RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.journalinquirer.com/articles/2011/12/17/chris_powell/doc4eeb59c3c29bd202950830.txt
Having made New Haven a “sanctuary city,” where local government nullifies federal immigration law by awarding city identification cards to illegal aliens to facilitate their lawbreaking, Mayor John DeStefano now proposes to allow illegals to vote in municipal elections in Connecticut.

Ordinary state legislation for that would not be enough, as the state Constitution provides that only citizens can be electors, so a state constitutional amendment would be needed as well. Since federal law forbids anyone who is not a citizen from voting in federal elections, two voter lists would have to be maintained, one for local elections and one for president and Congress. Would the local voter list then be kept secret, as New Haven has concealed its list of city ID card holders, lest immigration lawbreakers become identifiable?

But those are mere details. The point, Mayor DeStefano, says, is about “how you define community.”

Indeed it is, but in a sense far broader than what the mayor means. For the community most at sake is the national community, and the bigger issue is whether the United States should retain the right to define itself as a nation or just default to some amorphous mass and become whatever outsiders might choose to make it.

http://sarahhonig.com/2011/12/22/another-tack-just-hate-wholeheartedly/

Iconic Palmach songwriter and Israel Prize laureate (1983) Haim Hefer celebrated hate (only partly tongue-in-cheek) as a downright pleasurable and invigorating force. In his poem Zehubim (Yellows) he muses (my translation) that

Love and amity
Are signs of immaturity.
Mercy and all the rest
Are worthless relicts of the past.

One thing hasn’t lost its attraction:
That strange penchant for abomination…

Nothing here is smart or dumb,
Or logical, my chum –
So just hate wholeheartedly
So utterly impulsively.

Hefer’s insights into the compulsive nature of hate are remarkably borne out by the unbridled offensive of Peace Now Secretary-General Yariv Oppenheimer on Bank Leumi’s “Two Million Good Reasons” campaign. It set out to aid a broad variety of nonprofit organizations. The idea was for the public to vote online for its favorite among the 139 vying outfits – among them, alas, Im Tirtzu.

The top 10 were to receive bigger shares of the NIS 2 million set aside for grants, while lesser gifts would go to the next 50 contestants. To Oppenheimer’s consternation, it emerged that Im Tirtzu was a top contender. Im Tirtzu, it cannot be stressed enough, is an absolute anathema to the leftist Peace Now.

http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/22/army-to-allow-hijabs-turbans-in-junior-rotc/
Army to allow hijabs, turbans in Junior ROTC

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has announced that the Department of Defense will now allow Muslim and Sikh students participating in Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) to wear headscarves and turbans while in uniform.

The decision, announced Thursday, followed an October incident in which Muslim teen Demin Zawity quit JROTC when her commanding officer at a Brentwood, Tenn. high school would not allow her to wear her hijab in the homecoming parade.

CAIR later wrote to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta requesting “constitutionally-protected religious accommodations for the girl and for future Muslim JROTC participants.”

In a letter to the Muslim organization sent on Panetta’s behalf, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army Larry Stubblefield explained that based on the incident that led Zawity to quit JROTC, the Army will now be making more accommodations for religious headwear in the training program.

http://www.melaniephillips.com/a-fearful-symmetry

What is happening in American politics is simply astounding. Here is an incumbent President whose approval ratings are rightly dire. He is the most far-left, dangerous and damaging President the US has ever known. In office, he has amply fulfilled the worst fears of those like myself who warned well before he was even elected that his agenda was to neuter America’s influence abroad and to extend the reach of the state into people’s lives at home.

In foreign policy, he has made the world an immeasurably more dangerous place by strengthening America’s enemies and dumping on its allies (even vitiating the sacrifice of America’s own soldiers in Iraq, now poised to descend into world-threatening anarchy because of the militarily illiterate and defeatist withdrawal of US forces from there). With the US economy tanking so disastrously, one might think that such a President offered an open goal for the Republicans. Yet the amazing fact is that the Republicans just have not got a credible candidate. One after the other, they have been exposed as either embarrassingly third rate or off-the-wall or both.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/22/us-newyork-security-idUSTRE7BL21820111222

Nearly half of extremist plots in NYC aim at Jewish targets

(Reuters) – New York City police boost security at synagogues during the holiday season because nearly half the plots to attack the city in the past 20 years were aimed at Jewish targets, law enforcement sources said on Thursday.

Since al Qaeda militants flew hijacked airliner attacks into New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the city considers itself a prime target and authorities traditionally increase security during the busy holiday season.

While law enforcement sources said there was no information to indicate New York would be targeted this holiday season, authorities are still wary after a Nigerian man tried to bring down a Detroit-bound passenger plane on Christmas Day in 2009 with a bomb hidden in his underpants.

New analyses from the New York Police Department (NYPD) Intelligence Division showed that since 1992, eight of 18 plots to attack the city targeted Jewish institutions or Jewish people in New York, law enforcement sources said.

The intelligence analyses also found that New York City had at some point been home to 44 extremist militants since 2002.

Of those, 43 were captured, while Samir Khan, editor of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire magazine, was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen in September.

In the past decade New York City has developed extensive intelligence and counterterrorism divisions. In response to the new intelligence reports, New York Police Department Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said: “Fortunately the NYPD has gotten close to (the extremists) without their knowledge.”

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Jerry Norton)

Dear e-pals: The death of North Korea’s dictator has evoked a flurry of predictions and suppositions. How about a little historical perspective?

“On July 27, 1953 the 38th parallel remained the front line of both north and south and a final armistice was signed. The Americans whose determination and military prowess had decimated and dispirited North Korea, had the ability and will to “roll back Communism” but instead, they rolled back the war.

July 27th, 2011 was the 58 th anniversary of that armistice which ended a war that resulted in the deaths of 54,229 American troops, with 103,248 wounded, 8,200 missing in action, and roughly 4,000 captured. The devastation in South Korea included 227,800 killed, 717,100 wounded, 43,000 missing, and an untold number captured and turned over to China.”

please read http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.257/pub_detail.asp

Exclusive: The Legacy of an Unfinished War

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

There is one fundamental element that is absolutely necessary for an isolationist foreign policy. Isolation. Isolationism without physical isolation is as much good as belligerence without an army to back it up.

American isolationism might have been feasible during WW1 when its neighbors were either friendly or no threat, there was no danger from the Pacific and a fleet crossing the Atlantic seemed unlikely. Though it wasn’t so unlikely even then.

As far back as 1897 and long before any American involvement in Europe, Operational Plan Three called for shelling New York and seizing parts of Virginia, as a staging base for attacks on Washington and Baltimore. Plans were drawn up in Germany for the occupation of Boston and Philadelphia.

Vice-Admiral August Thomsen wrote, “At the moment every thinking German officer is occupied with the consequences of a belligerent conflict between Germany and the United States of America.”

IN THE BRONX “BUSHWA” WAS THE POLITE WAY TO SAY BULL…IT….AND IN THIS COLUMN MAY, AFTER PRESENTING THE FACTS AND THE HISTORY, JUST RECYLES THE SPOOR….IF ONLY THEY BEHAVE AND PROMISE TO BE NICE TO ISRAEL THEY CAN HAVE A STATE…..JUST LIKE GAZA….?….RSK
“What would be an alternative? To say straightforwardly to the Palestinians: “If you want to develop as a nation and live in a state of your own, we will help you. But our support is not unconditional: You must be willing to compromise. You must be willing to make peace with the Israelis, who will be your neighbors.”

The Case for Palestinian Nationalism Do Palestinians really support a two-state solution?
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/286446

http://news.yahoo.com/militant-hamas-moves-join-plo-umbrella-110943864.html

CAIRO (AP) — The Hamas militant group has agreed to join the Palestine Liberation Organization — a key step toward unifying the long-divided Palestinian leadership.

Hamas’ leader Khaled Mashaal on Thursday joined a committee that will prepare for elections to the PLO leadership.

Those elections are likely years away but Mashaal’s move means he will work with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, head of the rival Fatah party.

The PLO is the umbrella group of the Palestinian independence movement.

Thursday’s development is an important step toward reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah — which have been split since Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007.

Separate elections in the West Bank and Gaza for a unified parliament are tentatively set for next year.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/12/on_the_holiness_of_jerusalem_in_judaism_and_in_islam.html

“These days, the never-ending cry for a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital surely contains a trace of the claim that the city is holy in Islam. But, essentially, the historic record shows that the actions and circumstances on which the claim is based aren’t very holy at all. In fact, by any standard of religious values in any society in the world, artificially imbuing a place with holiness, through wordplay and administrative sleight of hand, constitutes the very opposite of holiness.”