RUTHFULLY YOURS

The first rains that follow the High Holy Days have come to Jerusalem. As always, a blessed relief. But no relief seems imminent from the renewed tensions that have descended on the city. A series of brutal murders and attempted murders of Israeli Jewish civilians by Palestinian Arab Muslims have taken place over the last two weeks [1]. These have occurred against a backdrop of violent demonstrations and protests in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and increasingly among Israel’s Arab citizens.

For five years, Israel has lived a strange and contradictory reality. The Arab world is in an advanced state of meltdown. A number of formerly strong states have effectively ceased to exist. Syria, Iraq, Yemen are today merely names for areas in which sectarian militias battle one another. These states have collapsed along their ethnic and sectarian fault lines. The results have been bloody and are not yet over.

Yet on the edge of all this, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has remained quiet. An anomaly. This is the only place of non-Muslim sovereignty between Europe and India. The existence of a sovereign area successfully defended by the Jews — a group traditionally despised and ridiculed by Muslims — has long been a source of rage and humiliation for both Sunni and Shia.

An ISIS video apparently taken several weeks ago has emerged of the terror group executing three Assyrian Christian men with bullets to the back of the head and then showing three more hostages demanding payment of $50,000 for each additional captive. There are an estimated 280+ additional Assyrian Christian hostages held by ISIS.

As each man identifies himself, he says: “I am a Nazarene (Christian).”

I reported here at PJ Media back in February of the ISIS offensive in the Khabur River valley in northeast Syria, where a number of Assyrian Christian villages were attacked. Reports at the time indicated that churches were systematically burned and hundreds of hostages taken.

An article from Al-Masdar News reports:

Sorry to break the good news to some of our conservative friends, but it turns out that most immigrants to America are assimilating as their forebears did. That’s the gist of a new 400-page report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which looks at everything from English proficiency, education levels and family structure to health, crime and employment.

Here’s the money sentence: “Across all measurable outcomes, integration increases over time, with immigrants becoming more like the native-born with more time in the country, and with the second and third generations becoming more like other native-born Americans than their parents were.”

Across all measurable outcomes. That bears repeating, especially when so many are painting immigrants who come here to work as criminals or welfare mooches. To take one example, the Donald Trump brain trust at the Center for Immigration Studies recently found “significantly higher welfare use associated with immigrants.”

There are few more outspoken proponents of conservative ideas in North American Jewry today than Ruth Wisse: pioneer of the academic study of modern Jewish literature, longtime professor of Yiddish and Yiddish literature at McGill and Harvard, essayist, political commentator and author of a dozen books. In works such as If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, Wisse argues that Jews must stop blaming themselves for the hatred, past and present, of Judaism and Jews. Rather, she says, Jews must first demand from others acknowledgment of the right of the Jews to exist as a people and a nation-state. Anything short of that is racism, she says, which undermines not only Jewish rights but democratic values in America and abroad. Unsurprisingly, Wisse often finds herself at odds with mainstream liberalism on issues including Israel, feminism and American politics.

A bombshell report by the Washington Times reveals that fecklessness in the face of terror isn’t a condition exclusive to the Obama administration. “Bill Clinton’s administration gathered enough evidence to send a top-secret communique accusing Iran of facilitating the deadly 1996 Khobar Towers terrorist bombing,” the Times states, “but suppressed that information from the American public and some elements of U.S. intelligence for fear it would lead to an outcry for reprisal, according to documents and interviews.”

Nineteen American servicemen were killed in that attack and another 372 people were wounded when a tanker laden with plastic explosives was driven into the parking lot and detonated next to the eight-story dormitory used for U.S. Air Force personnel assigned to the Gulf. A U.S. indictment was issued in 2001 charging 13 Saudis and a Lebanese man with the crime for which then-Attorney General John Ashcroft blamed Iran, stating they “inspired, supported and supervised members of Saudi Hezbollah.” Yet no Iranian officials were named or charged, nor was the Iranian government accused of any legal responsibility for the atrocity.

According to memos obtain by the Times, the intelligence demonstrating Iranian involvement in the attack was characterized as extensive and credible. It included interviews by the FBI of a half-dozen Saudi co-conspirators who told the agency their passports were provided by the Iranian embassy in Damascus. They further revealed they reported to a top Iranian general, and received training from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), according to FBI officials.

Islamic Female Genital Mutilation and Islam-Denial — on The Glazov Gang
Two leading scholars of Islam discuss a vicious Islamic crime against women — and the effort to hide it.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/islamic-female-genital-mutilation-and-islam-denial-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/16/bane-capital-and-the-gops-dark#commentcontainer

Newt’s bad narrative has made a mockery of this presidential race.

The media always has an established theme — a narrative — into which the coverage of political stories is shoehorned. Sometimes that results in important stories being ignored because they just don’t fit. That’s okay with the media bosses this year because they’re not in the news business. They’re in the business of helping Obama get re-elected.

The narrative is important because it shapes the flow of information voters get and thus defines the political debate. If the narrative controls what the voters hear, read, and see — and it usually does — then the voters are thinking and deciding on the basis of the information to which they’re exposed. Were it not for conservative talk radio and publications such as the Spectator, the media would be pretty much in total control of that information flow leading up to the election.

Before the Iowa caucuses, the media narrative of the Republican primaries was pretty much a personality contest about who was more electable, who was more conservative — or, as the media phrase it, more radical — and who was going to score in Iowa’s beauty contest in which social issues usually play a disproportionate role.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/us/politics/in-shariah-gingrich-sees-mortal-threat-to-us.html?_r=2&pagewanted=print
In Islamic Law, Gingrich Sees a Mortal Threat to U.S.By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — Long before he announced his presidential run this year, Newt Gingrich had become the most prominent American politician to embrace an alarming premise: that Shariah, or Islamic law, poses a threat to the United States as grave as or graver than terrorism.

“I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it,” Mr. Gingrich said in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington in July 2010 devoted to what he suggested were the hidden dangers of Islamic radicalism. “I think it’s that straightforward and that real.”

Mr. Gingrich was articulating a much-disputed thesis in vogue with some conservative thinkers but roundly rejected by many American Muslims, scholars of Islam and counterterrorism officials. The anti-Shariah theorists say that just as communism posed an ideological and moral threat to America separate from the menace of Soviet missiles, so today radical Islamists are working to impose Shariah in a “stealth jihad” that is no less dangerous than the violent jihad of Al Qaeda.

“Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence,” Mr. Gingrich said in the speech. “But in fact they’re both engaged in jihad, and they’re both seeking to impose the same end state, which is to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Shariah.”

Echoing some Republicans in Congress, Mr. Gingrich blasted the Obama administration’s policy of declining to label terrorism carried out in the name of militant Islam as “Islamic” or “jihadist.” Administration officials say such labels can imply religious justification for a distortion of doctrine that most Muslims abhor, thus smearing an entire faith.

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http://www.prudenpolitics.com/index.php/pruden/full_column/a_little_humility_at_the_crossroads “Climate research,” the New York Times confidently assures us, “stands at a crossroads.” This means that a lot of research scientists are standing at the crossroads, holding out paper bags like trick-or-treaters on Halloween night, standing in line for taxpayer largesse to fill ‘em up. These specialists in shakedown “science,” who speak only in […]

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/12/netanyahus-misleading-lessons.php Many of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s supporters were stunned last week when IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz announced he was promoting Brig.-Gen. Nitzan Alon to major general and appointing him to serve as the next commander of the Central Command. Alon completed a two-year tour of duty as Judea and Samaria Division […]