RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/02/12/cynthia-ozick-and-william-shakespeare-on-judith-butler-plus-ca-change-plus-c%E2%80%99est-la-meme-chose/

Will Judith Butler, who recently brought her frenzied campaign to expel Israel from the family of nations to Brooklyn College, be remembered as a latter-day Yael in reverse, delivering Israel not from but to her enemies? Or as the author of anti-Israel diatribes comprising a virtual Magna Carta of stupidity (written not in Latin, to be sure, but in prose of stupefying opacity)? Or as a Malvolio, sick with self-love? Or as just another self-deluded and self-fascinated Jewish apostate? Cynthia Ozick answered this question almost a decade ago in her conclusion to an essay called “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” which Paul Bogdanor and I used as a Preamble to a book about Jews who hate Israel called The Jewish Divide over Israel. I take the liberty of quoting Ms. Ozick here.

Judith Butler, identifying herself as a Jew in the London Review of Books, the claim that linking “Zionism with Jewishness… is adopting the very tactic favored by antisemites.” A skilled sophist (one might dare to say solipsist), she tosses those who meticulously chart and expose antisemitism’s disguises into the same bin as the antisemites themselves. Having accused Israel of the “dehumanization of Palestinians”; having acknowledged that she was a signatory to a petition opposing “the Israeli occupation, though in my mind it is not nearly strong enough: it did not call for the end of Zionism”; and having acknowledged also that (explicitly) as a Jew she seeks “to widen the rift between the state of Israel and the Jewish people,” she writes:

It will not do to equate Jews with Zionists or Jewishness with Zionism…. It is one thing to oppose Israel in its current form and practices or, indeed, to have critical questions about Zionism itself, but it is quite another to oppose “Jews” or assume that all “Jews” have the same view; that they are all in favor of Israel, identified with Israel, or represented by Israel….To say that all Jews hold a given view on Israel or are adequately represented by Israel, or, conversely, that the acts of Israel, the state, adequately stand for the acts of all Jews, is to conflate Jews with Israel and, thereby, to commit an antisemitic reduction of Jewishness.

One can surely agree with Butler that not all Jews are “in favor of Israel”: she is a dazzling model of one who is not, and she cites, by name, a handful of “post- Zionists” in Israel proper, whom she praises. But her misunderstanding of antisemitism is profound; she theorizes rifts and demarcations, borders and dikes; she is sunk in self-deception. The “good” anti-Zionists, she believes, the ones who speak and write in splendidly cultivated English, will never do her or her fellow Jews any harm; they are not like the guttersnipe antisemites who behave so badly. It is true that she appears to have everything in common with those Western literary intellectuals (e.g., Tom Paulin and the late Edward Said) whose aspirations are indistinguishable from her own: that Israel “in its current form” ought to disappear. Or, as Paulin puts it, “I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all.” Tony Judt, a professor of European history, confirms this baleful view; writing in the New York Review of Books, he dismisses the Jewish state as—alone among the nations–”an anachronism.” Yet Butler’s unspoken assumption is that consonance, or collusion, with those who would wish away the Jewish state will earn one a standing in the European, if not the global, anti-Zionist world club. To a degree she may be right: the congenial welcome she received in a prestigious British journal confirms it, and she is safe enough, for the nonce, in those rarefied places where, as George Eliot has it (with a word altered), it would be “difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [Zionism] which had not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print.” In that company she is at home. There she is among friends. But George Eliot’s Zionist views are notorious; she is partial to Jewish national liberation. A moment, then, for the inventor of the pound of flesh. Here is Cinna, the poet, on his way to Caesar’s funeral [in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar]:

http://www.meforum.org/3447/islamism-france-election

What is Europe going to do about Islam? Submit? Resist? Or just wait it out, dimwittedly? The recent French presidential election offers insight into the way Islam, or more exactly the Islamist factor, may eventually play out in European politics.

Despite attempts by the Left to focus the debate on the economic crisis, Islam played a decisive role in the contest. The Socialist candidate, whose platform was tilted to favor the party’s Muslim clientele, could not have won without total support in the second round of voting from far Left parties marked by zealous anti-Zionism and a full range of anti-Western ideologies. The question of Islam-in-France was raised with unprecedented candor by incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy of the Movement for a Popular Majority (UMP). For the first time in France, a major party clearly advocated a push back against Islam (qualified of course with the adjective “radical”). This strategy fired up the enthusiasm of the base, mobilized voters, brought tens of thousands to party rallies, and led to a daily increase in Sarkozy’s polling figures. It would be fair to estimate that if he had had one more week to campaign he might have defeated Hollande during the second-round vote on May 6, 2012.

But his momentum had already been slowed by Marine Le Pen, candidate of a refurbished Front National. During the first-round campaign of April 9-22, the media kept its spotlight on her in a replay of the strategy used by the last Socialist president, François Mitterrand, who deployed them to exaggerate her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s importance and weaken the conservative opposition. While accusing the Right of dallying with the Front National “fascists,” Mitterrand had unashamedly governed with a coalition of communists and the far Left without which the Socialists could never have won. A variation on this strategy was used in 2012: Anyone who dared question the virtues of “immigration” (code word for Islam) or defend national identity (code word for Islamexasperation) was smeared with pejoratives, all related to Nazism and the Holocaust.

French exasperation with Islam is prompted by situations such as this where Muslims illegally take over streets in Paris in order to pray. Authorities look the other way while the French are left wondering what has happened to their country.

In fact, this worked to the advantage of Le Pen, who came in third with 17.9 percent of the vote in the first round. What explains her pulling power? Did millions of French voters, disappointed with Sarkozy’s failure to release the pent up energies of the French economy, go for the Front National’s unrealistic economic program? Or did they, like the more vocal counter-jihad activists who rushed into her arms, simply ignore it and focus strictly on her championing of Islamexasperation? The activists, blaming Sarkozy for being big on rhetoric but soft on Islam, placed their faith in Le Pen, who came out beating the drum against Muslim street prayers (“an invasion without tanks”) and marched forward, stressing all the issues about which they themselves were blogging. They believed she would put an end to shameful compromises by the Right and the Left, which they designated by the composite “UMPS” (UMP + PS [Parti socialiste]).

Enchanted by her tough-on-Islam rhetoric, the new enthusiasts ignored the core of small-minded, retrograde anticapitalist—and often anti-Semitic—Front National stalwarts. Members of the “Jews-for-Marine” faction gave credibility to her clumsy visits to the United States and Israel. Her secularist Jewish supporters hardly noticed the way she lumped Judaism together with Islam, willing to sacrifice kosher slaughter if Islamic halal could be abolished along with it.[1] They did not even hear her declare that the U.N. Security Council should recognize Palestine.[2]

Heady with power after her good first round showing, Le Pen orchestrated the defeat of Sarkozy by convincing half of her supporters to cast a blank ballot in the second round of voting. Bloggers and activists associated with the counter-jihad site, Riposte Laïque,[3] believed that the UMP, condemned for its failure to stop the Islamic onslaught, would fall apart, and Le Pen would pick up the pieces. Confident that a slew of deputies would be elected in a Front National wave, they said she would be the leader of a new conservative party and, in 2017, why not Présidente de la République?
The True Victims

There is one category of the indigenous European population that is clearly persecuted by Muslim immigration: the Jews.

Not all Muslims attack Jews but virtually all anti-Jewish violence in France is committed by Muslims. And it is so widespread, so merciless, so stubbornly resistant that thousands of Jews have chosen to emigrate.[4] Of those who remain, many valiantly devote their energies to denouncing the violence and trying to defend Jews against it. But no less shocking than the flight or fight choice imposed on Jews is the general indifference to their dilemma.

The expulsion of a few illegal immigrants can monopolize prime time news for days while most attacks against Jews are ignored by the national media. Those that are reported are twisted out of shape by fabricated ambiguity. The victim says he was beaten/knocked down/kicked/slashed/bombarded with anti-Semitic insults. The perpetrator denies the insults. The journalist gives equal credibility to the Jew-basher and the bashed Jew, and the story quickly drops out of sight.[5]

On the rare occasion when an anti-Semitic crime is too big to ignore, it is drowned in a flood of emotion: Solemn public figures in skull caps attend synagogue ceremonies, Jewish community leaders and intellectuals publicly agonize in the media, and minutes of silence and solemn marches are organized. But the connection between Islam, Jew hatred, the specific killer, and the criminal act is severed. This was the case with the murder of Sébastien Selam by a Muslim neighbor in 2003 and the kidnap-torture murder of Ilan Halimi by an Islamist gang in 2006.[6]

Islamism’s brutal face showed up once again on the eve of the official presidential campaign in the form of Muhammad Merah, who assassinated three paratroopers of fellow North African origin—Abel Chennouf, Imad Iban Ziaten, and Muhammad Legouade—and then on March 19, executed Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his sons Aryeh and Gavriel, and 7-year-old Miriam Monsonego at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse. A surviving soldier, Loic Liber, is a tetraplegic while student Bryan Aaron Bajoui is recuperating from critical chest wounds and the shock of witnessing the murders.

Because Merah killed both Jews and apparent Muslims (in fact one of his Maghrebi victims was Christian), the crime could not be termed as purely anti-Semitic. The fact that he was a run-of-the-mill punk rather than a wildly deranged one-of-a-kind killer raised no alarms in the public mind: Ominously, a striking increase in attacks against Jews following Merah’s jihadist operation showed that a very broad swath of the French Muslim population is both radicalized and activated.[7]

This does not mean that French society was not shaken by the Merah massacre. The weekly Nouvel Observateur featured a cover story on anti-Semitism in July. Yet, the lead article by Isabelle Monnin, “Journey to the Depths of Anti-Semitism,” meanders with half-closed eyes down the path of the new anti-Semitism. Merah is identified as a jihadist admired by a “small minority.” Several attacks against Jews are described. (Attacked by whom?) Jews who wear skull caps are afraid to go into certain neighborhoods. (What kind of neighborhoods?) Most incidents, it seems, are not violent enough to be worth reporting. Others—in Villurbane, a North African bashed a young Jew’s head with a hammer—are admittedly serious but, writes Monnin, they are whipped up by bloggers, leading to a “paranoid trend that makes every attack on a Jew the absolute proof of rampant anti-Semitism.” Finally, Monnin identifies the Jew-bashers when she states that “today’s anti-Semitism is often [sic] committed by youths of Maghrebi origin or sub-Saharan Africa calling themselves Muslims.” Are they not really Muslims? Or does the author think they do not represent true Islam? She attributes this anti-Semitism to a “political-religious molasses transposed from the Israel-Palestine conflict and anti-Americanism.” But, she alerts her readers to watch out for “a certain number of Jews whose racism and Islamophobia is reinforced by the increase in anti-Semitism.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/dear-father-dear-son-two-lives-eight-hours-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

The Importance of Fathers — on The Glazov Gang

Posted By Frontpagemag.com On February 12, 2013 @ 12:33 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments

Don’t miss this special episode of The Glazov Gang in which Larry Elder, a New York Times best-selling author and nationally syndicated radio talk show host, and Dwight Schultz, a Hollywood actor who played Murdock on NBC’s The-A-Team, discuss The Importance of Fathers. The inspiration for the dialogue was Larry’s new riveting memoir, Dear Father, Dear Son: Two Lives… Eight Hours. [To read Larry Elder’s Frontpage interview about Dear Father, Dear Son, click here.]

Watch both segments of the two-part Glazov Gang series below:

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-democratic-disgrace/print/

Every job has a minimum requirement. The absolute very least that anyone can do without being considered a complete and utter failure.

The minimum requirement for a Commander-in-Chief is to stick around when an American diplomatic mission is under fire. Obama flunked even this minimal requirement by going to sleep and then flying off for a fundraiser in Vegas.

The minimum requirement for a Secretary of State is to at least pretend to care why such an attack took place. Hillary Clinton failed that minimum requirement by declaring that it didn’t matter why the attack happened.

The minimum requirement for a Vice President is to avoid becoming a national embarrassment. Biden has failed miserably at that.

The minimum requirement for the country’s leading environmentalist is to refrain from selling a television news network created to promote an environmental message to one of the world’s leading petro-tyrannies. And Al Gore failed there.

Obama, Clinton, Biden and Gore couldn’t even meet the lowest possible standard for their positions, but that’s not a problem in a Democratic Party that no longer has any standards.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/why-israel-is-the-victim/

Israel, the only democracy and tolerant society in the Middle East, is surrounded by Muslim states that have sworn to destroy it and have conducted a genocidal propaganda campaign against the Jews, promising to “finish the job that Hitler started.” A global wave of Jew-hatred, fomented by Muslim propaganda and left-wing anti-Semitism, has spread through Europe and the United Nations and made Israel a pariah nation. David Horowitz’s classic Why Israel Is the Victim, now updated in the pamphlet below, sets the record straight about the Middle East conflict. In addition to restoring the historical record — a chronicle of obsessive aggressions first by Arab nationalists and then by Muslim jihadists, this pamphlet brings the story up to date by showing the systematic way in which the fanatical Islamic parties, Hamas and Hezbollah, sponsored by Iran, have subverted peace in the Middle East.

As Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield notes in his insightful Foreword, this pamphlet “tells us why we should reject the ‘Blame Israel First’ narrative that has so thoroughly saturated the mainstream media… It confronts the myth of Palestinian victimhood… and it delivers a rousing restatement of the true history of the hate that led us to all this.” America needs to be Israel’s protector, for as George Gilder has observed, “If the United States cannot defend Israel, it cannot defend itself.” Instead, under the leadership of Barack Obama, it has become Israel’s prosecutor with ominous portents for the future.

Foreword

In “Why Israel is the Victim” David Horowitz tells the ugly tale of the war against Israel, laying bare the sordid hypocrisies and deceits behind its campaign of violence. No volume can contain the full story of Islamic terrorism or the courageous ways in which the ordinary Israeli confronts it in the streets of his cities. What this essay does tell is the story of the lies behind that terror.

Propaganda precedes war; it digs the graves and waits for them to be filled. The war against the Jews has never been limited to bullets and swords; it has always, first and foremost, been a war of words. When bombs explode on buses and rockets rain down on Israel homes, when mobs chant “Death to the Jews” and Iran races toward the construction of its genocidal bomb; the propaganda lies to cover up these crimes must be bold enough to contain not only the murders of individuals, but the prospective massacre of millions.

The lie big enough to fill a million graves is that Israel has no right to exist, that the Jewish State is an illegitimate entity, an occupier, a warmonger and a conqueror. The big lie is that Israel has sought out the wars that have given it no peace and that the outcomes of those wars make the atrocities of its enemies understandable and even justifiable. That is the big lie that David Horowitz confronts in “Why Israel is the Victim”.

From the latest outburst of violence to its earliest antecedents under the Palestine Mandate, “Why Israel is the Victim” exposes the true nature of the war and wipes away the lies used by the killers and their collaborators to lend moral authority to their crimes. It shows not only why Israel must exist, but also why its existence has been besieged by war and terror.

“Why Israel is the Victim” tells us why we should reject the “Blame Israel First” narrative that has so thoroughly saturated the mainstream media. It challenges the false hope of the Two State Solution in sections such as “Self-Determination Is Not the Agenda” and “Refugees: Jewish and Arab”. It confronts the myth of Palestinian victimhood in “The Policy of Resentment and Hate” and delivers a rousing restatement of the true history of the hate that led us to all this in “The Jewish Problem and Its ‘Solution’”.

Recent history shows us that it was not an Israeli refusal to grant the Palestinian Arabs the right of self-determination that led to their campaigns of terror, but that Palestinian self-determination empowered a people steeped in the hatred of Jews to engage in terrorism.

With the peace process each new level of Palestinian self-determination led to an intensified wave of terror against Israel, as chronicled in this pamphlet. In 2006 when the Palestinian Arabs were able to vote in a legislative election for the first time in ten years, they chose Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization that drew its popularity from its unwillingness to even entertain the thought of peace with the Jewish State.

The 2006 election showed once again that the root cause of terrorism lay in a culture where political popularity came from killing Jews, not from bringing peace.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/27/some-advice-on-women-in-combat-from-a-female-veteran/ Yesterday’s column on women in combat elicited a number of passionate responses from both sides. Some of them came from proponents of the move, frequently citing alternate motives on my part. These ranged from “trying to keep women pregnant in the kitchen” and “Republicans want to lock women in the 1950s” to whichever variant […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/women-in-combat-roles-a-non-starter?f=puball

David Sayers is a Viet Nam Veteran that served in the U.S. Army for 13 years, is airborne qualified. He Served with 82nd Airborne and 101st. D

The left would have us believe placing women in direct combat roles is a problem in search of a solution. They are not only wrong but dangerously so. It is not part of a necessary military evolution such as going from a battleship Navy to a carrier Navy. As the old saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Since the early days of mankind, the male role has traditionally been that of the protector /provider and the woman’s role that of mother/nurturer. Despite outcries from the left, especially the feminist, and with the understanding that there are exceptions, this is the way of nature and what has sustained civilization for eons.

The primary role of the military in combat is not to provide a remedy for their perceived gender inequality or any other form of PC social experimentation. The sine qua non of front line combat troops is to prevail in combat and simply put, men are far better equipped both physically and mentally to accomplish that role! This is in no way meant to speak adversely of women’s courage or their willingness to go in harm’s way; rather, it is a matter of the most effective way to accomplish the mission of combat troops. Unfortunately, too many of those advocating this proposed new role for women are more interested in advancing the cause of gender equity rather than preparing combat troops to defeat the enemy. This is a dangerous aspiration with deadly consequences!

While there are isolated cases of women placed in combat roles (the Israelis, Soviets, and Germans, when in desperate need of front-line troops, placed women in combat, but later barred them) these have been rare and there were extenuating circumstances. Those conditions simply do not exist in our military.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/europes-hezbollah-dilemma The long-awaited results of the Bulgarian investigation into the Burgas terrorist bombing last July 18th has placed enormous pressure on the European Union to proscribe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization – a classification repeatedly called for by the US, Canada and Israel, but so far rejected by EU member states except the Netherlands. Hezbollah’s […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/classic-hagel I think it is pretty amazing that AIPAC is keeping mum on the fact that Obama has nominated a Jew hater and Israel basher to serve as the next Defense Secretary. As I’ve said before, Hagel’s appointment is a far greater threat to the US military than it is to Israel. But still, it […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/340377/obama-s-benghazi-success-rich-lowry The Obama White House is to be congratulated. It has executed one of the most effective stonewalls in recent memory over the Benghazi attack last September 11 that killed our ambassador to Libya and three others. Its handling of the aftermath of the debacle is a model example of the power of obfuscation and […]