RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is notable that the same week that Israel marked the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of prime minister and defense minister Yitzhak Rabin, Palestinian Authority President and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas went before the UN Human Rights Commission and asked the UN to establish “a special regime of international protection” for the Palestinians against Israel.

“It is no longer useful to waste time in negotiations just for the sake of negotiations. What is required is the ending of the occupation in accordance with international legitimacy,” said the man who has never held good faith negotiations with Israel in his life and has refused to even pretend to hold them for the past seven years.

Geert Wilders has, once again, been accused, of violating hate laws in The Netherlands over a remark he made during a March 19, 2014 Freedom Party (PVV) campaign rally for the European Parliament elections that occurred in May of last year: “fewer and fewer Moroccans” . Complaints were filed by alleged aggrieved Dutch Moroccans on the grounds that his remarks were racist and violated hate laws in The Netherlands. These remarks in the US would be protected under our First Amendment to the Constitution. No such protections current exist under the laws in The Netherlands, let alone the EU. We noted this in a December 2014 Iconoclast post about a statement Wilders made before his interrogation by Dutch police in The Hague:

In 30 years, these are the people who will be running (or ruining) the United States of America…..These are the people currently in schools and in early work careers who are the subjects of training about all the microaggressions and offensive things that leap out at you. They go to safe spaces and watch videos of puppies when they get scared.These millennials may drag down the whole country, but we’re all to blame.

A new study from the world’s largest nonprofit educational testing organization says that American millennials are super stupid. In results that the Educational Testing Service managed to call “cause for concern” rather than “disastrous to the entire concept of American progress,” American millennials managed to score at or near the bottom in literacy, numeracy and computeracy ( Problem Solving in Technology-Rich Environments, or PS-TRE) when compared to 21 other countries. The overall results for the study called the low scores of American millennials “disappointing.”

The aftermath of a terrorist attack that took place in Ra’anana. Photo: Magen David Adom.
The current state of affairs in Israel is full of lessons and truths. The sooner we learn them, the ‎sooner we can stop the attacks.‎
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1. We can stop feeling guilty‎.
A few good things have come out of the recent wave of terror in the streets of ‎Israel. The first is that the facade that jihadis are somehow struggling for self-determination, ‎social justice, or any other noble idea has been unmasked. It is clear to us now that, unlike what ‎we’ve been urged to believe for the last 30 years, jihadis don’t want peace. They want to ‎annihilate Jews, Judaism, and the State of Israel. This is great news. Because once the ‎pretense is dropped, we stop falling for it and begin unloading the guilty feeling that we are at ‎fault for everything. We drop the idea, for example, that building in Jerusalem or Judea is causing this war. Those few ‎voices who still try to blame the victims sound delusional and their ideas are being debunked. At ‎the same time, there is a realization that within Israel is a hostile minority that simply ‎does not accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Clarity is forming, and it will lead to victory.

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2. The Jewish fighting spirit is back‎.
The second good thing is that the Jewish fighting spirit is back on the streets. Men and women, ‎old and young, are responding to terror with defiance. Pepper spray, rolling pins, umbrellas, ‎selfie sticks, kicks, fists, running, and especially shooting — Israelis are shooting bad guys (and ‎gals). Yes, there have been some horrific videos of Jews being gouged as though we’re back in ‎a medieval Polish countryside. But even in those videos, soon enough, a gun-toting Jew ‎vanquishes the jihadi zombie. We don’t cower and shriek as they wish we would, and it ‎demoralizes them. Our people’s healthy fighting instincts have (amazingly) not been ‎corrupted by the media, or by the ideology of weakness. Remember: Fighting back is good, so ‎stay tactical out there, folks!‎

Those with snouts buried deepest in the climate trough are the engines whose faux science, gingered stats and withdrawn papers drive the alarmist publicity machine, but their mischief would be impotent without the support of the ill-read and ardently gullible
Many years ago, when I was a young shaver, Connie Francis had a very catchy hit – Stupid Cupid. I heard it again recently and it made me think of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). It occurred to me that the cupidity of the climate science establishment, and its rent-seeking claque, coupled with the gullibility of the masses, has created a perfect ideological storm that no amount of common sense seems able to calm.

This is brought home to me most forcefully by a local denizen who infests the columns of our local Letters to the Editor page, regurgitating any and all alarmist claptrap he can glean from what must be an obsessive, 24/7 trawling of all the usual alarmists sources.

Still inspired by Connie Francis, my reverie ranged further afield until it conjured the mental image of a predominately normal Aussie bloke — someone like my local rag’s tireless correspondent, in fact — who one day notices a slight, dull ache in his left leg. He ignores it in the fond hope that it will go away. But it doesn’t. Eventually, our hapless hero, let’s call him Jerry, consults his GP who, after some tests, refers him to an oncologist, Dr Piltdown Mann.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told USA Today yesterday that the wave of Syrian refugees that will be admitted into the U.S. in the coming year will be subjected to “extensive, thorough background checks.”

But just last week, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI Director James Comey said exactly the opposite.

When asked about criticisms made by Donald Trump about the administration’s immigration policies and about concerns that ISIS may embed themselves among Syrian refugees as a “Trojan horse,” Johnson replied:

Well, in terms of the level of effort of security review that we will apply and we have applied it will be and it is extensive. Both law enforcement and homeland security have improved the process from the days when we admitted a lot of Iraqi refugees.

We now do a better job of connecting the dots, consulting all the right databases and systems that we have available to us, and the refugee review process is probably one of the most if not the most extensive thorough background checks that someone seeking to enter this country goes through.

President Obama wants to flood this country with “Syrian refugees.” As most AT readers know, we should not admit a single one. Unfortunately, a lot of folks are in the dark about what’s going on and/or are so brainwashed by politically correct thinking they dare not acknowledge the truth. We need to keep chipping away at this gargantuan problem of Americans choosing stupidity over survival.

Any one of the reasons noted below should be sufficient to make the case as to why we must close our doors to Muslims pouring out of Islamic countries heading points West. But in case you encounter someone who is truly thick (and there are a lot of them out there), it’s always best to have several facts on hand.

They are not “refugees.” They are invaders; soldiers of Allah: What is unfolding is hijra, otherwise known as immigration jihad. It is written in the Quran and is a powerful strategy the Islamic world has used for many centuries to overwhelm nations and assert dominance. We must not allow our culture to be undermined and destroyed by increasing the population of Muslims in the United States. (See here, here, here, and here. See here for a book on the topic by Ann Corcoran.)
The vast majority of Muslims flooding into the West are young men: We are being invaded by an army of young fighting-age men from across the Islamic world. Muslim males often wreak havoc wherever they go, including disproportionately high levels of involvement with criminal activity, rape, threats against others, terrorism, and everything in between. We should not be importing a demographic of people who have a propensity toward violence. (See here, here, here, and here.)

Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Tuesday soft-pedaled the “not great news” that scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (i.e., the “nation’s report card”) declined this year for the first time since 1990. We once hoped that education would be a bright spot of the Obama Presidency, but it appears that student learning has stalled.

The Administration says the discouraging results on the NAEP exam, which tests a representative sample of students every two years in all 50 states, may be a blip. Perhaps, but the retrogression is troubling. Math proficiency in the fourth and eighth grades slipped two percentage points nationwide to 40% and 33% of students, respectively. Average scores fell across the board save for fourth-grade reading where progress was flat. Since 2007 fourth- and eighth-grade math, and fourth-grade reading, scores have plateaued.

Mr. Duncan says one culprit might be that schools are adjusting to new Common Core standards. Yet in 2013 he attributed modest gains in Michigan and seven other states to early implementation of Common Core. The handful of states that haven’t adopted Common Core have also sunk or are treading water.

For the past 15 years, retired Paris-area police commissioner Sammy Ghozlan has sounded the alarm over the rising tide of attacks on Jews in his beloved France. Now he’s relocated to Netanya.

When I enter Sammy Ghozlan’s apartment in Netanya, he’s at his computer, looking at an email. It features a photograph of the metal shutters of a Jewish-owned optician store in Paris. Freshly painted graffiti on the shutters shows a Der Sturmer-style purple and black caricature of a hook-nosed Jew. It looks pretty horrible to me, but Ghozlan is not hugely fazed. Routine, he calls it wearily. Unremarkable. Just one more sign of the times.

A former Paris-area police commissioner, Ghozlan in retirement established a liaison organization between French police and the Jewish community, the BNVCA (National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism), alerting both sides to attacks and threats against Jews. He made aliya this summer, but will be paying frequent return visits to France, he says, and is still running the BNVCA.

I’d arranged to meet Ghozlan after reading an August 2015 Vanity Fair profile of him, headlined “Paris is Burning,” which described him variously as a “Sephardic Columbo” and a “beat-up version of Yves Montand” and said he had made his police counter-terrorism reputation by identifying Palestinian sympathizers rather than neo-Nazis as the perpetrators of a 1980 synagogue bombing on Rue Copernic in which four people were killed. In retirement, it said, he has been “almost alone in his fight to protect the Jews of the banileues” — the suburbs surrounding Paris.

The question I most want to ask Ghozlan, 72, is whether his decision to move to Israel signals that there is no future for the Jews in France. And the answer he gives me is revelatory: “It’s not that there’s no future for the Jews in France. It’s that there is no future for the Jews in France that they want,” he says.

‘Unify Syria, Divide Israel’ Says Kerry in Major Middle East Policy Address
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke about U.S. Policy Towards the Middle East on Wednesday, Oct. 28 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Kerry touched on many topics during his hour-long talk, including the Nuclear Iran Deal, ISIS, the war in Syria and, of course, the Arab-Israeli conflict.

GENESIS OF ISIS

Kerry claimed that ISIS – which is apparently now to be known in U.S. Diplo-talk as Daesh – arose out of the chaos during the early days of the Syrian Revolution, when poor, disillusioned Syrians were protesting in the streets because they just wanted jobs and a future.

But Bassar al-Assad’s thugs, Kerry explained, beat up those young people. Then the parents of the young people went out in the streets to clash with Assad’s thugs, who in turn used bullets and bombs on the protesting parents.

“Having made peaceful change impossible, Assad made war inevitable,” Kerry said. And then Assad turned to Hezbollah for help, and then to Iran and Russia, and this exacerbated tensions between Sunni and Shiite communities, and this paved the way for Daesh.