RUTHFULLY YOURS

John Paul McCarthy: Shatter spoke for Irish Protestants as well as the Jewish congregation

The justice minister’s Holocaust speech showed how ‘context’ comes from the heart, writes John Paul McCarthy

IN his essay, The Idea of a University, Cardinal Newman observed that “what is spoken cannot outrun the range of the speaker’s voice”. By this he meant that speaker and sentiment must somehow coalesce to generate affecting rhetoric.

The Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter, gave a master class in this regard last week with his landmark speech on the Holocaust. Cutting a chastening swathe through the various arguments about “context”, Shatter denounced Irish neutrality as morally bankrupt. Previous Fine Gael politicians have handled the Emergency era fairly roughly as well. Remember that Garret FitzGerald dismissed neutrality as morally inadequate in Ireland in the World (2005), arguing: “I could never regard our decision to opt out of western European defence and to rely for our defence exclusively on a combination of other states in the formulation of whose policy we have no say as being in accordance with our dignity as a state, or with our moral responsibilities.”

In order to drive home his point about Irish moral delinquency here, he noted some mortifying similarities between contemporary Irish security policy and those of war-torn Tajikistan. (For a spell, both countries were unique in being members of the Conference on Security and Co-Operation, but not members of the Nato-led Partnership for Peace.)

On PA TV: Glorification of Fogel family murderers

Mother of Hakim Awad, killer of 5 Fogel family members:
“My greetings to dear Hakim, the apple of my eye,
who carried out the operation in Itamar, sentenced to 5 life sentences”

Aunt of Hakim Awad:
“Hakim Awad, the hero, the legend”

PA TV host:
“We [PA TV] also convey our greetings to them”
http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=6245

Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik

Twice last week, official Palestinian Authority TV broadcast greetings to the murderers of the Fogel family from the relatives of the killers and from the PA TV host.

On March 11, 2011, five members of the Fogel family were killed in their home in the Israeli town Itamar by Palestinian terrorists from the Awad family. Hakim Awad led the attack, killing the parents Ehud and Ruth and three of their children, aged 11 years, 4 years, and 2 months.

The Revenants

The definition of the word revenant is: a person who returns after a lengthy absence, or someone who has returned from the dead.The origin of the word revenant is French, from present participle of revenir, meaning to return. (Participle is a word formed from a verb and used as an adjective or a noun.)

The word revenant was first known to have been used in 1818.The Jewish Nation is a revenant nation.

The Jews have returned to the Land of Israel, after lengthy absence, several times, thus the name revenant is the most appropriate for any Jew living in the land of Israel.

The Babylonian empire, under the ruling of Nebuchadnezzar II, conquered and occupied the Kingdom of Judea between 597-586 BC. In 586 BC, the Babylonian army, under the commandment of Nebuchadnezzar, destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem and exiled the Jews to Babylon, mostly, the middle class and above Jewish population.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/01/29/will-guilty-verdict-in-canadian-honor-killing-trial-be-turning-point-for/

On January 29, after a ten-week trial and fifteen hours of deliberations, a seven woman, five man jury returned with a verdict of guilty to first degree murder for all three Afghan-Canadians who were charged in the pre-meditated murder of four female members of the polygamous Shafia family.

The convicted are each facing 25 years without parole.

Mohammed Shafia, 58, Tooba Yahya, 42 (his second wife), and Hamed, 21, their son, were found guilty of conspiring to and of having murdered Mohammed’s first wife, Rona Mohammed Amir, 50, and Tooba Yahya’s three daughters, Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, because they refused to wear hijab, wore Western, sometimes “sexy” clothing, dared to have boyfriends, and, in their father’s words, “dishonored” and “betrayed” both “their family and Islam.”

On June 30, 2009, when the bodies of the dead girls and woman were discovered in the family’s Nissan in the Rideau Canal, the accused wept uncontrollably and went through an exaggerated public display of mourning.

However, privately, post-massacre, the police recovered wiretaps of Mohammed Shafia saying that his daughters had “hurt (him)..and betrayed…and violated us immensely. God curse their generation, they were filthy and rotten children. To hell with them and their boyfriends…May the devil shit on their graves.”

On wiretap, Mohammed said that if he had it to do over again he would. His self-pity, self-righteousness, and cruelty are typical of the kinds of men who commit such murders.

http://www.therightscoop.com/mark-levin-newt-did-more-for-the-conservative-movement-than-virtually-all-of-his-critics-today/

Mark Levin is, by his own admission, no special pleader for Newt Gingrich and he says that we can certainly criticize Gingrich on substance. But he says to count him out among those that are trashing Gingrich. In fact, he opened the show saying that if this trashing of Newt Gingrich is what the conservative movement has come to, then count him out.

This quote from Levin probably sums up his point about Newt more than anything else:

“Newt Gingrich, if he does nothing else, did more for the conservative movement and to stop the liberal Democrats in the House of Representatives than virtually everybody today who is criticizing him!”

He also plays the full audio in context, of the so-called Reagan-bashing that Newt did back in 1988, that absolutely disproves the idea that Newt was bashing Reagan at all.

Listen to the full segment. It is excellent:

http://www.therightscoop.com/mark-levin-newt-did-more-for-the-conservative-movement-than-virtually-all-of-his-critics-today/

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/27/global-warmings-dirty-laundry/
University of Virginia should disclose climate emails

Those who say man alone is responsible for overheating the planet frequently dismiss any role the sun might play. As can be seen in an ongoing freedom-of-information lawsuit leveled against the University of Virginia (UVA), sunshine is precisely what the heralds of climate catastrophe fear most of all.

The American Tradition Institute (ATI) is going after 12,000 emails sent or received by Michael E. Mann while he was on the staff of the publicly-funded university. Mr. Mann is famous for coming up with one of the “tricks” used to “hide the decline” in global temperatures. On Wednesday, ATI released a small selection of emails it hopes will convince a Prince William County judge that full disclosure of the rest is in the public interest.

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/01/28/aafia-siddiqui-versus-ayaan-hirsi-ali-sharia-versus-freedom/

Aafia Siddiqui Versus Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Sharia Versus Freedom

My colleagues Phyllis Chesler [1] and Diana West [2] have just written two important, complementary assessments which eviscerate journalist Deborah Scroggins’ recently published, Wanted Women: Faith, Lies and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui. Chesler and West mince no words in their discussions of Scroggins’ oeuvre, appropriately highlighting the book’s intellectually and morally cretinous argumentation. Ms. Scroggins diatribe cum “analysis” excoriates the intrepid former Dutch Parliamentarian and Muslim freethinker, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, while providing a Leftist claptrap “blame the West,” sympathetic portrayal of the Sharia-compliant, pious Muslim jihadist, Siddiqui.

As revealed by Chesler and West, Scroggins’ work epitomizes disturbing trends I examine in my forthcoming Sharia Versus Freedom—The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: Western self-loathing, accompanied by thoroughly uninformed, treacly apologetics on Islam and its quintessential, totalitarian religio-political code, Sharia. For example, Diana West [2] points out how Scroggins chastises Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “simplistic” views on Islam for ignoring two ostensible avatars of “Islamic modernism”—the late Pakistani Prime Minister Benazhir Bhutto, and Sudanese religious “reformer,” Mahmoud Muhammad Taha. But Scroggins ignorant attack simply confirms the author’s willful blindness and hostility to the mea-culpa based, wrenching reforms of Islam Ayaan and other true modernists from Muslim backgrounds are rightfully insistent upon. Taha was at best a dishonest tinkerer; Bhutto far worse.

Taha’s defining work, “The Second Message of Islam [3]” is readily available in an English translation by his fawning acolyte, and Islamic Sharia-promoting apologist, Abdullah an-Naim. Taha proclaims these bowdlerized pieties (in “The Second Message of Islam [3]”) on Islam’s violent Medinan emergence as a polity:

Islam used persuasion for thirteen years in propagating its clearly valid message…When the addressees failed to discharge properly the[ir] duties…the Prophet was appointed as their guardian…once they embraced the new religion [i.e., by coercion]…the sword was suspended…and [they] were penalized according to new laws. Hence the development of Islamic Shari’a law…

And Taha further had the temerity to compare the jihad-genocide waging historical “sword of Islam” to a surgeon’s scalpel—an unconscionable immoral equivalence to this physician:

In justifying the use of the sword, we may describe it as a surgeon’s lancet, and not a butcher’s knife…We [the Muslims] have enacted fighting with the sword in order to curtail the freedom of those who abuse it, so the sword brings them to their senses, thereby allowing them to earn their freedom and benefit from their life [note: “freedom as perfect slavery to Allah”, the Sufi notion of Ibn Arabi, perhaps? [4]]

But Taha’s true sentiments towards non-Muslim infidels are in the end, not concealed from anyone who cares to look. He in fact justifies—consistent with mainstream Islamic jurisprudence—their historical subjugation by violent jihad:

Suffering death by the sword in this life is really an aspect of suffering hell in the next life, since both are punishments for disbelief…for the disbelievers the law of war, and hardship of iron.

The Suicide Club Posted By Roger Kimball

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/01/28/the-suicide-club/

John Stuart Mill famously described conservatives as “the stupid party.” The description has unwritten boundless hilarity among liberals for more than a century, but that is only because they (stupidly?) neglected to take Mill’s deeper message on board. Every true partisan of liberalism, Mill wrote, should pray for the enlightenment and acuity of conservatives if for no other reason than intelligent opposition tends to have a tonic effect on liberalism itself.

That is probably true. But there is a toxic assumption lying behind Mill’s strictures that is worth pondering. It is this: the more closely one compares liberals and conservatives, the more it emerges that by “stupid” many liberals (including, I believe, Mill himself) mean “disagreeing with me.” Liberalism, that is to say, regards its political opinions not as opinions but as reflections of the state of nature: what any right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) person believes. But your opinions, my conservative friend, are regarded not so much as opinions as some form of heresy. Here in a nutshell you have the motor behind political correctness and the staggeringly illiberal attitudes espoused by the elite liberal establishment.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/01/palestine_back_to_the_future.html

There was a time when the lands now known as Israel (including Judea and Samaria and Gaza) and Jordan were called “Palestine.” In fact, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 declared that “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

There followed considerable cooperation between the Jews, represented by Chaim Weizmann, and the Arabs living in Mespotamia, now Iraq and Jordan, represented by Emir Feisal. As a result, the Feisal-Weizman Agreement was signed in January 1919, in which it was agreed that the Jews would get the lands lying west of the Jordan River watershed to the Mediterranean.

Two months later, Feisal wrote to Felix Frankfuter, the then-leader of the American Zionists, extending a welcome:

We Arabs, especially the educated among us look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.

Unfortunately, that initial agreement and embrace was overtaken by events. The British and the French had other plans.

Finally, the allied powers — Britain, France, Italy, and Japan — passed the San Remo Resolution in evidence of their agreement:

The High Contracting Parties agree to entrust, by application of the provisions of Article 22, [League of Nations Charter] the administration of Palestine, within such boundaries as may be determined by the Principal Allied Powers, to a Mandatory, to be selected by the said Powers. The Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 8, 1917, by the British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/843/one_more_cuban_martyr_and_latin_america_s_leadership_turns_a_blind_eye_
One more Cuban martyr – and Latin America’s leadership turns a blind eye

The day of reckoning will inevitably come for the tribunal of History to deliver the last word with respect to the Cuban ordeal. On that day, some of Latin America’s leaders will receive a moral condemnation.

Whoever has endured the yoke of a long and cruel dictatorship knows that one of the most comforting feelings one may experience under those circumstances is to be able to count on the solidarity of people and institutions from the outside world. That solidarity gives strength to those who struggle from within.

All too naturally, when those like-minded voices go missing or run low; when the crimes of the dictatorship fail to arouse international indignation; when those who lead countries living in democracy turn a blind eye, it is revulsion which, most understandably, springs from the hearts of dissidents thus abandoned to the mercy of a tyrant.

Such revulsion is what the Cuban people must be feeling vis-à-vis the leaders of Latin America. Cubans have received only sporadic scraps of sympathy and support from within their own region, as the bulk of Latin American governments and regional organizations tend to shun – whether by fear or by convenience – any quarrel with the longest tyranny in the history of that continent.

That indifference is all the more reprehensible as it comes from a continent with seasoned experience in struggling against military dictatorships. Its democratically-elected leaders, therefore, should have been in the forefront of international initiatives aimed at assisting the Cubans in their fight to rid themselves from the claws of Castroism.