RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://nsroundtable.org/as-we-see-it/enemy-named/

It looks like the US government has finally named the enemy. So who would that be?

The Muslim Brotherhood, which has infested US government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Pentagon, the State Department, etc? The Russian bear awakened by the stench of a declining America and a weak American president? Or maybe Iran, the world’s #1 sponsor of terrorism and soon-to-be nuclear power? No, the US government has started cracking down on enemy #1… i.e., the Israelis. Not Islamist terrorists, mind you, but Israeli tourists seeking visas to visit the US.

We kid you not. The US State Department has dramatically increased its rejection rate of Israelis seeking visas to visit the US, and expelled Israel from its visa waiver program (see below). You know, the State Department’s visa waiver program, the same program reserved for such stalwart US allies as Saudi Arabia, aka Wahhabi Central, and Qatar, banker to terrorists worldwide.

American Jewry take note: This is the President who received the overwhelming majority of your vote…TWICE. The problem is, as Rev Jeremiah Wright, President Obama’s pastor of 20 years would say, your “chickens are coming home to roost.”

One Week After Russia’s Crimean Invasion, US Imposes Travel Sanctions…Against Israelis-Thomas Rose

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/03/08/One-Week-After-Russia-s-Crimean-Invasion-US-Imposes-Travel-Sanctions-Against-Israelis

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/putins-contempt-for-obama-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Igor Melcuk, a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Montreal and Member of the Royal Society of Canada. A scientist and “reluctant” Soviet dissident, he left the Soviet Union in 1977 after being expelled from the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences because he defended Andrei Sakharov​ in a letter published in The New York Times​.

Prof. Melcuk joined the Gang to discuss Putin’s Contempt For Obama. The discussion occurred in the context of Putin’s Ukraine Gamble. Prof. Melcuk explained what Putin is really after, who and what he really fears, and why he laughs in the Radical-in-Chief’s face:

Don’t miss this week’s other BLOCKBUSTER episode with Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center who runs the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel joined the Gang to discuss Why Lois Lerner Pleaded the Fifth, Obama’s Belief that Abbas is a Peace Angel, Obama’s Helplessness Over the Ukraine, and much, much more:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/reductio-ad-hillaryum/print/

Hillary Clinton has waded into the Ukrainian crisis by invoking history. Referring to Vladimir Putin’s plans to provide passports to Russians outside the nation’s borders, she said:

“Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the ‘30s.”

She continued:

All the Germans that were. . . the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people, and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.

The former First Lady, a likely presidential candidate in 2016, is right about Hitler’s tactics but she ignores the “back in the ’30s” history most applicable to Ukraine. The shot-caller back then was Joseph Stalin, and he set out to crush all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism, as Russian tyrants had done for ages. Stalin had a different plan — known as genocide.

In his forced collectivization campaign, Stalin raised Ukraine’s grain procurement quotas by 44 percent. That meant that there would not be enough grain to feed the people, but to make sure, Stalin also deployed regular troops and secret police units in a merciless war of attrition. And that condemned millions to death by starvation. That is genocide by any standard, but for Stalin it was a big success. As one of his commanders said, it showed the Ukrainians “who is the master here.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-appeasement-leads-to-war/print/

On the shield of the Strategic Air Command a steel mailed fist grips a lightning bolt and an olive branch. The motto of the organization that was the nightmarish obsession of every Cold War leftist was “Peace is our Profession.”

To the moviegoers who sat through Dr. Strangelove, to the earnest leftists who saw the world going up in a puff of atomic smoke because the military industrial complex was obsessed with killing people, to the pseudo-idealists who passed on atomic secrets to Moscow to avoid an American monopoly on the bomb, the SAC’s motto was a demented joke. They knew that the only way to stop war was to disarm.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in the face of relentless pressure from Ronald Reagan, against their fervent opposition, their jeering of SDI defense and their clamor for total appeasement, they did not change their minds. They are even now penning earnest essays in The Nation explaining, as they did of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, that we are the warmongers who are making threatening moves.

In the spring of 2009, Obama delivered a speech in the Czech Republic calling for an end to nuclear weapons. Rather than celebrating the patriotic dedication of Americans throughout the Cold War which had made the freedom of the Czechs possible, he dug up the hoary leftist cliché of how “generations lived with the knowledge that their world could be erased in a single flash of light.”

Obama vowed “to put an end to Cold War thinking”, eliminate nuclear weapons and guarantee the defense of our allies “including the Czech Republic”.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/obama-sides-with-palestinian-rejection-of-the-jewish-state/print/

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has flatly refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Such recognition is a key condition that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded for reaching an acceptable peace agreement on a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

Prime Minister Netanyahu explained the importance of such Palestinian recognition, which would amount to an expression of the Palestinians’ good faith intention to truly end the conflict by accepting Israel’s right of self-determination to once and for all live in peace as the Jewish state its founders envisioned:

“The central question at the end is of course ‘Are you willing to recognize that the state of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish nation?’. If you don’t have the brunt of the agreement, then why turn to the leftovers. Concentrate on the central and difficult questions that they need to provide an answer for, but they don’t provide an answer. If they do give an answer — its negative. They say that they will not recognize a Jewish state in order to leave the right of return on the table. So then what are we even talking about here? That a Palestinian state will be established but it will continue its conflict against the state of Israel with more preferential borders? We are a lot of things, but we are definitely not fools.”

Incredibly, the U.S. State Department backs Abbas’ position. The spokeswoman for the State Department, Jen Psaki, stated in an interview Saturday with the “Al-Quds” newspaper that “[T]here is no need for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The American stance is clear in that it recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, but there is no need for the Palestinians to recognize it as such in a final agreement.”

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303824204579421732340754044?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion&mg=reno64-wsj

How many black people own a broadcast television station in the United States? The answer is one: Armstrong Williams. I know this because he’s a friend.

So imagine my surprise when I heard that the Federal Communications Commission is currently considering pulling the financial rug from under him by changing its regulations to—get this—promote diversity.

The reason for the proposed rules shift is that Mr. Williams’s two television stations operate under a so-called sidecar agreement with a larger broadcast company. Sinclair Broadcasting, the larger, white-owned firm, leverages its clout in the market to get better deals from advertisers for the two stations in return for a percentage of Mr. Williams’ revenues.

This arrangement is not a token deal. Similar agreements are common in the television industry. The difference is that typically all the players are white. Nevertheless, the FCC is proposing new restrictions that would make it harder for broadcast companies to control two stations operating in the same market.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/supplemental/2014/03/two-state-minus/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=2ecf3a11ca-2014_3_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-2ecf3a11ca-41165129

Oh Puleez!…Hillel Halkin is an articulate writer….In the most erudite and elegant prose he straddles every fence….and remains stranded in blatherdom because he always returns to the “legitimate needs” of the Arabs. rsk

I agree with Yoav Sorek that we should look forward to the day when there are no signs in the Land of Israel forbidding Jews to travel in parts of their historic homeland. But we should also look forward to there being no walls, fences, and roadblocks preventing and encumbering Palestinians from traveling in far more extensive parts of their historic homeland. However justified these may be at the present moment by considerations of security, they are surely more of an inconvenience and humiliation to Palestinians Arabs than the ban on travel in Area A is to Israeli Jews.

I point this out not because I wish to engage in the who’s right/who’s wrong debate that has characterized most discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian issue and that characterizes much of Yoav Sorek’s essay. Although I’m an Israeli and happen to think, if not in terms as black-and-white as Sorek’s, that my side has been more right than wrong, that’s not something I expect to convince the other side of. I point it out because any discussion of the problem that does not take into account the legitimate needs of both sides will just keep going around in circles.

Sorek is one of a growing number of people in Israel and elsewhere to argue that the conventional two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be implemented because it does not satisfy these legitimate needs and it must therefore be abandoned in favor of its one-state alternative. With the first half of that proposition, I once again agree. Dividing the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan into an Israel and Palestine that will, like Israel and Egypt, live with little contact on either side of a sealed border requiring passports and visas to cross is not possible. Israelis and Palestinians are not separable like Israelis and Egyptians. They are irreversibly scrambled together, with over a million Palestinians Arabs now living in Israel and over a half-million Israeli Jews in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Moreover, a majority of each people thinks it has a right—if not necessarily an exclusive one—to the entirety of this territory. No approach to the problem that fails to take these facts and feelings into account can work.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/other-russian-crackdown_784284.html On February 24, while Ukrainian protesters were still reveling in their victory over corrupt pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, eight Russians stood in a Moscow courtroom to hear their sentences in a blatant show trial stemming from the last of Moscow’s massive street protests two years ago. Seven men convicted on trumped-up charges of rioting […]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/obama-s-fantasy-based-foreign-policy_784266.html?page=1

On February 23, five days before Russia invaded Ukraine, National Security Adviser Susan Rice appeared on Meet the Press and shrugged off suggestions that Russia was preparing any kind of military intervention: “It’s in nobody’s interest to see violence returned and the situation escalate.” A return to a “Cold War construct” isn’t necessary, Rice insisted, because such thinking “is long out of date” and “doesn’t reflect the realities of the 21st century.” Even if Vladimir Putin sees the world this way, Rice argued, it is “not in the United States’ interests” to do so.

It was a remarkably transparent case of pretending the world is what we wish it to be, rather than seeing it as it is.

On February 28, Russian troops poured into Ukraine. As they did, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart. Kerry briefed reporters after their talk, plainly unaware of the developments on the ground. Kerry said that Russia wants to help Ukraine with its economic problems. Lavrov had told him “that they are prepared to be engaged and be involved in helping to deal with the economic transition that needs to take place at this point.”

Hours later, television screens across the world displayed images of Russian soldiers infiltrating Crimea and Russian artillery rolling through Sevastopol. Obama administration officials told CNN’s Barbara Starr that the incursion was not “an invasion” but an “uncontested arrival” and that this distinction was “key” to understanding the new developments.

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/truth-lies-and-iranian-weapons-shipments/

For Iran’s foreign minister and chief nuclear negotiator Mohammad Javad Zarif, it had to be an awkward moment. There he is, the “moderate” face of Iran, fluent in English, educated in the U.S., jetting around the world telling everyone that Iran will never give up its nuclear facilities — but don’t worry because Iran’s nuclear program is “nothing but peaceful.”

And then the Israelis go and fracture Zarif’s “nothing but peaceful” narrative by interdicting yet another of those big illicit Iranian weapons shipments. On March 5, Israeli commandos board a freighter in the Red Sea, which is heading for Port Sudan after taking on cargo at ports including Iran’s Bandar Abbas.

Onboard they find crates of Syrian-made M-302 rockets, hidden by bags of made-in-Iran cement. They release statements and videos [1], showing the rockets and explaining that they had been tracking this shipment for months — as the rockets were flown from Damascus to Tehran, transported to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, and loaded onto the freighter, a Panama-flagged ship called the Klos C. The Israelis say these rockets were meant to be smuggled overland from Sudan across Sinai and into Gaza, where they would have provided Palestinian terrorists with a game-changing range covering almost all of Israel.

That doesn’t sound peaceful at all. Even worse for Zarif, it comes just as AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is wrapping up its annual meeting in Washington — where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just given a speech warning about the dangerous, aggressive agenda of Iran (read Bridget Johnson’s report here [2]). It illustrates the point.