RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has at least four different problems.

First, an upcoming State Comptroller report seems set to accuse Mr. Netanyahu of keeping critical information from his cabinet in the buildup to Israel’s summer 2014 military action in Gaza, and of failing to adequately respond to tunnels Hamas used in launching attacks on Israeli soil.

Second, Mr. Netanyahu is under increasing pressure from coalition partners in his cabinet. As I noted last November, the Israeli government is defined by significant internal tensions. Leading the charge for tougher action against the Palestinians is Education Minister Naftali Bennett. A young, charismatic hawk and proponent of expanded West Bank settlement construction, Mr. Bennett wants to bend Mr. Netanyahu to his hard-line agenda.

Third, the likelihood of renewed conflict with Hamas is growing by the day. Recent weeks have seen Hamas escalate the pace of rocket, mortar, knife, and bomb attacks on Israelis. In response, the Israeli military is launching operations against Hamas facilitation nodes.

Fourth and finally, tensions are growing with Iranian proxies in the Golan region on Israel’s border.

Let’s take the third and fourth issues first. Israel’s strategic goal in dealing with Hamas is to constrain the group’s military capabilities. Partly motivated by the aforementioned domestic controversy over Hamas’s infiltration tunnels in 2014, Netanyahu also wants to ensure that they cannot launch a surprise attack on Israeli civilians. Such an attack would cost innocent lives, and, more important, it would embolden Israeli adversaries at a time of growing regional instability.

And that leads us to Iran. With President Bashar al-Assad of Syria now buoyed by Russia, Lebanese Hezbollah (LH) and Iran sense an opportunity to re-commit their energies toward Israel’s northern border. The Syrian Civil War has imposed a heavy military and political toll on Iran and LH, but their existential fetish for Jewish blood is unrelenting. As the Middle East sinks into unrestrained violence, the Obama administration has sat idly by, dancing to Vladimir Putin’s tune at every turn. And without any confidence that Obama would come to its aid in a time of need, Israel is now aligning with the Sunni-Arab monarchies against Iran. Netanyahu’s recent assurance of Israel’s continued claim to the Golan Heights was a physical metaphor for Israel’s evolving security strategy: Israel wants Iran to know that it will not replicate America’s strategy of acquiescence and will role the military dice to preserve its deterrent posture if it must.

Raised-Fist Photo by Black Women at West Point Spurs Inquiry By Dave Philipps
” “These ladies weren’t raising their fist to say Black Panthers. They were raising it to say Beyoncé,” said Mary Tobin, a 2003 graduate of West Point and an Iraq veteran who is a mentor to some of the seniors and has talked with them about the photograph.” (huh?!!!!)
Young black women set to graduate from West Point ignited debate last week when they raised their fists in this group photo.

A group of young black women poised to graduate from the United States Military Academy gathered on the steps of West Point’s oldest barracks last week in traditional gray dress uniforms, complete with sabers, for a group photo. Known as an “Old Corps” photograph because it mimics historical portraits, it was nearly identical to thousands that cadets have posed for over the decades, with one key difference: The 16 women raised their clenched fists.

The gesture, posted on Facebook and Twitter last week, touched off a barrage of criticism in and out of the armed forces as some commenters accused the women of allying themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement and sowing racial divisions in a military that relies on assimilation.

West Point opened an investigation on April 28 into whether the women violated Army rules that prohibit political activities while in uniform. Now, as the women wait to hear if they will be punished, they are gaining supporters who say they were simply making a gesture of solidarity and strength.

The elite public military academy, which trains many of the Army’s future leaders, is overwhelmingly male and 70 percent white. The 16 cadets in the photo represented all but one of the black women in a graduating class of about 1,000, a meager 1.7 percent. But the Army has long tried to play down race and gender to create a force where “everyone is green.”

When it comes to protest, West Point could not be more different from a civilian campus, where demonstrations, sit-ins and leaflets are commonplace.
At the military academy, in contrast, public displays of politics by students and staff members are prohibited in an effort to build a unified force that remains clear of partisanship.

The group photo has revealed an underlying tension at West Point.

The academy, while seeking to foster a diverse student body that reflects the nation, also aims to educate future officers in the regimented ways of the military, in which the only differences that matter are the ranks displayed on soldiers’ shoulders.

The Arab world still does not today accept the concept of a Jewish state of any size or any shape. Even Egypt and Jordan, who signed peace agreements with Israel, do not accept that Israel is a Jewish state, and they continue to promote anti-Semitic hatred against Israel.

During Israel’s War of Independence, Jews were ethnically cleansed from Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, and in the years that followed, they were ethnically cleansed from the rest of the Arab world.

Jews demand the right to exist, and to exist as equals, on the land where they have existed and belonged continuously for more than three thousand years.

We would rather claim that the conflict is about “occupation” and “settlements.” The Jews see what radical Islamists are now doing to Christians and other minorities, who were also in the Middle East for thousands of years before the Muslim Prophet Mohammed was even born.

The real Arab grievance against the Jews is that they exist.

As Arabs, we are very adept at demanding that our human rights be respected, at least when we live in liberal democracies such as in North America, Europe, and Israel. But what about when it comes to our respecting the human rights of others, particularly Jews?

When we examine our attitude towards Jews, both historically and at present, we realize that it is centered on denying Jews the most fundamental human right, the right without which no other human right is relevant: the right to exist.
The right to exist in the Middle East before 1948

Anti-Zionists often repeat the claim that before modern Israel, Jews were able to live in peace in the Middle East, and that it is the establishment of the State of Israel that created Arab hostility towards Jews. That is a lie.

From 1985 to 2000, the Israeli military occupied an 11-mile-deep “security zone” in southern Lebanon, in an effort to prevent the area from becoming a staging ground for attacks by Hezbollah into Israel itself. Some 250 Israeli soldiers were killed fighting in the zone and another 840 were injured—numbers that, for a country of Israel’s size, proportionately exceed America’s casualties in Iraq. Yet the campaign was never given a proper name, and the soldiers who fought in it never received a ribbon for wartime service.

This was the Jewish state’s forgotten war. Yet as Matti Friedman notes in “Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story,” the fighting anticipated the kind of conflicts the U.S. would soon find itself waging in the Middle East—conflicts in which a modern army, technologically sophisticated but weakly supported by public opinion at home, gets bogged down in a failed state trying to hold the line against primitive but cunning adversaries motivated by religious zeal and determined to sustain the fight for decades, even generations. It’s the kind of war the West has yet to figure out a way of winning.
Pumpkinflowers

By Matti Friedman

Algonquin, 256 pages, $25.95

Mr. Friedman, a Canadian-born Israeli writer, served in Lebanon in the late 1990s at an exposed Israeli outpost called “the Pumpkin.” (His title comes from Israeli military jargon, where “flowers” mean wounded soldiers and “oleander” means a dead one.) This superb book is partly a history of the war, partly a personal memoir, and partly a work of political analysis. But mainly it is an effort to tell the story of the young men who fought to defend something “the size of a basketball court”—not all of whom survived.

“At the outpost were several dozen young men isolated to a degree exceptional in the modern world,” Mr. Friedman recalls. “Mail arrived in the same way the soldiers did, on convoys rendered unpredictable by the threat of bombs. There were no women. There was nothing feminine, nothing unnecessary to the purposes of allowing you to kill, preventing you from being killed, and keeping you from losing your mind in the meantime. Nothing was soft or smelled sweet.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/video/gaza-play-features-kid-stabbing-a-jew-crowd-applauds/

In Gaza, a Jordanian refugee (“Palestinian”) group holds a children’s play, and it features a young man “stabbing” a “Jew.” The audience applauds this action on stage, so what can we expect when the action is carried out in real life?!?

SEE THE VIDEO AT SITE

At a UN conference “on the Question of Jerusalem,” invited speakers praised Palestinian terrorists as “martyrs” and legitimized the slew of stabbing, shooting, and car ramming attacks that have killed over 30 Israelis since October 2015. The conference, held in Dakar, Senegal on May 3 and May 4, 2016, was sponsored by the UN’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Here are some of the statements justifying Palestinian terrorism, analogizing Israelis to Nazis, and deemed worthy of distributing around the world via the UN’s press release:

Ahmad Rwaidy, Former Chief of the Jerusalem Unit of the Palestinian Presidency: “Israel still refused to hand over the bodies of martyrs killed by Israeli security forces, he continued. ‘What we need in Jerusalem is a scheme to support resilience,’ he said.”

Nur Arafeh, Policy Fellow at Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network: “New Israeli plans for Jerusalem used urban planning as a geopolitical tool to constrain the urban expansion of Palestinians and Judaicize the city, she said… In that context, the current Palestinian uprising should be seen as acts of resistance and desperation against ethnic cleansing, forced displacement and economic marginalization… She held that the development approach should be rethought and embedded in the larger Palestinian liberation struggle against Israel’s occupation and settler colonial regime.”

“During the ensuing interactive dialogue… a representative of the Democratic League, noting Israel’s ‘disgraceful attempts’ to exterminate the people of Palestine, said the time had come to ‘take things up a notch’ in Africa’s support for the Palestinians.”

Thursday, May 5 is Holocaust Remembrance Day or “Yom Hashoah,” an occasion to remember and mourn the unique horror that resulted in the murder of 6 million Jews including one million children – unfathomable numbers that still shock the conscience of humankind. Except at the United Nations. Though the UN was built on the ashes of the Jewish people, in our time this organization plays a disturbing role in advancing antisemitism.

Antisemitism works in many ways. Devotees deny or minimize its very existence. Instead, they appropriate the suffering of their targets and invert the genuine victim and the actual perpetrator. The U.N. of the 21st century does all of this.

On April 27, 2016, the Palestinian’s UN representative Riyadh Mansour, held a press conference at UN headquarters in New York.

He said: “If you throw a stone…if you throw it at a moving car of the army or the terrorist settlers, they send you to jail for 20 years, and yet their representative in the Security Council…he paints them as terrorists. Guess what. All colonizers, all occupiers including those who suppressed the Warsaw uprising labelled those who were resisting them as terrorists.”

Jewish victims of Palestinian rock-throwers have been maimed for life with catastrophic brain injuries or have died as their cars careened out of control. According to the Palestinian spokesman, however, Israelis are like Nazis and Palestinians are their victims.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been asked to condemn Mansour’s comments and to remove them from the UN website where they are now broadcast around the world 24/7 – because, for starters, these comments contradict the essence of the U.N. Charter. But the Secretary-General has refused to do so.

This is not an isolated incident. UN headquarters – visited by millions of American school children – hosts a Holocaust exhibit and also a Palestinian exhibit that is a model of historical revisionism. The Palestinians have succeeded in having the two exhibits placed side-by-side.

The eagle is the symbol of America…so it stands to reason that the Prez would be indifferent to their deaths….rsk

Environmentalists have been successful in halting development by claiming damage to small fish, toads, and small mammals.

But eagles – they’re apparently fair game, as long as the beautiful birds are killed as a result of getting caught in a wind turbine.

Fox News:

The Obama administration is revising a federal rule that allows wind-energy companies to operate high-speed turbines for up to 30 years, even if means killing or injuring thousands of federally protected bald and golden eagles.

Under the plan announced Wednesday, companies could kill or injure up to 4,200 bald eagles a year without penalty — nearly four times the current limit. Golden eagles could only be killed if companies take steps to minimize the losses, for instance, by retrofitting power poles to reduce the risk of electrocution.

Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe said the proposal will “provide a path forward” for maintaining eagle populations while also spurring development of a pollution-free energy source that’s intended to ease global warming, a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s energy plan.

Ashe said the 162-page proposal would protect eagles and at the same time “help the country reduce its reliance on fossil fuels” such as coal and oil that contribute to global warming.

“There’s a lot of good news in here,” Ashe said in an interview, calling the plan “a great tool to work with to further conservation of two iconic species.”

The true story behind yet another ‘extreme weather event’By Sierra Rayne

As the capital of Canada’s oil sands, Fort McMurray, burns to the ground in a massive forest fire, out come the commentators talking about climate change.

At the National Post, Jen Gerson writes the following:

All that said, it sure doesn’t seem at all implausible that the Fort McMurray fire was caused or, at least, exacerbated by climate change. I mean, come on. It’s 30C in early May. We had no winter. There’s little snow on the mountains. The Bow River never froze. For goodness’ sake, there were rafters on it as if it were high summer over the weekend.

As for the Bow River apparently never freezing, and the rafters on it last weekend, we can ignore that comment, since the Bow River passes through Calgary in the southern end of the province, literally 440 miles south of Fort McMurray. Calgary’s average temperatures in January are a full 10°C warmer than those in Fort Mac, as they call it.

Gerson argues that she will “unpack the thing that has been made unmentionable by those who wish to remain sensitive to Fort Mac’s plight: climate change. Here will be the required caveats; one cannot link any single extreme weather event to climate change.”

Single extreme weather event? Since when is a forest fire an “extreme weather event”? What exactly is that single extreme weather event that took place recently in Fort McMurray?

Is it that “[i]t’s 30C in early May”? Indeed, it did get above 30 C on Tuesday in Fort Mac.

I mean, come on – like that has never happened before. Such as on May 3, 1937 (31.7 C), or May 4, 1944 (33.3 C), or May 2, 1980 (30.6 C), or May 7, 1987 (30.8 C)…or what about April 29, 1980 (30.2 C)?

There was “no winter” in Fort McMurray this year?

The average temperature this past December was -10.4 C, which isn’t close to a record warm for this month. January came in at -13.9 C. Again, nowhere near a record. February was -9.8 C. Yet again, not in the remote neighborhood of a record. Neither March nor April was especially hot, either. Likely warmer than average, but nowhere near record warm.

Even the winter of 2015-16 average temperature looks to be about 3 C off a record warm. In other words, Fort Mac had a winter this year.

The left has concocted a lucrative category of politically correct victims: “climate refugees.” It’s the new Green racket.

U.S. taxpayers will now be forking over untold billions to ease the pain allegedly inflicted on “carbon’s casualties” by industrial activity. By contrast, those who have suffered as a direct result of government incompetence by federal environmental bureaucrats continue to get the shaft.

Consider the plight of two tribes: the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw in Louisiana and the Navajo Nation in New Mexico.

The New York Times splashed a viral story on its pages this week spotlighting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s $48 million grant to Native-Americans who live in the flood-ravaged coastal community of Isle de Jean Charles. About 60 residents, the majority of whom belong to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, will be resettled to drier land.

That’s a whopping $800,000 per “climate refugee!”

Never mind that the Times’ propagandists themselves admit that erosion on the island began in 1955 as a result of land-use and land-management factors that had nothing to do with climate change.

“Channels cut by loggers and oil companies eroded much of the island,” the paper reported, “and decades of flood control efforts have kept once free-flowing rivers from replenishing the wetlands’ sediments.”