RUTHFULLY YOURS

With new films, Hollywood finally telling story of fledgling Israeli Air Force

http://www.jta.org/2013/04/03/arts-entertainment/with-new-films-hollywood-finally-telling-story-of-fledgling-israeli-air-force#ixzz2gBGSjrBK

Some 65 years after a band of foreign volunteers took to the skies to ensure Israel’s birth and survival, filmmakers are racing to bring their exploits to the screen before the last of the breed passes away.

Among the competing producers and their financial backers are such famous names as Spielberg and Lansky. And though their budgets fall well short of Hollywood blockbuster standards, their competitive spirits are just as intense.

Nancy Spielberg, the youngest of Steven Spielberg’s three sisters, is the producer of “Above and Beyond: The Creation of the Israeli Air Force.” Her main challenger is Mike Flint with his “Angels in the Sky: The Birth of Israel.” His father, Mitchell, battled the Japanese in the skies of World War II before joining Israel’s famous 101st Squadron in 1948.

Spielberg, who lives in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, N.Y., and Flint, of Los Angeles, are facing competition from Boaz Dvir of the University of Florida in Gainesville, who has been working on “A Wing and a Prayer” since 2007.

The three films focus on the overseas pilots who made up 90 percent of the fledgling Israeli Air Force in the first desperate months after Israel declared its independence in May 1948. The pilots came mainly from English-speaking countries; nearly all of them were veterans of World War II. In Israel, they were officially members of Machal, the Hebrew acronym for “volunteers from outside the land.”

“First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.” There’s a clear connection between Jews being attacked and driven out of Muslim countries during the last century to today’s increased persecution of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa.Sadly, Christians did little to help victimized Jews, ignoring “the canary in the mine.” Some calmed themselves and assuaged their guilt by tracing the purge to just punishment for Jewish non-acceptance of Jesus as a messiah. However, time and time again, the maxim, “What begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews,” proves true.
When will Christians, who number 2.1 billion, acknowledge and stand up to the evil that confronts them and other non-Muslims worldwide? Where are the voices of Christian leadership as the carnage of their brethren reaches epidemic proportions?

Janet Levy,Los Angeles

The Persecution of Christians: “Turn the Other Cheek”

by Stu Bykofsky
Philadelphia Daily News

http://www.investigativeproject.org/4178/the-persecution-of-christians-turn-the-other-cheek

To our readers: This is an important article by Stu Bykofsky, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News from today’s Philadelphia Daily News on how the world is ignoring the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries.

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A RELIGIOUS minority is being persecuted, driven from their homes, robbed, raped, murdered.

From all the faux Islamophobia hysteria, you’d think it was Muslims.

It’s Christians, under a death sentence in parts of the Muslim world. Not in every Muslim country, but in too many.

The world remains remarkably, willfully blind and mute as the faithful of the world’s largest religion are blown apart by followers of the world’s second-largest religion.

Precise Christian persecution “figures are hard to come by,” says Kiri Kankhwende, spokesman for Christian Solidarity Worldwide, in the United Kingdom. Precise or not, things have rarely been worse. And who cares?

I am not a Christian, but I belong to a minority with a long history of persecution. The electrifying experience of the Holocaust, when the world stood mute, shapes my belief that it should happen “never again” to anyone. When the world is silent, slaughter follows.

http://www.jewishledger.com/2013/09/destination-jewish-barbados-a-family-celebration-with-the-oldest-jewish-congregation-in-the-western-hemisphere/
BARBADOS CITIZENS CALL THEMSELVES BAJANS….THESE MUST BE BAJEWS…. READ THE WHOLE SECTION ABOUT BARBADOS IN THE CONNECTICUT JEWISH LEDGER- BEST JEWISH INTEREST PAPER IN AMERICA………RSK
Destination: Jewish Barbados A family celebration with the oldest Jewish congregation in the Western Hemisphere

BRIDGETOWN – In 2014, Congregation Nidhe Israel in Barbados will turn 360, making it the oldest Jewish community in the Western Hemisphere.

The story of Jewish Barbados is one of escape, freedom, piracy, trade, secret identities, sugarcane, intermarriage, assimilation, windmills, conversion, slavery, emigration, restoration.

It is a story of mysteries and remnants.

It is one that Robin Walcott knows well. A descendant of one of the first English families to arrive on the island, Walcott has spent his life exploring the various cultures and historical threads that weave through his homeland.

As a veteran of the hospitality business, he has shared his pride and knowledge with countless visitors to the island. After managing several successful restaurants along the west coast, Walcott opened Beach View, a popular family resort in Paynes Bay, which he manages together with his younger daughter, Carrie.

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/korol/130928   The mission of San Diego State University shall be to provide well-balanced, high quality education for undergraduate and graduate students and to contribute to knowledge and the solution of problems through excellence and distinction in teaching, research, and service. The university shall impart an appreciation and broad understanding of human experience throughout the […]

Daniel Halper: Another Yalta Conference. From Churchill, FDR, and Stalin to Blair, Clinton, and Pinchuk. http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/another-yalta-conference_757228.htmlYalta On a charter flight from Kiev to Simferopol, before our two-hour drive here, I’m asked by the earnest reporter seated next to me whether I know what Victor Pinchuk looks like. I give a vague description—tired from having traveled […]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/27/editorial-mcauliffes-tap-dance/#ixzz2g5ipg1xa
WITH ALL THE BROUHAHA OVER TED CRUZ AND DEFUNDING OBAMACARE, ONE CAN EASILY FORGET THAT ROBERT CUCCINELLI WHO IS RUNNING AGAINS MCAULIFFE FOR GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIAN WAS THE FIRST LEGISLATOR TO CHALLENGE OBAMACARE IN THE COURTS…..HE DESERVES TO WIN AGAINST SLEAZY CLINTON ENFORCER MCAULIFFE…..RSK

Ayear ago, when Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia, was a cog in the Obama campaign, he insisted that Mitt Romney had to come clean with his financial documents. “By not releasing them,” he said, “the imagination runs wild.”

So what is Terry McAuliffe trying to hide now? When he was asked in Wednesday night’s gubernatorial debate why he hasn’t released more of his tax returns, he lapsed into a tap dance. Fred Astaire he is not. “I’ve gone beyond what the last governors have done, when Gov. Kaine, Gov. Warner and Gov. McDonnell ran,” he said. “I’ve gone up and beyond that.” Then he abruptly changed the subject to an attack on his Republican rival, state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

Our imagination is running wild. Earlier this year, Mr. McAuliffe released a six-page summary of his tax returns, showing that he earned about $16.5 million in the years 2009 through 2011. The summary lacked the detail he insisted Republicans must provide. Even his “modified limited hangout,” as the Nixon White House once called such summaries, was offered only in response to Mr. Cuccinelli’s providing eight years of complete tax returns. His returns showed his income between 2005 and 2012 ranged from a high of $264,296 in 2005 to a low of $134,078 in 2009.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/27/pruden-the-bad-boy-at-the-party/ Ted Cruz has been a bad boy, and deserves a good spanking. That’s the message his colleagues in the Senate, particularly his Republican colleagues, have been sending to him. They just couldn’t find anyone big enough to deliver the spanking, and now they never can. His marathon speech — argument persists over whether it […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/359692/print Texas senator Ted Cruz’s 21-hour 19-minute soliloquy this week apotheosized Republican dissatisfaction with Obamacare. Likewise, the GOP House recently voted to finance everything in Washington, minus the so-called Affordable Care Act. A real surprise lies behind these headlines: Democrats are falling out of love with Obamacare. Last year, according to a Washington Post/ABC News […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359691/giving-cruz-his-due-john-fund Liberals are passionate in their scorn for him — which tells you how worried they are. A spat has broken out over whether the media demonstrated liberal bias in their coverage of Senator Ted Cruz’s marathon anti-Obamacare speech. Conservatives are contrasting the heckling and slurs leveled against Cruz with the overwhelmingly positive reaction won […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5795

On Thursday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas finally got the chance to address the U.N. General Assembly as the representative of an observer state. Having been provided an actual seat at the event was not the only reason that Abbas was pleased, however.

Over the past few weeks, the PA leader has been despondent watching international attention to his cause eclipsed by Syrian carnage and Iranian overtures. So, when U.S. President Barack Obama catapulted Palestinian statehood back to center stage in his speech on Tuesday — by placing it on a par of importance with a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program — Abbas’ sigh of relief was so deafening that it drowned out the calls for a third intifada emanating from Ramallah.

According to the Gatestone Institute’s Khaled Abu Toameh, it is not only extremist groups such as Hamas that have been beating the war drums; the Palestinian Authority itself is part of the orchestra. “While some PA officials have come out in public in support of escalating ‘popular resistance’ against Israel,” writes Abu Toameh, “others have been telling Palestinians that ‘extremist Jewish gangs are storming and contaminating the Aqsa mosque’ — a reference to routine visits by Jews to the Temple Mount. These are the kind of statements that prompt young Palestinians to take to the streets and throw stones and petrol bombs at Jewish settlers and IDF soldiers.”

Nevertheless, Abbas told the General Assembly, “… As we have repeatedly affirmed, and as we have proven in practice, the State of Palestine, which abides by the United Nations Charter, by international humanitarian law and by the resolutions of international legitimacy, will exercise its role and uphold its responsibilities in the international system in a positive and constructive manner, and in a way that reinforces peace. …”

That Abbas is useless at everything other than lying through his teeth is a given by now; the unemployed and otherwise disgruntled residents of the PA would be the first to say so. This is why their president’s subsequent assertion that “we shall respect all of our commitments” would have caused the rest of us to alternate between yawning and laughing, if innocent lives weren’t at stake. After all, killing Jews is the only commitment that Palestinian leaders have ever honored, especially while engaged in “negotiating peace.”