RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4766/a_nation_through_its_faith

Daniel Johnson is the Editor of Standpoint

It is easy to denigrate democracy while enjoying its benefits as Israel knows all too well. And it seems that Herzl’s dream of a Judenstaat, a Jewish state, is still not fully accepted in Europe

In My Crazy Century, an excellent new memoir by the Czech writer Ivan Klíma (Grove Press, £16.99), the author recalls a visit to Britain in the mid-1960s. As a journalist on the magazine Literární noviny he took full advantage of the slight thaw that preceded the Prague Spring in 1968, soon to be crushed by the Soviet invasion.

In London Klíma went to see the Leftist guru Isaac Deutscher, politely explaining that as a Czech Jew he had “barely survived one bloody dictatorship only to begin serving another” — hence his efforts to promote democratic reform.

Deutscher would have none of it, proposing instead the slogan: “Never return to the old democracies but do return to the regenerated Soviets of the people’s representatives.” Klíma was aghast: “He was recommending this to me, someone who

It is easy to denigrate democracy while enjoying its benefits. This phenomenon is most obvious in relation to Israel, still the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/how-maddows-msnbc-takeover-dooms-the-left/print/

Liberal media succeeds best when it isn’t identified as such. The reason for that can be seen in numerous polls where Americans of both parties identify themselves with conservative values.

The left is adept at selling its agenda through biased mainstream media coverage, but when it discards the disguise of objectivity on radio or television the end result is shrill, irritating and off-putting.

The playwright and director David Mamet achieved an epiphany while listening to NPR. Unfortunately for NPR the epiphany was that he was no longer a liberal. “I felt my facial muscles tightening,” he described, “and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f___ up.”

The unfiltered left with its onslaught of sanctimonious bleating often brings out that reaction.

It’s why Air America not only couldn’t compete with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other conservative talk radio hosts, but it couldn’t even remain solvent. MSNBC, the bastard child of a ridiculous union between Microsoft and NBC, spent years drifting in search of an identity only to become the new Air America.

Why does the left, which is so adept at putting its agenda across in mainstream media outlets fail spectacularly when it puts away the disguise and begins saying what it really thinks?

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vijeta-uniyal/the-punching-bag-bigots-of-anti-israel-boycotts/print/

Reprinted from TheCommentator.com.

The Italian philosopher and politician Niccolò Machiavelli famously said: “Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception”. After decades of aggression failed to destroy Israel, deception is the “new” game in town.

This deception has a name, or to be precise, a lame sounding acronym — BDS, the campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.

The BDS campaign has two main ingredients — one is deception and the other is another kind of lie. There’s the sinister deception about the campaign’s own true nature, and a blatant lie about the state of Israel.

The otherwise vocal BDS campaign remains eerily silent about its ties and sympathies with terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The campaign lures in faith-based Christian groups, and LBGT community and feminist groups while at the same time hiding its ties with the homophobic and misogynist clerical regime of Iran.

Yes, indeed. The BDS campaign calls for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel, while doing the bidding of its masters in Tehran who offer bounties on the heads of writers abroad and hang poets for penning dissenting verses at home.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/lessons-on-the-new-left-from-the-hanoi-hilton/print/

C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb recently interviewed Lee Ellis, author of Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton. The book is a valuable primer on history that many Americans have forgotten or not know only in part. Leading with Honor is also an introduction to characters all Americans should get to know better, such as Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. Ellis came to know the pair under different circumstances.

In November of 1967 Ellis was shot down on a mission to destroy the guns that protected the Quang Khe ferry that supplied the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In the Hoa Lao prison, which POWs dubbed the Hanoi Hilton, Ellis learned firsthand about North Vietnam and its systematic torture of American POWs. As the author notes, the North Vietnamese tortured more than 95 percent of American POWs including eight tortured to death. Ellis describes the “Pretzel,” one of the regime’s favorite tortures:

After the prisoner’s legs were tied together, his arms were laced tightly behind his back until the elbows touched and the shoulders were virtually pulled out of joint. Then the torturer would push the bound arms up and over the head, while applying pressure with a knee to the victim’s back. During the torture, the circulation is cut off and the limbs to go sleep but the joint pain continues to increase as the ligaments and muscles tear. When the ropes are finally removed, circulation surges back into the “dead” limbs, causing excruciating pain.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/169426 Are we more “polarized” and “partisan” than we were in the past? Political commentators think so. In a recent Atlantic profile, conservative pollster Frank Luntz attributed his cynicism about American politics to the unprecedented polarization of the American people he has seen in his recent work with focus groups. They are “contentious and argumentative,” don’t “listen […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/an-al-jazeera-anchors-bloody-call?f=puball

A prominent Al Jazeera anchor with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood issued a statement praising the murders of police officers and advocating attacks on journalists who stand with Egypt’s current government.

Ahmed Mansour’s statement was reported Saturday on the Brotherhood’s own web site, Ikhwan Online. It blamed police and journalists for supporting last summer’s military intervention which ousted President Mohamed Morsi – the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate – from office just one year into his term.

Those who “retaliate against the criminal officers, are the ones who will help in overthrowing the coup,” Mansour’s statement said, according to Ikhwan Online. “They are those which will destroy the economy of the coup. They are those which will decisively prevent the return of tourism.”

A suicide bomber killed four people and injured 14 more last week in an attack on a tourist bus and an Egyptian police conscript was shot in the leg during an attempted ambush.

Mansour’s statement also criticized “the treasonous media” for siding with the military in toppling Morsi last July. The military violently quashed protest camps demanding Morsi’s return to power, killing hundreds of people.

“Considering the media partners in all the massacres is correct, and their being punished at the hands of the movements today is not a terrorist act, but act of heroism,” Mansour’s statement said.

The article was quickly removed by the Brotherhood, however, and Mansour denies making the statement. He claims that he is being set up by Egypt’s military government.

“Coup agencies misled dozens of news sites, including Ikhwan Online [the Muslim Brotherhood] by spreading an article in my name, with incitement to murder,” Mansour wrote on Twitter Sunday. “I proclaim my innocence of this prattle.”

Tricking the Brotherhood would be quite an accomplishment. Mansour has been identified as a Brotherhood member and has long had close relations with the group.

This is not the first time Mansour claims to have been set up. Days after Morsi’s ouster, the Brotherhood published a report attributed to Mansour which claimed Egypt’s new interim president was a Seventh Day Adventist, “which is a Jewish sect,” the article said.

The new leader wanted to move the Muslim-majority country closer to Christianity, Mansour said.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-wants-to-waste-a-billion-on-climate-change?f=puball

Barack Obama will be remembered for many things during his two terms in office, but high on the list, right after lying to everyone about everything, will be his determination to waste billions of taxpayer dollars on every Green scheme from solar and wind energy to electric cars, and now on “climate change.”

He is calling for a billion-dollar climate change fund in his forthcoming budget, due out next month. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the fund “would be spent on researching the projected effects of climate change and helping Americans prepare for them, including with new technology and infrastructure, according to the White House.

We don’t need any research and we don’t need any new technology. The National Weather Service has hugely expensive computers that enable it to predict what the weather will be anywhere in the U.S. with some measure of accuracy for up to three or four days. After that, it gets fuzzy. What will the weather be next week? Well, maybe a bit warmer or a bit colder.

As for the effects of weather events, we have centuries of knowledge regarding this. We know what happens after a blizzard or a hurricane, a drought or a flood.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/can-ukraine-avoid-partition?f=puball

I wish it were as easy as goodies against baddies, students against secret policemen, democrats against autocrats. In the early stages of an uprising – what we might call the Arab Spring Phase – Western media, wanting to simplify things for their readers, gloss over the complexities. Later, when things turn tragic, those readers can be left baffled.

Don’t get me wrong. Viktor Yanukovych was a nasty piece of work, whose goons carried out unspeakable crimes. My sympathies were with the protesters, both in general (the vision of a pluralist, market-oriented Ukraine is more wholesome than that of a country tied to Putin) and on the specific issue that triggered the demonstrations (a free trade agreement is better than a customs union, because it is non-exclusive).

But the ousting of a thug doesn’t mean that “all shall be well / and all manner of thing shall be well”. This is, after all, not the first time that Yanukovych has been toppled by street protests. Ten years ago, crowds in the same places pushed him from office and, in new elections, installed their candidate, Viktor Yuschenko. Years of corruption and failure followed, and Yanukovych came back, in an election that observers agreed had been free and fair, in 2010.

Ukraine means “edge” or “borderland” (Krajina in the former Yugoslavia shares its etymology). To Russian nationalists, Kiev is the cradle of Russian nationhood, and Ukrainians are the Little Russians who, along with the White Russians and the Great Russians, comprised the historic motherland. Plenty of Russians will tell you that Ukrainian is a Russian dialect and Ukrainian national identity a creation of, first, Polish and, later, Austrian occupiers. They point to the many famous Russians who might as easily be called Ukrainian – Gogol, Tchaikovsky, Brezhnev – arguing that the distinction is synthetic and pointless.

Muhammad Ali Mocks Obama’s Iran policy

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/muhammad-ali-mocks-obamas-iran-policy

In an Iranian mosque with hundreds of worshipers present and thousands more watching on television, he denigrated the United States and urged his listeners to chant “Death to America.”

He called America’s leaders liars.

He mocked U.S. President Barack Obama for “constantly threatening us that the military option is on the table. Iran laughs at these threats … We know that the military threats that all options are on the table serve America’s domestic interests … They don’t have the guts to do it and they know it.”

This was the Feb. 14 sermon — not of the famous boxer Muhammad Ali — but of Ayatollah Muhammad Ali Movahedi-Kermani.

A boxing metaphor seems appropriate as Iran’s leadership uses the United States’ leadership as a punching bag.

Teddy Roosevelt’s approach to foreign policy, famously quoted as “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” counseled not to threaten verbally but leave no doubt force will be used if necessary.

Despite the ayatollah’s protestations, Obama has embraced a foreign policy with Iran 180 degrees out of sync with Roosevelt’s, endeavoring to “speak softly and carry no stick.”

Iranians fear Obama as much as they do “Pee Wee Herman.”

http://pamelageller.com/2014/02/muslim-group-boko-haram-continues-bloody-rampage-slaughters-37-christian-college-coordinated-attacks.html/

From my E-pal Dr. JHA: ”

And, unlike the conservative/libertarian media, the Leftist press and its PC minions utter no outrage, demonstrate nowhere, demand no revulsion from again silent Muslim leaders in regard to these atrocities,
time after time after time from the ‘Religion of Peace’.. Their silence is deafening….
But woe betides Israel when it mistakenly harms a single Arab — a flood of howling protest erupts…Shame!”

Daily carnage in the cause of Islam — every day. More gruesome, more bloody, and the West naval gazes and chants huminah huminah huminah-islamo-phobia *hiccup* Adamawa attack:death toll rises to 33, many missing The City Reporters The death toll of insurgents attack on Michika and Madagali local government areas of Adamawa has risen to 33 persons according to local sources. A source at Shuwa said when the [Muslims] struck in the village they opened fire.

Yesterday this same