RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4746/hezbullah_s_al_manar_tv_says_jews_invented_superman_to_conquer_the_world

The powerful Islamist terror group Hezbullah, which aims to destroy Israel, continues to push anti-Jewish hysteria of the most bizarre kind. But you wouldn’t know it from Western media

Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV has recently been pushing propaganda to the effect that the Jews created Superman as part of a plan to control America and then push Jewish goals all over the world, The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has reported.

“[The American Jews] felt rejected by real American society. Therefore, they tried to change society’s opinion of them by inventing cinematic characters that would serve as role models. That’s when it all began. Everybody wanted to be like Superman, the hero from outer space, who could not fit in society as Superman, so he invented a character that was better suited for American society – the feeble, bespectacled Clark Kent,” MEMRI quoted an Al-Manar reporter as saying.

As reported by MEMRI, the segment then moved into a back and forth interview with Professor Farroukh Majidi as follows:

MAJIDI: “If you hit the heart of somebody, the result is short term, but if you hit his brain, then the result is long term.”

REPORTER: “Incidentally, Superman was invented by the Jew, Joe Schuster.”

MAJIDI: “They try to make you believe that what you think comes out of yourself.”

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-fray-Can-Israel-survive-the-Jews-342116
The vindictive, borderline treasonous malevolence of the Left and the inept, borderline imbecilic impotence of the Right are emerging as the gravest threat to the sustainability of Jewish political independence

The right of return of the Palestinians is an integral part of UN Resolution 194… The moral and political injustice of dispossessing the Palestinians in the past shall not be remedied by creating new injustices
– Avraham Burg, “Say a big ‘thank you’ to Martin Schulz,” Haaretz, February 14, 2014

Liberation from Zionism is not a dirty word…. what lies behind Zionism nowadays are interests related to water, real estate… and a huge army hungering to justify its existence… We have to get rid of Zionism…
– Yitzhak Laor, “Get rid of Zionism,” Haaretz, June 3, 2011

We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society… engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities…
– Michael Ben-Yair , “The war’s seventh day,” Haaretz, March 3, 2002

For readers less familiar with the lesser- known protagonists in today’s Israeli socio-political milieu:

Avraham Burg was the speaker of Israel’s parliament, and chairman of the Jewish Agency, son of Yosef Burg, iconic leader of the right-wing National Religious Party that evolved into what is now Bayit Yehudi, headed by Economy Minister Naftali Bennett. Avraham Burg’s mother, Rifka Slonim, daughter of Jacob Joseph Slonim, Ashkenazi rabbi of Hebron, was a survivor of the 1929 Arab massacre of Jews in the city;

Yitzhak Laor is a well-known Israeli poet, author, and journalist, and lectured in the department of literature, Tel Aviv University;

Michael Ben-Yair was attorney-general under the governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. In a 2013 Facebook post, Ben-Yair labeled construction of Jewish communities across the pre-1967 lines “the most evil and immoral act since the Second World War,” deeming them worse than the atrocities of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, the purges during Stalin’s reign of terror and the gory genocide in Darfur.

Bad week for Jewish sovereignty:

The last week or so has been a very bad time for the sustainability of Jewish political independence. It has been even a worse time for intellectual integrity in Israeli politics and a really atrocious time for Jewish solidarity.

Somewhat paradoxically, things got off to a not so bad start last Wednesday, when European Parliament President Martin Schulz gave what was, overall, a rather positive address to a plenary Knesset session that was far more laudatory toward Israel than critical. He was even unequivocally emphatic that “the EU has no intention to boycott Israel.”

But things went seriously awry when Schulz foolishly insinuated that Israel was depriving Palestinians of water, citing wildly inaccurate figures, which he admitted were uncorroborated, and which he had heard in a passing conversation with a Palestinian youth. This incident prompted an irate walkout of the Bayit Yehudi faction.

Of course the “water libel” against Israel is nothing new. Totally unfounded – indeed, outlandish – accusations that it is denying the Palestinians access to adequate water supplies have been leveled against it for years. But in the case of the furor over Schulz’s remarks two points should be made.

Cross-posted from National Review Online, The Corner http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2014/02/iran-nuclear-buildup-and-american-irrelevance The Menendez-Kirk “Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013” (S. 1881) threatens the Iranian regime with additional sanctions and appears to be the only way to counter the Obama administration’s flaccidity vis-à-vis Tehran. I am skeptical, however, that it can do much good. Like the megalomaniacs in […]

  http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14558#.UwmGg4U_VrP A recent January 27, 2014 New Yorker interview of direct, Obama-vetted quotes by President Obama himself describing his Middle East policy is bound to cause a titanic battle between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The specific President Obama quoted statement in the New Yorker interview was: “If we were able to get Iran to […]

The climate change in Japan is really unsettling. I don’t mean the junk science….I mean the cooling relations between Japan and America which are heating up as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe distances himself and national policy away from the United States. John Kerry is busy ricocheting in the Middle East. You see him here and you see him there but nowhere is he on Japan, Korea, Caracas, Ukraine…..

So, one would think that the role of the Ambassadress in Japan would be to smooth things over on the rift. So where is Caroline?

Well, she was busy this past January…..expressing her deep concern at the “inhumaneness” of an annual dolphin hunt carried out by fisherman in Japan, where she serves as U.S. ambassador. ( (http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/20/22366866-ambassador-caroline-kennedy-concerned-by-inhumaneness-of-japan-dolphin-hunt?lite)

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Putin’s little fingers in the Ukraine, Cuban agents in Venezuela and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt all remind us how uniquely vulnerable democracy is totalitarianism. In the United States, cities aren’t burning and streets aren’t filling up with bloodied bodies, but the government of phone and pen also shows us that we are always one election away from losing our freedom.

When a political system becomes polarized between the forces of freedom and the forces of totalitarianism, then the forces of freedom have to win every single election. Meanwhile the totalitarians only have to win one election and then spend the rest of time reconstructing civic institutions, mobilizing thugs and making it structurally impossible for the other side to compete.

Even if the other side occasionally wins elections, the totalitarian process continues chugging along because the totalitarian side follows no rules while holding its opponents to above and beyond the letter of the law. The law constrains the ability of the law-abiding party to undo the work of the totalitarian party, but not the ability of the totalitarian party to pursue its agenda and undo the work of its opponents.

When one side is on a long march through the institutions while the other seeks consensus, the long marchers will win.

A democratic political system in which a leading political faction is totalitarian cannot endure.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ LAWS ARE FOR LITTLE PEOPLE, NOT LIMO LIBERALS When the mayor announced his 62-point safe streets initiative, which includes lowering the speed limit to 25 mph, he said, “We want the public to know that we are holding ourselves to this standard.” As CBS 2′s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday, the mayor’s two-car caravan was […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ TOW BE OR NOT TOE BE                 What this silly little exchange brought home to me once again is how liberals are invested in the appearance of intelligence, something that I wrote about in Manufactured Intelligence. “Intelligence to a modern liberal isn’t depth, it’s appearance. It isn’t […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371660/ted-cruz-oil-man-betsy-woodruff

Houston — “This is oil country, baby!”

It’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon in Beaumont, Texas, an hour and change east of Houston, near the Gulf Coast, and about 40 people are gathered in a square surrounded by the old-timey buildings that make up the Spindletop Gladys City Boomtown Museum. I’m chatting with Kaye Goolsby, the grassroots chair for Senator Ted Cruz’s reelection campaign. The crowd here in oil country — “ohl,” like bowl — is twice what the organizers expected.

The senator is on his way, the topic is compelling, and the setting is almost too perfect: He’ll mount a podium in front of a tall model oil derrick, part of the museum’s exhibits on Texas petroliferous past, to pitch the soon-to-be-filed American Energy Renaissance Act.

At last week’s Heritage Action policy summit, Cruz gave a speech on the bill to a Capitol Hill audience of national journalists and (for lack of a better term) think-tanky types.

The two pitches for his new bill have bookended a messy week. Two days after talking up the legislation at the Heritage Foundation, he attracted a fresh outpouring of vitriol from many Beltway Republicans when he refused to allow a debt-ceiling hike without a politically messy cloture vote.

The night after the vote, he headed back to Texas, where his testy relationship with Senate Republicans has been the object of some humor.

Here’s the story he told the five hundred or so attendees at the Bexar County GOP Lincoln Day Dinner, the night before his Beaumont appearance, hosted in a corporate headquarters over plates of red meat and scalloped potatoes:

“I’m reminded of last fall,” Cruz starts, “when Heidi brought our two girls, Caroline and Catherine, to Washington. Caroline is 5 and Catherine’s 3. Catherine is the sweetest child; she is a ball of love. Caroline is a rascal. It’s how God made her from the moment she was born. I’ll tell you, I was driving the family down to Mount Vernon to see George Washington’s home, had a little bit of down time on Sunday afternoon. And we’re driving along, and Caroline asks her little sister, she says, ‘Catherine, what do you want to be when you grow up?’ Catherine says, ‘I want to work in the U.S. Senate. I want to work with Daddy.’ And Caroline says, ‘Oh, that’s boring! We’re going to be rock stars!’” There’s chuckling in the crowd.

“And then she tossed in the zinger,” Cruz continues. “She said, ‘Besides, Daddy’ll be dead by then!’”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/371707/print

Over the last several weeks, reading news of disorder and upheaval from Venezuela to the Levant to Ukraine to Iraq to Afghanistan, I have thought often of a poem written almost a century ago. Thomas Hardy composed “The Convergence of the Twain” in memory of the sinking of the Titanic. It was published in 1915, three years after the great ship made contact with the deadly iceberg, but reading it today one cannot help experiencing its timelessness, cannot help sharing in its tragic sense of fate.

Hardy’s theme is the vanity and fragility of progress, of technological achievement, of wealth and human power when compared with the immensity and amorality of nature. When I read the poem today however I am drawn to its final stanzas, where Hardy writes of the limits of human foresight, of sudden and unexpected changes in fortune, of the horrible things that can result from the collision of disparate elements. What seems disconnected, separate, foreign, distant, estranged can suddenly cohere in terrible and revelatory events: a Titanic, a Pearl Harbor, a 9/11, a Boston Marathon bombing. I worry that one of those events approaches us now.

Hardy’s poem begins with the image of the Titanic “in a solitude of the sea / Deep from human vanity.” It is a ruin. Frigid waters flow through the “steel chambers” of the engine room, “late the pyres / Of her salamandrine fires.” Beasts of the sea — “grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent” — crawl “Over the mirrors meant / To glass the opulent.” The ornamentation of the cruise liner is dimmed, “bleared and black and blind.” Where human beings once walked, “Dim moon-eyed” fish swim instead. Hardy anthropomorphizes them, has the fish ask, “What does this vaingloriousness down here?” What caused the wreckage?