RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/02/16/sympathy-for-the-european-devil/?print=1

European Parliament President Martin Schulz provoked an uproar last week in a speech before Israel’s Knesset, citing in passing a Palestinian claim that Israelis get four times as much water as Arabs in Judea and Samaria. The Jewish Home party delegation (led by my favorite Israeli politician, Naftali Bennett) walked out on the German politician in protest; Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz called the protest “disproportionate.” In this case I think Steinitz is right: Schulz is not an anti-Semite. He’s the sort of German who loves Israel in a peculiarly German way. By and large, Germans do not hate Israel; on the contrary, they love to love the Israeli left. They really, truly, sincerely want to be philo-Semitic (that brings to mind the old definition of a philo-Semite: an anti-Semite who likes Jews). The Germans are post-Christian and post-nationalist. In more than forty years of traveling (and occasionally living) in Germany I have not met a single German who can abide religion, except for full-time clergy. Their experience of nationalism, like the experience of most Europeans, has been unrelentingly horrible. They cannot help but identify with the “post-Zionist,” existentially addled Angst of the Israeli Left.

Zeruya Shalev, the Israeli novelist who dissects the disordered lives of disappointed utopians, is a bestseller and a cultural icon in Germany. Her last book was the subject of a gushing review by Adam Kirsch, book critic for the Jewish webzine Tablet and a stalwart at The New Republic. Every major German news publication has profiled or interviewed Ms. Shalev. In 2011, the popular weekly Stern asked her whether the then-ongoing “social justice” protests portended a “New Israel,” that is, an Israel more to the liking of Stern and Ms. Shalev; the Israeli writer was hopeful. The German interviewer simply took for granted that Stern’s readers would identify with the lefty literati against the Netanyahu government. Shalev writes the sort of introspective fiction that I find less tolerable than gum surgery; the great Israeli novelist in my view was the Nobelist S.Y. Agnon, whose masterwork Only Yesterday is not available in German translation. It is a wrenching, difficult book first published in Hebrew in 1945, and I am not surprised that the German public would avoid it. Today’s Germans have sensibilities hardly distinguishable from those of Adam Kirsch and prefer the Freudian meanderings of Ms. Shalev. (Of course, I’m the wrong person to ask about such things. I don’t like fiction.)

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/in-their-own-words

In an unusual move, one of the suspects in the 2012-13 Via Railway terror plot has been allowed to give an interview to the Canadian National Post. That interview is remarkable because it explains the jihadist motivations behind the plot in clear and unambiguous language that leaves no room for doubt about “why they hate us.” Those who would confront and defeat this hate and the terror plots it inspires would do well to listen to the words of Chiheb Esseghaier.

Esseghaier was a Tunisian doctoral student at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, a branch of the Université de Quebec and a landed immigrant who’d come to Canada in 2008. His travel to Zahedan, in eastern Iran, caught the attention of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which launched a complex investigation that eventually led to the unraveling of a joint al-Qa’eda-Iran plot to blow up a passenger train over the Niagara River gorge. Esseghaier and fellow suspect, Raed Jaser (from the United Arab Emirates), were arrested in the conspiracy and now face terror charges in Canadian court. Over the months since their April 2013 arrest, Esseghaier has made a number of court appearances as well as public statements, of which the recent National Post interview includes just the latest.

Although thanks to good intelligence and police work, Canada to date has been spared the kind of horrific terror attacks that have made headlines elsewhere in the West (Burgas, London, Madrid, U.S.), there have been jihadist attempts, including the August 2010 Ottawa Parliament plot and the earlier 2006 Toronto 18 plot. National Post coverage of the Via Railway terror plot has been extensive and its multiple reports quoting the very vocal Esseghaier are revealing, even though it is clear the Post itself doesn’t understand what he’s been trying to tell them. Faced with the reality that their country, too, is a target, Canadians have been struggling to make sense out of Esseghaier’s simple pronouncement: “I am a Muslim.” The so-called “experts on extremism” consulted by the National Post weren’t much help: Prof. Lorne Dawson, ex-director of the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, opined that Esseghaier’s views were “very comparable to what one might hear from a strident anti-abortion activist coming from a Christian perspective.”

THIS GARBAGE WAS PUBLISHED IN (AL)-HA-ARETZ, ISRAEL’S EQUIVALENT OF A PORNO DAILY WITHOUT THE PICTURES. AND, SPEAKING OF PICTURES, EVA ILLOUZ IS THE PRESIDENT OF BEZALEL ACADEMY OF ART AND DESIGN- ONE OF THOSE ISRAELI CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS THAT RECEIVES A GREAT DEAL OF FUNDING FROM GENEROUS WEALTHY PATRONS WHO DEVOUTLY AVOID POLITICS. THIS RANT IS ARTLESS AND DESIGNED TO MALIGN ISRAEL AND SHE SHOULD BE DISMISSED AS PRESIDENT… RSK

http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/.premium-1.572880

47 years a slave: A new perspective on the occupation: Very few struggles in history have centered on how a nation should treat a third group of people, but there are strong parallels between black slavery and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Open Haaretz on any given day. Half or three quarters of its news items will invariably revolve around the same two topics: people struggling to protect the good name of Israel, and people struggling against its violence and injustices.

An almost random example: On December 17, 2013, one could read, on a single Haaretz page, Chemi Shalev reporting on the decision of the American Studies Association to boycott Israeli academic institutions in order to “honor the call of Palestinian civil society.” In response, former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers dubbed the decision “anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intent.”

On the same page, MK Naftali Bennett called the bill to prevent outside funding of left-wing NGOs in Israel “too soft.” The proposed law was meant to protect Israel and Israeli soldiers from “foreign forces” which, in his view, work against the national interest of Israel through those left-wing nonprofits (for Bennett and many others in Israel, to defend human rights is to be left-wing). The Haaretz editorial, backed by an article by regular columnist Sefi Rachlevsky, referred to the treatment of illegal immigrants by the Israeli government as shameful, with Rachlevsky calling the current political regime “radical rightist-racist-capitalist,” because “it tramples democracy and replaces it with fascism.” The day after, it was the turn of Alan Dershowitz to call the American Studies Association vote to boycott Israel shameful, “for singling out the Jew among nations. Shame on them for applying a double standard to Jewish universities.”

This mudslinging has become a normal spectacle to the bemused eyes of ordinary Israelis and Jews around the world. But what’s astonishing is that this mud is being thrown by Jews at Jews. Indeed, the valiant combatants for the good name of Israel miss an important point: the critiques of Israel in the United States are increasingly waged by Jews, not anti-Semites. The initiators and leaders of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement are such respected academics as Judith Butler, Jacqueline Rose, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Rose and Larry Gross, all Jews.

If Israel is indeed singled out among the many nations that have a bad record in human rights, it is because of the personal sense of shame and embarrassment that a large number of Jews in the Western world feel toward a state that, by its policies and ethos, does not represent them anymore. As Peter Beinart has been cogently arguing for some time now, the Jewish people seems to have split into two distinct factions: One that is dominated by such imperatives as “Israeli security,” “Jewish identity” and by the condemnation of “the world’s double standards” and “Arabs’ unreliability”; and a second group of Jews, inside and outside Israel, for whom human rights, freedom, and the rule of law are as visceral and fundamental to their identity as membership to Judaism is for the first group. Supreme irony of history: Israel has splintered the Jewish people around two radically different moral visions of Jews and humanity.

If we are to find an appropriate analogy to understand the rift inside the Jewish people, let us agree that the debate between the two groups is neither ethnic (we belong to the same ethnic group) nor religious (the Judith Butlers of the world are not trying to push a new or different religious dogma, although the rift has a certain, but imperfect, overlap with the religious-secular positions). Nor is the debate a political or ideological one, as Israel is in fact still a democracy. Rather, the poignancy, acrimony and intensity of the debate are about two competing and ultimately incompatible conceptions of morality. This statement is less trivial than it sounds.

A Test We Mustn’t Fail* The United States is going through one of those periodic crises, testing a complex and often sclerotic constitutional system. An increasingly diminishing presidency has tried to “transform” the society, and particularly its economy, with draconian measures. One at least, Obamacare, rammed through an absent-minded Congress with a temporary majority of […]

http://acdemocracy.org/?utm_source=America%27s+Commercial+Air+FleetNeeds+Protection+from+Shoulder-Fired+Missiles&utm_campaign=America%27s+Commercial+Air+FleetNeeds+Protection+from+Shoulder-Fired+Missiles&utm_medium=email#sthash.Lqhbeqhn.dpbs

A version of this article, titled “Protect Airliners From SAM Threat” was published on February 17, 2014, in Aviation Week & Space Technology’s Viewpoint section (p. 58).

Speaking at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, former CIA director General David Petraeus issued a serious warning about the international threats posed by shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles (Manpads) in the hands of al Qaeda and other terrorists. Petraeus referred to the January 27th downing of an Egyptian military helicopter by a Russian Strela-2 missile (aka SA-7) by al Qaeda-affiliated Ansar Beit al-Maqdis in the Sinai Peninsula. “Shooting down a helicopter with an apparent shoulder-fired missile is a big deal. … Our worst nightmare [was] that a civilian airliner would be shot down by one,” he said. … “The concern over an attack on civilian aviation flows not only from the loss of passengers’ lives, but also from the likely economic consequences that would follow—a worldwide grounding of air traffic that might bring the global economy to a screeching halt.”

The threat of Manpads in the hands of al Qaeda and terrorist groups has escalated dramatically. After Moammar Gadhafi’s killing by rebels in Libya, on October 20, 2011, some 20,000 Manpads went missing. Months later only 5,000 were reportedly destroyed. Where the remaining 15,000 missiles are is unclear.

While the Obama Administration issued a statement assuring Americans that most of Libya’s weapons, including shoulder-fired Manpads, had been secured, NATO’s then-military committee chairman, Admiral Giampaolo di Paola, was not so sure. His fear that Libyan Manpads could be scattered “from Kenya to Kunduz [Afghanistan]” subsequently materialized.

Libyan, Iranian and possibly Syrian MANPADs found their way to Salafi Bedouins, Hamas and al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups in the Sinai, forcing restriction of Israeli military and civilian air traffic in the area. A year after Gadhafi’s fall, Israeli officials reported that an SA-7 had been fired at one of their military aircraft over the Gaza Strip (AW&ST March 12,2012).

Tomorrow is President’s Day honoring both Abraham Lincoln and George Washington- both great and noble men. Washington, born on February 22, 1732 was a great general and commander in our Revolutionary War and a founding father and first President- in office April 30, 1789 – March 4, 1797.

On August 17, 1790, Moses Seixas, the warden of Congregation Kahal Kadosh Yeshuat Israel, wrote an eloquent letter to the President to welcome him to Newport, Rhode Island:

President George Washington responded:

To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport Rhode Island.

Gentlemen,

While I receive, with much satisfaction, your Address replete with expressions of affection and esteem; I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you, that I shall always retain a grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced in my visit to Newport, from all classes of Citizens.

The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet, from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security. If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and happy people.

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my Administration, and fervent wishes for my felicity. May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig-tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.

G. Washington

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

Islam’s Latest Contributions to Peace “Mohammed is God’s apostle. Those who follow him are harsh
to the unbelievers but merciful to one another” Quran 48:29

2014.02.15 (Kunduz, Afghanistan) – Two civilians are shredded by a Fedayeen suicide bomber.
2014.02.14 (Yadouda, Syria) – Dozens are reported dead following a car bomb attack on a rival mosque.
2014.02.13 (Baghdad, Iraq) – Sunni extremists set off two bombs at a historice market which leave seven dead.
2014.02.13 (Mogadishu, Somalia) – An al-Shabaab car bomb takes the lives of fifteen people at an airport.
2014.02.13 (Pattani, Thailand) – A Buddhist monk and a child of 9 are among five people brought down by a Muslim drive-by shooting.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/college-student-thinks-diversity-of-opinion-requires-not-tolerating-conservative-views/article/2544065

A student at Swarthmore College thinks that in order to ensure that students are “hearing a diversity of opinion,” the institution should “not be tolerating” the “conservative views” of a prominent alumnus.

The student made the comment in reference to a recent discussion between two Princeton professors, Robert George and Cornel West.

“The whole idea is that at a liberal arts college, we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion,” the campus newspaper quotes Erin Ching, who graduates in 2016, as saying. “I don’t think we should be tolerating [George’s] conservative views because that dominant culture embeds these deep inequalities in our society.”

West explained why it’s good for students to hear from people with whom they disagree. “I’m engaging in dialogue so that many people who would come to see [George] and come to see me can be exposed to a variety of perspectives on the issue,” he said at Swarthmore.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/feb/14/gaski-the-liberals-new-mccarthyism/#ixzz2tUB658VT Of all the crimes against standards of decent discourse that we observe in contemporary politics and media, several are congealing into an ugly mass that stifles free expression and civil interchange. In roughly inverse order of dysfunctional magnitude, they are: the tendency for sophists and demagogues to rely on mere unsupported assertion […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ A day after Bill de Blasio’s Tale of Two Cities address in which the wealthy Park Slope resident once again made inequality his focus, the radical pol intervened to spring one of his biggest supporters from prison. The New York Post, a tabloid that unlike the Daily News is much less enamored with the […]