RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/9894275/North-Korea-expanding-gulags-satellite-images-show.html

North Korea is expanding its network of camps for political prisoners, apparently to meet demand for a growing gulag population, according to new satellite images.

Analysis of images by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea indicates that the size of Camp No. 25 alone has increased 72 per cent and perimeter guard posts, which numbered 20 in 2003, had increased to 43 in 2010.

The camp is believed to house some 5,000 prisoners, in conditions that human rights groups have described as “deplorable.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/341526 If, as is frequently claimed, conservative fears of a federal gun registry are paranoid and spurious, then the stand that Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn is taking in the Senate will presumably be welcomed by all sides. On this week’s Fox News Sunday, Coburn bluntly affirmed that any background-check bill emanating from the Senate “absolutely […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/341534

Republicans are terribly confused over illegal immigration. They still can’t quite figure out its role in the last election.

Did the issue lose them the Latino vote? Maybe — but why did they also forfeit the Asian vote, and by nearly the same margin? Why did the caricature of Republicans as old white nativists resonate with Asians as well? If support for closing the border and refusing amnesty lost Republicans the election, why do a majority of Americans continue to poll in opposition to any sort of collective amnesty?

And why, in some polls, did Latinos seem more concerned about continuing big-government readiness to help the poor and tax the wealthy than about immigration reform? Alan Simpson and Ronald Reagan, who helped to give us the 1986 amnesty, are not heroes to the Latino community. Is there statistical support for the often-repeated axiom that Latinos, as a group, are more likely than members of the so-called majority culture to embrace traditional family values — lower divorce rates, lower rates of illegitimacy, lower crime rates, higher graduation rates?

Of course, kinder, gentler talk — unlike the buffoonery that was heard in some of last year’s sloppy Republican primary debates — would have helped. Yet in 2008 circumspection and prudence did not aid all that much the moderate John McCain, who in the past had championed a sort of amnesty lite. And all the silly and often gratuitous braggadocio about upping the height of the border wall or electrifying it was more than trumped by the crass pandering of Barack Obama, who called on Latinos to “punish our enemies”; joined with a foreign nation, Mexico, to sue one of his own states, Arizona; and claimed his opponents wanted to arrest children on their way to ice-cream parlors. Note there is no national commentary deploring the fact that the president of the United States engaged in just the sort of crass ethnic showmanship that characterized the Republican debates. Apparently, because his pandering worked and the Republicans’ did not, under the laws of politics only the latter was pandering.

Confused by questions like these, Republicans don’t quite know what to do about the 11 to 15 million illegal aliens in our midst, with more to come in future years. And in lieu of wisdom, principles, and consistency, Republican are mostly experimenting, trying to square the circle and win the Latino vote with clichés about conservative values and a vaguely familiar message of amnesty for those already here predicated on no additional illegal immigration. But the problem can be only reduced, not solved, by kinder, gentler language and outreach to Latino groups, for in the end it is an existential issue well beyond trimming.

In truth, illegal immigration is illiberal to the core, based on reducing the legal applicant to a formalistic naïf, making a mockery of the law, undermining the American poor, enabling the worst policies of the Mexican government, and aiding the American well-off. True, it was mostly conservative employers and mostly liberal partisans, hand in glove, who have created the problem in the last 30 years — the one wanting cheap non-union labor, the latter wanting future dependents and constituents. But that said, there are now forces in play that ensure that the status quo is antithetical to everything the Republican party claims it stands for.

Republicans profess that they favor a meritocracy and a nation that looks at the content of our character rather than the color of our skin. But contemporary illegal immigration is not a theoretical issue about federal law. Rather, in terms of particular immigrant groups, it is largely of concern to Latin Americans, who want more Latin Americans to enter the United States, preferably legally but, if not, then illegally. This is largely for reasons of ethnic solidarity, never mind that it interferes with integration and assimilation. If it is a question of keeping the present system of massive influxes of illegal aliens, periodically remedied by amnesties of the 1986 sort, versus an entirely legal system that privileges education and skill sets, and therefore might well result in true diversity, with tens of thousands of Asians, Africans, and Europeans entering legally, rather than mostly a monolithic influx of Latin Americans entering illegally, then I fear most activists would prefer the present non-system.

In other words, if the southern border were closed, and only legal immigration were permitted, predicated on criteria other than ethnic profile, proximity, pseudo-historical claims on the American Southwest, and family ties, then Republicans would still lose the Latino vote, at least for the short term.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Hollywood has no problem being dumb, sleazy and violent. Those are all known and marketable qualities. What it does not look is appearing desperate. Desperation however is what the Oscars of this year and last year have in common. They stink of an industry desperately racing its own age and irrelevance reaching for gimmicks to try and hang on to a younger audience.
The dirty little secret is that Hollywood hardly exists anymore. The industry is bigger than ever, but its bread and butter consists of 200 and 300 million dollar special effects festivals filmed in front of green screens and created in Photoshop and three-dimensional graphics programs. They star obscure or mildly famous actors and they do two-thirds of their business abroad.

America is still the official headquarters of the global entertainment industry, but many of the bigger projects are filmed internationally with foreign money and intended for foreign markets. What the American corporations bring to the table is the intellectual property which is why the latest spasm of mergers and buyouts has focused on taking control of every treasury of classic marketable properties.

Disney has put Star Wars, Mickey and Marvel Comics under one roof. It’s impressive from a business standpoint, but bankrupt from a creative standpoint. Old Americana is being milked dry for the sake of turning out another disposable movie starring familiar characters. The movies are actually still the same.

The blockbuster has mutated into its final stage. The “individual” movie is almost dead. Forget Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark. The modern blockbuster is seamless and soulless. An impersonal work that renders the director and cast irrelevant. The criticism has been made before, but what is new now is the percentage of special effects and the cost. The more expensive a movie becomes, the more risk averse its producers are.

If a movie is going to cost 200 million dollars to make, then it has to be identical to the other 200 million dollar movies that were profitable. The template is there. All that’s left is to plug in another talented Korean, British, Russian or even perhaps American director, and then roll out the same movie with characters from another property.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2804/gaza_rocket_hits_israel_obviously_israel_s_fault

BBC reporting on the Middle East is no longer even biased, it’s just a joke…

You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot force it to drink.

This is a lesson that for some reason or another, we were persistently taught as children. The BBC seems keen on it too, dedicating an entire webpage to it, here.

It’s no wonder then that their journalists employ such tactics, leading readers to the water in the hope that they’ll partake of the flagrantly anti-Israel bias that comes with almost every BBC report out of the region.

If you haven’t yet heard, ‘militants’ (terrorists) in Gaza have broken the ceasefire from November after the intensive Operation Pillar of Cloud which struck at the very heart of terrorist infrastructure in the Gaza strip. Somehow though, this is Israel’s fault.

Of course, the BBC report here doesn’t overtly state it. But it leads the horse to the water. Observe:

BBC REPORTS:

“A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip has landed in southern Israel – the first such attack since shortly after a ceasefire ended eight days of clashes in November, Israeli police say. The rocket caused some damage to a road in Ashkelon but no injuries.

The strike follows confrontations in the West Bank between Israeli forces and Palestinian protesters. Riots broke out across the West Bank at the weekend after a Palestinian man died in Israeli custody.”

Wait. Did you see what happened there? Blink and you may have missed it. In fact, many of the millions of people who consume BBC reports such as this do indeed miss such things. Instead, their worldview is shaped by this passive propaganda. Read the second paragraph again. This time with our emphases:

“The strike follows confrontations in the West Bank between Israeli forces and Palestinian protesters. Riots broke out across the West Bank at the weekend after a Palestinian man died in Israeli custody.” (no mention of who he was, what he did, or the ongoing investigation around his death).

And now, read what a more accurate report of the circumstances should have read.

HOW THE COMMENTATOR WOULD HAVE REPORTED IT:

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2797/galloway_quotes_ahmadinejad_israel_is_a_cancerous_tumour

Galloway’s latest comments on Israel come straight out of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s playbook on the Jewish state

In a Facebook update from just two hours ago, the Member of the British Parliament for Bradford West, George Galloway, released a statement on the incident that saw him walk out of a debate with an Israeli student last week.

Galloway, who is known for his crude demeanour, channelled the words of the Iranian tyrant Mahmound Ahmadinejad, stating that, “Israel is a cancer at the heart of the middle-east”.

It was reported last year that Iran’s president said that Israel was an “insult to humanity” and “a cancerous tumor” and called for “a new Middle East with no trace of Americans or Zionists”. The remarks were widely condemned by the international community, only to be repeated a day later by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said: “The great powers have dominated the destiny of the Islamic countries for years and… installed the Zionist cancerous tumour in the heart of the Islamic world.”

Galloway’s comments being so closely linked to that of the Iranian leadership will come as little surprise to some, given the Member of Parliament’s fawning over Ahmadinejad on previous occasions, and his links to Islamist-linked television networks.

The statement, it seems, comes on the back of messages to Galloway demanding an explanantion for his behaviour last week. His reference to the ‘conservative establishment’ is thought to be a veiled nod at The Commentator, which urged readers to contact Galloway last week, resulting in a number of e-mails being sent to Galloway’s parliamentary inbox.

GALLOWAY’S FULL STATEMENT:

Me and the Palestinian cause: A number of questions have recently arisen I need to deal with.

Firstly if people want to talk to the Palestinians they need to contact the Palestine Liberation Organisation. This is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and has been for many decades.

Secondly, an organisation calling itself “BDS” does not own the words or the concept of boycott, divestment or sanctions. They are entitled to their own interpretation of these words but they don’t own or control me. I will make my own interpretation. And it is this – no purchase of Israeli goods or services, no normal contacts with individuals or organisations in Israel who support the existence of the racist Apartheid creed of Zionism. That’s what I mean by boycott. That’s what I do.

Israelis who are outside of and against the system of Zionism are comrades of mine – like Prof Ilan Pappe. My opponent at Oxford University did not meet this test. The organiser of the event momentarily lionised by the liberal as well as the conservative establishment needs to know this, especially as he is a medical student.

To compare Israeli Zionism to “Vegetarianism” is like a doctor not knowing the difference between a pimple and a tumor. Apartheid Israel is a cancer at the heart of the middle-east. Only it’s replacement by a bi-national democratic state from the Jordan River to the sea will cure this. That is what I am fighting for.

George Galloway MP

House of Commons

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/02/25/State-Dept-Issues-License-For-Sale-Of-Tear-Gas:-To-Muslim-Bros-Led-Egypt The United States federal government has approved the export of tear gas to the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled government of Egypt, the State Department stated Monday. A reporter asked Deputy Spokesman Patrick Ventrell about the sale of tear gas canisters from a U.S. manufacturer at a midday press conference, and Ventrell confirmed the State Department had […]

http://news.yahoo.com/morocco-film-searches-jews-left-israel-085200322.html

RABAT, Morocco (AP) — Hundreds of members of Islamist and left wing political groups demonstrated outside the Tangiers Film Festival earlier this month against a documentary about Moroccan Jews living in Israel. They claimed that director Kamal Hachkar was promoting “normalization” with the Jewish state.

But Hachkar was not expelled from the artists’ union, nor was his film banned, and he wasn’t ostracized from Morocco’s intellectual class, as has happened in similar cases in Egypt and elsewhere. Instead, directors and actors circulated a petition of support, and his film went on to win best work by a new director at the festival.

Once home to some 300,000 Jews, the largest population in the Arab world, Morocco is increasingly taking a fresh look at its long history with Judaism and is spurning the flat rejection of all things Hebrew found in so many other Arab countries.

In the film, “Tinghir-Jerusalem: Echoes from the Mellah,” Hachkar talks to people in Berber villages high in the Atlas mountains about their memories of the Jews suddenly leaving for Israel in the 1960s. He then travels to Jerusalem and finds many of these Jews, still speaking Moroccan Arabic and the Berber language, fondly reminiscing about the land they left behind.

“It tells the story of a forgotten part of Morocco’s history, a history that is not taught at school,” Hachkar told The Associated Press. “My goal is to tell the human story and to defend the plurality of Moroccan history and identity.”

The director, who was born in Tinghir but left to live in France with his father at the age of 6 months, has toured all over Morocco showing the film to what he says were packed houses. Most people were initially suspicious, but warmed to the subject when they saw Jews speaking Moroccan Arabic and even the Berber dialect of the High Atlas, he said.

According to Zhor Rehihil, the curator of the Museum for Moroccan Judaism in Casablanca — founded in 1997 and unique in the region — Jews have been part of Morocco since Jewish merchants came to North Africa with the Phoenicians hundreds of years before the birth of Christ.

For centuries they were found in the mountain villages alongside Morocco’s Berbers — the original inhabitants of North Africa — who mostly converted to Islam with the arrival of the Arab tribes in the 7th century.

Morocco’s Jewish population was invigorated in 1492 when Spain expelled Muslims and Jews, most of whom fled to Morocco and brought with them the sophisticated urban culture of Andalucia.

“The Jews in Morocco were everywhere, in the cities, in the small villages. It was a country with a large and vibrant community of Jews and with their departure, Morocco lost a large part of its history,” said Rehihil.

At its peak in the 1950s, there were an estimated 300,000 Jews in Morocco out of a population of some 8 million.

With the establishment of Israel and the encouragement of Zionists, Morocco’s Jews left. Some went for religious reasons to seek the long promised land, some for a better life than in economically troubled post-colonial Morocco, still others who feared persecution.

Unlike elsewhere in the Arab world, the creation of Israel did not spark widespread animosity or attacks on Jews. There were isolated incidents but no national campaign. Many Jews left, however, after being told by Zionist agents they were in danger, said Rehihil.

“Each time there was an Arab-Israeli war, there would be tensions and the Jews would become afraid and some more would leave,” she said, adding that most had left by the 1973 war.

Some 5,000 now remain, almost all in Morocco’s commercial capital of Casablanca.

As in the rest of the region, however, there has been a heavy focus in Morocco on the plight of the Palestinian people and many Moroccans have started equating Jews with Israel. In May 2003, a series of al-Qaida-inspired bombings in Casablanca attacked, among other targets, a Jewish cemetery and a community center, which was empty at the time.

Protests against Israeli military actions are a regular occurrence, the most recent in November over the latest clashes in Gaza. Tens of thousands marched through Casablanca and Rabat in demonstrations attended by members of the governing moderate Islamist party.

“It’s not a matter of denying the history of Moroccan Jews nor attacking freedom of expression, but defending one of the principal foundations of the nation, which is to say, no to normalization with the Zionist entity,” said Mohammed Khiyi, a member of parliament with the Islamist Party for Justice and Development who demonstrated against Hachkar’s film on Feb. 5.

He contended that the film “is trying to do Zionist propaganda. The real Moroccan Jews were those which stayed in their country and were proud, not those the film tries to portray as victims of deportation to Palestine.”

A surprising critic of the film is one of Morocco’s Jews, Sion Assidon, a leftist activist, former political prisoner and a member of a group advocating the boycott of Israeli products.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/02/denmark_a_century_and_three_quarters_of_telling_the_truth_about_islam.html Over the past two years, I have chronicled the ongoing travails of my intrepid colleague Lars Hedegaard, the Danish journalist and historian, most recently, his narrowly surviving an assassination attempt by a likely Muslim assailant. Hedegaard’s plight, and his voiced (and written) opinions on Islam whetted my curiosity about what the profound 19th century […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324338604578324463371635292.html?mod=opinion_newsreel If you’re a reporter at the Washington Post and you aspire to write unsigned editorials, just send an email to the ombudsman. That’s a lesson one might draw from yesterday’s extraordinary column by Patrick Pexton, the veteran journalist who, according to the Post’s website, “represents readers who have concerns or complaints” about “accuracy, fairness, […]