RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4256/iran-europe-nuclear-dual-use

The illegal transfer of dual-use equipment to Iran continues unabated, due to lax enforcement and the failure of European governments to keep pace with the growing number and sophistication of actors involved in security-related trade with Tehran.

“Iran continues to seek items for its prohibited activities from abroad by using multiple and increasingly complex procurement methods, including front companies, intermediaries, false documentation and new routes.” — Confidential U.N. Panel of Experts

Spanish police have arrested four individuals suspected of attempting to export to Iran industrial machinery that could be used to make weapons of mass destruction.

The machinery involves so-called dual-use equipment—products and technologies that can be used for both civilian and military applications.

Although the European Union bans the export to Iran of certain dual-use machinery and technology that could be used to aid Iran’s military program, loopholes abound and enforcement remains patchy.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jeff-ludwig/the-israeli-solution-3/print/

Caroline Glick’s latest book, The Israeli Solution, carefully explains the political, legal, demographic, and military position of Israel in the modern world. She corrects many faulty notions that are prevalent about Israel. The reader learns from her that Israel was not created as an emotional reaction by a world horrified by the Holocaust. Its legitimacy and destiny as a state is grounded in historical and political realities that antedate the Holocaust and in the prayerful longings of the Jewish people to be restored to and to rule their own homeland after dispossession by the vengeful Romans 20 centuries ago.

Although Glick does not place much emphasis on the visionary and incredibly determined work of Theodore Herzl and Chaim Weizman, their vision is foundational and cannot be separated from the existence of present-day Israel. Rather, she derives Israel’s right to exist primarily from three sources: the continued presence of Jews in the territory now called Israel for 2000 years, the Palestine Mandate to the British, and from the British after World War I, and U.N. Resolution 181 which established the state of Israel (as a Jewish state).

With amazing logic and compelling detail, she depicts every phase and aspect of Israel’s struggle to come into existence and remain in existence from 1920 until the present. The reader can see plainly that the Arab world accepted France’s mandate to create an independent Syria and Lebanon and the legitimacy of the British prerogative to create Iraq and Jordan, but at the same time found the British mandate for a Jewish state to be illegal and untenable. Self-determination became a by-word, a new, significant idea in international affairs after WWI and especially after Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but self-determination for the Jews, who had remained as a continuous presence in Palestine for 2000 years – to this, the Arab world’s resounding answer was “no.” Israel has had to struggle all these decades against a pathological and almost fiendish opposition by the Arab world to her claims. The Israeli Solution is utterly and properly offended by the racism and religious bigotry of the Arab world with respect to the Jews living in their midst.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/negotiating-with-terrorists-doesnt-work-2/print/

Let’s set aside the moral issue that it’s wrong to negotiate with terrorists and the practical issue that negotiating with terrorists encourages more terrorism. Those are both right and obvious, but there’s also a third issue. Negotiating with terrorists doesn’t work unless they intend to stop being terrorists.

The peace process between Israel and the PLO has never worked and will never work because the members of the terrorist group never intended to stop being terrorists. The PLO yammers on about Palestine, a country that never existed and a name that has nothing to do with the Arab conquerors they descend from, but functions like a terrorist group, not like a state.

Diplomats and politicians write up annual reports claiming that the Palestinian Authority has made progress with its civic institutions and its economic development. The truth is that if anything it has actually gone backward.

Mahmoud Abbas has no intention of running for office. The elected legislature has long been defunct and actual decisions are made by the PLO Council. The Palestinian Authority is a dictatorship run by high profile leaders of a terrorist group. It is less open and democratic than it was a decade ago and it wasn’t very open and democratic back then either.

The only progress that the latest incarnation of the peace process achieved was to give Abbas enough confidence to boot his Prime Minister who was there to assure the Euros that there was some slightly competent management at the helm. The same pundits who were praising Fayyad for salvaging the Palestinian Authority have already forgotten about him.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375426/print

The Left is trampling free speech for the sake of orthodoxy.

What if you believed that the planet might not have warmed up over the last two decades, even though carbon emissions reached all-time highs?

Or, if the earth did heat up, you thought that it was not caused by human activity?

Or, if global warming were the fault of mankind, you trusted that the slight increases would not make all that much difference?

The Los Angeles Times would not print your letter to the editor to that effect.

The CEO of Apple Inc. might advise that you should “get out of this stock.”

Or maybe if you were a skeptical climatologist, you would cease all research and concede that man-caused global warming needed no further scientific cross-examination — as columnist Bill McKibben recently advocated.

If you were a drought-stricken California farmer and worried about diversions of irrigation water to support fish populations, you would be told by the president of the United States that the real problem is not a failure to build reservoirs and canals but is due entirely to global warming, which is a “fact” and “settled science.”

What if you supported equality for all Americans regardless of their sexual preference, but — like presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 and about half the country today — opposed making gay marriage legal?

If you were the CEO of Mozilla, Brendan Eich, you would be forced to resign your position.

If you owned a fast-food franchise like Chick-fil-A, boycotts of your business would ensue.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4864/some_good_decisions_at_last_in_middle_east_talks_crisis

Finally some good sense:” I would suggest a step further still – returning to “routine dealings with the Palestinians” as they were before Oslo, before the rest of the world poked it’s collective finger into the hornets’ nest.”…rsk

Nick Gray is Director, Christian Middle East Watch, a British organisation dedicated to objective and factual discussion of Middle Eastern issues, especially of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

As the doomed-from-the-start Israel-Palestinian talks finally crumble into dust, some good decisions have finally come from all sides. None of them will salvage the unsalvageable, but all show signs of reality taking precedence over fantasy.

Just over a week ago, on the eve of releasing the last scheduled batch of Palestinian terrorists (sorry, “gallant freedom-fighters”), the Israeli government cancelled the move unless they received a guarantee that the Palestinians would extend the peace talks to the end of this year.

“Not fair!” screamed the Palestinian leadership. “Oh, no!” sighed John Kerry and his team, “not more obstacles.” Despite the resulting accusations, this was a good decision by Israel. It is almost a certainty that the Palestinians would have scuttled away from the talks once they got their last promised prisoner release; no doubt to acclamation from the Palestinian “street”.

In a scenario so oft-repeated it gets boring, Israel has again been pressured to make more and more painful concessions while Mr Abbas has got away again with a total lack of compromise, offering only more and more demands that he knows Mr Netanyahu cannot meet.

Abbas has shown clearly in the past months that he does not want to end the decades-long conflict. He will never recognise Israel as a Jewish state and he is not about to destroy the fantastical dreams of the refugees and Palestinian diaspora to return to the homes they left in 1948 or 1967. Of course this is at least in part because he wants to end his life in retirement and not in a pool of blood.

The rise in diplomatic temperature has caused what may prove to be the last round of frantic shuttle diplomacy by John Kerry as he rushed back to the region last week to try by any means possible to stop his peace bid from exploding in his face.

And here we come to another good decision.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4866/norway_s_capital_to_get_first_muslim_only_school_to_teach_arabic_and_muslim_values

Norway’s capital’s first Muslim-only school will teach “Arabic and Islamic values as well as the standard subjects on the curriculum, replacing the subject of Religion, Philosophy and Ethics with Islam, Religion and Philosophy”

Amid cross-party opposition, Norway’s education ministry has approved an application for the capital city Oslo to get its first Muslim-only school, the country’s English language online media outlet, The Local reported on Tuesday.

The school, which reports said would have 200 students when it is fully operational, is to be founded at the behest of the Association of Muslim Mothers.

According to the report in The Local: “…the school would teach its pupils Arabic and Islamic values as well as the standard subjects on the curriculum, replacing the subject of Religion, Philosophy and Ethics with Islam, Religion and Philosophy.”

Islam and multiculturalism are highly sensitive subjects in Norway in the wake of the massacre perpetrated by far-Right extremist Anders Breivik in July 2011. Breivik killed eight people in a bomb attack in Oslo and a further 69 at a socialist youth camp on Utoya island. Breivik cited as one of his primary motivations the alleged “Islamisisation” of Europe.

Nonetheless, even members of the opposition Labour Party have voiced concerns that the move to open such a Muslim-only school could be divisive.

“We spend a lot of money on inclusion in Norway, and now we are apparently going to be spending it on segregation.” the Labour chairman of Norway’s parliamentary education committee, Trond Giske, was quoted in the above mentioned report as saying.

The growing Muslim population of Norway is estimated at 4-5 percent, with that figure rising to between 8 and 10 percent in Oslo.

http://www.americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/who_is_governor_chris_christie_really_pandering_to.html

Pundits have written about Governor Chris Christie’s recent faux pas at the Republican Jewish Coalition conclave in Las Vegas. The Governor mistakenly called the territories that Israel was forced to conquer in its defensive wars of 1967 and 1973, “occupied.” The fact is that the Palestinians have consistently refused to negotiate in good faith, refusing to even verbally acknowledge of the existence of a Jewish state.

The reason that the term “occupied territories” is offensive to some is that those facts seem to be glaringly omitted by that particular phraseology.

Certainly, Governor Christie should have been better briefed. It appears that Christie later apologized for the use of the term to Sheldon Adelson, the Jewish philanthropist, major humanitarian, and political benefactor, at whose Las Vegas hotel the event was held.

After the apology, the enlightened oracles of the media began alluding to the fact that the only reason that the governor apologized for the wording was to pander to Mr. Adelson because of his wealth and generosity to political campaigns.

The most odious comment came from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who compared Adelson to Iran’s dictator Ayatollah Khamenei saying they had, “…one thing in common — they are both trying to destroy Israel. Adelson is doing it by loving Israel to death. Khomeini is doing it by hating it to death.”

Not agreeing with a policy for making peace with those who daily demonstrate that they are clearly not ready for peace, by inciting children to blow themselves up in pizza restaurants by teaching them that one day all of Israel will someday be theirs, does not equate with “trying to destroy Israel.”

If Mr. Friedman had spent time speaking to the parents of some of the Israeli children who have been killed by the terrorists lionized by Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, he would understand a bit more of just what the Jewish state is really up against, and how out of touch he is with the reality on the ground.

http://www.steynonline.com/6250/degrees-of-separation

Today, Brandeis University announced that it was reversing its decision to award an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, following complaints from faculty, an online petition, and pressure from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which represents nobody but is flush with Saudi cash. The biases of the academy are well known: Robert Spencer is in no danger of getting an honorary degree any time soon, nor Douglas Murray. Nevertheless, in this instance, Brandeis University is stiffing someone who’s black, feminist and from Somalia. Which makes their decision the most explicit recognition yet that, in the hierarchy of identity-group politics, Islam trumps everything, including race and gender.

Brandeis said they had changed their mind about Ms Hirsi Ali’s degree because “we cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values”. Presumably, Tony Kushner’s statement that the state of Israel shouldn’t exist is entirely consistent with Brandeis University’s core values, because no one bothered rescinding his honorary degree.

I wrote about Ayaan a couple of years ago in Maclean’s:

She lives under armed guard and was forced to abandon the Netherlands because quite a lot of people want to kill her. And not in the desultory behead-the-enemies-of-Islam you-will-die-infidel pro forma death-threats-R-us way that many of us have perforce gotten used to in recent years: her great friend and professional collaborator was murdered in the streets of Amsterdam by a man who shot him eight times, attempted to decapitate him, and then drove into his chest two knives, pinning to what was left of him a five-page note pledging to do the same to her.

What would you do in those circumstances? Ayaan and I had repaired to that third-rate bar after a day-long conference on Islam, jihad, free speech and whatnot. That’s usually where I run into her, whether in Malibu or at the Carlton Club in London or at a less illustrious venue. Would you be doing that with a price on your head? Or would you duck out of sight, lie low, change your name, move to New Zealand, and hope one day to get your life back? After the threats against the Comedy Central show South Park the other week, Ms. Hirsi Ali turned up on CNN to say that the best defence against Islamic intimidation is for us all to stand together and thereby “share the risk.” But, around the world, every single translator of her books has insisted on total anonymity. When push comes to shove, very few are willing to share the risk.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/04/08/reid-really-rich-rich-rich-rich-rich-people-keep-women-from-equal-pay/?print=1

Harry Reid is really dumb, dumb, dumb dumb and dumber….rsk

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters after a policy luncheon today that “really rich, rich, rich, rich, rich people” are trying to keep women from earning as much as men.

Democrats were on the offensive for Equal Pay Day, when President Obama issued executive orders to prohibit federal contractors from retaliating against employees who choose to discuss their compensation and to collect information from federal contractors on pay broken down by sex and race.

“For the last few days, you’ve heard it, you’ve heard it, and you’ve heard it. I’m going to repeat it today. In America, a man who works the same job a woman has makes more money than she does. It takes a woman until today every year to make up for what she lost last year,” Reid said.

“So my Republican colleagues, I guess, think that pay gap doesn’t matter that much since I had not a single person come to the floor — well, we’ve had a couple. One of them came and said it was a bill for trial lawyers,” he continued. “But basically they do nothing but stand in the background and filibuster. I get it. Two Congresses ago, they did it last Congress, and they’re doing it this Congress, filibustering our moving to this important piece of legislation.”

Reid spoke of the Paycheck Fairness Act, which comes to the floor Wednesday with heavy opposition from Republicans.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/rip-peace-process/?print=1
Why is it that Mr. Speyer, like almost all commentators on the moribund “peace process” has to end with the following tripe ?: “Israel will and should continue to make clear to both the PA leadership and to Jordan that it is willing to reach a solution based on partition with appropriate security guarantees, or a long term interim accord if this proves impossible.” In other words the so called peace process is not dead…just resting?…..rsk

The April 29th deadline has not yet been reached, but it may be said with confidence that the initiative by Secretary of State John Kerry to revive the ‘peace process’ between Israelis and Palestinians has already reached its final destination: failure.

The failure of this initiative was obvious from the beginning. To everyone except, apparently, Kerry himself. This reality lent an element of low farce to the entire proceedings.

By now, it should really be obvious to any serious observer that there is no chance that the Israeli-Palestinian negotiating process will produce a comprehensive peace between the two sides.

There are two core reasons for this. One of them is of long-standing, the other is a development of the last decade.