RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dr. Syd Cohen, dubbed ‘Flying Rabbi’ of WWII passes away at the age of 90. ‘His name will forever remain in the air force pantheon,’ say colleagues

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4157126,00.html

Aviel MagneziThe man who said to tell “the damn Nazis that they were fighting a Jew” when he was in the middle of a dog fight with German airplanes during WWII has died.

Dr. Sydney (Syd) Cohen who received the nickname the “Flying Rabbi of World War II” and who later became one of the founders of the Israeli Air Force’s first combat squadron, passed away on Sunday. He was 90-years-old. Cohen dies at his home in Ramat HaSharon.

“His name will forever remain in the air force pantheon,” his former air force colleagues said.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970204903804577082441532803110-lMyQjAxMTAxMDAwNjEwNDYyWj.html?mod=wsj_share_email

Pearl Harbor, Iran and North Korea Don’t be surprised if one of our underestimated adversaries does the unthinkable.
On Dec. 7, 1941 the United States suffered the worst intelligence failure in its history—before or since—when Japanese planes destroyed much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
The most astounding aspect of the Pearl Harbor attack was that the U.S. had already broken the Japanese code and was listening to its communications. The U.S. had hundreds of cryptologists and linguists, mostly from the Navy, listening to Japanese wireless communications. But it wasn’t enough.

“We knew something was going to happen on Sunday, December 7th at around noon Washington time,” Henry Kissinger said at a speech I attended two years ago in New York City. “The problem is that nobody knew that when it’s noon in Washington, it’s around 7 a.m. in Hawaii.”

In other words, despite being on a war footing with Japan and knowing from intercepted communications that the Japanese were planning for a significant event to affect Japanese-U.S. relations that Sunday, our government couldn’t conceive of—and didn’t defend against—an attack on its largest Pacific naval facility, Pearl Harbor.

Republicans press Pentagon for long-range interceptors

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/dec/5/north-korea-making-missile-able-to-hit-us/?page=all#pagebreak

New intelligence indicates that North Korea is moving ahead with building its first road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile, an easily hidden weapon capable of hitting the United States, according to Obama administration officials.

The intelligence was revealed in a classified Capitol Hill briefing last month. Its existence was made public in a letter to Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta from five House Republicans.

“As members of the House Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces …, we write out of concerns about new intelligence concerning foreign developments in long-range ballistic missile development, specifically ballistic missiles capable of attacking the United States,” the Nov. 17 letter said.

http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2011/12/07/ben_shapiro/print Last week in Boston, a seven-year-old boy named Mark got into a fight with a bully. The bully put his hands around the boy’s throat and began to squeeze. That’s when Mark fought back; he kicked his aggressor right in the family jewels. In a normal society, we’d celebrate Mark. Throw him a ticker […]

The End of Religious Freedom Posted By Phyllis Chesler URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-end-of-religious-freedom/ Time has run out for the cause of worldwide religious freedom. On November 18, 2011, America chose not to extend any further lifeline to persecuted religious minorities around the planet. On that day, the U.S. government shut down the work of an important and […]

(Reuters) – A suicide bomber attacked a Shi’ite Muslim shrine in Kabul on Tuesday killing at least 54 people in unprecedented sectarian violence a day after Afghanistan’s Western allies pledged long-term support once their troops leave.

Doctors and police struggled to count the dead from one of the bloodiest attacks in the Afghan capital since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001. The Taliban denied responsibility.

Bodies and blood were scattered across a street after the blast in the heart of old Kabul where a crowd of hundreds had gathered for the festival of Ashura. More than 100 were injured.

It was a potent reminder of Afghanistan’s troubles the day after its Western allies gathered at an international conference to pledge long-term support, even after their combat troops leave at the end of 2014.

All-American Muslim: The Perils of Propaganda Posted By Daniel Greenfield

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/06/all-american-muslim-the-perils-of-propaganda/

All-American Muslim is on its last legs. Not only was the last episode of the show the lowest rated show in its time slot, losing again to Homeland, but it was also the lowest rated show of the night among the top 100 cable shows aimed at adults. While Homeland has improved its ratings, All-American Muslim has dropped so low that it’s hovering above the abyss.

Just to bring out the vultures, Discovery Communications is being sued by Visionaire Media which accuses it of stealing its idea for an “American Muslim Show” without compensation. At this point Discovery Communications, which oversees the disaster areas that are TLC, The Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and several other learning channels that have turned into minor variations of each other serving up the same Reality content, might consider letting Visionaire have the credit for All-American Muslim which a month later looks more like blame.

The media which enthusiastically embraced All-American Muslim has nothing more to say about it. There are hardly any more stories on it and those few that show up make it clear that the writer did not watch the show beyond the premiere episode. The deadly secret of All-American Muslim is that not even the liberals in the media want to watch it.

 http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com Holy Cow! I Agree With Ron Paul, Trump-Moderated Debate is a Circus Regular readers of this site are about read something you thought you would never find in anything written by me, but I agree with Ron Paul. In fact this time the Texas Congressman the has shown more courage than Michele Bachmann, Rick […]

Egypt’s Sham Election The military helps the Islamists to power.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/284962
According to Egypt’s elections committee, the Muslim Brotherhood won 37 percent of the vote of the first round of voting in Egypt, and the Salafis, who promote a yet more extreme Islamist program, won 24 percent, giving them together a jaw-dropping 61 percent of the vote.
This stunning result prompts two questions: Is this a legitimate or rigged outcome? Are Islamists about to dominate Egypt?
Legitimate or rigged? No one took seriously Soviet elections with their inevitable 99 percent returns for the Communists, and, while the process and outcome of the Egyptian elections are less blatant, they deserve similar skepticism. The game is more subtle, but it’s still a game, and here is how it’s played:
The Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1928) and the military dictatorship (ruling Egypt since 1952) have a parallel ideology and a long history that makes them simultaneously rivals and allies. Over the decades, they off-and-on cooperated in an autocratic system bound by Islamic law (Sharia) and in oppressing liberal, secular elements.
In this spirit, Anwar El-Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and now Mohamed Tantawi tactically empowered Islamists as a foil to gain Western support, arms, and money. For example, when George W. Bush pressured Mubarak to permit more political participation, the latter responded by having 88 Muslim Brotherhood members elected to parliament, thereby warning Washington that democracy means an Islamist takeover. The apparent weakness of non-Islamists scared the West from further insisting on a transition to political participation. But a close look at the 2005 elections finds that the regime helped the Islamists gain its 20 percent of the seats.

Published on The Weekly Standard (http://www.weeklystandard.com)
Friends Indeed How and why the Jews have thrived in England.

In the last words of this book, the author quotes her brother Milton Himmelfarb in one of his last essays: “Hope is a Jewish virtue.” Nobody embodies that virtue more felicitously than Gertrude Himmelfarb, who over a long and fruitful life of scholarship has given hope to all who have encountered her, whether in person or in print.

Some 60 years have elapsed since her first book appeared: Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics. There she praised her noble subject for having taken “the idea of conscience out of the reign of metaphysics and placed it within the province of politics,” thereby giving his readers grounds for hope in the face of the pessimistic dictum for which he is chiefly remembered: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Like Acton and the other great Victorians to whose study Himmelfarb has devoted so much of her life, she is a “liberal with a difference”—a liberal, that is, who takes seriously humanity’s capacity to inspire despair. Such liberals are nowadays invariably seen as conservatives by the socialists who have usurped the term “liberal.” But like her late husband Irving Kristol, she is also a “conservative with a difference”—a conservative, that is, who takes seriously humanity’s capacity to inspire hope.