RUTHFULLY YOURS

LAME DUCK EFFORT TO WEAKEN ISRAEL RSK
The White House is working on plans for reviving long-stalled Middle East negotiations before President Barack Obama leaves office, including a possible United Nations Security Council resolution that would outline steps toward a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, according to senior U.S. officials.

The internal discussions are aimed at offering a blueprint for future Israeli-Palestinian talks in a bid to advance a critical foreign-policy initiative that has made little progress during Mr. Obama’s two terms in the White House, the officials said.

The strongest element on the list of options under consideration would be U.S. support for a Security Council resolution calling on both sides to compromise on key issues, something Israel had opposed and Washington has repeatedly vetoed in the past.

Other initiatives could include a presidential speech and a joint statement from the Middle East Quartet, an international group comprising the U.S., the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.

A senior administration official said no final decisions have been made and that Mr. Obama is considering a range of possibilities. The timing of any new White House move hasn’t been determined, but officials said it would be later this year.

The White House offered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a meeting with Mr. Obama later this month, but Mr. Netanyahu declined, administration officials said Monday.

By wading into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the final months of his presidency, Mr. Obama would be following a path some of his predecessors have taken. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both pushed for an agreement late in their second terms, but neither was able to bridge longtime divisions between the two sides. CONTINUE AT SITE

The largest Evangelical communities remain solidly supportive of Israel, and their size dwarfs that of the rising forces of replacement theology and its concomitant hatred of Israel.

Monday the Bethlehem Bible College, an Evangelical Christian college in Jesus’s hometown, opened its fourth biennial Christ at the Checkpoint conference. The conference, which is directed specifically toward US Evangelicals, will run through the week.

Today, Evangelical communities in the US number anywhere between 60 and 150 million people, depending on who is counting. They form the backbone of American support for the Jewish state. It is the support of the Evangelical community, rather than the Jewish community in the US that ensures that come hell or high water, no matter how Israel is demonized in the media and in academia, the majority of Americans continue to support Israel.

But will this support last? One of the more surprising aspects of the 2016 elections is Evangelical support for businessman Donald Trump. Trump in many ways personifies everything that people who take the Bible seriously are supposed to oppose. He owns casinos. He curses and uses profanity in his public appearances. He has donated to Planned Parenthood and forcefully supported abortions on demand.

Trump has also insisted repeatedly that he will be neutral toward Israel.

From the Stanford Review editorial board’s “The Case for a Western Civilization Requirement at Stanford,” Feb. 21:

National debates erupted over Stanford’s decision to remove Western Culture requirements during the 1980s. We believe the University must reignite a national debate and reinstate a Western Civilization requirement. Therefore, the Stanford Review is petitioning to place an initiative on the undergraduate spring ballot urging the Faculty Senate to instate a two-quarter Western Civilization requirement, replacing Thinking Matters. The initiative text reads:
“In accordance with Stanford’s commitment to educating its students, and in recognition of the unique role Western culture has had in shaping our political, economic, and social institutions, Stanford University should mandate that freshmen complete a two-quarter Western Civilization requirement covering the politics, history, philosophy, and culture of the Western world.” . . .

Western civilization, more so than any other, unleashes disruptive technology on the world; and Western history brims with examples of technological revolutions and their effects on warfare, politics, culture, economics, and poverty. Technologists and policymakers working on driverless cars, for example, would surely benefit from knowledge of how transportation innovations impacted urbanization patterns, employment, and culture.

But these future business and government leaders will not have this insight. 59% of Stanford’s Class of 2019 intends to major in engineering. These students will not know the history that society needs them to grasp. Stanford must equip these students with the knowledge necessary to attain “direct usefulness in life,” as our Founding Grant requires.

– Nurit Greenger, Western Civilization Heritage Israel Program (C.H.I.P) Founder & President introduced the Program to the Tennessee Legislators in Nashville, Tennessee, causing a wave of great interest and much support.C.H.I.P‘s entire vision began with Whitwell [Tennessee] Middle School Paper Clips Project and the Whitwell Children Holocaust Memorial. This is a project about the discrimination of others, about the Holocaust, the result of the Nazis discrimination of Jews. Whitwell Middle School Paper Clips Project has set the case in point that a change could be made, one young student at the time.
For the past two years C.H.I.P, that has set itself up to the task to take middle school students to Israel and thus start building a generation with the emphasize on the teaching of basic western values of tolerance and indiscriminating behavior, along the values that are captured in the Ten Commandments, has been gathering growing support.
“C.H.I.P, means chipping away at ignorance” stated Mrs. Linda Hooper, the visionary of the Paper Clips Project, who is leading the way for 22 Whitwell Middle School students and 10 chaperones to partake in the C.H.I.P Project this coming May, 2016.
Assisted by Lydia Taylor of Hayovel who initiated the Tennessee legislators’ introduction to C.H.I.P, this past week in February, Ms. Greenger was invited to meet with the several Tennessee legislators: Tennessee General Assembly Senator Janice Bowling, David Alexander-Tennessee State Representative and Randy Boyd Commissioner, Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. The visit has captured the endorsement of C.H.I.P by the legislators.

Who supports the Islamic State (ISIS) and why do Sunni nations seem to tolerate it?

Patrick Sookhdeo, a Muslim convert to Christianity and scholar of Islamic faith and politics, “suggests a pessimistic prospect; Islamic State is likely to remain a persistent threat, even if it suffers overwhelming defeats.” So reads his recent book Unmasking Islamic State: Revealing Their Motivation, Theology, and End Time Predictions, an insightful primer into the Islamic State (IS) jihadist polity currently ravaging Mesopotamia and beyond.

Islamic State “is the most well organized Sunni jihadi organization in the Middle East and may well have the most sophisticated structure of any terrorist organization currently active,” Sookhdeo writes. Islamic State presents an alliance of convenience between high ranking military officers and officials from Saddam Hussein’s deposed Baathist dictatorship and jihadist organizations that originally fought Iraq’s American-led regime change. The result is a “powerful fusion of Salafi/Jihadi ideology with professional military and counterintelligence strategies and urban warfare tactics, as well as bureaucratic know how needed to run state.”

“With the declaration of the caliphate Islamic State has become the leading jihadi group worldwide, supplanting Al-Qaeda [AQ] as perceived leader of the radical Islamist movements,” assesses Sookhdeo. Kidnapping for extortion, looting of bank gold deposits and other valuables like antiquities, and black market oil sales mean that “Islamic State has become the richest jihadi organization in the world,” worth over $2 billion in some estimates. Having “constructed a viable territorial state,” Islamic State “is constantly opening up new, unexpected fronts and bringing other jihadi groups under its umbrella” globally. The “information strategy now employed by Patrick Sookhdeo, Andrew Harrod, Islamic State, Saudi, ISIS, ISIL makes most of Al-Qaeda’s efforts seem old-fashioned.”

“Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Allen Bloom (1930-1992)

American philosopher, classicist

and author of Closing of the American Mind

In a message to Congress on internal security in August of 1950, Harry Truman said: “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of the opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

President Truman was speaking at a time when Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy was coming to prominence with his attacks on “perceived” Communists in government. (Not all of his accusations were false, but his tone and manner were venal.) While Mr. Truman did not approve of Senator McCarthy’s harangues, he knew the Wisconsin Senator was free to bloviate. Silencing him would prove more dangerous to democracy than letting him spout off. Mr. Truman’s counsel has applicability in the corridors of our politically correct colleges and universities where demands to censor those who are seen as purveyors of “hateful” messages have gained approval of presidents and deans. “Inclusiveness,” with these folks is okay, as long as it does not include those who offer ideas outside accepted norms.

Student disruptions regarding conservative speakers is not the problem. It is the acquiescence to their demands by faculty and administrators that risks upending a free society. Students have always had a juvenile streak. I know I did. But professors, deans and college presidents are expected to act and respond like adults – to be the keepers of Mr. Truman’s precept for freedom.

Those who argue that “hateful” speech should be censored cite Adolph Hitler, a demagogue and master of invective. He spewed venom. It was not his words of hate that made him a monster. It was his shutting up of his critics. Hitler took the extreme measures of imprisoning or murdering those who disagreed or he thought inferior. But it was the silencing of critics, no matter the means, that was wrong. Keep in mind Voltaire’s admonishment: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it.”

One way the young learn is by questioning conventional thinking. Socratic methods abet the self-examined life, critical to a liberal arts education. Inquiring minds seek answers, and most students are in college to learn. But they do not do so when they are pampered, when “safe” places are substituted for difficult lessons. Consider: Would the provision of a “safe” place help students at Bowdoin because they were offended by other students wearing sombreros to a tequila party? Were they truly upset, or were they pushing the administration because they knew they could? Were Cornell students really offended by the word “plantation,” that it evoked images of slavery? If so, where does political correctness end? There are 600,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, many of which are sure to be disparaging to someone somewhere. Should we rely on college administrators or government bureaucrats to determine which words to use? Who will police us and what punishments will be forthcoming? Such control smacks of the “thought police” in George Orwell’s nightmarish novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

“Israel is a water superpower.” So wrote Renaissance man and entrepreneur-commentator Seth M. Siegel in his recent bestselling book “Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World.”

This fascinating volume analyzes the amazing pioneering story of how a once-poor, parched Israel became a prosperous, high-tech startup nation, offering solutions unto the countries of an increasingly water-starved world.

Siegel presented Israel as a laboratory for a growing global population endangered by impending socioeconomic and national security water crises examined by official top-secret American studies. “Sixty percent of Israel is desert, and the rest is semiarid,” he noted, adding that Israel’s “annual rainfall, not generous to begin with, has dropped by more than half.” Nonetheless, this former third-world country at its independence in 1948 “now has one of the world’s most rapidly growing economies. Middle-class life is the norm in Israel.”

Siegel said that “despite its challenging climate and unforgiving landscape, Israel not only doesn’t have a water crisis, it has a water surplus.” Prior to World War II, British economists gloomily predicted that the territory of the British Palestine Mandate on which a Jewish national home was to emerge could sustain no more than 2 million people. By contrast, the “geographic area of Palestine today is home to more than 12 million people” in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and Israel exports annually water-intensive produce worth billions of dollars.

The persistent and unprecedented failure of the Obama administration to conduct foreign policy in ways that promote American interests is baffling to most observers.

The impulse to offer succor to those who would do us harm became almost too absurd to parody when State Department spokesperson Marie Harf suggested in January of 2015 that ISIS could be disarmed with a jobs-for-jihadists program.

A month later, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest answered a question on counterterrorism by claiming that the administration was hard at work developing “some pretty sophisticated social media strategy.”

But it appears now that the administration is contemplating an even less confrontational approach – a widespread effort to “Like” ISIS.

Policymakers must abandon the delusion that our enemies can be swayed or defeated by displays of kindness.

This new low point in foreign policy thinking came in the person of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, an Obama insider who was rumored in 2012 to have been on the short list for a second-term cabinet position. In a January 20, 2016 panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Sandberg offered what appears to be a new counterterrorism strategy – the “‘like attack.”

A report launched following allegations of rampant antisemitism within the Oxford University Labour Club and completed 10 days ago revealed that a number of its members condoned attacks on Paris synagogues in 2014 and mocked the mourners of the victims of the Hyper Cacher supermarket massacre, Britain’s Jewish News reported on Sunday, basing its information on evidence obtained by the Sunday Times.

In addition, according to testimony in the report — conducted by members of the British Labour Party and seen by the Times — some members referred to the Auschwitz extermination camp as a “cash cow.”

The report in which these revelations came to the fore was launched following the resignation of the Oxford Labour Club’s co-chairman – who claimed some members had “some kind of problem with Jews” – and additional complaints from members of the school’s Jewish Society, who said they felt “intimidated” by the antisemitic atmosphere.

Oxford Labour Students also launched a probe into the allegations, but the findings of their investigation were not released. Nor, according to the Jewish News, were the results of the Labour Party report in question.

In an op-ed Thursday in the Jewish News, Labour MPs Michael Dugher and Rachel Reeves condemned the phenomenon of antisemitism in Britain in general and bemoaned its existence in a student Labour club in particular, while calling for the immediate release of the report’s findings:

…The Labour movement has always had a strong record of opposing discrimination and racism, including anti-Semitism. That was – and still is – central to what we believe as Labour people. That’s why we were so deeply saddened by the allegations of anti-Semitism at the Oxford University Labour Club.

This special episode of The Glazov Gang was joined by Dr. Peter Hammond, the founder of Frontline Fellowship.

Dr. Hammond came on the show to discuss Islam’s Hatred of Dogs and Cruelty to Animals, examining the Islamic theological foundations that inspire a hatred of and sadism toward animals.

Don’t miss it!

A special Glazov Gang with Dr. Hammond also focused on How the Animal Kingdom Exposes Leftist Utopia as a Sham, unveiling the world of animals and its delegitimization of the socialist fairy tale: CLICK HERE.

And make sure to watch the special 2-part series of The Glazov Gang below that focused on Do Animals Have Souls? Joined by Dr. Hammond, the series explored many of the key questions related to the Biblical teachings on animals. Part I deals with Will Animals Be in Heaven? and Part II analyses How The Fall Affected Animals.

Please watch and share!

Part I: Will Animals Be in Heaven?

Part II: How The Fall Affected Animals.