RUTHFULLY YOURS

This semester I am teaching developmental reading at a local community college. This means that most of the students are reading at sixth-grade reading level. Their writing skills are, at best, very basic. Below is a sample of an unedited paragraph (replete with errors) that a student was asked to write after having been taught the meanings of autocratic, demolish, debilitating, hyperthermophile, perpetrators, and plaque. You will note that while the student incorporated the words into her paper, she does not really understand the meaning or the nuances of the words.

In the Atlantic Ocean there are tons of Hyperthermophiles hidden in the ocean. These plants often are by the waters or in it. Some sea creatures around this area are debilitating because of the warm temperatures. The plants have to be in cold waters where it’s below zero to stay alive. They will demolish into the ocean once they are gone. These pants will go into the colder parts of the ocean if they can make it. The marine biologist can be autocratic when picking these plants. They are just so rare in the U.S. that they don’t want these Hyperthermophiles to go instinct.

From Asia to Africa, Islamic militants are slaughtering fellow Muslims. In Europe, they’re fomenting anti-Semitism. Through the Internet, they’re spreading hatred and winning recruits. We can’t defeat this enemy with weapons, money or liberal platitudes. We need a man of God.

Into this role steps a most unlikely candidate: Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Britain. Mr. Sacks believes that Islamic violence, like Jewish and Christian violence, flows from a misunderstanding of sacred text. In “Not in God’s Name,” he illuminates a wiser faith and a gentler God. It’s a perceptive, poignant and beautifully written book. But its analysis of history suggests a darker conclusion: Words alone won’t pacify Islam. There will be a lot more killing.

The problem isn’t Islam: Mr. Sacks points out that Jewish and Christian scriptures have also been invoked to justify violence. It’s human nature. We’re tribal creatures. We bond with our kinsmen against outsiders. Tyrants and demagogues exploit this tribal propensity by feeding us religious doctrines that blame our suffering on enemies: infidels, Crusaders, Jews. This “pathological dualism,” as Mr. Sacks describes it, corrupts societies by deflecting internal scrutiny and impeding reform. And it dehumanizes the putative enemy, facilitating mass murder.

So why do Muslims, Christians and Jews kill one another? Because we’re sibling rivals. As children of Abraham, we claim the same holy land. Each of the three communities sees itself as the people of God. Mr. Sacks says we’re all wrong: God’s love is infinite. “To insist that being loved entails that others be unloved is to fail to understand love itself.”

Countless Palestinian parents support, encourage and praise the sacrifice of their children in suicide bombings, stabbings and other terrorist attacks.International law prohibits using children to fight. Article 38 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (adopted in 1989) condemns the recruitment and involvement of children in hostilities and armed conflictsA criminal Palestinian Arab leadership, along with cowardly and intimidated Palestinian parents on the West Bank and Gaza, exploit their children to engage in armed conflict – in opposition to values held by the rest of the civilized world and in flagrant violation of international law and common decency.There is no excuse for sacrificing the youth of any society for political gain and tactical advantage. If this is to stop, the culpability must be put squarely on the shoulders of Palestinian society and others, who legitimize, support and “understand”such child sacrifice.UN Security Council Resolution 1377 reaffirms its unequivocal condemnation of all acts, methods and practices of terrorism as criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, in all their forms and manifestations, wherever and by whomever committed……please read this article from 2009

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/10/20/a-death-cults-terror-against-israelis-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Dr. Anna Geifman, the author of Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia. She unveils the new phase of the old war – and who is behind it.

Don’t miss it:

The current wave of stabbings of Jews in Israel is an attempt to imitate Islamic State terrorists, who have been using knives to behead many Muslims and non-Muslims. In most attacks, the Palestinian terrorists focused on the victims’ throats and necks. They are trying to replace Islamic State jihadis as the chief “butchers” of humans in the Middle East.

How can our leaders in Ramallah accuse Jews of “contaminating” the Aqsa Mosque with their “filthy feet” at a time when our youths burn a religious site such as Joseph’s Tomb? Palestinian Authority security forces, which maintain a tight grip on Nablus, did nothing to prevent the arson attack.

The attacks are an attempt to erase history so that Jews will not be able to claim any religious ties to the land. This is exactly what the Islamic State is doing in Syria and Iraq.

Mahmoud Abbas and other Palestinian leaders are lying. This is not a struggle against “occupation” or a wall or a checkpoint. This is an Islamic State-inspired jihad to slaughter Jews and wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

Is there any place lower for Islam to go? Four-year-olds? What’s next? Recruiting babies at the fetal stage? Getting papers to commit their first born for the Jihad before conception?

Four pupils of Gandini Primary in Kaloleni, Kilifi County, Kenya, have said their Islamic teacher, Samwel Wanjala Wambwile, recruited them for the terrorist group Al-Shabaab.

According to Kenya’s Daily Nation, Wambwile was arraigned for recruiting seven children in the school to become Al-Shabaab members on June 19, 2015.

The children are all between the ages of four and 16.

Giving testimony before Principal Magistrate Diana Mochache, the victims who were old enough to testify said Wambwile alias Salim Muhamud Wambwile radicalized them inside the Jilad mosque.

One of them, a female standard five student, said the teacher taught them martial arts and advised them to fight non-Muslims in school.

Another victim said Wambwile wrote the words “Radical Boys” on their shirts and told them all non-Muslims should be persecuted to death.

The carnage in Jerusalem and other parts of Israel continued this week with an increased ferocity and barbarity, with stabbings, shooting, bombings, car ramming, rocket attacks, and other assaults on Israeli citizens claiming the lives of five Israelis and twenty-five Palestinians in the past two weeks alone. While the violence intensifies and seems to be spiraling out of control, not only touching Jerusalem but also the West Bank, Gaza, and other Israeli towns, officials are intent on identifying the inspiration for the latest escalation of jihad against Jews.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was quick to assign blame, not to the perpetrators of the deadly attacks—psychotic young men acting in the name of Allah to purge the land of Jews—but to the victims themselves, Israelis. Speaking at the Belfer Center at Harvard University, Kerry disingenuously observed in a question and answer session after his talk that, “There’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years and there’s an increase in the violence because there’s this frustration that’s growing.” Blaming the settlements for being an obstacle to peace is a favorite refrain for this administration, of course, and it puts the responsibility for the outbreak of violence squarely on Israel, and Netanyahu, instead of where it more justifiably belongs: namely, with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority, and a culture of death where “resistance” and martyrdom are promoted as virtuous rather than inhumanly counterproductive.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was more accurate in identifying the inspiration of the current uprising, this so-called “Jerusalem Awakening,” that has increased the tension of everyday life for Israelis and Arabs alike. At a weekly cabinet meeting Netanyahu correctly observed that Israel is “. . . in the midst of a wave of terrorism originating from systematic and mendacious incitement regarding the Temple Mount – incitement by Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and the Islamic Movement in Israel.”

Muslim “Frustration” caused 9/11 and every other act of terror.

As Jews were being butchered in the streets of Jerusalem, Secretary of State John Kerry blamed them.

“There’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years, and now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing,” the nation’s greatest diplomat said.

“Settlements” are Jews living in parts of Israel captured by the invading Muslim armies in 1948, from which Jews were ethnically cleansed, and then retaken and liberated by Israel in 1967. A Jew living in a part of Jerusalem from which Jews were driven out in 1948 is a “settler” who “frustrates” Muslims.

And who can blame Muslims for taking an axe or a knife to those frustrating Jews. Not John Kerry.

Back before 1967, Muslim terrorism had to be attributed to “frustration” at Jews living anywhere in Israel. Before Jews had an independent state or any realistic possibility of achieving one, Muslims were frustrated at Jews living. And so they strove to make the Jews into the “unliving” by murdering them.

That much hasn’t changed.

“Frustration” is one of the most common excuses for Muslim violence. Most frustrated people just punch a wall. It takes a special sort of person to respond to frustration by ramming into a bus stop and then hacking at an elderly Rabbi with a cleaver or stabbing a 13-year-old boy on a bike.

But Muslim “frustration” is an international problem.

The increase in global temperatures, touted by warmists but nowhere evident in almost 19 years of flat-lining satellite readings, is said to inflict many dubious ills, from shark attacks to hermaphroditic lizards. Its only demonstrable consequence, however, is the cowardice of those who dare not speak up
At the essence of conservatism is the philosophy that, while accepting change as inevitable, it should be for the good or, at the very least, do no harm. Coupled with this should be a healthy scepticism and an insistence that any case for significant disruption of society and the economy be first subjected to rigorous examination. This raises the matter of what we now routinely refer to as “climate change” – catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW), to use one of the climateers’ favoured and emotionally laden descriptors.

Tony Abbott, speaking frankly, once conceded that “climate change is crap”. It’s difficult to know just how many conservative voters share that conviction if one goes only by the polls. Take as one example a recent Lowy survey that posed two questions. The first asked what Australia’s approach to the upcoming Paris climate conference should be, with 63% of respondents agreeing we need to “commit to significant reduction” in greenhouse gas emissions pour encourager les autres. Only 35% believe we should not make commitments ahead of other countries. But this result seems to fly in the face of responses to the second question, relating to belief in global warming. While 50% of respondents rate climate change a serious problem, 40% believe its effects will be gradual and can be dealt with by taking less costly and disruptive steps over time. The remaining 10% believe that “unless we are sure that global warming is a problem” we should take no steps at all.

Ms. Hotovley is deputy foreign minister of Israel.

Palestinian leaders have created a culture of death that is motivating the latest violent terrorism.

The latest surge of Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis has come in the immediate wake of explicit calls by the Palestinian leadership to “spill blood.” This well-orchestrated campaign of violence follows many years in which Palestinian children have been taught to idolize the murder of Jews as a sacred value and to regard their own death in this “jihad” as the pinnacle of their aspirations.

Such violence has deep roots. It goes back to the rampages at the behest of Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Muslim activist and at one point grand mufti of Jerusalem, in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. It continued with the fedayeen Palestinian militants in the 1950s and ’60s, and evolved into the terrorism of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah under Yasser Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas. Anyone who claims that Palestinian terror against Jews dates only to 1967, or is a response to Israeli settlements, should become more informed of the conflict’s history.

Yet the apathy shown by the international community to the death-culture fostered by Palestinian elites, and the unbalanced manner in which subsequent violence is often treated by the international media—as if there is any kind of symmetry between terrorists and their victims—is doing long-term, and possibly irrevocable, harm to generations of Palestinians.

A few recent examples underscore the depth of the problem.

Mr. Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, said the following on Palestinian television on Sept. 16: “We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.”