RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Having run his numbers, this son of Zionist pioneers can’t help marveling at the success—or “miracle,” as he writes—of the Jewish national project.”Zionism’s goal,” he concludes, “was to transfer a people from one continent to another, to conquer a country and assemble a nation and build a state and revive a language and give hope to a hopeless people. And against all odds, Zionism succeeded. If a Vesuvius-like volcano were to erupt tonight and end our Pompeii, this is what it would petrify: a living people. People that have come from death and were surrounded by death but who nevertheless put up a spectacular spectacle of life.”

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304527504579167770239619540?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

In the spring of 1897 a steamer carrying a delegation of 21 British Jews left Port Said, Egypt, for Jaffa—the last leg of its journey to the Holy Land. Leading the pack was Herbert Bentwich, an affluent London lawyer and Zionist leader and the great-grandfather of Ari Shavit, a columnist for the Haaretz newspaper and one of Israel’s most influential political commentators.

In “My Promised Land,” his first book in English, Mr. Shavit charts Israel’s history partly through the lives of his pioneering forebears: His grandfather, Herbert’s son, was a Cambridge-educated pedagogue who helped develop Israel’s education system, while his father was a chemist at the eye of Israel’s nuclear program. The result is roughly equal parts personal and family memoir, Israeli history, and prophecies for the land’s future. It is one of the most nuanced and challenging books written on Israel in years.

Each chapter of “My Promised Land” is a portrait of a time and place (Lydda, 1948; the Alon Shvut settlement, 1975; Gaza Beach, 1991). Mr. Shavit writes of the Bentwich delegation’s fateful journey, of its members touring their hoped-for homeland in white safari suits and cork hats. “Is this colonialism?” he asks. “If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.” Even so, he goes on, “these pilgrims do not represent Europe. On the contrary. They are Europe’s victims.”

Much of the book is told from the perspective of Mr. Shavit himself, from his childhood in the university town of Rehovot through his service as a paratrooper, his headlong jump into Israel’s peace movement and then his partial decampment from it.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/putins-ruthless-power-an-ex-kgb-agent-on-the-glazov-gang/

On this week’s Glazov Gang, Ex-KGB Agent Konstantin Preobraszhensky unveiled Putin’s Ruthless Power. He also tells a disturbing tale about The Betrayal of American POWs in Russia:

Don’t miss this week’s other BLOCKBUSTER episode with Mudar Zahran, a secular Palestinian Leader who admires and supports Israel. He daringly points to the Palestinian homeland in Jordan, denounces the Islamists and calls out the western media for being Israel haters and not caring about the Palestinians:

http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=330928 On Wednesday, after the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court cleared Avigdor Liberman of corruption charges, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said that the not-guilty verdict “ends a persecution that has lasted years.” The state prosecution first announced it was investigating Liberman for alleged graft in 1996. Since then, he was placed under open-ended investigation after open-ended investigation […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/john-kerry-and-saudi-women-driving/print/

For the Left, all cultures are equal, but some cultures are more equal than others.

For instance, in the world of the Left, the West never has a right to say what is right or wrong — when dealing with an adversary culture and regime, that is.

If it’s Israel, you can start shooting right away.

For example, when it comes to Israelis getting out of line and engaging in monstrous behavior like building houses and apartments on their own territory, they must be denounced immediately for that — and pressured relentlessly to desist from such unconscionable activity.

When Israelis have the audacity to imprison Palestinian terrorists who have massacred Israeli innocent civilians, something has to be done fast. And that’s why, on April 24, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry and the Obama administration demanded that Israel release a number of Palestinian terrorists from its prisons — to make the Palestinian Authority happy of course. (P.S.: The P.A. was not pressured to stop its mosques, schools and media outlets from teaching that Israel has no right to exist or that Jews are descended from apes and pigs.)

If Kerry were asked what he thinks of apartheid-era South Africa, which Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has compared Israel to, one just dares to presume that he would say it was a bad thing that blacks were considered second-class citizens — which of course it was. He would, in other words, apply a universal standard of human rights on South Africa and declare that a society that marginalizes and disempowers a certain group of people based on skin color is an inferior society and must civilize itself. And that would be a legitimate position.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/ending-the-war-on-terror/print/

“Calling an end to the “war on terror” is not a solution, because terror is not the enemy – Islamic supremacism is, and it has been a threat to the west for many centuries and isn’t going away overnight, particularly not with Barack Obama in the White House.”

In a piece last week in The Atlantic entitled “Terrorism Could Never Threaten American Values—the ‘War on Terror’ Does,” James Fallows says it’s high time that President Obama shows he understands the truth of that article’s title, and calls to put a stop to the “open-ended ‘Global War on Terror.’”

Fallows, a longtime national correspondent for The Atlantic, has argued at least as far back as 2006 that we had al Qaeda on the run, and that even though its “successor groups in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere will continue to pose dangers… its hopes for fundamentally harming the United States now rest less on what it can do itself than on what it can trick, tempt, or goad us into doing.”

There is some undeniable truth to this. All one has to do is look at how Shoe Bomber Richard Reid, who wasn’t even successful in his attempt to bring down Flight 63 from Paris to Miami twelve years ago, transformed our air travel experience into a tedious, massively bureaucratic and intrusive TSA nightmare, detrimentally impacting our economy in the process (in a succinct summation of Fallows’ argument, famed atheist Richard Dawkins recently tweeted his irritation over what he deemed the pointless idiocy of airport security extremes: “Bin Laden has won.”). And of course, one could look at how terrorist acts have resulted, even more intrusively, in the surveillance state that emerged under George W. Bush and which has metastasized exponentially under Barack Obama.

“But if it saves a few lives…” goes the seemingly reasonable rationale for

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-bad-apple-president/print/ Turn on your television. Keep flipping the channels past the infomercials, the reality shows and the music videos and you’ll hear it. The problem only affects a small (millions large) sliver of the population. The plans being cancelled were substandard. Health plans aren’t lost; they’re transitioning to new health opportunities. The private marketplace was […]

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2013/11/07/de-blasio-is-broken/?print=1

New York has always been a city for strivers, where hard work and wit led to success. Contrary to Mayor-elect de Blasio’s whining about the gap between rich and poor and the high cost of housing and the humiliation of young black and Hispanic men by the police, the city is still doing just what it is supposed to do. The proof is the success of Asian immigrants.

There has been considerable hand-wringing during the past few years about “lack of diversity” in the eight public high schools that require written exams. Asians are 14% of the public school population, but 50% of the elite high school population (the same proportion applies to Hunter College’s free public high school). By and large the Asian entrants are the children of working-class immigrants who pay extra tuition to prepare them for the entrance exams.

The NAACP has filed a complaint against the school system demanding racial quotas. The same concern for those “left behind” motivated the open admissions program in the City University system in 1969, which nearly ruined the system until CUNY found a way to shunt the underperformers into the community college system. (See chart at bottom of page.)

Asian immigrants are changing the face of New York, and for the better. My own solidly middle-class neighborhood in Manhattan is slowly becoming Asian, as the successful children of the last generation of Asian immigrants reach the income levels to buy Manhattan apartments–not the plutocrats’ pads on Park Avenue to the west of my corner of the island, but still within walking distance of many of the city’s best-known private schools. A few years before, Russians began moving in to our neighborhood from Brooklyn. Their kids also are hugely overrepresented in the city’s elite high schools.

The inequality argument is idiotic, as the London Economist (no voice of conservatism) pointed out on November 9th:

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/11/03/the-ten-worst-purveyors-of-antisemitism-worldwide-5-the-guardian/ Britain’s far-left newspaper/website the Guardian with its media group (which also includes the Observer) has been called “more hostile to Israel” than any “mainstream media outfit in the Western world.” That description was offered by The Commentator, the site run by Robin Shepherd, author of A State Beyond the Pale. British media expert Tom Gross, noting […]

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2013/11/07/amir-taheri-still-flush-with-spring-fever/

My great respect for Amir Taheri notwithstanding, his hopes for democratic transformation of the Middle East cause him, yet again, to misinterpret the most recent developments in Egypt.

There, the initial draft of a new constitution is about to be published, the product of a committee overseen by the military, which has run Egypt’s government since Mohamed Morsi’s ouster. The new constitution will reportedly preserve sharia (Islam’s societal framework) as the country’s main source of law. It will also codify the “special status” of the armed forces as protectors of the state vested with supreme power in matters of national defense, foreign relations, and economic affairs — possibly including, the Washington Post reports, the discretion to try civilians (such as Muslim Brotherhood operatives) in military courts.

In a recent New York Post column, Taheri argues that the new constitution will thus be an insidious pact between the generals and the “Salafists” — Muslim supremacists who, like their Brotherhood political rivals, are determined to create a caliphate beholden to Islam’s repressive principles. It will betray hopes for real democracy that are shared, Taheri insists, by the vast majority of Egyptians.

Adopting the conveniently pliable passive voice, Taheri writes (the italics are mine):

The coup that returned the military to power after a year-long interval was presented as an attempt to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from imposing an Islamist dictatorship with a constitutional facade. Highlighted were two articles in the Morsi constitution that identified the Islamic sharia as the source of legislation in Egypt and gave Al-Azhar, the official seminary, a virtual veto on certain issues.

The crowds that for weeks filled Tahrir Square called on the army to intervene to save the nation from a burgeoning sharia-based dictatorship. Well, when the new draft constitution — written by a 50-man committee appointed by the military — is published, the Tahrir Square crowds are likely to be disappointed. The two controversial articles will still be there, albeit under different numbers and with slight changes in terminology.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/363439/father-fed-knows-best-jonah-goldberg

The government thinks you’re stupid, or at least ignorant.

This isn’t just an indictment of the current government or an indictment of government itself. It’s simply a statement of fact. At its core, the government exists to do certain things that people aren’t equipped to do on their own. The list of those things has gotten longer and longer over the years. In 1776, the federal government’s portfolio could have easily fit in a file folder: maintain an army and navy, a few federal courts, the post office, the patent office, and maybe a dozen or two other pretty obvious things.

Now, the file folder of things the federal government does is much bigger. To paraphrase Dr. Egon Spengler from Ghostbusters, let’s imagine that the federal government in 1776 was the size of this Twinkie (take my word for it, I’m holding a normal-sized Twinkie). Today that Twinkie would be 35 feet long, weighing approximately 600 pounds. Or, if that illustration doesn’t work for you, consider this: The number of civilians (i.e., not counting the military) who work for the executive branch alone is today nearly equal to the entire population of the United States in 1776. The Federal Register, the federal government’s fun-filled journal of new rules, regulations, and the like, was about 2,600 pages in 1936 (a year after it was created). Today it’s over 80,000 pages.