RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sylvia goes to Cannes – in a documentary about her life.

My interest in Sylvia Raphael began at the end – her end.

“One day when true peace comes, they will write books about her, name streets after her and make movies of her life,” wrote Eitan Haber, former defense correspondent and close associate and adviser to former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, in Yediot Aharonot in 2005, following the funeral of top Mossad agent, Sylvia Raphael at Kibbutz Ramat Hakovesh.

Her “unveiling” at the world premiere on the March 29 at Yad Lebanim in Ra’anana is proof that the day has assuredly dawned.

Interviewed in the movie Sylvia – Tracing Blood following years of personal interest and research, I am proud – as a South African – to introduce the film and its director Saxon Logan, before both departed for Cannes.

MY JOURNEY with Raphael began one morning in 2005 when my eyes zoomed in on a brief report on Page 3 of The Jerusalem Post regarding a funeral that had taken place the previous day, a few kilometers north of my home city of Kfar Saba.

It revealed that the deceased was a South African, that she had been a Mossad agent convicted of a botched assassination in Norway connected with the 1972 Olympics Games Munich Massacre. It also seemed to hint at her not being Jewish. Fed on crumbs, I was hungry for more, and it came in the form of a line that to most would be inconsequential, but for me was alluring and illuminating: “The entire perimeter of the kibbutz had been cordoned off by the police.”

This was a red rag to the journalist’s Gallic bull. The message between the lines was clear – the funeral would be attended by a Who’s Who of Israel’s security community, and the powers- that-be did not want the general public to know too much about it. Why? While her remains were lowered into the earth, it was her life that invited unearthing.

My first question was why would a woman, not Jewish, dedicate the best years of her life, risking life and limb, to a foreign cause – the survival of the Jewish state? Shmuel Goren, a former deputy head of the Mossad, had also expressed after the funeral, “It is a pity that there are not more like her.”

Vassar College, a private, coeducational college in Poughkeepsie, NY, has gone from prestigious to pernicious, by reason of its support for the Islamic invasion of the West (America and Europe) and its biased programs against Israel and Jews. Complicit are eight of the college’s 54 academic departments (including “Jewish” studies) that invite radical speakers, such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and others who advocate the BDS movement (boycott, divestment, sanctions), against Israeli products and American companies that conduct business with Israel.

Jashir Puar, Rutger’s infamous professor of women’s and gender study, who is herself conflicted with, among other things, her own gender identity, was a recent guest speaker. She vigorously demonizes Israel, the only Middle Eastern country that would permit her, a homosexual, to live. Without a shred of evidence, she employed the vicious, centuries-old blood libel and accused the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of harvesting Palestinian organs, adding that Israelis are poisoning Palestinians with elements, such as Uranium, to stunt their growth. Curiously, she did not mention a Michigan State University report in 2014 about two dozen Syrians who ate the hearts of their victims and died of Kuru, a neuro-degenerative disorder associated with cannibalism. Two others were hospitalized for treatment in Germany.

Puar is one of several who present preposterous indictments against Israel to academia’s captive audiences – the unwitting students who listen raptly and the spineless faculty who remain mute during these hate-mongering sessions. Puar, who has been declared a “crackpot” by the NY Daily News, is a dangerous crackpot, who now disallows recordings of her lectures.

Psychologically at odds with her gender and consumed by hatred, Puar favors tyrannical Islam, whose police patrol the streets to enforce Sharia on all and would likely condemn her to 500 – 1,000 lashes and imprisonment, or execution. (The highest number of lashes recorded by Amnesty International was 40,000 for murder.) However, the rich and powerful are explicitly permitted to practice pedophilia, citing supportive versus from the Qur’an and the examples of Muhammed.

If Palestinian growth is indeed stunted, as the professor contends without substantiation, blame may rest with theQur’an, which declares that Allah made marriage with first cousins acceptable and lawful because Mohammed seduced his first cousin and children as young as 9, and endorses other sexual activities with infants.

Further, consanguineous marriages – those between blood relatives – are an integral feature in Islam, accounting for more than half of all marriages in some nations and leading to a higher incidence of offspring with genetic disorders. Perhaps Islam produces these impaired children to be sacrificed to war and suicide, with a double purpose of culling out the defective results of inbreeding and assuaging the revulsion that accompanies incest and rape.

In 2014, Vassar’s Hillel Union, part of 100-year-old network of Jewish students, professionals and leaders dedicated to enriching the Jewish campus experience, chose to re-define itself as “Open Hillel.” This is nothing less than abandoning their rules that protect Israel and Jewish students, and revealing their willingness to host anti-Semitic speakers (including Students for Justice in Palestine – SJP) who advocate to boycott, divest and sanction (BDS) against Israel.

On February 17, 2016, after several years of discriminatory events and adverse publicity, one outspoken alumnus, CAMERA fellow Jason Storch, succeeded in bringing Palestinian Human Rights Activist Bassem Eid to speak in condemnation of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the BDS campaign, and to reveal some truths about Israel. Nevertheless, the Vassar Student Association, motivated by the SJP and forty faculty members, enacted their BDS Resolution 30-x.

This is not about whether climate change is real or not. This is about people believing a leader so much that they will believe and say things that are totally absurd. We should all be careful not to fall into the same trap.Scientific American is the oldest periodical published in the United States. It was first published in 1845, 171 years ago. I have been reading Scientific American since I started college as a physics major back in January, 1957. I enjoy reading a wide range of articles on medicine, cosmology, physics, archeology, paleontology and whatever else they publish.

In the last few years they have added Politically Correct articles and that bothers me.

The March, 2016 issue features the article “Climate Refugees of Syria” under the category “Sustainability”. The title:

The Ominous Story of Syria’s Climate Refugees

Farmers who have escaped the battle-torn nation explain how drought and government abuse have driven social violence

This article is written in the fine tradition of Rolling Stone’s college rape story. It is the story of Kemal Ali. In true pseudo-documentary tradition, that is not his real name so you can’t possibly check out the story.

Kemal Ali was a well driller. Because of a drought, exasperated by Climate Change, the water table fell so far that he could no longer drill to it and lost his income. There is mention of corruption that made well drilling impossibly expensive. He decided to go through Turkey to Greece and Europe. No mention is made about how he would make a living in Europe.

The article says the drought lasted from 2006 to 2010. It ended 6 years ago. On the way, the bus he was in was attacked. He was wounded and lost the use of his legs so now he languishes in a camp on the Greek isle of Lesbos.So we have a nice, personalized drama.Did Syrians flee Syria during the 2006-2010 drought? Nope.

If you asked Syrians why they fled their homes, do you think any one of them would say “Climate change, of course. Our average temperature is 1o warmer now”? Is it more likely they would say, “I feared Assad’s barrel bombs and poison gas and I feared Da’esh (ISIS) cutting off my head after raping my wife”?

The Syrians fled Syria for Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. All share the same climate and the same drought. They don’t share Da’esh.

California has a drought. Californians are fleeing California for other states. Why? Not for the drought. It is because it has become a high-tax state with a “progressive” government. California is working now to end their water problems. They are working with Israeli companies to solve their water shortage the same way Israel solved its water shortage problems.

The obvious answer to Syria’s water problem is to make peace with Israel and use Israeli technology to end the water problems as they have done in Israel.

I am left with the impression that the article is to provide support for the Progressive Agenda. I do not understand how this was in a scientific magazine and not a political one. The only thing it really says about climate is that there was a drought and climate change made it worse.

Federal law makes it a felony “for two or more persons to agree together to injure, threaten, or intimidate a person in any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the Unites States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same).”

I wonder if U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker, or California Attorney General Kamala Harris, or New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman have read this federal statute. Because what they’re doing looks like a concerted scheme to restrict the First Amendment free speech rights of people they don’t agree with. They should look up 18 U.S.C. Sec. 241, I am sure they each have it somewhere in their offices.

Here’s what’s happened so far. First, Schneiderman and reportedly Harris sought to investigate Exxon in part for making donations to groups and funding research by individuals who think “climate change” is either a hoax, or not a problem to the extent that people like Harris and Schneiderman say it is.

This investigation, which smacks of Wisconsin’s discredited Putin-style legal assault on conservative groups and their contributors, was denounced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Hans Bader as unconstitutional. Bader wrote:

Should government officials be able to cut off donations to groups because they employ people disparaged as “climate change deniers?” … Only a single-issue zealot with ideological blinders and a contempt for the First Amendment would think so. …

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is getting subpoenaed by the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands to cough up its communications regarding climate change. The scope of the subpoena is quite broad, covering the period from 1997 to 2007, and includes, according to CEI, “a decade’s worth of communications, emails, statements, drafts, and other documents regarding CEI’s work on climate change and energy policy, including private donor information.”

My first reaction to this news was “Um, wut?” CEI has long denied humans’ role in global warming, and I have fairly substantial disagreements with CEI on the issue. However, when last I checked, it was not a criminal matter to disagree with me. It’s a pity, I grant you, but there it is; the law’s the law.

(I pause to note, in the interests of full disclosure, that before we met, my husband briefly worked for CEI as a junior employee. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.)

Speaking of the law, why on earth is CEI getting subpoenaed? The attorney general, Claude Earl Walker, explains: “We are committed to ensuring a fair and transparent market where consumers can make informed choices about what they buy and from whom. If ExxonMobil has tried to cloud their judgment, we are determined to hold the company accountable.”

That wasn’t much of an explanation. It doesn’t mention any law that ExxonMobil may have broken. It is also borderline delusional, if Walker believes that ExxonMobil’s statements or non-statements about climate change during the period 1997 to 2007 appreciably affected consumer propensity to stop at a Mobil station, rather than tootling down the road to Shell or Chevron, or giving up their car in favor of walking to work.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni publishes occasional reports on what college students know. Nearly 10 percent of the college graduates surveyed thought Judith Sheindlin, TV’s “Judge Judy,” is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than 20 percent of the college graduates knew the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. More than a quarter of the college graduates did not know Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during World War II; one-third did not know he was the president who spearheaded the New Deal. But it is little mystery why so many college students are illiterate, innumerate and resistant to understanding. Let’s look at it.

Student activists at Brown University complained of emotional stress and poor grades after they spent months of protesting for various causes. They blamed the university for insisting that they complete their coursework. One of the objects of their protest was an op-ed in The Brown Daily Herald, the university newspaper, that was deemed racist because it defended the celebration of Columbus Day. Brown University’s faculty recently took care of that and renamed Columbus Day “Indigenous People’s Day.”

Professor Salvador Vidal-Ortiz of American University told his students that capitalism dehumanizes brown people and black people. If his students had one iota of brains, they might ask him why it is that brown and black people all over the world are seeking to flee to countries toward the capitalist end of the economic spectrum rather than the communist end. Campus Reform reports that Vidal-Ortiz, during the Q&A of a book talk at the University of Virginia, said he tells his students that though he is light-skinned, he refuses to be called white. “I will not be labeled as something that I know is violent,” he said.

For a hard-core segment of travelers to Jerusalem, when the sun sets at the Sabbath, the magic in the air is not just the serene image of a peaceful dusk in an enchanted land. It is the empowering knowledge that the sun still shines on a Jewish State surrounded by fiery military and diplomatic turmoil. Israel remains a nation determined to survive and preserve its sense of magnetic amazement. In the minds of many, a visit to Israel is more than just a vacation. It is a geopolitical destination. Traveling to and enjoying Israel makes a statement to the world and to history. It reflects the steeled determination to be happy and fulfilled in one of the most treasured places on earth, despite a virtual siege around every corner.

When in Israel, especially in Jerusalem, everything about your tourism choices is political—which hotel you select, which taxi driver you hire, which bagel you buy, which restaurant you dine at, what fascination you experience, what memories you return home with. Are you buying a half pound of za’atar in Jerusalem’s teeming Jewish market at Machena Yehuda or at the stone-ensconced spice kiosks that line the time-polished lanes of the Old City? Or do you try both?

Anti-Israel sentiment abounds at the café tables of the Ottoman-era American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, while fierce loyalty to the Jewish State is detected in every corner of the modern David Citadel Hotel. Visitors book their rooms accordingly and create their own comfort zones in the respective lobbies.

Like everything else in the Jewish State, Israel’s tourism industry—that is, its hotels, restaurants, amusements, and visitor services—has achieved a modern miracle. Despite wars and pressures, the nation has honed its travel experience to rival the best in the world. Elegant, constantly upgrading, hotels combine with a robust service and physical infrastructure attractive to any visitor. Exciting restaurants, where both ethnic and modern cuisines operate at the culinary apex, cater to all tastes and budgets. Breathtaking vistas in close proximity offer magnificent desert mountains, frothing Mediterranean shores and beckoning hills. Everywhere, one feels the irresistible lure of ancient history and religious authenticity.

Is there anything global warming can’t do? It’s absolutely amazing the impact on our planet global warming will have just because the temperature rises a few degrees.

The latest on the catastrophe that will befall us comes from a befuddled academic who claims that warming temperatures will make us less inclined to have sex, thus reducing the number of births in the U.S. by more than 100,000 a year.

ABC Australia:

Temperature impacts the sexual patterns of human beings for two reasons, according to Professor Barreca.

One reason he gave was that human beings did not want to exert themselves physically in hot weather, due to possible discomfort.

The second reason was more scientific.

“The effect of temperature on the production of sperm — that’s been shown to be pretty strong in animals,” Professor Barreca said.

“When you expose a bull to high temperatures, sperm motility and sperm count fall right off.”

He said with the onset of climate change and global warming, the implications could grow.

“According to a state of the art global circulation model, there is going to be about 90 hot days per year by the end of the 21st century — that’s about 60 more days than we currently experience,” he said.

“Using our estimates, we project that the number of births will fall by about 107,000 per year in the United States by the end of the 21st century.”

He said this implied climate could have an impact on the seasonal variation of births, and ultimately change when we have to attend the most birthday parties.

I guess the good doctor never heard of air conditioning.

“What I want for my children and their children is that they will love God – and love the land of Israel,” Naddaf says.Father Gabriel Naddaf never intended to step into the limelight. Popularity and prominence hardly figured into his plans for the future. But the Greek Orthodox priest who pastors his flock from Nazareth knew he was called to speak the truth on behalf of Israel, the tiny sliver of a country in the midst of a roiling Middle East where he and his fellow Christians are safe to live, thrive and worship.

Naddaf’s conviction has little to do with politics. The truth, he knew, was found in the source of all he believes: the Bible. And the Bible is clear about God’s everlasting commitment to the Jewish People. Moreover, it teaches that the title deed for the Land of Israel is held by the Almighty and pledged with a covenant to the children of Abraham.

And so the Arabic-speaking, Christian priest who calls the Jewish state home stepped up as an objective voice telling those who wished to hear – and often those who did not – of the freedoms, rights and security Israel’s non-Jewish citizens enjoy.

The past four years have proved particularly eventful for Naddaf. It started with his public call on Christian Israelis to join their Jewish brothers and sisters in shouldering the responsibility of guarding the Promised Land. Then came the establishment of the Christian Recruitment Forum as a formal platform to encourage his flock to join the Israel Defense Forces and the Christian Empowerment Council – a mouthpiece on behalf of Israel’s Christian citizens.

Both the forum’s and council’s efforts are supported by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, led by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, who has been by Naddaf’s side since the very beginning, funding the council’s $150,000 annual operating budget.

“We have a wonderful, close relationship, and we are very thankful for the support that enables and strengthens us,” Naddaf says of his backers. “When I described our need for help to Rabbi Eckstein, he promised that his fund, which raises money from Christians all over the world who love Israel, would help us create programs that help Christian Arabs integrate into Israeli society,” Amit Barak, the forum’s project manager, says.

“Our connection with the IFCJ has played an extremely important role in helping us strengthen our relationship with other Christians around the world. We explain to people how Israel is the safest place for Christians to live in the Middle East, and tell them about the efforts being made to help integrate Arabs into Israeli society.”

Then there was an opportunity to address the United Nations. And then a flurry of invitations to share his testimony with audiences around the world. Despite an increasingly jam-packed schedule, Naddaf also found the time to author a booklet warning international Christians against the malice masquerading as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and act as the voice of those forging a non-Arab, Aramaic identity in the Land of Promise.

All too soon, the priest who never intended to step into the limelight became a household name in Israel.

Naddaf has gone by many titles. His Arab opponents label him a “traitor,” a “divider of the Arab society” and a persecutor of Palestinians. The Israeli media refer to him affectionately as “the unorthodox priest who stands with the Jews.”

To Western believers, he is a Christian brother, sharing experiences forged from everyday life in the country where their belief was born. And for those who look to him for spiritual guidance, he is abouna, Arabic for father.

But who is this Greek Orthodox priest from Nazareth who ruffles feathers, wins hearts, speaks truth about Israel to the international Church, inspires the young of his flock to serve their country and stands for a people forging an identity?

Why is it in the 15 years since 9/11, after the loss of 7,000 American lives and $2 trillion plus in treasure, we have failed to win the war against Global Jihad? That is the question answered in a new book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War by Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a recognized authority on counterterrorism and Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University. He is a much sought after guest on Fox News, BBC, CNN, Sky News and The Lisa Benson Radio Show. Listen to this podcast of a January 9, 2016 broadcast with Dr. Gorka and former commander of British Forces in Afghanistan, Co. Richard E. Kemp (ret.) CBE.

It is not lost on many Americans that within months following 9/11, we failed to capture Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri in Tora Bora despite a US Special Ops team on horseback supported by C-130 Spectre gunships and an Afghan warlord’s fighters had vanquished the Taliban. See: Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan.

Dr. Gorka suggests that mired in political correctness we failed to identify the threat as the fanatical hybrid Islamic equivalent of the atheist tyranny of Soviet Communism. He argues that the next US President should revisit the case study of the 40 year containment policies that brought down the “evil empire.” The next President and his national security team need to revisit the seminal “long telegram” by American diplomat in Moscow George Kennan which led to President Truman’s 1947 declaration of war against Soviet Communism’s threat to “bury us.” The details of that plan are contained in Paul Nitze’s 1950 NSC-68 document roadmap. Both documents are included in an appendix to Gorka’s book.

Soviet tyranny is rivetingly depicted in Gorka’s prologue about his Hungarian refugee parents who escaped to freedom during the 1956 Hungarian Revolt. He discusses his father’s betrayal by the famed Soviet mole in MI-6, Kim Philby, which led to his imprisonment and torture under Hungarian Communists. Gorka learned from his parents, Paul and Susan, that “Freedom is as precious as it is fragile. If you are complacent, there will always eventually come a group that will try to take your freedom away from you by violence and through the subversion of your values.”

Gorka contends “the current threat is hybrid totalitarianism that goes beyond man-made justifications for perfecting society along politically defined lines and instead uses the religion of Islam and Allah as justification.”

He defines that threat as a “global jihadist movement […] There is no middle ground. […]The infidel must submit or be killed.”

Gorka lays out the underlying Islamic doctrine in a masterfully succinct depiction of the various dimensions of historic Jihad doctrinal development. Accordingly, Gorka says that we lost our way following 9/11 in the brilliant opening stages of the misnamed GWOT (global war on terrorism) in both Afghanistan and Iraq. We forgot we came to both theaters of operation to quickly crush and destroy the Jihadis who attacked us and became mired in mission creep endeavoring to remake both countries as functioning democracies against the historic realities of both tribal and religious sectarian divisions. The worst example of that was in Iraq. After crushing Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime and defeating its military, President Bush allowed his personal emissary, State Department official Paul Bremer, to become the “viceroy” of Baghdad. That left a 300,000 man unpaid and well-armed Army to revolt against the American occupation and its leaders. This facilitated an alliance with the al Qaeda in Iraq that morphed into ISIS and the self-declared Caliphate of the Islamic State.

Gorka contends that misuse of military, especially special operator assets, in counter insurgency programs to remake both Afghanistan and Iraq under Bush was a folly. President Obama’s election as Commander in Chief worsened the problem by portraying the Iraq war as “bad” versus the Afghan one as “good” because the latter represented the epicenter of al Qaeda.

This gave rise to Obama relying on the “kinetic” tactic of killing Jihadi leaders of al Qaeda and its affiliates in what amounted to a “whack a mole” strategy that failed to win the war. That was compounded by Obama’s doctrine that denied any mention of Islam and Jihad. Islam was depicted as a “religion of peace” in Presidential speeches in Ankara and Cairo. The strategy of temporary surges of combat troops was only a hiatus separating sectarian Shia / Sunni internal conflicts in Iraq or suppressing Taliban re-emergence in Afghanistan, now ironically supplanted by ISIS.

Gorka provides background to the emergence of Global Jihadism by following the evolution in post Qur’anic Islamic Doctrine. He dismisses the Jihad as “inner struggle” argument, instead concentrating on “jihad of the sword” which went through several stages of evolution over the 1,400 years since Mohammed. He cites the seven “swords” of imperialist Jihad:

• The suppression of apostate subjects, or “false Muslims”;
• Revolution against “false” Muslim leaders;
• The anti-colonial struggle and the “purification” of the
religion;
• Countering Western influence and jahiliyyah, or pagan
ignorance of Allah;
• Guerrilla warfare against infidel invaders; and,
• The direct targeting of civilians in terrorist attacks