RUTHFULLY YOURS

Operation Protective Edge has put a significant spotlight on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) after munitions were found in one of the agency’s schools.

Following the discovery, UNRWA came out, “strongly condemn[ing] the group or groups responsible for placing the weapons in one of its installations. Such an infiltration is a flagrant violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law. The discovery, which is the first of its kind in Gaza, endangered civilians including staff and put at risk UNRWA’s vital mission to assist and protect Palestinian refugees in Gaza.”

However, none of this is new and seemed only to be surprising to UNRWA itself. The group has a long-documented history of terrorist ties, something UNRWA’s former Commissioner General Peter Hansen openly admitted in 2004 to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation stating, “I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll … and I don’t see that as a crime.”

There have been examples relations between UNRWA schools and staff with dubious affiliations. In 2008, Awad al-Qiq, a headmaster of a top prep school in Gaza, was discovered to also be the chief rocket-maker for Islamic Jihad. He was also a science teacher who worked for an UNRWA school.

In 2002, Nidal Abd al-Fattah Abdallah Nazzal, an ambulance driver for UNRWA from the West Bank town of Qalqiliya, admitted that he was a Hamas member and that he transported munitions in his ambulance, taking blatant advantage of the freedom of movement afforded to UNRWA vehicles by Israel.

UNRWA’s involvement in Palestinian society is unique. Its role as serving the Palestinian refugee population has made it one of the most important and influential Palestinian institutions. The agency now employs nearly 30,000 people, most of whom are Palestinian. This makes UNRWA the single largest employer in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and indispensable to the Palestinian economy. As such, there is a strong economic incentive to keep the organization afloat.

he most righteous of men cannot live in peace if his evil neighbor will not let him be.
– Wilhelm Tell, Act IV, Scene III, by Friedrich von Schiller, 1804

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his.
– Gen. George S. Patton Jr.

There is always a cost to defeat an evil. It never comes free, unfortunately. But the cost of failure to defeat a great evil is far higher.
– Jamie Shea, NATO spokesman, BBC News, May 31, 1999, on civilian casualties inflicted by NATO in the Balkans.

As Operation Protective Edge – which could have been dubbed “Pillar of Defensive II” or “Cast Lead III” – drags on, it is becoming increasingly clear that the government is misconstruing its role..

Running the country vs. leading the nation

It seems to believe that its primary role is to run the country, rather than lead the nation. This is a disastrously inappropriate misperception of its task

The manner in which the current round of military operations is being conducted clearly reflects a state of mind preoccupied with tactical management of existing realities, rather than strategic leadership, which strives to forge new realities.

The objective of the campaign – articulated as the restoration of calm – makes any other conclusion difficult to reach. Indeed, when “calm” is chronically impermanent, the desire for a return to the precarious status quo ante has a ring of despairing resignation to it, and conveys little hope of any better realities.

This debilitating syndrome was diagnosed in a perceptive opinion piece titled “Defeatism at its worst” (Jerusalem Post, July 14) by Anya Zhuravel Segal – who interestingly enough served on Binyamin Netanyahu’s staff prior to the 2005 disengagement from Gaza: “We are facing a deep crisis of political leadership, and a deep disbelief in our power to shape reality.”

FROM ED CLINE:

They forgot to remove the suicide belt from a cadaver…and boom!!!

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=710386152343782&set=vb.100001172107440&type=2&theater

The value of Secretary John Kerry’s proposals are consistent with Kerry’s track record.

Kerry’s Syrian Track Record

Until the eruption of the civil war in Syria, Kerry was a member of a tiny group of US Senators – along with Chuck Hagel and Hillary Clinton – who believed that Bashar Assad was a generous, constructive leader, a reformer and a man of his word. Kerry was a frequent flyer to Damascus, dining with Assad and his wife at the Naranj restaurant in central Damascus. Following a motorcycle ride with Bashar al-Assad, he returned to Washington referring to Bashar as “my dear friend.”

In September 2009, Kerry opined that “Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region,” while Assad was conducting hate-education, repressing his opposition, hosting and arming terrorist outfits like Hezbollah, cozying up to Iran, and facilitating the infiltration of Jihadists into Iraq to kill US soldiers. WikiLeaks disclosed that on February, 2010, Kerry told Qatari leaders that the Golan Heights should be returned to Syria and that a Palestinian capital should be established in East Jerusalem. “We know that for the Palestinians the control of Al-Aqsa mosque and the establishment of their capital in East Jerusalem are not negotiable.”

“These boys were groomed [at the Al Manar Centre] … so that they are satisfied that what they go to do is right … once they’re groomed, all it takes is someone to say come and I’ll take you.” — Source close to the Yemeni Community, Cardiff, U.K., as reported in The Telegraph.

All these preachers share one thing in common: they are favorites of the two leading government-subsidized Salafi charities in Britain.

The British government, on June 26, banned Sheikh Mohammad Al Arifi from entering the United Kingdom, after reports in the British media linked the Saudi preacher to the radicalization of British youth now fighting for ISIS in Syria.

Arifi’s sermons at the Al Manar Centre in Cardiff in particular, have been linked to the radicalization of three young British Muslims: brothers Nasser and Aseel Muthana and their friend, Reyaad Khan.

Saudi Islamist preacher Muhammad al-Arifi (right) at an iERA stall in London

This ban demonstrates the British government’s growing acceptance that Islamist preachers actually do play an important role in driving Muslim youth toward terrorism.

In an interview with Channel 4 News, Mohammad Al Arifi denied the charges and voiced condemnation for those who incite Muslims to fight in Syria. His denial, however, was clearly at odds with his earlier declarations. In 2010, Arifi stated in a television broadcast that:

“There is no doubt that a person whom Allah enables to sacrifice his soul, and to fight for the sake of Allah, has been graced with a great honor.

They carried banners saying, “Stop Israeli State Terror,” but some went off-message, deciding, apparently, that it did not matter if their targets were Israelis or not.

In the Netherlands, fresh from a pro-ISIS rally in Amsterdam, the home of the Chief Rabbi — not Israeli, just Jewish — was attacked twice in one week.

We live in a rightful disgust for racism of any kind. And yet here we see — and nowhere more clearly than in Germany — the new racist nightmare for Europe.

The backlash in Europe against Israel has been underway since the beginning of Operation Protective Edge. In each country the protests have similarities. And in each they are spear-headed by the same motives and often by the same people.

In London the protests have been dominated young Muslims with the usual smattering of far-left fellow-travellers. They have carried Socialist Worker Party banners saying “Stop Israeli State Terror.” But some went off-message, apparently deciding it did not matter if their targets were Israeli or “just” Jews. There have also been the predictable banners comparing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Adolf Hitler. Others have a more confused relationship with this sinister conflation. One young protestor was photographed at a demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy in London with a poster saying, “Hitler you were right!” Elsewhere the protests have spilled over into occasional outbursts of violence.

The bear is loose

No, not the self-designated ursus in the White House, but the Kremlin’s ruler.

Having launched a program attempting to reinstate Moscow’s hegemony over the former Tsarist/Soviet Empire, Vladimir Putin now has been hoisted on his own petard.

When his naked aggression in Georgia in 2008 elicited no significant American-EU response, he followed it with his 2014 annexation of Crimea. When that produced little more than Western denunciation, he mobilized for further aggression, attempting to use the Russian-speaking minority in eastern Ukraine.

But he has now become a prisoner of his own rhetoric and aggression.

True, like the European dictators of right and left of the 1930s, he has gained wide popular support at home. But the chauvinistic reaction of the Russian public is a false flag. Shamed and humiliated by the implosion of the Soviet Union [“the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century”, Putin has said], a catastrophic declining population, a start-and-stop economy, and an enormous flight of capital, Putin has used aggressive nationalism to try to reinvigorate a failed regime with all too well remembered demagoguery.

But he is now riding a tiger. Earlier he seemed to have won in Ukraine with an administration succumbing to pressure to back away from the overwhelmingly popular demand to move closer to European Union’s prosperity. [Even relative objective polling of Russian-speakers in Ukraine show their choice is to move into the EU orbit rather than to tie their destinies to a failing Russia.] Then when a popular movement overthrew that Kyiv administration and installed a new pro-European Union executive by a democratically elected parliament, reinforced now with new elections, Putin grabbed Crimea and began to try to manipulate the Russian-speaking minority in eastern Ukraine for his program to reestablish empire.

Good morning, Don Imus. Caught you this morning on the Fox Business Network and as usual you were right about everything. Except Israel.

If the Jewish State can’t count on America, what’s left?
Dig it, as our guy Lenny used to say, I am touchy on the subject for a thousand different reasons so I won’t even name one. But for the topic at hand, the Arabs versus Israel, you are hugely important. On radio, TV, you’re fast, you’re smart and millions pay attention even when you’re cranky. You’re the last hipster. You grew out of Lenny Bruce.

You’ve got the “undecided” in the palm of your hands. One word from you can tip the scales.

If America equivocates between right and wrong, between Israel and the savages, I fear not only for Israel. I fear for America as well. We are in the same boat.

So on the Gaza crisis, when it came up, I was hoping you would take sides. Staying neutral is the same as taking sides, in this case the wrong side.

Around the world the asylums have emptied out. If the Jewish State can’t count on America, what’s left?

This is a conflict between good and evil. This should not be difficult to separate. On 9/11, when Muslims murdered 3,000 of our people a few blocks from where you were broadcasting in Manhattan, those Hamas Muslims and Fatah Muslims cheered. We wept. They danced and they laughed.

That’s the same crowd that’s been shooting rockets at Israel. That’s the war Israel is fighting and when it comes to evil there is no choice but to crush it entirely.

Diana West, author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, delivers a one-two punch in her July 25th syndicated article, “Israel and the U.S.: Whose Survival Instinct is Stronger?”

The subject is the use of children by terrorists in Gaza as “human shields,” and the use by President Barack Obama of children as “invasion shields” at the U.S. and Mexican border.

Terrorists and Obama lie; children die.

Children have been used as a Trojan Horse for all sorts of statist and collectivist initiatives: to ban smoking, to ban guns, to ban obesity, to ban Barbie Dolls and other “dangerous” toys, and so on. But West discusses the nearly unprecedented use of children as weapons of war in the Middle East and in the U.S. As she describes the phenomena:

There’s something darkly coincidental in the fact that the latest weapon to be deployed against the survival instinct of both Israel and the United States is an alleged “heartlessness” when it comes to children.

Most stories appearing in the MSM in the U.S. and overseas are nearly maniacal in their focus on the “civilian casualties” of “Palestinians” in Gaza as a result of Israel’s campaign against Hamas, with “personal” stories accompanied by photographs of devastated streets and homes, sorrowful pictures of Gazan children sitting in the rubble, and even faked photographs of supposedly dead children, or second-hand, recycled faked photographs used in Syria.

Is Hamas’s use of children as “human shields” unprecedented? No. Hitler, when he began to run out of adults to fight the Allies, filled his shrinking armies with adolescents and boys. Japan counted on women and children to fight the expected invasion by Americans, with guns, if available, with bamboo sticks, if necessary. Mao employed uncounted children to enforce, by violence and force, his “cultural revolution.” Islamic jihadists have employed children to don suicide vests and blow themselves up among Jews and American soldiers. So, the “human shield” tactic isn’t new.

But all that is conveniently forgotten by the MSM. It’s easy to decide whether that forgetfulness is a symptom of a short-term memory or deliberate repression. It’s deliberate repression.

Discussing an article in the London Telegraph about Israel’s alleged war crimes, West writes that the Telegraph headline is not untypical: “Israel’s offensive in Gaza has ‘killed more children than fighters,’ say human rights groups. Israel has been accused of waging ‘war on the children’ of Gaza …”

Dr. Anna Geifman on “Life in Israel Under Siege” — on The Glazov Gang
The author of “Death Orders” shares life in Jerusalem during a state of war — and what it means to confront a death cult.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/dr-anna-geifman-on-life-in-israel-under-siege-on-the-glazov-gang/