RUTHFULLY YOURS

35 YEARS ON: ISRAELI CENSOR ALLOWS ISRAELI PILOTS TO DISCUSS BOMBING OF SADDAM’S NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM

I have written before that (in my view, at least) one of the most significant – yet internationally underappreciated – acts in recent decades was the decision by Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to bomb Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program before Saddam gained nuclear weapons.

Begin did so despite threats and warnings against striking Saddam by almost everybody — including then Israeli opposition leader Shimon Peres and then American President Ronald Reagan.

Given the fact Saddam freely used chemical weapons against his own people (including on thousands of Kurdish civilians) a few years later, and committed near genocide against the marsh Arabs, one can only imagine what he might have done with nuclear weapons had he acquired them, whether using them against Western nations, against the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war, or against Israeli population centers.

The entire world condemned Prime Minister Begin for his bold act and the Reagan administration imposed sanctions on Israel.

On Friday evening, on Israel’s Channel 10, for the first time some of the Israeli pilots and others who took part in the operation were authorized to reveal some (though not all) previously unknown details of the heroic and dangerous mission that took place 35 years ago this Tuesday, on June 7, 1981.

DEFYING THE U.S.

Retired Maj. Gen. David Ivry, who commanded the Israeli Air Force at the time of the raid, told Channel 10 that Israeli intelligence had discovered the Iraqis were building a nuclear reactor in 1976.

Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency did everything they could in the years that followed to thwart Saddam’s program. For example, the reactor’s first core, which was manufactured with French help, exploded in mysterious circumstances in the southern French port of La Seyne-sur-Mer.

But by 1981, Israel had taken all the delaying tactics it could and with Iraq’s nuclear reactor about to go online, Begin realized he couldn’t delay any longer and had no choice but to resort to air strikes.

The U.S. refused to allow Israel to use its tanker planes for mid-flight refueling so Israel had to improvise. Retired Col. Ze’ev Raz, who led the raid, told Channel 10 that Israeli air force technicians “recognized that flying 2,000 miles to Iraq and back was beyond the range of our jets, so we used all sorts of tricks to extend it.”

Therefore various ingenius methods for making the fuel last longer were undertaken — methods which the Israeli military has declined to make public until the present time. Eight Israeli pilots took part in the raid and all returned safely, even though prior intelligence estimates were that at least one or two pilots would be shot down during the mission.

“Without doubt, Syrians of all confessions are being victimized by this savage war and are facing unimaginable suffering. But only Christians and other religious minorities are the deliberate targets of systematic persecution and genocide.” — U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, March 17, 1016.

Christians account for 10% of Syria’s total population — yet they account for less than 0.5% of the refugees received into America. Sunni Muslims are 74% of Syria’s population — yet 99% of those received into America. In other words, there should be 20 times more Christians and about one-quarter fewer Sunnis granted refugee status than there already have been.

ISIS is “taking advantage of the torrent of migrants to insert operatives into that flow.” — James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence.

Although the U.N. and U.S. know that Sunni refugees are terrorizing Christians in their camps, they abandon the true victims who deserve sanctuary in the West, while “humanitarianly” taking in their persecutors.

The Obama administration has been escalating a policy that both abandons Mideast Christians and exposes Americans to the jihad.

Late last year it was revealed that 97% of Syrian refugees accepted into the U.S. were Sunni Muslims — the same Islamic sect to which the Islamic State belongs— while fewer than half-a-percent were Christians.

This disparity has since gotten worse. From May 1 to May 23, 499 Syrian refugees — a number that exceeds the total number of refugees admitted during the last three years — were received into the United States. Zero Christians were among them; 99 percent were Sunni (the remaining one percent was simply listed as “Muslim”).

These numbers are troubling.

The European Union (EU) possesses the financial levers to end 10 years of exploitative rule by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in not holding any elections in the West Bank during that period.

95 per cent of the West Bank Arab population live in Areas “A” and “B” under the total administrative control of the PLO. That population has been subjugated into silence by the PLO and given no opportunity to freely express their support or otherwise for the political and economic decisions taken by the PLO since 2006.

The EU in February 2015 released €130 million in direct financial support to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and a further €82 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations, Johannes Hahn, commented at the time:

“The EU remains committed to the two-state solution and will therefore continue to support the Palestinian Authority in its state-building efforts and in delivering basic social services.”

Hahn’s statement ignored that the PA had:

1. frustrated state-building efforts to bring about the two-state solution during the previous twelve months by refusing to resume negotiations with Israel without preconditions.

2. ceased to exist as a legal entity after President Abbas had disbanded it by Presidential decree on 3 January 2013.

Peace plans are busting out all over. First we hear that prominent “pro-Israel” American Jews are putting forward a plan for the next administration to consider. Then we hear that 214 retired IDF Generals have put forward their plan. Both Plans essentially backed Obama’s parameters requiring:

1. The ’67 lines to be the border subject to negotiated swaps;

2. The division of Jerusalem; and

3. A just settlement of the refugee claims.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair and others in the international community were working behind the scenes to arrange for the Zionist Union, led by Yitzhak Herzog, to join the present government coalition in Israel. At the last moment, PM Netanyahu opted to include Avigdor Lieberman’s party instead. The deal was cinched by Lieberman dropping many of his demands and settling for his appointment as the Minister of Defense and the appointment of one of his associates as Minister of Absorption.

The Obama administration made their displeasure known. Lieberman was described as an ultra-nationalist and an extremist. In fact he was neither. Government spokesperson, Tony Ernst, said the Government was the most right wing government ever, which it isn’t.

On Monday evening, Lieberman formally joined the government and was sworn in as Minister of Defense.

PM Netanyshu chose this moment to do something he had never done before. He embraced the Arab Peace Initiative (API), otherwise known as the Saudi Peace Plan.

“The Arab peace initiative includes positive elements that can help revive constructive negotiations with the Palestinians. We are willing to negotiate with the Arab states revisions to that initiative so that it reflects the dramatic changes in the region since 2002, but maintains the agreed goal of two states for two peoples,” he said.

Science is a process for finding truth in our material world. The blossoming of science occurred in Medieval Europe and continued to flourish until the early part of the last century, almost exclusively in the Western world. This was not coincidental.

The combination of the ancient Greek desire for free inquiry combined with the Judeo-Christian belief in an orderly universe and, most vitally, the Judeo-Christian primary value of honesty created in poor, small Europe explosions in thought that the old, rich empires of the East could not achieve.

It is also not an accident that the overwhelming majority of early great scientists were either among a small pool of ancient Greeks – essentially Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Euclid – or among especially devout Medieval Christians – (Friar) Roger Bacon, (Bishop) Jean Buridan, (Bishop) Robert Grosseteste, (Father) Nicolai Copernicus, and (Canon) Galileo.

Because these profoundly devout Christians considered physics and mathematics simply another manifestation of a holy and ordered Creation, they never worshipped science. Lying was a sin, and lying about the nature of the world was a particularly serious sin, because it knowingly concealed the true nature of the world.

Within the Medieval university was that same sort of freedom and mutual respect that had never existed before except in the academy of Plato. As with the academy, the Medieval university had schools of thought and different interpretations of what phenomena meant. This was science.

Scientism, on the other hand, is a vile misology that arose at the end of the nineteenth century and has infected those processes intended to discover the truth about our world ever since. The most evil and dishonest regimes in modern history – Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China – were all utterly and passionately devoted to whatever pseudo-science was needed to support the party.

Often these regimes cranked out huge numbers of physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and related hard science disciplines, but it is not the quantity of trained scientists, but the quality of their environment that matters. We were afraid, at the beginning of the Cold War, that the hordes of physicists and engineers that the Soviet Union turned out would leave America behind. In fact, science did much better under the tsars than the Soviets.

Millions of Americans enrolled in for-profit colleges in recent years to learn a trade and find decent-paying work. A new study found devastating results for many of their careers.

The working paper, published this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, tracks 1.4 million students who left a for-profit school from 2006 through 2008. Because students at these schools tend to be older than recent high-school graduates, they’ve spent time in the workforce. The researchers used Education Department and Internal Revenue Service data to track their earnings before and after they left school.

The result: Students on average were worse off after attending for-profit schools. Undergraduates were less likely to be employed, and earned smaller paychecks–about $600 to $700 per year less–after leaving school compared to their lives before. Those who enrolled in certificate programs made roughly $920 less per year in the six years after school compared to before they enrolled.

The key factor is that most of these students never earned a degree–they dropped out early. Excluding them, the minority of students who earned degrees saw an earnings bump after graduating.

“Certificate, associate’s, and bachelor’s degree students generally experience declines in earnings in the 5 to 6 years after attendance relative to their own earnings in the years before attendance,” write co-authors Stephanie Riegg Cellini of George Washington University and Nicholas Turner of the U.S. Treasury Department.

The picture is even worse when considering most students borrowed to attend the colleges. Nearly 9 out of 10 for-profit school students took on student debt; those in associate’s programs borrowed an average $8,000 and those in bachelor’s programs, $13,000. CONTINUE AT SITE

It is not every day that a panelist at a conference worries about getting killed later.
“You are going to get me killed…I have got my flight back home,” stated Pakistani religious freedom advocate Arafat Mazhar to an audience questioner at an April 20 Georgetown University conferencerecently made available online. His jarring response emphasized that the conference’s examination of Islamic blasphemy norms in Pakistan and the world beyond was no mere academic matter but involves global, often lethal, threats to freedom of speech and religion.

Mazhar’s statement occurred during the conference’s afternoon panel in an exchange with an audience member from Afghanistan studying in America. Mazhar emphasized that his organization Engage Pakistan currently only supports reforming the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws with theological arguments such that these laws would not have a divine status. Any abolition of these laws, a proposition that has had deadly consequences for Pakistan’s Punjab provincial governor Salman Taseer and Federal Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti, would be a much longer term goal.

Just as illuminating and disturbing was Mazhar’s Afghan interlocutor who cited a 2015 Afghan incident in which a mob brutally killed a woman accused of burning a Quran. “Had there been a good anti-blasphemy law” with codified standards, he suggested, “she would not have been killed that viciously.” On the basis of such conjectured more humane executions he accordingly asked, “Is it a good idea to get rid of the anti-blasphemy law or is it good to have a good law?”

Mazhar responded that empirical evidence contradicted such arguments previously made in favor of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. From Pakistan’s 1947 independence to the 1986 completion of these laws, Islamic blasphemy accusations caused only four extrajudicial killings, but after 1986 these killings increased by 2,500 percent. His fellow panelist, University of Notre Dame professor Daniel Philpott, noted that Pew studies had found that blasphemy laws had a perverse “pedagogical effect” in inciting hostility towards the protected faith’s opponents real or imagined.

Ambassador Alberto Fernandez, a retired American career diplomat, concurred on the panel that blasphemy laws are “like handing a loaded gun” to people. He cited a 2005 Sudan case where the government had dropped charges of insulting religion against a newspaper editor, but outraged mobs still demanded retribution. Months later his beheaded corpse turned up after a kidnapping.

Nicholas Christakis and his wife, Erika, came to Yale University in 2013 with high expectations. At Harvard, the couple had held prominent teaching and administrative roles. At Yale, Dr. Christakis, a sociologist and physician, received a laboratory directorship and four appointments; Ms. Christakis, an expert in early-childhood education, became a seminar instructor. Two years after their arrival at Yale, Dr. Christakis and Ms. Christakis were awarded positions as master and associate master of Silliman College, Yale’s largest residential college. (I attend the university and reside at Silliman).

Last week, the Christakises resigned those posts.

Their departure comes as no surprise. For seven months, the couple has been subject to bullying, harassment and intimidation. They inadvertently became a national media story last fall and catalyzed a month of campus protests, prompting Yale President Peter Salovey to tell minority students: “We failed you.”

The Christakises encountered a witch-hunt mentality on a contemporary college campus. It began fittingly on the day before Halloween, when Ms. Christakis questioned guidelines from Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee warning against “culturally unaware or insensitive” costumes. Ms. Christakis reasoned, in an email to Silliman residents, that students should decide for themselves how to dress for Halloween, without the administration’s involvement.

Student radicals of the 1960s might have recognized her note as a defense of free expression, but those days are long gone. Instead, Ms. Christakis was denounced as a proponent of cultural insensitivity. Irate students circulated petitions, wrote editorials and posted social-media tirades. They scribbled criticisms in chalk outside the Christakises’ home and posted degrading images of them online. Two student groups demanded their removal from Silliman. CONTINUE AT SITE

Contrary to conventional “wisdom,” most Arabs in British Mandate Palestine – and most of the 320,000 1948 Arab refugees – were migrant workers and descendants of the 1831-1947 Muslim immigrants from Egypt, the Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, as well as from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, North Africa, Bosnia, India, Afghanistan, etc.. Britain enticed Arab immigration and blocked Jewish immigration.

Thus, between 1880 and 1919, Haifa’s Arab population surged from 6,000 to 80,000, mostly due to migrant workers. The eruption of WW2 accelerated the demand for Arab manpower by the British Mandate’s military and its civilian authorities.

Moreover, Arab migrant workers were imported by the Ottoman Empire, and then by the British Mandate, to work in major civilian and military infrastructure projects. Legal and illegal Arab migrants were, also, attracted by economic growth, which was generated by the Jewish community beginning in 1882.

According to a 1937 report by the British Peel Commission (featured in the ground-breaking book, Palestine Betrayed , by Prof. Efraim Karsh), “during 1922 through 1931, the increase of Arab population in the mixed-towns of Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem was 86%, 62% and 37% respectively, while in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only 7% and a decrease of 2 percent in Gaza.”

Irrespective of occasional Arab emigration from British Mandate Palestine – due to intra-Arab terrorism, which has been an endemic feature in the Middle East – the substantial wave of Arab immigration from 1831-1947 triggered dramatic growth of the Arab populations in Jaffa (17 times), Haifa (12 times) and Ramla (5 times).

Dear Mr. Prime Minister:

I am grateful for your letter of May 30./2/ I appreciate particularly the steadfastness with which the Government and people of Israel have maintained a posture of resolution and calm in a situation of grave tension. All of us understand how fateful the steps we take may be. I hope we can continue to move firmly and calmly toward a satisfactory solution.

Our position in this crisis rests on two principles which are vital national interests of the United States. The first is that we support the territorial integrity and political independence of all of the countries of the Middle East. This principle has now been affirmed by four American Presidents. The second is our defense of the basic interest of the entire world community in the freedom of the seas. As a leading maritime nation, we have a vital interest in upholding freedom of the seas, and the right of passage through straits of an international character.

As you know, the United States considers the Gulf of Aqaba to be an international waterway and believes that the entire international maritime community has a substantial interest in assuring that the right of passage through the Strait of Tiran and Gulf is maintained.

I am sure Foreign Minister Eban has reported to you the written statement which I had prepared and from which Ambassador Harman made notes during our meeting of May 26./3/ The full text of that statement is as follows:

“The United States has its own constitutional processes which are basic to its action on matters involving war and peace. The Secretary General has not yet reported to the UN Security Council and the Council has not yet demonstrated what it may or may not be able or willing to do although the United States will press for prompt action in the UN.

“I have already publicly stated this week our views on the safety of Israel and on the Strait of Tiran. Regarding the Strait, we plan to pursue vigorously the measures which can be taken by maritime nations to assure that the Strait and Gulf remain open to free and innocent passage of the vessels of all nations.

“I must emphasize the necessity for Israel not to make itself responsible for the initiation of hostilities. Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go alone. We cannot imagine that it will make this decision.”……