sufis, Shia Muslims, non-fundamentalist Sunnis, Jews, Christians, and Hindus, among others. Radical Islamist interlopers and their financiers, mainly from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, have also been relocating to Macedonia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia.

Peace TV is coordinated in Kosovo by a local “Center for Islamic Studies,” which appears to exist only online and via television – and, in addition to Naik’s propaganda, offers academic studies and fatwas [religious opinions]. The “Center” also does not identify its officials or financing – except for its link to Naik.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3362/why-do-they-hate-us Conflicts begin with the hope of political, territorial and economic gains. Muslims are encouraged by their leaders to hate us for the same reason that Nazi leaders encouraged Germans to hate the Jews whose wealth and property they had their eyes on. The appeaser consensus obstinately refuses to understand that Muslim violence is not […]

http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=2882

“Every U.S. election year sees the next decisive nail in the coffin of the Serbs’ birthplace, where they fended off the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire that gave us Hitler. In 2004 we had the deadly pogroms by Albanians which spurred our bureaucrats in Congress to reward the violence by putting Kosovo on the fast-track to independence, defying our own signature on international agreements. In 2008, we sealed the deal by encouraging the Albanians to avoid legality — and declare independence unilaterally. We recognized statehood immediately, of course, thereby giving Serbia the stick even after it went for the carrot (they had voted in an obedient ‘pro-Western’ regime).

This election year, while everyone is distracted, we will militarily force the Serbs to submit to Muslim Albanian mafia rule. If Americans think the fate of Kosovo’s Serbs doesn’t foreshadow their own future, they are manifestly mistaken.”

Ex-NATO Press Officer Suing U.S.-Sponsored Kosovo Police; Black U.S. Troops to Serbs in Kosovo: Yes, You Are the White Niggers

“The slow and systematic ethnic cleansing of Serbs and other minorities takes place in Kosovo every day.” – Kristian Kahrs, former NATO press officer in Kosovo

“[From] what I was taught in school in Communist Albania, Serbs have a genetic tendency to be submissive….They are natural slaves.”

– dissident Albanian-American professor Ilia Toli

“Those few reporters who dare to risk their lives in Kosovo have had a hard time being heard by a bored public…Now, faced with the horrors of the New Kosovo, we excuse ourselves from the consequences of our actions, pleading that ‘we didn’t know.’ And where have we heard that before?”

– Ronald Kim, UPenn Ph.D. candidate, The Daily Pennsylvanian, May 4, 2000

I recently heard from Kristian Kahrs, who in 2001 was a press officer for KFOR, NATO’s Kosovo force — and in 2011 publicly apologized to Serbia. He is closing his site http://serbtrade.no, and is now using Sorry Serbia.

So I went to “Sorry Serbia,” and learned that it was the 1999 gang bang of Serbia that saw Norway GOING TO WAR FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1788, and also saw the following stunning developments in the life of Kahrs, who is fast turning heroic in my eyes. He describes his ordeal as he accompanied a few thousand Serbs to Kosovo on June 28th to attend the annual St. Vitus Day (or Vidovdan) ceremonies commemorating the battle the Serbs lost bloodily to the Ottomans in 1389. His abridged blog posts follow later, but first is a breathtaking interview with Kahrs and Canadian journalist John Bosnitch, who is riveting. They were taken by International Antiserbism Monitoring (I-AM), a newly formed, first-ever body to counter the 20-year, worldwide, government and media free-for-all on the Serbs. Kahrs talks about his eureka moment on the Kosovo war, and there are outtakes from the scene of Albanian Muslims providing “security” at a Christian Serb commemoration. Note the way international monitors look on without interference or objection to the brutish discrimination by Kosovo police. Indeed, Kosovo’s supervision by the International Steering Group was removed this month, its “authorities” deemed worthy to be fully in charge of their own (still not recognized) state.

For those who haven’t been following the developments in Kosovo since our intervention there, what is said in the video may sound unbelievable, and at least two sentences by Mr. Bosnitch may come across superficially as “anti-U.S.” But his assessment is deadly accurate. What appears below describes perfectly everything I myself observed and concluded from articles, commentaries, sound bites, and conversations I either had or overheard — all filled with the most wounding attitudes toward a nation, about whom none of the usual rules applied. It fascinated me. In a region I had no knowledge, interest, or ties to, I’d stumbled onto a people without worth. I had found a true Lower People ( “untermenschen” ). Their suffering was dismissed or scoffed at, and the more violence visited upon them, the more they deserved it. For those who prefer reading to viewing, I’ve transcribed the interviews, which flash between Kahrs and Bosnitch. Any links in the text have been added by me, and rather than italicize emphasized words, I’ve bolded them.

To Release a Blind Sheik — on The Glazov Gang
Josh Brewster, Leon Weinstein and Dwight Schultz analyze the troubling indications that Obama might release a mass murderer.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/to-release-a-blind-sheik-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/09/thomas_szasz_a_life_in_error.html

Dr. Thomas Stephen Szasz has died at the age of 92 at his home in upstate New York. Born in Hungary in 1929, he came to the United States at the age of nine, trained as a psychiatrist, and served — after a stint in the military during which he was stationed at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda — as professor of psychiatry at the Upstate Medical Center in New York from 1956 until he retired in 1990.

Szasz serves as a powerful testament to the proposition that ideas have consequences — and that terrible ideas, no matter how demonstrably false and even absurd, can not only survive, but shape our institutions, in the process doing untold damage to human lives and the social fabric.

The bizarre idea that Szasz propagated for upwards of fifty years was that mental illness does not exist. The vast majority of Szasz’s 35 books and over four hundred articles are devoted to this claim. As Charles Krauthammer has observed, “Like the atheist who can’t stop talking about God, Szasz cannot stop talking about psychiatry.” Szasz disposes of mental illness by rhetorical sleight of hand: “Mental illnesses do not exist; indeed they cannot exist, because the mind is not a bodily part or bodily organ.” But of course what is diseased in “mental illness” is the brain, which is as susceptible to malfunction as any other bodily organ.

Szasz rejected mental illness on ideological grounds. An unsparing libertarian, Szasz insisted that each man was responsible for his actions. “Autonomy is my religion,” he wrote. It is thus ironic that his notion that mental illness does not exist owed its impact to being taken up by the political radicals and counterculture of the 1960s, which Szasz despised. The mentally ill became a group to be “liberated” along with blacks, Hispanics, and third-world peoples. Some countercultural intellectuals went so far as to claim the sane were mad and the mad sane, for it was the latter who rejected the irrational reality of a rotten social system.

Szasz’s idée fixe of mental illness as merely an invention of power-hungry psychiatrists came to be the foundation of public policy through its impact on a cohort of radical young attorneys who would make “liberation” of the mentally ill their lifework. Bruce Ennis, the single most influential member of this group, admits he knew nothing about mental illness until he stumbled on the works of Thomas Szasz while working on a new project on the rights of “the mentally handicapped” for the New York Civil Liberties Union. Within a year, the NYC Civil Liberties Union had passed a resolution denouncing involuntary hospitalization as incompatible with the principles of a free society. Szasz would write the preface to Ennis’s 1972 book Prisoners of Psychiatry, praising Ennis for recognizing “that individuals incriminated as mentally ill do not need guarantees of ‘treatment’ but protection against their enemies–the legislators, judges, and psychiatrists who persecute them in the name of mental health.”

Anti-psychiatric doctrine in its Szaszian formulation (Szasz’s veneer of logical reasoning was especially appealing to lawyers) soon made its way into articles on mental illness in legal journals. Entire issues of law journals were devoted to demolishing all psychiatric claims. In one such issue, the May 1974 University of California Law Review, Ennis and Thomas Litwack argued that relying on psychiatric expertise was worse than relying on chance, and so psychiatrists should not be allowed to testify as expert witnesses in commitment hearings. Indeed, anti-psychiatry so dominated discussions on mental illness in law journals in the 1970s that it was rare to find an article with a different perspective. And these articles became the acknowledged underpinning for judicial decisions in the flood of law cases brought by the new mental health bar.

If mental illness was a myth, there was nothing to treat, and so psychiatric treatments, and above all the psychoactive drugs that were psychiatry’s proudest achievement, became the next targets. Law journal articles painstakingly described their every possible unpleasant side-effect, with no hint of their benefits. Yet it was these medications which could restore the individual’s ability to make choices in any meaningful sense — in other words, restore the autonomy that Szasz claimed to value above all else.

The upshot was that as a result of judicial decisions and actions of state legislators in response to them, state mental hospitals were emptied, and involuntary commitment became contingent on imminent dangerousness — and even then, treatment was uncertain because the law instituted a right to refuse it, which could be exercised even after commitment. All this had a devastating effect on families, who were forced to watch helplessly as someone they loved deteriorated, and on the lives of the mentally ill themselves. This did not trouble Szasz. For all his emphasis on the alleged brutality of psychiatry (many of his volumes are extended comparisons of psychiatry to the persecution of witches and Jews, the Inquisition, and slavery), it is Szasz’s ideology that is truly inhumane. In a 1975 speech in California, he declared that he did not give psychotropic drugs and did not promise patients he could make them better: “They can go home and blow their brains out.”

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/flintstone-spy-device-explodes-at-iranian-nuclear-site/story-fnb64oi6-1226479668976 A monitoring device disguised as a rock exploded when it was disturbed by Iranian troops near an underground nuclear enrichment plant, according to western intelligence sources. Revolutionary Guards were on a patrol last month to check terminals connecting data and telephone links at Fordo, near Qom in northern Iran, when they saw the rock […]

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2245/The-Army-Response-to-SSG-Sitton.aspx Army chief of staff Odierno’s so-called response to SSG Sitton’s letter is below. More on the story of SSG Sitton from the Tampa Tribune — specifically, the US military’s response: LARGO — Cheryl Sitton’s questions are simple. To her, the answers should be, too. And so far, she’s not satisfied with what top U.S. […]

http://times247.com/
Silent Obama hears it over ‘Piss Christ’ art
Fox News
Saturday, September 22, 2012
News
Silent Obama hears it over ‘Piss Christ’ art
Religious groups such as the Catholic League are blasting President Obama for not condemning an anti-Christian art display, titled “Piss Christ,” set to appear in New York City, and one Republican lawmaker said he is fed up with the administration’s “religious hypocrisy.” Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz27IMsecy4
Smothering speech OK, so long as Muslims do it
The American Spectator
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Commentary
The only religion for which liberals make excuses is the most illiberal one — Islam. Self-styled Voltairean liberals, who normally gush about the glories of free speech, have popped up on mindless morning shows to endorse the imprisonment of Islam’s critics. So much for fighting to the death for free speech. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz27INFVNw7