RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sarahhonig.com/2014/04/04/another-tack-the-postulate-of-illegitimacy/

Something strikingly dramatic happened in this country exactly on this day 94 years ago. Cries of Itbach el-Yahud(slaughter the Jews) filled the air. It was the first coordinated mass-murder offensive launched by infamous Jerusalem Mufti Haj-Amin el-Husseini (who would in time become an avid Nazi collaborator, Hitler’s personal guest in Berlin during WWII and a wanted war-criminal).

Ever since, this land shook fitfully as rounds of massacres and wars followed each other in breathless succession. The past mustn’t be consigned to irrelevance. Unbroken historical continuities contextualize current events. Nothing springs forth from a vacuum. What now transpires began back then.

The pivotal murder-drive of 1920 and its aftermath are vital for understanding why John Kerry’s peace pageant is a flop and why Israel so profoundly displeases him, his boss Barack Obama and their pet-Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas. It established the prototype whereby Jews are punished for Arab crimes against Jews. It highlights the pattern of appeasing Arab wrath and of Jews paying – as if Jewish existence is in and of itself a casus belli.

The bias maddeningly came into play already in 1920. It’s the bias that has today burgeoned into the escalating extortion and shameless expectation that Israel release convicted murderers as a matter of course and injure its own interests to keep its enemies sweet. It’s as if Israel has no valid interests, no rights. This is the postulate of illegitimacy.

Western antipathy to Jewish self-preservation was already gallingly evident in 1920, as was indulgent acquiescence to Arab aggression. It’s scary to realize how little has actually changed.

Those deadly landmark rampages were kick started on April 4, 1920, exploiting Muslim celebrations to rally thousands of raiders at Nebi Musa in the Judean Desert. Serially inflamed by Husseini’s vitriolic harangues, they poured into Jerusalem, descended upon the Old City’s Jewish Quarter and began butchering, raping, pillaging and burning – all in the name of their God.

The premeditated atrocity lasted four days. Even passing reflections on its overlooked anniversary (it’s so uncool to recall crimes against Jews), can contribute considerably to our present-day perspectives.

This unprovoked killing-spree was launched before any of the excuses for Arab bloodlust – now so conveniently and commonly cited – had existed. There was no Jewish state to fulminate against and no Israeli occupation with which to justify any outrage against Jews in the Jewish homeland.

There was no hint of what the Palestinians market so effectively as their nakba – catastrophe. There wasn’t a single Arab refugee. There was no war, no displacement, no reason to rage.
Jewish victims of the 1920 Nebi Musa Massacre- Jerusalem’s ancient community was deemed fair game

Jewish victims of the 1920 Nebi Musa Massacre- Jerusalem’s ancient community was deemed fair game

The 1920 victims were largely members of the old-time, traditional, pre-Zionist Jewish community that had long before then constituted Jerusalem’s outright majority. Yet this ancient community was deemed fair game. The subtext was that Jews have no rights – not even indigenous non-Zionists.

Considering their penchant for distorting history, Israel’s detractors are doubtless tempted to describe 1920’s predators as oppressed Palestinian peasants protesting against usurper Jews. It must, therefore, be a whopping downer to discover that none of this homicidal fury was unleashed on behalf of Palestine. The Arabs loathed the very name introduced to this country by its new British overlords.

Ironically, it was the Jews who became known throughout the first half of the 20th century as Palestinians and it was the Arabs who scornfully rejected the moniker.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4248/abbas-kerry-beg

Abbas is convinced that it is only a matter of time before U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry rushes back to the region in yet anther desperate effort to “salvage the peace process.”

In recent weeks, according to Palestinian officials, Kerry has literally been “begging” Abbas to agree to an extension of the peace talks after the end of April.

Abbas and the Palestinian Authority leadership have concluded that the Obama Administration is prepared to do almost anything to show some kind of “victory” in the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis. Palestinian demands therefore have continued to increase almost every day.

Palestinian Authority [PA] leader Mahmoud Abbas is now waiting to see what the U.S. Administration will offer him in return for refraining from pursuing his bid to join various international treaties and institutions.

In recent weeks, according to Palestinian officials, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has literally been “begging” Abbas to agree to the extension of the peace talks after the end of April.

Hours after Abbas signed the applications for joining a number of international bodies and treaties, he received an urgent phone call from Kerry asking him to refrain from further moves that could “derail” the peace process.

Abbas is convinced that it is only a matter of time before Kerry rushes back to the region in yet another desperate effort to “salvage the peace process.”

On Wednesday night, Abbas and the PA leadership received the first sign that the U.S. Administration was nervous and confused following the PA’s surprise decision to join 15 international organizations and treaties.

Kerry’s envoy, Martin Indyk, invited Chief PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat and Israeli Justice Minister Tsipi Livni to an emergency meeting in Jerusalem to find ways of preventing the “collapse” of the peace talks in the wake of Abbas’s decision to apply for the memberships.

http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Hidden-agenda-Palestinian-plans-to-free-Barghouti-347388?prmusr=JeGWAfSusoKd0FDJQi0mWFFI3vvIklNyejLwz3JeUDFDUAS6mfdNaIZdzQ6R4XBa
This Palestinian terrorist leader, is unrepentant, still a sworn enemy of the United States, irremediable, and utterly refractory.

In 2004, an Israeli court sentenced Fatah terrorist Marwan Barghouti to five life sentences, plus forty years in jail. This sentence was imposed after the court had found him guilty of orchestrating multiple suicide attacks against Israeli civilians during the then-raging intifada. Although Palestinians still generally regard him as a Nelson Mandela type of “freedom-fighter,” Barghouti is anything but heroic. Rather, as a leader of the insidiously murderous Tanzim, he was, at the time of his capture by Israeli Special Forces on April 15, 2002, one of the world’s most wanted criminals.

Now, as the next negotiated deadline for additional Israeli terrorist releases comes due, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has reportedly asked the Obama Administration to mediate with Jerusalem. The objective of any such inquiry is to include Barghouti among those other prisoners soon to be freed. Last year, under great pressure from Mr. Obama, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to free 104 Palestinian prisoners as a gesture of “good will,” but he had also explicitly excluded Barghouti from this already-unwarranted deal.

Significantly, should Netanyahu decide to soften his position on Barghouti’s release going forward, it would represent not only another conspicuous act of national defilement, but also a palpable infringement of international law. At a minimum, any Barghouti release would elicit further terror attacks upon Israelis, carefully choreographed assaults that would be in prima facie violation of the law of armed conflict.

“No crime without a punishment.” Codified in multiple sources after the Nuremberg Trials, this universal legal principle is so rudimentary, as part of “peremptory” or “jus cogens” law, that it must never be disregarded. Apart from any such formal legal considerations, however, even simple human decency and common principles of morality dictate that a state must never agree to trade away justice and security in exchange for any presumed diplomatic advantage.

Why, exactly, does Barghouti remain so popular among his fellow Palestinians? The answer is revealing. It lies in incontestably widespread respect for his “operational specialty.” This area of “professional” concentration remains the willful maiming and murder of Jewish children.

So much for the Mandela analogy.

When the victorious allied powers first established a special military tribunal at Nuremberg, on August 8, 1945, they reaffirmed an ancient principle of law, Nullum crimen, sine poena. It was that criminals, especially those who had committed crimes of war, crimes against peace, or crimes against humanity, must always be punished.

In 1946, this reaffirmation was further incorporated as Principle I of the authoritative Nuremberg Principles: “Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore, and liable to punishment.” These principles, additionally formulated by the United Nations International Law Commission in 1950, stipulate: “Offenses against the peace and security of mankind…are crimes under international law, for which all responsible individuals shall be punished.”

I have always been very proud of my participation in AFSI. Last night our wonderful Chairman Mark Langfan, whose maps clearly illustrate the existential danger to Israel from any territorial concessions, hosted an evening and lecture by Israel’s finest diplomat…my friend….Yoram Ettinger. His talk included some staggering statistics about the burgeoning birthrate among Israelis and the decline in Arab births within Israel including Judea and Samaria. All these statistics puncture holes in the myth of a “demographic time bomb” that is used to intimidate proper discussion of Israel’s legitimate rights in what sissies still call “The West Bank.”

However, it was something else that Ambassador Yoram Ettinger said that resonated with me. By “normative” statistical standards- given the centuries of oppression, dislocation, expulsion, torture, murder, and genocide- Jews should be extinct. One in every three Jews in the entire world was exterminated during the Holocaust. But, as Yoram Ettinger stated we seem to defy the word and definition of “normative.” Not only have we survived, but Israel is now a powerhouse- in economy, technology, science, medicine, culture, standard of living, education and social institutions- all in the land where it all started.

Now that is something to ponder as we approach Passover. Thank you Yoram Ettinger and thank you Mark Langfan.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/north-koreanot-your-fathers-battlefield-anymore

As North Korea attempted to trigger an international incident by firing 500 artillery rounds into the Yellow Sea-of which about 100 crossed over into South Korean territorial waters-the South responded with about 300 rounds of its own. This incident comes on the heels of Pyongyang’s warning it will soon conduct another nuclear test.

Incidents such as this support the U.S. effort to supply the South with some very advanced weapons armament.

During its late 1951/early 1952 deployment off the coast of North Korea during the Korean war, the battleship USS WISCONSIN (BB-64)-representing the Navy’s longest range gunfire support ship-received fire from an enemy artillery battery hidden in defilade atop a hill.

The North Koreans had made use of the far side of the hill to afford them protection from the ship’s 16-inch guns. While the enemy was well within the battleship’s twenty-four mile range, WISCONSIN was unable to elevate its massive gun barrels to achieve the proper trajectory to hit the battery in its defilade position.

But, determined to silence the enemy battery, the ship shifted to Plan B. It continuously fired its 2000-plus pound rounds at the hilltop until it was leveled. Eventually denied its topographical protection, the battery was left exposed to WISCONSIN’s final fatal fire.

Long gone now are those huge explosive shells and the battlewagons that could fire them.

North Korea’s topography is 80% mountainous. Taking advantage of such terrain, should war erupt again, would be an obvious part of Pyongyang’s battle plan. Whenever possible, it would seek to use the terrain to its tactical advantage.

There is also a level of stubbornness, or ignorance, among North Korean military leaders to rely on past battlefield tactics, even when they have become outdated by new technology.

This was evident when-unknown to Americans at the time-the North Koreans pressed the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war to allow Pyongyang to send a squadron of pilots to study U.S. air combat tactics by engaging American pilots. Initially, the Vietnamese were reluctant to do so but after mounting pressure, Hanoi finally acquiesced.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374856/print

No place on the planet is as beautiful and as naturally rich as California. And few places have become as absurd.

Currently, three California state senators are either under felony indictment or already have been convicted.

State senator Leland Yee (D., San Francisco) made a political career out of demanding harsher state gun-control laws. Now he is facing several felony charges for attempting to facilitate gun-running. One count alleges that Lee sought to provide banned heavy automatic weapons to Philippines-based Islamic terrorist groups.

State senator Ron Calderon (D., Montebello), who had succeeded one brother, Thomas, in the state assembly and was succeeded by another, Charles, now faces felony charges of wire fraud, bribery, money laundering, and falsification of tax returns.

State senator Roderick Wright (D., Inglewood) originally entered politics as a champion of social justice. Not long ago, the Democratic leaders of the California senate in secretive fashion paid $120,000 in taxpayer funds to settle a sexual-harassment suit against Wright. This time around, not even his fellow senators could save Wright, who was convicted earlier this year on eight felony counts of perjury and voter fraud.

What is the common denominator between all three California senators — aside from the fact that they are still receiving their salaries?

One, they are abject hypocrites who campaigned against old-boy insider-influence peddling so they could get elected to indulge in it.

Two, they assumed that their progressive politics shielded them from the sort of public scrutiny and consequences that usually deter such deplorable behavior.

Criminal activity is the extreme manifestation of California’s institutionalized progressive hypocrisy. Milder expressions of double standards explain why California has become such a bizarre place.

The state suffers from the highest combined taxes in the nation and nearly the worst roads and schools. It is home to more American billionaires than any other state, but also more impoverished residents. California is more naturally endowed with a combination of gas, oil, timber, and minerals than any other state — with the highest electricity prices and gas taxes in the nation.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374884/print

Last week I invoked the case of a 14-year-old Brooklyn boy arrested for shooting another teenager, in making the claim that behavioral differences, not racism, drive the disparity between black and white student suspensions. The Obama administration had released its latest school-discipline data on March 21, showing that black students are suspended at three times the rate of white students. The civil-rights industry predictably greeted this information as yet more proof that schools are biased against black students. The day before the federal data were published, eighth-grader Kahton Anderson had opened fire on a Brooklyn bus when several members of a rival “crew” (a localized mini-gang) got on; an innocent 39-year-old father was fatally shot in the head.

Anderson was relevant to the school-discipline debate as an emblem of the pathological urban culture that is manifested both in the black crime rate and in classroom misbehavior. “The chance,” I wrote last week, that Anderson was “a model pupil, quietly paying attention in class and not disturbing his fellow students and teacher, was close to zero.” That statement proved prescient. A fuller picture of Anderson’s school behavior is now in. It is exactly what one would expect.

According to the New York Times, Anderson

was frequently in trouble. Sometimes it was for violating the school’s uniform code or disrespectful chatter in class. . . . Sometimes it was worse: He had a sealed arrest from 2011, and often, high-school-age members of a crew students knew as “R&B” or “RB’z” — the initials stand for “Rich Boys” — loitered outside the school, waiting to fight him.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374887/print
Gawker’s Adam Weinstein suggests arresting those on the “wrong side” of the climate-change debate.

Finally, someone has come up with a way to settle the debate over climate change: Put the people on the wrong side of the argument in cages.

A writer for the website Gawker recently penned a self-described “rant” on the pressing need to arrest, charge, and imprison people who “deny” global warming. In fairness, Adam Weinstein doesn’t want mass arrests. (Besides, in a country where only 44 percent of Americans say there is “solid evidence” of global warming and it’s mostly due to human activity, you can’t round up every dissenter.) Fact-checking scientists are spared. So is “the man on the street who thinks Rush Limbaugh is right. . . . You all know that man. That man is an idiot. He is too stupid to do anything other than choke the earth’s atmosphere a little more with his Mr. Pibb burps and his F-150’s gassy exhaust.”

But Weinstein’s magnanimity ends there. Someone must pay. Weinstein suggests the government simply try the troublemakers and spokespeople. You know, the usual suspects. People like Limbaugh himself as well as ringleaders of political organizations and businesses that refuse to toe the line. “Those malcontents must be punished and stopped.”

Weinstein says that this “is an argument that’s just being discussed seriously in some circles.” He credits Rochester Institute of Technology philosophy professor Lawrence Torcello for getting the ball rolling. Last month, Torcello argued that America should follow Italy’s lead. In 2009, six seismologists were convicted of poorly communicating the risks of a major earthquake. When one struck, the scientists were sentenced to six years in jail for downplaying the risks. Torcello and Weinstein want a similar approach for climate change.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4245/come-get-us

The entire purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter possible threats to the United States, especially the use of nuclear weapons against us by a major nuclear-armed state. They are primarily weapons of “war prevention” rather than “war fighting.”

Destroying a mere 10 targets would be a far less daunting task than taking on the 567 American nuclear assets an adversary has to fear today. Why would anyone make it easier for our enemies to target U.S. nuclear forces? The Global Zero study even admitted this critical flaw. What assessment has been done by Global Zero to determine that the world is going to be a lot less dangerous then?

In the latest proposed defense budget, a preview of which had been discussed a day earlier by DOD leaders at the Pentagon, on February 26, 2014, Doyle McManus of the LA Times took Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to task for not slashing the funding for the US nuclear deterrent.

McManus concluded that U.S. nuclear deterrent forces can be dramatically curtailed through a series of sleight-of-hand moves mixed in with a mash of disarmament happy talk, including cooking the books on the relevant nuclear numbers based almost entirely on a 2012 report by an organization known as “Global Zero.”

McManus began with the claim that, “Almost every expert on nuclear weapons agrees that the United States has a far larger nuclear force than it needs to deter attacks,” including more warheads and platforms upon which the warheads are carried. He then reassures his readers that the U.S. has even more nuclear weapons than our main adversary Russia, so there apparently is nothing to worry about.
What are the facts?

It is true that Russia does not publish exact date on its nuclear forces. Two arms control experts, Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists and Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defense Council, explain “Russia does not disclose how many nuclear weapons it has….[we] use public statements made by Russian officials, newspaper articles, observations from commercial satellite images, private conversations with government officials, and analysis of Russian nuclear forces over many years to provide the best available unclassified estimate of Russian nuclear forces.”[1]

With those caveats in mind, they place Russian nuclear warheads — deployed on platforms, in reserve and awaiting dismantlement, at 7800 while U.S. warheads are estimated to be 7400.

While the U.S. and Russia both will deploy roughly an equal number of warheads on their long-range strategic systems as required by the New Start Treaty of 2010, Russia has a major advantage in smaller-yield nuclear weapons. These are generally thought to be mated to shorter-range delivery systems, often referred to as “tactical nuclear weapons” for which there are no arms control limits.

Even the current estimates of greater numbers of Russian tactical nuclear weapons assume we are not underestimating Moscow’s nuclear stockpile which we did throughout the Cold War.[2]

This Russian advantage was highlighted in an essay by the former Commander of the US Strategic Command and the top military authority over America’s nuclear deterrent, retired Admiral Richard Mies. In the Spring 2012 issue of Undersea Warfare Magazine, dedicated to the nuclear strategic deterrent mission[3], the retired admiral explained Russia’s warhead advantage — that could actually be as great as four to one — by highlighting the US elimination of most of its tactical nuclear warheads and our countries lack of warhead production capacity, which contrasts sharply with Russia’s many thousands of theater nuclear weapons it has kept in its stockpile and its robust warhead production capability.

Given current Russian aggression against Ukraine, and its massing of 20,000 troops on Ukraine’s eastern border,[4] the US-Russian nuclear balance may be a critical aspect of whether hostilities break out between Ukraine and Russia.

McManus however appears to make light of Russian nuclear modernization. He references comments from Brookings Institute arms control expert Steven Pifer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, who explains away Russian nuclear weapons modernization as indicative only that “Putin needs the political support of the small towns in Russia that produce military equipment.”

McManus also similarly leads us to believe that it is only members of the U.S. Congress “from missile states” who support the nuclear missiles making up our nuclear Triad for land, sea and air because they provide jobs in their states.

He does bow briefly in the direction of “fairness,” with an aside that representatives in Congress “might” be motivated by “honest differences in strategy,” but in his essay, that remark is the only indication that there might indeed be reasonable differences in strategy among Americans concerning their nuclear deterrent future.

As explained by leading nuclear expert Dr. Mark Schneider[5], Russia has adopted a nuclear weapons use doctrine that allows for the first use of nuclear weapons in local and regional wars not only in response to WMD attack but also in a conventional war. Schneider underscores that it was Putin who was directly responsible for this doctrine when he was National Security Council Secretary in the 1990s. He signed the policy into law as acting President of Russia in 2000.

This doctrine even goes so far as to view the first use of nuclear weapons in a crisis as a “de-escalation of a conflict.” Additionally, Russia employs various types of nuclear attack threats as a means of intimidating its neighbors. Since 2007, there have been about 15 overt Russian nuclear targeting threats from senior officials, including four from Putin.

Then McManus, having assumed Russia has fewer nuclear warheads than America (highly certain a false assumption) and that Russian arms modernization is largely due to retail politics and not a hostile intent against the US or its allies (again a highly dubious assumption), endorses the Global Zero 2012 report.[6]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4246/uk-sharia-law

The question of what constitutes “voluntary” remains. Could the state ever have confidence that a woman whose marital problems were put before a Sharia court actually “volunteered” for this process, or avoided it, or would have any say whatsoever in accepting the court’s judgement? In reality, the woman never stood a chance.

If we are indeed seeing the beginning of this process, we are far from seeing what lies at the end of it.

What is Sharia and what should be our attitude towards it? These questions, which have intermittently swirled around Britain in recent years, have just re-erupted thanks to a recent story in the Sunday Telegraph.

The story revealed that The Law Society — the body which represents and advises solicitors in England and Wales — has drawn up guidance for its members on how to draw up wills in accordance with Islamic law. The document can be seen here. As the Telegraph pointed out, High Street solicitors in England and Wales will now be assisted in drawing up documents that refuse women an equal share of inheritance and that discounts the potential inheritance of non-believers entirely. Nicholas Fluck, president of The Law Society, told the Sunday Telegraph that the document, which would be recognised by the national courts, would promote “good practice” in applying Islamic principles. The paper claims that this document effectively enshrines Sharia law in the British legal system for the first time.