RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/99112/bernard-lewis-stubborn-hope

PROFESSOR LEWIS’ STUBBORN HOPE LED HIM TO DELIGHT IN THE “CAMP DAVID” DELUSION OF PEACE, IN THE OSLO CALAMITY, AND IN THE GAZA WITHDRAWAL….AH YES HIS ENGLISH IS SUPERB, HIS KNOWLEDGE AMAZING, BUT HIS POLITICAL SENSES AND HIS ABILITY TO HAVE LEARNED FROM HIS VAST KNOWLEDGE OF THE HISTORY OF ISLAM ARE TRULY PATHETIC….RSK

In Notes on a Century, the historian is still optimistic about a ‘great civilization’ in the Muslim world

Bernard Lewis beckons to us as if from the mists of legend. A poet-scholar, linguist, observer and sometime participant in the great events of the Middle East for seven decades, the London-born scholar belongs more to the world of T.E. Lawrence than to ours. At 95, his prose is translucent and his recollection luminous.

But Notes on a Century—his personal and professional memoir—makes for sad reading, for two reasons. The first is that we will not find another like Bernard Lewis; it is a valedictory essay not just for a remarkable man but for an epoch. No university today could train a poet capable of extracting the red thread of history from the obscure orthography of official archives, or a historian-diplomat who knows the songs of a dozen peoples in their own dialects. Part of the reason is ideological. The post-colonial-studies movement typified by the late Edward Said has ruined a field that once was called “Orientalism”—meaning simply a specialty in Near Eastern philology rather than Greek and Roman. Saudi and other Gulf State funding of Middle East studies programs, meanwhile, has made a critical stance toward Muslim culture an academic career-killer. Even without the ideological divide, though, our culture has grown too brittle to nurture another mind of Lewis’ depth.

The second, even sadder reason is the disappointment of Lewis’ hope for what he calls the “heirs of an old and great civilization.” For decades, Lewis balanced a clear-sighted critique of the failings of Muslim society with an underlying optimism about the future of the Arabs, Turks, and Persians. The backwardness of Muslim societies, he insisted, was a self-inflicted condition rather than the crime of Western colonialists. But he never lost faith that the West that defeated Hitler and overcame communism also could find a way to nurture modern institutions of civil society in Muslim countries. Lewis not only reported their history but also translated their poetry, befriended their men, and loved their women.

This optimism made Lewis an icon for American conservatives, and an enormous, if reluctant influence on American policy: Although he advised against the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Lewis is indelibly (if unfairly) linked with inflated neo-conservative expectations for Muslim democracy. But Lewis explicitly warned against a simple-minded rush to parliamentary forms in the Muslim world, hoping instead for a gradual expansion of existing consultative mechanisms into something that would approach democracy at some undermined date. But Lewis and the neo-conservatives shared an inherent optimism about the changing Muslim culture that informed the national mood after Sept. 11.

Lewis’ autobiography went to press just as the wave of optimism that attended the Arab Spring had begun to fade, and his lifelong optimism appears to be curling a bit around the edges, as a different and much darker picture than the one he imagined is emerging from Morocco to Afghanistan. His criticism of Muslim society was always tempered by respect and even affection. Part of his great popularity as a writer may be explained by the fact that his hopes resonated with characteristic American generosity and optimism. And so his disappointment also is ours.

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http://www.daylife.com/photo/07m0aYE6cPcyU?__site=daylife

People with an Islamic flag, chanting “Allah u Akbar” (God is the greatest), march through a street in Skopje, Macedonia, during a protest on Friday, May 4, 2012. A large crowd protested Friday against the arrest three men identified as radical Islamists suspected with the murder of five Macedonian fishermen in mid April. Two other suspects remain at large. The fatal shooting of the fishermen near Skopje has fueled tension in the Balkan country between ethnic Macedonians and the ethnic Albanian minority.

http://www.letthemfight.blogspot.com/ People who ‘rise to the occasion’ are generally no different than the people from whom they emerge. If the people are focused on good character, sound leadership, selfless service, a sense of personal responsibility for the good of the nation, an understanding of good and responsible nationalistic spirit, then those who are chosen to […]

http://www.mererhetoric.com/2010/10/05/j-street-co-founder-daniel-levy-israel%E2%80%99s-creation-an-act-that-was-wrong/

Quite the few days that J Street had last week, what with all the admitting they’re foot soldiers in Soros’s anti-Israel army after lying about it for years and then trying to get ahead of the story by lying about it some more. Most of the criticism has focused on co-founder Jeremy Ben-Ami, who did not exactly fall on his sword and instead tried to hamfistedly change the subject. But it’s probably unfair to blame him for all of J Street’s failings, from rigging polls to being more anti-Israel than the Saudis to expressing fake confusion about Hamas’s intentions.

Per Eli Lake’s first story, Ben-Ami seems to have been the one who did most of the “misleading” about J Street’s fundraising, from furtively squirreling away Soros’s cash to opaquely raising 50% of the group’s 2008 money from a single foreign source.

But per Lake’s second article, when it came time to shuttle Goldstone around DC and peddle his endlessly inaccurate and venomously biased libels around the Hill, J Street delegated the task to one of the adults in the organization. It was J Street co-founder, advisory board member, and international socialite Daniel Levy “who accompanied the judge to several of the [10-12] parleys” with Congress. It was also Levy’s New America Foundation that hosted a high-caliber lunch for Goldstone with “a group of analysts and Middle East wonks.”

The Goldstone tour wasn’t the first time that Levy willingly served as a channel for de facto Hamas propaganda. He’s been a tireless advocate of pro-Hamas diplomacy, and sees the Iranian proxy as an integral part of Palestinian civil society. A few years ago Noah Pollak took him out to the woodshed for historical revisionism that seemed jarringly anti-Israel and borderline anti-Zionist.

If sometimes it seems like Levy doesn’t really think that the modern Jewish State deserves defending, it’s because he kind of doesn’t really think that the modern Jewish State deserves defending. You can be confident on that point because he said so himself – quite definitively – at last May’s Fifth Al Jazeera Forum. Levy was on a panel with Al-Quds Al-Arabi editor-in-chief Abdel Bari Atwan, NAF Strategic Program Director Steve Clemons, surreal Hamas apologist and one-stater Allister Sparks, and accused terrorist Basheer Nafi.

www.jewishledger.com

The Israeli flag flew over the State Capitol in Hartford on April 25 and 26 in honor of Israel Independence Day. Rep. David Baram (15th district) and Rep. Brian Becker (19th district) prepared a statement that Baram read into the official record, noting Connecticut’s “historic trade relationships with Israel, not only in defense industries, but in medical, bio-tech, manufacturing and in the arts and sciences.” Photo courtesy of Don Miller.

http://www.jewishledger.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/capitol-flag.jpg

Wisconsin Recall Sputters

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/09/wisconsin-recall-sputters/

That sound you hear may be the sputtering of Wisconsin Democrats and public-sector unions’ campaign to oust Republican Gov. Scott Walker. On Tuesday, Democrats went to the polls to choose a candidate to square off against Walker in next month’s recall election. But the union-led opposition’s hopes that the standard bearer would be a Big Labor darling were dashed with the election of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, rather than the unions’ preferred candidate, Democratic operative Kathleen Falk. Falk’s defeat marks only the latest setback for a recall campaign that is increasingly running out of steam.

The differences between Barrett and Falk are small but politically significant. Though they both pledged to eliminate Walker’s restrictions on collective bargaining for most state workers, they disagreed on the methods. Falk took the more union-friendly approach, assuring her supporters that she would veto any budget that didn’t restore collective bargaining. That promise earned her the endorsements of the state’s leading public-sector unions, including the state chapter of the AFL-CIO and the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s biggest teachers union.

Barrett refused to go as far as Falk. While he is also committed to restoring collective bargaining, he has said that he would do so by introducing the issue in a special legislative session. The latter is particularly unattractive to unions because it would require Republican support for the legislation. Barrett’s victory in the Tuesday primary means the unions’ dreams of restoring collective bargaining through gubernatorial fiat have been shattered.

Yet another setback for the unions is that their efforts to turn the recall into a referendum on collective bargaining appear to have failed. While union activists and organizers still see collective bargaining as the dominant recall issue, Wisconsin’s voters, among them many Democratic primary voters, disagree. Polling of primary voters conducted by Marquette University found that over half of those who voted in Tuesday’s primary favored Barrett’s compromise-seeking approach on collective bargaining over Falk’s and the unions’ demands that it be reinstated without debate. Collective bargaining has also faded as a galvanizing issue. Increasingly, the recall has come to resemble a general election, where the main focus is on standard issues like jobs and unemployment. Doom-saying from Democrats and their union allies notwithstanding, challenging the unions over collective bargaining has not fatally diminished Walker’s political prospects.

Anti-Semitism Is Racism Posted By Daniel Greenfield

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/09/anti-semitism-is-racism/print/

Islam is not a race. Even though Islamophobia has become the great obsession of the politically correct elites of the Western world– there is nothing innate about Islam. One is not born a Muslim and there is no double helix of DNA that intertwines with the Koran. Muslims are followers of a belief system and no belief system should be above criticism or reproach.

Jews however are a race, a fact that has been known for thousands of years and has been backed up by genetic evidence in modern times. A fact that has been dismissed by liberals who are eager to denounce racism except when it comes to the one particular race that they have given themselves permission to hate.

By embracing the Islamophobia narrative, the left prioritized combating discrimination against a belief system over combating discrimination against a race, reversing its past position that racial prejudice is worse than any other form of prejudice because it persecutes an innate aspect of the individual, rather than an external adopted one. And when the two were in conflict over the racist aspect of the ideology, it chose the ideology and its racism.

Leftist and Islamic persecution of Jews and the common alliance of the two groups have made it necessary for the left to ignore or even legitimize displays of Anti-Semitism. The supremacy of these two ideologies over the rights and humanity of the most persecuted racial minority in the world are the toxic ingredients in the “New Anti-Semitism” which has revived Anti-Semitic racial prejudice as a progressive value.

American and European elites have become obsessed with protecting a single religion from any criticism, even when that religion comes burdened with an ugly legacy of racism that believes the Jewish people are its eternal enemies who must be destroyed in an apocalyptic Islamic genocide that concludes with every rock crying out, “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!”

The rocks have remained silent, but left-wing newspapers have taken up the call in their place. Jewish store windows are smashed, synagogues burned, schools attacked and children murdered, while the media ignores, justifies, whitewashes and even occasionally praises these crimes. Every other news story from the Middle East is either an attack on the Jewish State or a celebration of the Muslim Brotherhood and its plans for a genocidal theocracy stretching across the region and eventually across the world.

Attacks reminiscent of the work of Goebbels’ pet propagandists regularly make their way into the pages of The Guardian and Time Magazine as part of the Leftist-Islamic alliance against the Jews. Warnings about growing Anti-Semitism are ridiculed or dismissed while Islamophobia is treated as a grave threat, even though crime statistics clearly show a far higher numbers of attacks on Jews contrasted with a fairly insignificant numbers of attacks on Muslims.

The left cannot deny the hate crimes statistics, so instead it chooses to ignore them. The artificial reality bubbles sent up by its media empires clamor about the manufactured crisis of Islamophobia, while claiming Anti-Semitism is largely overblown, a tool that it insists Jews use to silence Muslims and leftists. The same elites who claimed that McCarthyism was worse than the Gulags, now claim that Islamophobia is worse than Anti-Semitism.

Criticize the affiliates of the genocidal Muslim Brotherhood and the cry of “Islamophobia” goes up from the disciples and propagandists of a group that was inspired by Mohammed and Adolf Hitler. And the media immediately takes up their call. No sooner does a Muslim leader, from Ahmadinejad to Raed Salah, make an Anti-Semitic statement than a thousand columnists rush to claim that he was mistranslated, misquoted or misunderstood.

Israel stands at the critical intersection of this debate. The Jewish claim to the land is based on the history of its people while the Muslim claim to the land is entirely ahistorical. Islam is a religion, not a people, and its claim to the territory rests on religious supremacy through a trip taken by Mohammed on a flying horse. The fiction of an ancient “Palestinian people” was a temporary convenience that is being set aside by Hamas leaders looking to join Gaza together with a Muslim Brotherhood run Egypt.

The struggle between Israel and the Muslim world is a struggle between a people and an ideology, just as the struggle between Israel and the left is a struggle between a people and an ideology. Islam and the left both represent transnational ideologies and as an ethno-religious group, the Jews remain an obstacle for the transnationalists of Islam and the left.

http://times247.com/
North Korea showing signs of new provocation
Washington Free Beacon
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
News
U.S. intelligence agencies are closely monitoring North Korea for signs the Kim Jong-un regime is set to conduct a new military provocation that could trigger another conflict on the Asian peninsula. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uMwOZTQw

Arab world views unity deal as ‘cold-blooded’ politics
The Times of Israel
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
News
Arab world views unity deal as ‘cold-blooded’ politics
The Arab world is intently following the Israeli political developments, with many spokespeople and commentators viewing the unity of Benjamin Netanyahu and Shaul Mofaz as a cynical maneuver by desperate politicians. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uMw0u29z
Obama reaps unauthorized donations
Daily Caller
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
News
President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign has some unwilling, defrauded donors, including David Newman, who found a $15 charge from the “Obama For America” campaign on one of his debit cards. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uMwDyniW

: http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/05/08/doj-defends-employee-comment-that-mississippi-is-disgusting-and-shameful/

DOJ Defends Employee Comment that Mississippi Is ‘Disgusting and Shameful’

The United States Department of Justice has defended comments by an employee who called Mississippi “disgusting and shameful.” This same employee reviews photo voter identification laws throughout the south for approval from her position in the DOJ Voting Section.

PJ Media first reported on comments made by Voting Section employee Stephanie Gyamfi toward the citizens of Mississippi:

On her Facebook page, Voting Section supervisory civil rights analyst Stephanie Celandine Gyamfi says about the people of Mississippi:

“Disgusting and shameful. Hey, that should replace the state motto: ‘Mississippi: Disgusting and Shameful’. . . forget the Magnolia State motto.”

On Tuesday, Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann held a press conference in response to the PJ Media story and demanded that Gyamfi be removed from all reviews of state election laws under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Three Mississippi congressmen (Nunlee, Harper, and Palazzo), sent a letter to the DOJ demanding the same.

Voting Section Chief Christopher Herren on Tuesday said that the comments by Gyamfi were “personal” in nature. Yet then the resources of the Department of Justice were deployed to defend the comments.

“The department maintains Gyamfi is a respected employee.”

Justice Department officials told WLBT-TV in Mississippi that the comments were “taken out of context” and were defensible because they related to an ugly incident at the University of Southern Mississippi. During that incident, some students taunted an opposing Hispanic basketball player.

Of course Gyamfi’s comments were not confined to her opinions about the handful of Southern Mississippi students. No, the bigotry extended to all Mississippians. All of Mississippi was sufficiently “disgusting and shameful” to warrant replacing the state motto with “Mississippi: Disgusting and Shameful.”

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-fbis-muslim-outreach-follies/?print=1

When FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies today for a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing [1], undoubtedly he will be questioned about the FBI’s ongoing “Islamophobia” purge [2].

Specifically, members of Congress are concerned about the FBI’s continued secrecy [3] regarding the identity of the three outside subject matter experts (SME) the bureau brought in to help with the purge (two other SMEs from inside the FBI assisted). One reason for congressional skepticism about the FBI’s use of these outside SMEs is that the bureau has an extensive history of failure when vetting Muslim outreach partners.

In June 2002, Director Mueller took fire [4] for a speech to the American Muslim Council (AMC), which his spokesman described [5] as “the most mainstream Muslim group in the United States.” During his speech Mueller asked the group [6] for their help in fighting terrorism. But the head of AMC at the time was Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was videotaped [7] in October 2000 delivering a speech just yards away from the White House, proclaiming: “I have been labeled by the media in New York as being a supporter of Hamas. We are all supporters of Hamas. I wish they added that I am also a supporter of Hezbollah.”

That same year, AMC board advisor and former acting President [4] Jamil Al-Amin was arrested for murdering a Georgia police officer. Alamoudi was arrested [8] in 2003 in a Libyan assassination plot targeting the Saudi crown prince, and was later identified [9] by the U.S. Treasury as one of al-Qaeda’s top fundraisers [10] in the United States.