RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

On his blog Israel Matsav has posted a video (hat tip: reader Shirlee) of an Arab vandal caught red-handed uprooting and destroying a tombstone in the Jewish cemetery on Har HaZeitim, the Mount of Olives, the most ancient burial ground in the world that is still in use, and of course one in which scores of renowned sages repose. (The tomb of the prophet Zachariah can be seen in this photograph, right foreground.) As Israel Matsav’s blog notes, the vandal (who received a three-month gaol sentence) had been paid to carry out the task of desecration, and the incident is by no means isolated; even mourners are sometimes physically attacked.

Hooliganism on Har HaZeitim was rampant during the Jordanian occupation of the Old City from 1948-67. And what’s more, it was state-sponsored.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/548/greenpeace_s_trail_of_darkness_developing_nations_fight_back_

In almost every corner of the world, there’s a Greenpeace activist working to limit food production, stop energy development or bullying a sovereign nation to stifle economic development in favour of their ideological goals.

To boot, government officials, most recently William Hague, erroneously call the group’s radical forestry work “important,” a strange description for a group constantly mired in criminal activities. One must find it curious that the Cameron government would be supportive of such a hostile organization.

For a long time their often criminal campaign stunts have drawn substantial media attention, but, unfortunately, little resistance.

The FAO-EC report fails to see the wood for the trees as the climate change argument unravels a little more

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/754/a_new_climategate_how_the_left_can_t_see_the_wood_for_the_trees

Another grand bargain not only failed to materialise but in Durban’s aftermath, Canada pulled out of the Kyoto Treaty claiming that the moribund agreement had failed to “represent a way forward.”

Canada’s (and Japan’s) actions have rightly bundled the Kyoto Protocol into the morgue, the coroner probing and dissecting to find the cause of death: Kyoto choked on hyperbole and a lack of direction.

Not only was the agreement detrimental to economic growth (read: Miss me Yet?), but also recent – and largely unreported – information highlighted just how fatuous this entire ‘green scare’ is.

Much of the discussion surrounding climate change mitigation is focused on reducing deforestation as a means of reducing emissions. Thanks to satellite technology, a report issued by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and the European Commission was set to uncover just how urgent the situation was just days before Durban Summit, creating yet more alarmist rhetoric in order to compel global leaders to sign a binding deal.

The facts, however, revealed otherwise. The report served to show that both organisations have been using such fatally flawed data that they overestimated global deforestation by a whopping 32 percent.

The overriding assumption, supported most notably by Lord Stern (we don’t link to the Grauniad), has always been that large scale deforestation has been the primary contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). The fact that the FAO and EC have been hoist with their own petard is a delicious irony not lost on us.

Global deforestation is occurring, but at an annual rate of 0.07 percent—a level surely tolerable for countries currently on the path towards industrialization. One of the most damning aspects of the FAO-EC report is that all the green initiatives put in place to help prevent deforestation in the developing world have been shown to be nothing but a sham.

What’s more, Britain is donating vast sums for conservation efforts to address a problem that actually doesn’t exist.

The developing world has repeatedly been cajoled into supporting schemes such as the United Nations’ Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD). In short, REDD is an egregious con perpetuated by global institutions, hampering growth in the developing world and sucking Western taxpayers dry.

http://melaniephillips.com/europes-unfinished-business

“Of course, there are profound differences between today’s anti-Jewish animus and 1930s Germany. But there is also more than an unsettling echo; there is a direct line of connection. Many of the Palestinian Arabs are descended from ancestors who formed Hitler’s Middle Eastern front in Palestine, with a shared goal of exterminating the Jews. And their current agenda is being promoted by Europeans who, having created the EU to exorcise the continent’s demons, never fully faced up to the true and universal sources of the eternal hatred and lunacy that had caused the genocide of the Jews.”

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1981/From-the-Vault-Looking-Back-on-Iraq.aspx

Writing a weekly column is much like keeping a journal. It preserves thoughts and events of the day that would otherwise slip or blur in memory. Now that US forces have withdrawn from Iraq, I decided to look back on some of my many weekly entries on the topic to see if any of them might be of use in taking stock of what happened — and what didn’t happen.

Here, from the vault, is a column published almost exactly 5 years ago to the day on something that had just been newly announced in Washington: the “surge.”

12.23.06: “The pitfalls of `victory’ in Iraq”

http://nationalconferenceonjewishaffairs.org/

CONFERENCE OF JEWISH LEADERS REAFFIRMS ITS RESPECT FOR CONGRESSMAN ALLEN WEST

For Immediate Release

Contact: Beth Gilinsky (212) 726-1124 natlconference@gmail.com

December 21, 2011 — At this time, the National Conference on Jewish Affairs (NCJA) would like to reaffirm the great support that Congressman Allen West has shown the Jewish People and the State of Israel.

In matters of life, actions are the greatest barometer of personal sentiment. Thus, those detractors accusing Congressman West of being insensitive to Holocaust victims are exploiting the situation to their own political benefit. Congressman West, as he explained, used the term Goebbels-like, as is the norm today, as a reference to incessant propaganda to demonize an opponent. We understand that is the context in which the Congressman used the phrase when speaking about how the mainstream media and some extremists in the Democrat Party have propagandized against Republican colleagues.

All politics and heated rhetoric aside, Congressman Allen West remains one of the greatest friends of the worldwide Jewish community and retains our confidence in his leadership and friendship.

—

The National Conference on Jewish Affairs is a pro-Israel, pro-America umbrella organization of Jewish leaders from across the nation.

http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2011/12/21/no_on_mitt_romney/print

“He was, is and always will be a politician of convenience. If Iowans don’t recognize that threat, they’ll be undercutting their own case to lead off the primary season and buying into conventional wisdom instead of standing up for themselves. They’d no longer be Iowa stubborn — they’d be Iowa pushovers.”

In the Meredith Wilson musical “The Music Man,” a small Iowan town faces the sinister wiles of a big city con man, Harold Hill. In introducing themselves, they sing, “We could stand touchin’ noses / For a week at a time / And never see eye-to-eye. But what the heck, you’re welcome, / Join us at the picnic. You can eat your fill / Of all the food you bring yourself.”

By the end of Act Two, Hill has suckered these poor rubes into buying into his scheme. He’s done it by pretending to be one of them, by warning them of the evils of big city ways and by speaking on behalf of their innocent children.

These days, Harold Hill goes by a different name: Mitt Romney.

Throughout the Republican debates, Romney has somehow suckered much of the conservative world into believing that he is a solid fiscal, social and foreign policy conservative. He says many of the right things — though he looks supremely uncomfortable saying them — and this has been enough to send the GOP establishment, which loves a blue state Republican, into spasms of ecstasy.

http://www.translatingjihad.com/2011/12/muslim-brotherhood-leaders-quote.html
Muslim Brotherhood leaders quote Prophet Muhammad at al-Azhar conference: “O Muslim, this is a Jew behind me, come and kill him”
While the much of the West was still congratulating themselves for their role in supporting the so-called ‘Arab Spring,’ Muslim Brotherhood members (the soon-to-be rulers of “the new Egypt”) were at al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo on 25 November calling for genocide against Jews. The call came in the form of a recitation of an authentic hadith from the Prophet Muhammad, in which he declared that Muslims should fight against the Jews “until the rocks and the trees will say, ‘O slave of Allah, o Muslim, this is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” The occasion was the commemoration of what the International Union of Muslim Scholars named “Save al-Aqsa Friday” (for previous reporting on this day, see here).

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2683/energy-politics

American energy policy has always been messed up. It was most messy when the main source of energy was animal muscle and the streets were full of animal by-products. When fossil fuels gradually replaced animal-based energy and the streets got cleaner, public health improved. For the hundred years or so when coal was king, the price in ruined lives and environmental degradation was heavy, but on balance, the changeover to fossil fuels was not a bad thing.

Over the last century and a half, the average standard of living of people throughout the Western world has improved immensely. Even in places such as Asia and Africa, the trickle-down effects, in terms of less hunger and better overall health, were considerable. In some parts of Asia, such as South Korea and Japan, the fossil fuel revolution has given the vast majority of people a lifestyle indistinguishable from that of Western countries.

Today, however, America’s vulnerability to the international oil market is playing havoc with both its foreign policy and its balance of trade. President Barack Obama’s decision to delay the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would deliver oil derived from the tar sands of Canada’s Province of Alberta to US refineries, is seen as a blow to the North American energy industry. It is hard to understand why the President, apart from appeasing a small group of public union workers who he is hoping will vote for him in next year’s election, wants the US to import more oil from the Middle East or other unfriendly places and less from Canada.

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2671/betraying-ben-gurion

It is ironic that Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel’s only university bearing the name of the Jewish state’s founding father, and established in the ancient desert he dreamt of reviving, has become a hotbed of anti-Israel propaganda at the expense of proper scholarly endeavor.

So much so that an international committee of scholars, appointed by Israel’s Council for Higher Education to evaluate political science and international relations programs in Israeli universities, recently recommended that BGU “consider closing the Department of Politics and Government” unless it abandoned its “strong emphasis on political activism,” improved its research performance, and redressed the endemic weakness “in its core discipline of political science.” In other words, they asked that the Department return to accurate scholarship rather than indoctrinate the students with libel.