RUTHFULLY YOURS

1. Pressuring Israel to retreat to the pre-1967 ceasefire lines – which is an 8-15-mile sliver along the Mediterranean, dominated by the Judea & Samaria mountain ridge – ignores Jewish history and represents a victory of wishful-thinking over the 1,400-year-old reality of Mideast violence, unpredictability, doublespeak, tyranny and hate-education.

2. Mideast peace agreements are as durable as are Arab regimes, policies and accords, which have been, since the 7th century, the world’s most shifty, intolerant, violent, volatile and treacherous, as currently reflected by the intensifying Arab Tsunami from northwestern Africa to the Persian Gulf.

3. “Land for Peace” assumes that an Israeli withdrawal from Judea & Samaria would convince Arabs to accord the “infidel” Jew that which Muslim “believers” have denied one another for 1,400 years: peaceful coexistence and compliance with agreements.

4. “Land for Peace” would usher the Arab Tsunami into the mountain ridges of Judea & Samaria, which tower over 80% of Israel’s population and infrastructures, including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Israel’s only international airport. It also towers over the Jordan Valley, Israel’s longest border.

5. “Land for Peace” would doom Jerusalem to be an enclave connected to the coastal plain through a 4-mile-wide corridor, which would be dominated by mountains under Arab sovereignty.

6. The width of pre-1967 Israel (8-15 miles) is equal to the length of DFW airport in Texas, the distance between JFK and La Guardia airports in NY, Kennedy Center and RFK Stadium in Washington, DC. The area of pre-1967 Israel (0.2% of the Arab World) is smaller than the gunnery range at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada.

7. Former Chairman of the US Joint C-o-S, the late General Earl Wheeler told President Lyndon Johnson: “The minimum requirements for Israel’s defense include most of the West Bank, the whole of Gaza and the Golan Heights.” 100 retired US Generals and Admirals cautioned Israel against withdrawing from Judea & Samaria, stating that is would be impossible to demilitarize the area effectively. The late Admiral Bud Nance:” The eastern mountain ridge of the West Bank is one of the world’s best tank barriers…. The western mountain ridge of the West Bank constitutes a dream platform of invasion to Israel’s narrow [8-15 miles] coastal plain. Control of the West Bank provides Israel the time [50 hours] to mobilize reservists [75% of Israel’s military], which are critical to Israel’s survival during a surprise Arab attack.” Most reservists reside in the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv-Haifa area, which is dominated by the Judea & Samaria mountain ridge.

From manufacturing to medical research, the Jewish state is crucial to the economic health of the U.S.

” it becomes easy to see that the BDS movement’s attack on Israel’s economy, not to mention its encouragement of academic and scientific boycotts, directly hurts Americans. Just as the movement claims to be helping the Palestinians, but in fact harms Palestinian interests, it also harms what is perhaps America’s most important interest: its economic success. Regardless of your position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if you support a stronger American economy and workforce, you should oppose boycotting Israel. It is important for Americans to know this, and for the anti-boycott effort to expand to include them.”

The movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (often referred to as BDS) hopes to economically isolate the Jewish state to the point that it is pressured into permitting the creation of a Palestinian state under conditions that would threaten Israel’s security and even its very existence. Those of us who fight against this support Israel’s right to exist and are usually motivated by religion, a specific worldview, or a moral code. But when boycotts hurt Israel’s economy, they hurt America as well. Israel makes massive and often unknown contributions to America’s economy and quality of life. If the boycott movement were to achieve its aims, Americans would lose regardless of their position on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the last few presidential election cycles, the economy has ranked among the top two most important issues to voters, and this year will likely be the same. This means that this fight is much bigger than the pro-Israel community, and the coalition to fight boycotts of Israel should expand to include those concerned about American domestic policy as well. Americans needs to understand that this hurts them too.
The U.S.-Israel alliance is expansive. Pro-Israel advocates understand that the alliance contributes to America’s security and its position as a moral, democratic leader in the world. Decades of polling show Americans outside the foreign policy establishment support Israel because of the democratic, liberal values shared by our two nations. But the alliance is much deeper than that. As of December 2015, according to the World Bank, Israel is the 37th largest economy in the world by gross domestic product (GDP), an extraordinary accomplishment for such a young and perpetually beleaguered nation. But last year Israel was also America’s 23rd largest trade partner. From Israel, America receives unusually high amounts of investment; helpful and profitable technologies and services; and advancements in science, agriculture, the environment, and healthcare that improve the quality of and, in some cases, quite literally save our lives. Our exports to Israel create jobs in America. Through Israeli innovations and collaboration, our scientists and medical professionals become smarter and more effective at their jobs, and our agriculture and environmental sectors become more efficient and productive. The impact of the alliance is as wide as it is deep.

Reprinted from InvestigativeProject.org

A Connecticut College professor has told colleagues that his school has grown so hostile toward Jews that he can no longer recommend Jewish students or professors come to the college.

“In my opinion, this harassment of Jews on campus in the name of fighting for social justice should end; immediately,” wrote Spencer J. Pack, an economics professor, in a faculty-wide email.

His comments were triggered by the smear campaign that pro-Palestinian students successfully waged against a pro-Israel professor, resulting in his indefinite leave from campus, and a more recent push to malign Birthright (a program enabling student travel to Israel) by plastering the campus with posters. The posters reportedly intimidated Jewish and pro-Israel members of the Connecticut College community, while attempting to poison the minds of uninformed students and faculty with vicious falsehoods about Israel. The posters were put up by Conn Students in Solidarity with Palestine (CSSP), whose faculty advisor, Eileen Kane, runs the school’s Global Islamic Studies program.

Kane’s Global Islamic Studies program also invited Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi to speak at Connecticut College on April 12. Kanazi, who is scheduled to give a “poetry performance,” is on the organizing committee of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and listed among its endorsers. His strategy has been to connect anti-Israel politics with popular urban struggles.

Making matters worse, Jasbir K. Puar was also invited to speak at Connecticut College. At a Feb. 3talk at Vassar College, Puar unleashed a torrent of vicious anti-Israel lies and blood libels, including outrageous accusations about Israel harvesting Palestinian organs and conducting scientific experiments in “stunting” the growth of Palestinian bodies. Her Connecticut College appearance was scrapped, but Kane has ignored repeated questions about the invitation.

Hatred of Israel and overall hostility towards Jews at Vassar has been amply detailed. More generally, campus hate against Israel and Jews has become an increasingly frequent and widespread problem thanks to the “Boycott, Divest, Sanction” (BDS) movement. Even Palestinians who aren’t sufficiently critical of Israel are targeted by BDS. Bassem Eid, founder of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, was directly threatened by anti-Israel protesters while lecturing at the University of Chicago on Feb. 18. More recently, the New York Post reported on the hateful harassment of Jews at four City University of New York campuses.

Connecticut College seems to be moving in the same direction. Last spring, Connecticut College Professor Andrew Pessin was libeled and silenced in a campaign led by Students for Justice in Palestine activist Lamiya Khandaker. That campaign included condemnation of Pessin by scores of Connecticut College departments and affiliates, including the Global Islamic Studies program. The administration nevertheless gave Khandaker the “Scholar Activist Award.” Then came the Birthright smear last December, the Puar invitation, and the scheduled talk by anti-Israel activist Kanazi, sponsored by the Global Islamic Studies program.

Palestinian leaders are notorious for speaking with forked tongues. Duplicitous officials often talk of peaceful dialogue and two-state solutions when addressing Western audiences but it’s an entirely different affair when they’re behind closed doors, addressing their fellow kinsmen. In such a familiar and comfortable setting, they let their guard down and spew the vilest calumnies and conspiracy theories that more often than not, involve the Jews. They’re also not shy about what they intend to do to Israel if they ever achieve statehood. One “moderate” Palestinian leader even suggested the use of nuclear weapons against the Jewish State.

In every forum and venue, Palestinian political and religious leaders, academics, educators and journalists incite the Palestinian masses to violence. Jews are routinely referred to as apes, monkeys and pigs or alternatively, the “vilest of creatures.” Ancient blood libels, involving Jews kidnapping Muslim (or Christian) children and using their blood as a key ingredient in Passover matzah, are regurgitated with banal regularity. Palestinian children are spoon-fed hate from birth and children’s programs, mimicking the Sesame Street genre are laced with references to murder of Jews and martyrdom. Often, this programming is financed, either directly or indirectly, by the EU and the United States State Department, making these governments complicit in the violence that results therefrom.

Western audiences are rarely exposed to such obscenities. They’re accustomed to viewing polished and often sympathetic Muslim characters who speak of the importance of peace and their desire for democracy and freedom. Of course, what it said behind closed doors, in Arabic to Arabic audiences, remains behind closed doors.

In Roger Cohen’s article on “Anti-Semitism From the Left” (NY 3/8/16), he issues the following imprimatur: “The oppression of Palestinians should trouble every Jewish conscience.” How sad that he didn’t issue these more relevant thoughts: The deliberate murder of innocent Jewish civilians, including pregnant women and children, should plague the conscience of every Palestinian instead of being the source of perverted celebrations and rewards. Muslim imams commanding their faithful to kill Jews everywhere with anything within their reach – knives, can openers or cars – should be condemned world-wide as brutal murderers, no different from Charles Manson who instigated a massacre without soiling his own hands. The collateral damage of killing American tourists can not be tolerated by our own government whose passport is meant to be protective of its citizens. American aid to Palestinians will be withheld until these policies of random stabbings and killings are forbidden by the Muslim clergy, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

Cohen prefers to believe that Palestinian violence is unrelated to the Islamic Jihad taking place all over Europe, Asia, Africa and the U.S. Instead, he wants to convince us that West Bank Arabs are “dehumanized through Israeli dominion, settlement expansion and violence.” Conveniently, he fails to acknowledge that the Israeli company Soda Stream, employer of 600 West Bank Palestinians earning the same wages as their Israeli co-workers, along with health and other benefits – was forced to shut down because of the BDS boycott. He never mentions that the profitable nurseries left intact for Palestinians in Gaza when Israel withdrew its own population – were destroyed by Hamas, depriving Arabs of ready-made jobs in an area plagued by unemployment. No statement about how the billions of dollars given by the U.S. and Europe to aid Palestinians have been re-directed for military purposes or have lined the pockets of corrupt leaders without making a dent in the welfare of their own people.

On August 30, 1987 the Israeli government by a vote of 12-11 decided to cancel the Lavi fighter aircraft project. The Lavi was the best fighter aircraft in the world at the time, the result of the work of thousands of engineers, scientists, and technicians at Israel Aircraft Industries and at many other plants around the country, a source of pride for most Israelis. Two proto-types were already in flight test when the decision was taken. Who shot down the Lavi, the crowning achievement of Israeli technology? John Golan’s book “Lavi, the United States and Israel, and a controversial fighter jet” provides the answer in illuminating detail.

The Lavi followed IAI’s successful production of the Mirage aircraft (renamed the Nesher) after France embargoed aircraft shipments to Israel on the eve of the Six-Day War, and the production of the Kfir fighter, an improvement of the Mirage, that was engineered at IAI. It was designed to specifications determined by the Israeli Air Force that were based on the experience that had been gained by its pilots in the Yom Kippur War, and was meant to give Israel a degree of independence in the acquisition of fighter aircraft..

The program really took off after the support of the US government and the US Congress had been obtained. This support included the allocation of $250 million of annual US aid money for engineering development in Israel, plus $300 million for Lavi development in the US. Even more important was the permission that was granted for the use of American technologies in the aircraft and the participation of American companies in the project. The result was that the Lavi was in effect a joint Israeli-US project. With the explicit support of President Reagan and a large majority of the US Congress, the program seemed assured of success. The degree of US-Israel technological cooperation on defense system development reached at the time has not been equaled since.

But, as related by Golan, there was one man, US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who was determined to kill the program. Golan describes how Weinberger mounted a “rogue offensive to kill a program that had been given the president’s stamp of approval”, by charging Dov Zackheim, a middle-level financial analyst at the Pentagon, with the mission of terminating the Lavi. From that point the plot thickens.

Visiting Israel at the wise and weathered age of 95, America’s 1980s secretary of state reaches into history to issue a call for decisive, clearheaded and credible leadership

In 1962, George Shultz, an ex-US Marine and Princeton- and MIT-educated economics high-flyer, was appointed dean of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, where he was a professor of industrial relations. Periodically, he’d hold a reception for the outstanding students who’d made the dean’s list. Every time, one of those outstanding students was a young Israeli named Joseph Levy.

Looking back over more than 50 years, Shultz — who would go on to serve in the Nixon administration as Labor and Treasury secretary, and most memorably as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state — still remembers Joseph Levy. And still mourns him.

Speaking to The Times of Israel on a visit to Israel last week, Shultz, a gracious, wise and weathered 95, recalls that all the kids on those dean’s lists were smart. But “there was something special” about Joseph Levy. “If you’ve been in the education business, you’ve seen this in some students right away,” says Shultz. “I could see this man was going to be a great leader. He’d got all the special attributes.”

But Levy did not go on to that anticipated greatness. As Shultz tells it, “Before I even realized that the Six Day War was on, he was dead. He came back to Israel and was killed in action.”

Levy was one of the members of the Jerusalem Brigade who died battling the Jordanians around Government House in Armon Hanatziv, southern Jerusalem, on June 5, 1967. Says the secretary, “My introduction to Israel was through Joseph Levy.” Now Shultz breaks into staccato sentences, keeping his emotions checked. “High talent. Tremendous patriotism. Tough neighborhood.”

Shultz was making this current visit to Israel as honorary chair of the Israel Democracy Institute’s International Advisory Council for four days of meetings, plus a dinner addressed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and devoted to grappling with the challenges faced by Israel’s democracy. But the IDI also reconnected him with Joseph Levy. The star Israeli graduate student had a wife and a son when he was killed, and the IDI tracked them down.

“We had a nice meeting. And then we went to the battlefield where he was killed. And there is on the hill above the battlefield a beautiful big monument … commemorating what he did.”

Again, the staccato sentences: “The monument has a great view. That’s where the field of battle was. That’s where he was killed. That was a long time ago. It initiated me to Israel.”

We all marvel, understandably, at Shimon Peres’s longevity, his indefatigability, his facility to keep moving with the times, to find the aphorism for every nuanced political shift, at 92 years of age. Shultz, three years Peres’s senior, comes across more as a rock of unshifting fundamentals — looking out on a dangerous world and lamenting, most of all, the absence of clearheaded, decisive leadership.

We talked in his room at the King David Hotel, at the tail end of his visit to a country he plainly much admires and cares for. He sat calmly, almost immobile, for our conversation, spoke in carefully formulated sentences, cherry-picking from more than two centuries of American diplomacy to make his points. But at the heart of the Shultz’s recipe for guiding the world, unsurprisingly, stood Ronald Reagan, whom he served as chief US diplomat for most of the 1980s.

Want to marginalize evil, and empower good? Take a page or three, says Shultz, from the Ronald Reagan playbook.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Israel for a two day visit on Tuesday, March 8. Shortly after Biden’s arrival in the region the day before, American graduate student Taylor Force was murdered by a Palestinian Arab terrorist in Jaffa, just blocks away from where Biden was meeting at the Peres Peace Center in Tel Aviv.

On Wednesday, Biden joined with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu at a press conference in Jerusalem. Both politicians condemned the terrorist attacks that took place in Israel the day before, with a special emphasis on the brutal murder of Taylor Force, the Texas-born Vanderbilt business school student and U.S. Army vet and West Point graduate.

Biden called on Mahmoud Abbas and the rest of the Palestinian Arab leadership and the entire international community to denounce terrorist attacks against Israelis, including the one in which Force was murdered, his wife was badly injured, and 11 others were wounded, according to the Jerusalem Post.

“Let me say in no uncertain terms: The U.S. condemns these acts and condemns the failure to condemn these acts,” Biden said.

But when Biden met with Mahmoud Abbas, the acting head of the Palestinian Authority, later in the day, Abbas pointedly did not do what Biden had insisted he should have done: he did not condemn the murders that Biden had condemned only hours before.

Instead, Abas offered condolence over the death of the American — as if the man died of some cause having nothing to do with Abbas — and then slid into assigning blame for the outrage. Not surprisingly, the Arab leader’s blame finger pointed only at Israel.

On March 9, 2010, the headlines were chocked with outrage over Netanyahu’s “snub” to Obama. Six years later, almost to the day, the same rerun is playing on news networks across America.

The White House is outraged, shocked and infuriated by Netanyahu’s “snub.” Obama is depressed at the snub and gorging on a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Brownie Batter to get over the pain of a skipped meeting with the Israeli prime minister. Obama-Netanyahu meetups convey all the joy of a root canal and yet we’re supposed to believe that Obama was looking forward to this particular session with Netanyahu.

Obama and his media allies are assuming that everyone forgot the last time they put on the same production of “Fake Outrage Theater” on this same date for the same exact reasons. Like the PLO, Obama keeps picking fights with Israel while trying to make it look like he’s the real victim.

If you remember that Obama and Hillary Clinton put on their best fake outrage over a fake snub six years ago, then the latest fake snub headlines look ridiculously fake. Suddenly you can see that the actors on stage are just acting, the background is just cardboard, the puppets have strings and the magician is stuffing the colored handkerchiefs up his sleeve. It’s not Pallywood. It’s Obamawood.

Why do people use the expression “as of yet?”e.g. “A school spokesman told FoxNews.com that no action has been taken as of yet.” While it is not grammatically incorrect, it jars….especially when writing of education. “As of yet” is a windy and pretentious substitute for plain old English “yet” or “as yet.” rsk
Trustees and alumni of a liberal arts college in Ohio are calling on the school administration to conduct a review and report back to them after a professor posted a series of “anti-Semitic and abhorrent” commentary on social media. The Board of Trustees at ultra-liberal Oberlin College demanded answers in a statement posted on the school’s own website, blasting Professor Joy Karega’s bizarre posts and demanding that immediate action be taken.

“These postings are anti-Semitic and abhorrent,” Chairman Clyde McGregor said in the statement. “We deplore anti-Semitism and all other forms of bigotry. They have no place at Oberlin. These grave issues must be considered expeditiously,” he continued, adding that the school and faculty must “challenge the assertion that there is any justification for these repugnant postings and to report back to the Board.”

Marvin Krislov, the president of Oberlin, has stood by Karega and defended her freedom of speech since the controversy erupted late last month. The professor, who teaches rhetoric and composition, has been publishing offensive commentary since January 2015, when she posted “an image of an ISIS terrorist pulling off and Mask with the face of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with the caption, ‘FRANCE WANTS TO FREE PALESTINE? TIME FOR A FALSE FLAG…’”

On Monday, Oberlin officials released a joint statement with the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, AJC Cleveland, the Anti-Defamation League Cleveland Region and the Cleveland Hillel Foundation, which met with Oberlin College President Marvin Krislov and his senior staff.

“In a welcoming atmosphere, we discussed, openly and candidly, the potential implications of a professor’s personal views on classroom activity and student intimidation,” the statement reads. “We also discussed our shared respect for academic freedom.”

The groups also announced that college is following procedures already in place to deal with the matter.

A school spokesman told FoxNews.com that no action has been taken as of yet.