RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/218263/run-newt-run/rich-lowry

Run, Newt, Run! Gingrich 2008?

“What thrills Republicans about Gingrich’s media appearances is the sense of intellectual mastery — that he has the arguments, along with the words, to beat all comers. And he hasn’t been shy about criticizing the Bush administration or the Republican Congress. This puts Gingrich in the enviable position of being a keen Beltway player, but one not associated with an unpopular GOP establishment.”

The casual TV viewer has probably noticed two things during the past few days — there’s a war in the Middle East, and Newt Gingrich is commenting on it.

Gingrich has been a ubiquitous analyst on the war — ubiquity being one of the tireless, outsized former House speaker’s favorite qualities. In between appearances in his role as a commentator for the Fox News Channel, Gingrich announced on Meet the Press that we are in the midst of World War III. A few days later, Hezbollah declared that it welcomed World War III, nicely capturing the moment: Simultaneous with its shooting war with Israel, Hezbollah is in a war of words with Newt Gingrich.

The old conventional wisdom about Gingrich was that we wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore. The new conventional wisdom is that he’s back, and he’s doing the kicking. Ousted by his own party after its losses in the 1998 midterm elections, Gingrich has reestablished himself as a party leader through sheer intellectual energy. He has had something intelligent to say about literally every issue of the hour, from health care to Katrina to the war on terror. “He has helped himself immensely — he’s all over the place,” says former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie.

http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2011/12/more-on-palestinian-inventivism.html

Not “inventiveness” but now: “inventivism” *.
Here:
THE PALESTINIAN NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT emerged in the early 1960s with the primary goal of “liberating the land and the people” from Zionist settler-colonialism. Today, with colonization accelerating throughout Palestine and with Palestinian refugees—mostly deprived of their national, civil, and human rights—still dispersed around the world, this aim sounds like an embarrassing echo of a distant past [1]. The failure of the strategy of armed struggle to deliver its maximalist (pre-1967) or even more limited (post-1988) goals became patently clear with the quelling of the second intifada. Meanwhile, the alternate strategy of seeking to liberate a fraction of historical Palestine by negotiations and diplomacy has proven equally futile.

“emerged in the early 1960s”? “pre-1967 armed struggle”?

But we know this movement is ancient, old, no? And we know the “settlements” cause the terror.

That’s what they tell us.

Who wrote that?

Raja Khalidi and Sobhi Samour.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=2232

At Hamas rally, Haniyeh threatens Israel with ‘millions of martyrs’

Days before Israel releases 500 prisoners in second part of Shalit deal, Hamas leadership holds mass rally in Gaza City to mark movement’s 24th anniversary, touting the “1,365 Israelis killed” over the years • Israel likely to release low-level terrorists in coming days as “gesture” to Egypt.

Under a sea of fluttering green flags, to the sounds of cheers and fiery rhetoric, some 100,000 Palestinians gathered Wednesday at Gaza City’s Al-Katiba Square for a mass rally to mark Hamas’ 24th anniversary.

Just days before Israel completes the second phase of the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap by releasing an additional 500 Palestinian prisoners, the chief figures of Gaza’s ruling Islamic movement stood proudly on stage under a banner emblazoned with the words, “We are on our way to liberate Jerusalem.”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/10998
Harvard has come to the aid of Islamic fundamentalists in their quest to dominate India and South Central Asia by their dismissal of Indian Prof. S. Swarmy for writing of Muslim persecution in India. For shame!

Prof. Phyllis Chesler is the author of fifteen books, including Women and Madness (Doubleday, 1972), The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and most recently, The New Anti-Semitism. She is the co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology and the National Women’s Health

First they came for the pagans and the Jews. Then they came for the Christians. And then they came for the Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, and Ba’hai.

What am I talking about? I am talking about the Islamic persecution of infidels on every continent—a persecution which is still ongoing; about forced conversions to Islam; and about the genocidal extermination of 80 million Hindus over a period of six centuries (1000-1500 CE).

What I’ve just written is historically true as is Islam’s history of anti-Black racism, slavery, and gender and religious apartheid. Ibn Warraq has a new and very important book just coming out on this very subject. It is titled: Why the West is Best. A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy.

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2667/vanishing-western-tradition

It is astonishing that those in the West are living through the near extinction of their civilization. For students in the Academy today, the Western Civilization history course, virtually a standard curriculum offering 30 years ago, has disappeared.

This survey course covering classical antiquity to the present was the glue, the all-embracing narrative, that gave coherence to everything else the university taught. At the very least, students came away from this course with a partial recognition of their civilization and its monumental achievements.

Now Western civilization survey courses have been eliminated from the general education requirements, replaced in large part by courses and programs that either undermine traditions in the West or “Balkanize” the curriculum. Latino studies, for example, exalt the accomplishments of Spanish speaking people. Black studies emphasize the plight of blacks in white societies. Women’s studies superordinate the role of women. However, white studies denounce male dominated, colonial societies. American history, on the rare occasion it is required, tells a story of conflict, exploitation and imperial goals. Third World studies is ostensibly a rehearsal of abuse and unfair dominance by the West.

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2668/clinton-saban-forum

“Attacking Israeli is easy – there are never any adverse consequences for the attacker. But tackling the real issues facing women in the world is harder and needs someone with true courage. Secretary Clinton’s remarks against Israel are saved for the comfortable, adoring, embracing Saban forum. She is again preaching to the converted, but the wrong kind.”

Secretary Clinton’s latest comments about Israel at the Saban Forum, (same Mr. Saban of the Power Rangers commercial success) voiced concern regarding Israel’s democratic process, highlighting two main issues: the discourse about women in Israeli public life as a whole and legislation curtailing foreign contributions to so-called “Human Rights Organizations.” Secretary Clinton chose (according to media reports; no transcripts are publicly available) to liken the women’s rights situation in Israel to the situation in the south of the United States during the time of discrimination in the days of Rosa Parks in 1955. She also compared Israel’s internal democratic processes to Iran — complementing Iran in the process. These are sweeping and strong statements — unheard of by a U.S.secretary of state — that require comment.

The timing of Secretary Clinton’s comments is baffling.

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2669/haaretz-newspaper

Of the countless threats of Arab violence in the run-up to the November 29, 1947 Partition Resolution and in its wake, none has resonated more widely than the warning by Abdul Rahman Azzam, the Arab League’s first secretary-general, that the establishment of a Jewish state would lead to “a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.”

Unfortunately, the longstanding failure to trace the original document in which the threat was made has given rise to doubts regarding its veracity, and by implication – the murderous Arab intentions: not least since the historical truth has been erased from public memory by decades of relentless pro-Arab propaganda.

Small wonder, therefore, that when the missing document was recently found, with an annotated full translation published in the Middle East Quarterly, which I edit, Haaretz columnist and self-styled “new historian” Tom Segev, who had spent a good part of the past two decades turning the saga of Israel’s birth upside down, went out of his way to whitewash Azzam’s threat and downplay its significance. “There is something pathetic about this hunt for historical quotes drawn from newspapers,” he wrote, without disputing the threat’s contents or authenticity. “Azzam used to talk a lot. On May 21, 1948, the Palestine Post offered this statement by him: ‘Whatever the outcome, the Arabs will stick to their offer of equal citizenship for Jews in Arab Palestine and let them be as Jewish as they like.'” He then quotes Ben-Gurion’s alleged description of the League’s Secretary-General as “the most honest and humane among Arab leaders.”

There is much….too much ado about nasty Tom Friedman. The orotund Tom waddles around where even the noxious team Walt/Mearsheimer fear to tread.

Even liberals recognize what an oaf he is. Here is some choice criticism of Tom from Matt Taibbi reviewing Friedman’s book “The Earth is Flat”…..
Flathead The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman.

By Matt Taibbi. Originally published April 21, 2005 in the New York Press.

The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays.

Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up.

On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country.

He is the perfect symbol of our culture of emboldened stupidity.

http://rolocroz.com/junk/friedman.html

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11026/pub_detail.asp

President Obama deserves credit for authorizing the execution of Osama bin Laden and for significantly intensifying the drone campaign against terrorists. He’s largely stopped romanticizing the Palestinians; has recognized that Putin made an ass of him; and has even hinted that he might stand up to China on some issues. But even if he turns into a combination of Ike, Reagan and Carl von Clausewitz in the coming months, his administration’s foreign-policy record will forever be defined by his disastrous rush to leave Iraq—then brag about it.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/39563#CurDomainURL#/blog.cfm
Hon. Geert Wilders’ New Book Offends Egypt Even Before It is Published

The Dutch Ambassador to Egypt, Susan Blankhart was called to the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, today, to protest ‘defamation of Islam’ in a new book by the Hon. Geert Wilders. Wilders’ book is scheduled to be released here in the US, next April. The Egyptians were likely using this opportunity as a media event. We note that this occurred while our State Department’s conference on The Istanbul Process Combating Intolerance conference was taking place in DC. With representatives from member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the EU, the OSCE, gathered in Washington why miss an opportunity to stifle any criticism of Islam and deny Free Speech? After all this plenary session in DC is developing ‘best practices’ to rein in religious intolerance. How Orwellian of them.