RUTHFULLY YOURS

Self contradiction here….if the overwhelming majority of Palestinian Arabs support an armed campaign against Israel, it is illusory to pretend there can be a “peaceful demilitarized ” state…rsk
Opinion polls show that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians support an armed campaign against Israel, and want to see Israel destroyed and a State of Palestine built on its ruins. The polls also show a troubling increase in popular support in the West Bank for Hamas, and a decrease in support for Mahmoud Abbas.

The greatest tragedy of the Palestinians is not 1948, it is 2015. The only thing the Palestinian leadership and terrorist organizations can agree on is their obsession to destroy the State of Israel.

It is particularly disappointing that we keep trying to defraud the Israelis and Americans with fictitious messages of peace and “two states for two peoples.” We assume they have no intelligence at all, do not understand Arabic and cannot read our Facebook pages.

The time has come to try creating — for the first time — a peaceful and demilitarized Palestinian state, which the Israelis have indicated for decades they would be happy to help us achieve.

This past week, the Israelis arrested 25 Hamas terrorists in the West Bank, most of them students from Al-Quds University in Abu Dis. Not rebels without a cause or the unemployed with a chip on their shoulder, but the finest minds we have, the intellectuals of the future Palestinian academia! The group, which dealt with recruiting and guidance and was being handled by Hamas in Turkey and its terrorist wing the Gaza Strip, was planning to carry out suicide bombing attacks inside Israel.

SEOUL—North Korea said it successfully staged its first test of a more powerful form of nuclear weapon, expanding the U.S.’s foreign-policy challenges and highlighting the limits of China’s ability to rein in its volatile ally.

North Korean state television said in a midday broadcast that scientists had successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb at around 10 a.m. local time.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported that it detected a magnitude 5.1 earthquake at that time near North Korea’s nuclear test site in the country’s northeast.

Experts have said it was unclear whether North Korea had developed the ability to build a hydrogen bomb. The magnitude of the latest explosion was the same as a 2013 test of an atomic bomb.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. couldn’t confirm North Korea’s claims of a nuclear test but is monitoring the situation.

“We are aware of seismic activity on the Korean Peninsula in the vicinity of a known North Korean nuclear test site and have seen Pyongyang’s claims of a nuclear test,” Mr. Kirby said.

Arab and Muslim leaders publicly declare the same goals as BDS activists; to eliminate Israel as a non-Muslim entity from lands that “belong” to Islam.
Hamas, PLO groups and the Palestinian Authority exploit the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign as a tool of Islamic warfare.

Arab and Muslim leaders publicly declare the same goals as BDS activists; to eliminate Israel as a non-Muslim entity from lands that “belong” to Islam. Following the al-Aksa war of terrorism in 2001, leading Muslim Brotherhood scholar Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi published an Islamic legal ruling (fatwa) on boycotting Israeli goods. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did the same. For Islamists, the reason is simple:

Since the existence of Israel is an affront to Islam, as former Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad, himself an Alawite and therefore not a true Muslim in Sunni eyes, declared throughout his life, any strategy and every tactic to rid the world of Israel is acceptable in service of advancing Islam as a victorious and conquering civilization.

Palestinian affairs analyst Khaled Abu Toameh reminds us of Hamas’s support for BDS. He writes in a Gatestone Institute brief that, “Senior Hamas official Izzat al-Risheq, heaping praise on BDS advocates and activists openly, admitted that the ultimate goal of the BDS campaign was to destroy Israel.” Risshek said, “We call for escalating the campaign to isolate the occupation and end the existence of its usurper entity.” Yair Lapid, former finance minister and head of the centrist Yesh Atid Party put it bluntly. He said, in June 2015, speech “the BDS movement is actually a puppet in a theater operated by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”

Latest: Mayor of Cologne urges code of conduct for young women to prevent future assault

Police in Germany are investigating an alarming series of sexual assaults on women trying to celebrate the New Year by large groups of single men “of Arab or North African appearance”.Authorities in the city of Cologne are to hold a crisis meeting on Tuesday after police described a group of some 1,000 men who took over the area around the main station on New Year’s Eve.

Women were robbed, groped, and had their underwear torn from their bodies, while couples had fireworks thrown at them.Police have received 90 criminal complaints, around a quarter of them for sexual assault, including one case of rape.

Police in Hamburg say there was a series of similar incidents in the city’s Reeperbahn red-light area. Witnesses described groups of five to 15 men of who “hunted” women in the streets.

In Cologne, the attacks took place around the main station, opposite the cathedral, a traditional gathering spot to see in the New Year.

A 27-year-old witness named only as Anne told Spiegel magazine’s website she was shocked by the crowds when she arrived at the station with her boyfriend.

“The whole place was full and almost only with men,” she said. “Only a few frightened women, who were being stared at.”

A short time later, she said, she “felt the first hand on my behind”.

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YEARS AGO THEY CALLED COLOGNE A DILUTED PERFUME “TOILET WATER” RSK
MOSCOW – A perfume, whose creator says was inspired by Russian President Vladimir Putin, has gone on sale in Moscow.
The “Leaders Number One” scent, created by Belarussian-born perfumer Vladislav Rekunov, is sold in a black bottle featuring Putin’s profile at Moscow’s luxury GUM department store as well as online for 6,500 rubles, or $95.

Leftwing radical billionaire George Soros fancies himself as “some kind of god.” He believes in the delusion that he is endowed with special insight into what is best for the world, even as his declarations defy reality and any objective distinction between good and evil.

Soros’s latest example of self-righteous tripe was his op-ed article, appearing on December 28th in The Guardian, in which he blamed the “hysterical anti-Muslim reaction to terrorism” for helping jihadist groups recruit more fighters to their cause. He wrote that “the fear of death leads us and our leaders to think – and then behave – irrationally…when we are afraid for our lives, emotions take hold of our thoughts and actions, and we find it difficult to make rational judgments. Fear activates an older, more primitive part of the brain than that which formulates and sustains the abstract values and principles of open society.”

Sorry to pop Soros’s balloon, but open societies will not be “open” for long if the jihadists succeed in expanding their Islamic supremacist ideology to the West. It is both a rational judgment of free peoples and a perfectly understandable human emotion to want to fight and destroy those who want to kill us.

Professing dislike of the West and its culture and legacy is an industry on campus. The subtext of “white privilege” is that it consists of unearned status accorded those of European background. To listen to the anti-Westerners, you would think that the inventors of electrical generation, indoor plumbing, and vaccinations were enemies of the planet.

Multiculturalism, the orthodoxy of popular culture, and the current bite of the media and the arts are all predicated on the idea that Western civilization is more toxic than admirable. Citing the evils of the European tradition can also provide exemption from an occasional politically incorrect gaffe. And assuming a non-Western identity (ask Elizabeth Warren, Ward Churchill, Rachel Dolezal, or Shaun King) can offer career dividends.

American society lavished scholarships on the upper-middle-class prep-school graduate Barack Hussein Obama but perhaps would not have done so much for just another Barry Dunham. It is not surprising that when George Zimmerman had been in a fight with Trayvon Martin, his scars were photoshopped away and his 911 call racialized. Would that have happened had he chosen to go by the name of Jorge Mesa?

Paradoxes arise in attacking the West in general and the so-called European diaspora in particular. First, there is the obvious question: “Compared to what?” There are plenty of alternative cultures unstained by past Western imperialism and colonialism. Are their legacies more congenial to the present politically correct progressive agendas?

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei threatened to “punch” in the “mouth” any countries that stand in the way of “completely Islamic” change as the rift between Iran and its neighbors grows wider.

Washington is trying to step carefully around the Saudi executions that have touched off a storm between the kingdom and Iran.

Pro-regime protesters in Iran broke into the Saudi embassy setting fires and looting — one posted a selfie with the telephone he stole — after Riyadh executed an opposition Shiite cleric.

“Doubtlessly, unfairly-spilled blood of oppressed martyr #SheikhNimr will affect rapidly & Divine revenge will seize Saudi politicians,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted on Sunday. “The only act of #SheikhNimr was outspoken criticism and he promoted virtue and prohibited vice which was due to his religious zeal. #SheikhNimr’s martyrdom & unfair bloodshed is Saudi govt’s political mistake. Islamic world & whole world must be concerned about the crime.”

“Saudi army’s oppressing of Bahrainis & destruction of their homes & months of bombing of Yemenis are other cases of Saudi regime’s crimes,” the supreme leader continued. “Surely, martyr #SheikhNimr will be graced by God & no doubt Divine revenge will seize oppressors who killed him & it is the point of relief.”

The siren’s call of UN-led multilateralism beckons for the year ahead. Before succumbing yet again to the UN Charter’s endearing promise “to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace,” a look back at the devastating record of 2015 is in order.

Number One: In 2015 the world’s nuclear non-proliferation regime was emasculated.

The Security Council had adopted four sanctions resolutions against Iran over almost a decade, resolutions that constituted binding international law. Iran refused to comply with all of them. In response, in July, the Council chose to “terminate” the laws, rather than insist on their implementation.

Successive Security Council resolutions demanded Iran “suspend…all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.” Iran never did. In response, the Council approved the Iran deal and granted Iran a right to enrich.

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in December that Iran had engaged in “activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device” and had taken specific steps to conceal them. In response, the IAEA decided not to insist on full disclosure but to close the books.

A 2010 Security Council resolution states: “Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.” In mid-October Iran tested medium-range missiles capable of delivering a nuclear weapon. In response the UN did nothing. So in early December Iran did it again.

No state interested in acquiring nuclear weapons will henceforth take the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the IAEA or Security Council resolutions on the subject seriously.

Number Two: In 2015 the UN made a mockery of its central tenet of the “equal rights of nations large and small.”

I do not know whether I have been more struck by the similarities between the American and the Australian or the differences. I incline to believe that the similarities are more superficial and the differences more fundamental.
—J. Pierrepont Moffat, American Consul-General in Australia, October 14, 1935

In November 2003, in an ABC radio interview, Andrew Peacock, once leader of the Liberal Party, and a former foreign minister and ambassador to the United States, was asked to identify the main differences between Australians and Americans. Without hesitation Peacock identified four areas in which national beliefs sharply differ: interpretation of the meaning of political freedom; attitudes towards the role of religion in public life and the challenge of American exceptionalism; the place of wealth and economic status in society; and attitudes towards war and the standing of the military. He went on to warn that while Australians and Americans are long-time military allies and share common Western liberal democratic values, they remain, at heart, two distinct nationalities shaped by very different histories.

These contrasting histories need to be carefully examined and understood, if only because casual assumptions about cultural similarities between Australians and Americans only act to conceal important differences—differences that carry with them risks of diplomatic superficiality and political miscalculation. When Mark Twain visited Australia in 1897, he observed that Australians “did not seem to me to differ noticeably from Americans, either in dress, carriage, ways, pronunciation, inflections or general appearance”. In the twentieth century, Twain’s comfortable image of similar peoples—what Alfred Deakin called “the blood affection” between Australians and Americans—was strengthened by the rise of the United States to global power and the pervasive Americanisation of so much of Western popular culture. Yet if Australia is to possess effective statecraft in the new millennium, we must probe beneath the veneer of popular myths and commonplace beliefs.