RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304066404579127310010016436.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

THE REVIEWER OPINES: “The Family” is a very emotional book. It has no overt message, but the lesson of its narrative is hard to miss: The survival of the Jews has hinged in some sense on the establishment of the state of Israel. Yet it is the U.S. that has given the Jewish people the secure homeland they have sought since the destruction of the Temple, where Mr. Laskin’s ancestors may well have been inking in Torah passages in days lost to memory.”

No one will dispute the security Jews have found in America….but…and this is the very troubling and important “but”- only Israel can secure Jewish continuity….rsk

The modern history of the Jews is encompassed in the saga of one family spread across Europe, the U.S. and Israel.

The unspeakable tragedies and improbable triumphs of the European Jewish diaspora in the 20th century have been told many times but rarely quite so compellingly as in David Laskin’s “The Family.” Mr. Laskin’s chronicle could have been written in tears—of torment and scarce joy—and it is at once anguishing and inspiring.

The story begins in 1835 with the birth of Mr. Laskin’s great-great-grandfather in the forlorn shtetl of Volozhin in the Pale of Settlement on Russia’s western edge. It ends in the second decade of the 21st century with 101 descendants in America, 32 in Israel and only a few gravestones left in Europe. In between are tales of piety amid privation, immigrant courage and industry, Zionist pioneering, Nazi brutality, and the precarious salvation of the Jewish people.

Remarkably, the modern history of the Jews is encompassed in the saga of a single family. One restless daughter, fired by revolutionary socialism, sets off alone for America, where she winds up the millionaire czarina of a brassiere empire. Another goes south and becomes a founding mother of Israel. An uncle journeys from the Pale to the Bronx and then on to Israel, where he dies just short of his 92nd birthday. Others, less intrepid, never leave home and are literally incinerated in the Holocaust. “History,” writes Mr. Laskin, “made and broke my family in the twentieth century.”

Ze’ev Jabotinsky said it first in 1911, but it is the only appropriate answer to the slanted and vicious NYT attack on the Israeli PM. Ronn Torossian

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13956#.UlvWzUbD-Ul

For a long time, the world complained about Israel’s harsh vow to protect themselves from Iran’s building of nuclear arms. Israel – so far – hasn’t yet acted in a defensive strike, yet the Iranian enemy remains at Israel’s doorstep devoted to her destruction.

And on Sunday, The New York Times ran a profile filled with venom for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Calling him a “shrill” voice on a one-man “messianic crusade” against Iran’s nuclear weapons program and saying he is “taking a lonely stance”, indeed may actually prove he is the one sane man in a world filled with delusional fools. More likely, it may mean that, like so many times in the past, the Jewish people stands alone in times of danger.

Worldwide, anyone concerned with the safety of the West should hope Netanyahu and Israel remain on their crusade to stop Iran from reaching nuclear capacity. With a fool in the White House, it is even more vital.

The New York Times profile states “His office wall is dominated by a map, Iran looming large at the center. Iran has been Mr. Netanyahu’s priority — many say obsession — since 1996.”

A country on Israel’s border who openly declares its intent to destroy the Jewish state is definitely worthy of obsession for that nation’s leaders. Sane people respect and envy those who defend and protect their people.

The fact that Netanyahu has held off, so far, from striking Iran should earn him praise from liberals – but, of course, since he is Prime Minister of Israel, that didn’t happen

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4013/al-hiwar-tv-europe Al-Hiwar is not “just” your friendly neighborhood Arab TV station. As its founder, Azzam Al-Tamimi, states, “We must refrain from violating these [Western] laws because this might… ban us from the air…At the end of the day; you want to convey a message.” Oh? And what message is that? The British communications regulator and […]

Walid Shoebat Exposes Obama’s Brother, Malik Obama — on The Glazov Gang
A former Muslim Brotherhood terrorist who turned to love unveils an administration’s Islamist odyssey.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/daniel-greenfield-on-obamas-shutdown-stragedy-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

NOTE FROM VICTOR SHARPE: Insanity and Humiliation are, indeed, the twin plagues Israel is enduring under the present government and under too many of its predecessors. The dance macabre, as I call it, between Israel and the terrorist cesspool called the Palestinian Authority must end. As we know, as soon as pressure is again imposed upon the Jewish state to enter into “peace” talks with the Muslim Arab barbarians, there is no peace but pieces of Jewish flesh. It is a zero sum game and there must be an end to the fraudulent entity known as the PA, which obscenely sits astride the very biblical and ancestral Jewish heartland of Yehuda and Shomron (Judea and Samaria).

There can never be true and lasting peace for the Jewish state with those who follow Islam. Period.

This is what a Christian Tea Party activist and American immigrant from India, Mario Goveia, wrote to me as the latest Palestinian crime against an Israeli civilian was perpetrated; this time by a Palestinian Arab sniper who shot a 9-year-old girl. Since then, yet another Israeli has been struck down – Seraya Opher – in the Jordan Valley.

My Christian friend wrote:

“It has bemused me for years that here you have an implacable adversary that has been honest enough to put their nefarious objectives and principles IN WRITING. They have never tried to hide their objectives. They even make maps that show no Israel, and no one in the US, UN or even Israeli leadership, takes them seriously, even when they have been acting on their principles for 65 years now.

“Thus emboldened, these Arabs, especially the so-called Palestinians, keep making demands as if they have the power and have been the victors in the various conflicts that have taken place. I have never seen anything like it in history, where the victors are the ones making concessions, and the vanquished intractably and consistently try and call the shots and make demands.”

Many supporters of Israel express utter bewilderment that the Jewish state, alone among the nations of the world, allows this murderous aggression by Palestinian Arab brutes to proceed day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year. We heard Transportation Minister, Yisrael Katz, warning that “the attack does not bode well for diplomatic talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.“

http://mosaicmagazine.com/supplemental/2013/10/two-words/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=9a3c883f97-Mosaic_2013_10_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-9a3c883f97-41165129

It’s time for American Jews to say thank-you to evangelicals—and to act accordingly.

Robert Nicholson’s “Evangelicals and Israel” should worry any Jewish supporter of Israel, for three major reasons.

The first is that ingratitude is a great sin—though one with deep roots in Jewish history. The story of the Jews in the Bible is replete with incidents of their ingratitude to God for His gifts to them: incidents that just as repeatedly merit and receive punishment. Here we go again: today’s American Jews are spectacularly ungrateful toward a huge community of evangelicals whose enthusiasm for Israel may become critical to its very survival and certainly to America’s continuing support of the Jewish state. The American Jewish population is dwindling, from a height of nearly 4 percent of the U.S. population to under 2 percent now. As Nicholson explains, Christian support, already enormously important, will become only more so.

The second reason for worry is the anti-Israel trend in the evangelical world: as Nicholson puts it, evangelical support for Israel may already have peaked. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: powerful currents in American culture, including the control of most university faculties (even in some evangelical colleges) and of the mass media by the voices of the liberal Left, are pushing young evangelicals away from the beliefs of their parents. Yet few American Jews know much about the evangelical community, let alone about the swings Nicholson lists and analyzes. Most will never have heard of the Palestinian Christian groups whose anti-Israel activities he describes, and are unaware of their growing influence among American evangelicals. For this reason alone, his article, providing new and valuable information, is an important wake-up call.

http://www.cis.org/paying-illeglas-to-stay To crib from Caesar, all immigration policy is divided into three parts: you can enforce the law and deport the illegals, you can ignore them (and there is a lot of that going around), or you can pay them to stay in this country. Not even the White House is publicly advocating the third […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Columbus may have outfoxed the Spanish court and his rivals, but he is falling victim to the court of political correctness.

The explorer who discovered America has become controversial because the very idea of America has become controversial.

There are counter-historical claims put forward by Muslim and Chinese scholars claiming that they discovered America first. And there are mobs of fake indigenous activists on every campus to whom the old Italian is as much of a villain as the bearded Uncle Sam.

Columbus Day parades are met with protests and some have been minimized or eliminated.

In California, Columbus Day became Indigenous People’s Day, which sounds like a Marxist terrorist group’s holiday. While it’s tempting to put that down to California political correctness, in South Dakota it was renamed Native American Day.

The shift from celebrating Columbus’ arrival in America to commemorating it as an American Nakba by focusing on the Indians, rather than the Americans, is a profound form of historical revisionism that hacks away at the origins of this country.

No American state has followed Venezuela’s lead in renaming it Día de la Resistencia Indígena, or Day of Indigenous Resistance, which actually is a Marxist terrorist group’s holiday, the whole notion of celebrating the discovery of America has come to be seen as somehow shameful and worst of all, politically incorrect.

Anti-Columbus Day protests are mounted by La Raza, whose members, despite their indigenous posturing, are actually mostly descended from Spanish colonists, but who know that most American liberals are too confused to rationally frame an objection to a protest by any minority group.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Call it Rabinstock or Rabinpallooza. It’s the annual anniversary of Yitzchak Rabin’s death transformed into a tawdry spirit rally for the even more tawdry remnants of Israel’s left.

The assassination of the former Israeli PM has become the “Camelot” of the left with Rabin as an unlikely JFK. American liberals nourished themselves on the fantasy that race relations would have been solved and Vietnam would have been avoided if only their golden boy hadn’t been shot in Dallas. It was more soothing than dealing with the reality that all the problems they cynically associated with Nixon would have happened even if Lee Harvey Oswald had stayed in Minsk.

The Israeli left has has always been behind the times. They had to wait until the Lebanon War for their Vietnam War and they are only now learning to embrace the post and multi everything order. And so they had to wait until the 90s for their own Camelot, their incarnation of the golden age that might have been if only Rabin hadn’t died.

Golden ages don’t depend on one man. If liberalism had led to a better America, it would have worked just as well when LBJ and Nixon implemented even more radical versions of JFK’s policies. If the peace process had worked, it would have worked under Peres and Barak and Olmert. It never did.

American liberals in perpetual mourning for Camelot are forced to ascribe everything to charisma. Israeli leftists don’t even have that comfort. Rabin was hardly a charismatic figure. Unlike American liberals, whose attempts to blame JFK’s assassination by a fanatical leftist who had defected to the USSR and attempted to defect to Cuba created a growth industry in convoluted conspiracy theories; their Israeli counterparts take refuge in reducing everything to a blame game for the right.

Danbury, Connecticut was settled by colonists in 1685. The original name was Pahquioque after the local Indian tribe, but in 1687 it was formally named Danbury.
I lived near Danbury for over forty years. I have watched the city rise and fall and rise and fall. Sometimes it was mismanagement and sometimes it was a consequence of tragedy. In the early 1980s Danbury welcomed residents from New York City and from the New York suburbs seeking lower taxes and bucolic settings. Union Carbide the huge international conglomerate, built headquarters on Old Ridgebury Road and 3.300 workers relocated- the largest corporate relocation of its time. Union Carbide helped its employees find homes in the area. It gave them housing subsidies to ease their move. Danbury was on a roll. It had restaurants, movies, shops, and a first class hospital.
In December 1984, a pesticide plant Union carbide owned and operated in Bhopal, India exploded and released posion gas that killed many thousands and left an equal number permanently ill. The company’s fortunes receded and gloom and doom settled over Danbury as its economy faded.
In 1986, the enclosed Danbury Mall, the second largest in the state opened, and renewed the economy and hopes of local residents. A Federal Prison. Danbury Correctional Institution is now an all women prison. There are two high schools one of which is an excellent vocational training school, many parochial and private schools, including the Maimonides Academy. Danbury is also home to the Army Reserves Special Operation Unit the 411th Civil Affairs battalion, and uniformed soldiers are often seen at the shops and restaurants. Western Connecticut State University and the world class Richter Park Golf Course are located in Danbury as well.
The former Congressman Chris Murphy a democrat is now (alas) a Senator.
The foregoing shows that Danbury is not a village but requires great management skills and vision from its Mayor.
Since 1685 there has never been a better mayor than Mark Boughton (R.) who is considering a run for Governor of the state. See his website and read about his accomplishments. They are not hype….they are real. I was in Danbury yesterday and the improvements are amazing : http://www.ci.danbury.ct.us/content/21015/22147/