RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2013/02/david-singer-on-why-israelis-wont-be.html

The author is a lawyer and international affairs analyst in Australia
Writes David Singer:

‘Amos Oz represents the perfect example of a writer of stories and tales who should stick to writing and not trade on his unrivalled excellence and international recognition in that field to try and influence the course of Israeli politics.
This becomes embarrassingly evident when considering his political opinions disclosed in an article written for the New York Times by Roger Cohen on 28 January.

His introductory remarks to Cohen are indeed promising:

“Most Israelis would wave goodbye to the West Bank but they don’t want to be suckers, they don’t want the Gaza scenario to repeat itself”

Israelis were really taken for suckers after unilaterally evacuating Gaza in 2005 – receiving in return the indiscriminate firing of thousands of rockets into Israeli civilian population centres as thank you presents since then.

Israelis will not be suckered into suffering a repeat performance of such war crimes emanating from any areas of the West Bank ceded by them to the Arabs.

Oz maintains that there is:

“a silent consensus that the occupied territories do not matter that much. Israelis are no longer interested. They vote with their feet. They don’t go there, except for the settlers and right-wing extremists. This means that if Israelis can be reassured that by renouncing the West Bank they are not going to get a lousy deal – they are quietly ready to do it.”

Israel offered to renounce its claims to more than 90 per cent of the West Bank in 2000/2001 and 2008 – but the Palestinian Authority insisted that millions of Arabs be given the right to emigrate to Israel and that any newly created state not be demilitarised.

This was the kind of lousy deal that Oz must have had in mind when talking to Cohen.

Oz insisted that at the end of the day some 70 percent on both sides – kicking and screaming and crying injustice – were ready for two states.

“If I may use a metaphor – I would say that the patient, Israeli and Palestinian, is unhappily ready for surgery, while the doctors are cowards.”

The Palestinian patient seems strangely disinterested in submitting to such surgery – still insisting after 20 years of negotiations that such surgery requires cutting up the Israeli patient for spare parts.

Oz is quite prepared to brand Israel’s recently elected Prime Minister a coward.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2592/outrage_over_a_cartoon_and_yet_no_one_died

The blood libel cartoons and the Mohammed cartoons, even if equally offensive, show the difference in the reactions of two peoples at loggerheads

Only on a BBC radio call-in show in Britain could you have heard listeners phoning in to express how the West would get what it has coming to it for a peasant-like film being uploaded to YouTube by some anonymous character in the United States.

But that is precisely what I heard, when as a guest on the BBC Asian Network last year, I was asked to take part in a phone-in discussion with listeners about the “Innocence of Muslims” film.

At the time, protests in Pakistan, Libya and other Muslim countries terrified pusillanimous Western leaders into apologising for the freedom of expression, or freedom to offend. The fallout was the death of an American ambassador and diplomatic staff, although the links to the protests in this case are spurious.

The same of course can be reflected upon of the firebombing of the Charlie Hebdo office in 2011, and of the response on the streets of Britain when a Danish newspaper published a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. Hundreds died. Property was burned. Unknown numbers of people were injured.

Against this backdrop, I have been assessing the implications of the Benjamin Netanyahu cartoon over the past 48 hours.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2612/hamas_to_teach_hebrew_in_enemy_language_initiative

Hamas intends to teach Palestinian children Hebrew, so that they may ‘know their enemy’ better

The terrorist outfit controlling Gaza has announced that it will seek to teach Hebrew to students in a new attempt to help young Palestinians to “know their enemy” in Israel.

Hamas has already flexed it linguistical skills, airing threatening videos and radio messages to Israelis in Hebrew during the war in November 2012. Hamas’s Hebrew broadcasts underlined a desire to use Hebrew as a propaganda tool in the conflict, which it claims is important for Gazans to utilise to help them gain a foothold over the Jewish state.

Hamas’s Twitter account has also begun reported in Hebrew, reports the Reuters news agency. Soumaya al-Nakhala, a senior Hamas education ministry official, told Reuters that knowing one’s enemy is consistent with the teaching:

“Expanding (Hebrew) teaching comes as a result of our plan and meeting greater demand by students to learn Hebrew. They want to learn the language of their enemy so they can avoid their tricks and evil.”

Two decades years ago, many Gazans could already speak and understand Hebrew, having worked in the Jewish state or spent time there in prison there for involvement in terrorist attacks.

But since 1994, Gaza has become increasingly isolated from Israel, having gained limited self-rule and being effectively shut off from the outside world by Hamas, the terrorist outfit which effectively rules by dictatorship in the area.

Today it is estimated that only about 50,000 Gazans retain a grasp of Hebrew, though this is set to change when Hebrew classes are extended to higher school grades, beginning next term.

Another Tack: Netanyahu’s coattail effect Paroxysms of irrepressible nattering seized numerous local know-it-alls hot on the heels of the Knesset election results. None-too-amazingly they were of one mind. While brimming with self-importance, few had anything original to contribute to our understanding of what happened. Every self-aggrandized analyst, so at least it seems, obligingly subscribed to the […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/01/is_the_obama_administration_deliberately_feeding_the_flames_in_egypt.html What the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in Egypt meant was the end of any hope on the part of secularists, women, and especially Egyptian Christians who were yearning for equal rights and the beginning of a true and enlightened fledgling democracy. Instead, they will now be forced to endure ominous Islamic Sharia law restrictions on […]

http://letthemfight.blogspot.com/ I have had just about enough of the queue of lambasting idiots whose sole desire is to control every aspect of American’s lives. Their bloated exhortations about things they obviously know nothing about has risen to the level of epidemic. What is more troublesome is that there seems to be an unending assortment and […]

http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/when-women-fight-civilization-loses/print/

And so it came, the coup de grace. The final “barrier” to “opportunities” for women in combat is no more. With a stroke of their pens, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin E. Dempsey decreed that no battlefield mission or military role is off-limits to the female sex. The defense secretary and the general thus liberated mothers, daughters, sisters and wives to kill and be killed in the infantry, commando raids, even in Obama administration “overseas contingency operations.” In so doing, they also slashed away at that last institutional protection for the space that separates men and women, where civilization once grew.

It (civilization) has been struggling there for decades, as social engineers and radical feminists – all heirs to Marx – have been cutting away at elemental human instinct, social grace, language and thought itself. This overhaul of manners and mores, the family structure and marriage – even private aspects of the relationship between men and women – has been successful to a point where the cultural argument against women in combat (women in the military being a lost cause) is rarely voiced, not even on the right. (I watched Fox News on women-in-combat announcement day, listening in vain for just one culture warrior.)

We are left to make only the utilitarian arguments – body strength and speed, unit cohesion, even urinary tract infections and other hazards that front-line deployment pose to females. These are compellingly logical points, but they are unlikely to reverse an ideological juggernaut. When the secretary of defense says putting women in combat is about “making our military … and America stronger” and no one says he’s lying to further a Marxian ideal via social engineering, the cultural argument is lost, and the culture it comes from is bound and gagged, hostage to what we know as “political correctness.”

I still see threads of the cultural argument in emails and some blog responses to the Pentagon’s latest whack at creating “gender neutrality.” It erupts like a reflex against the conditioning to deny differences defined, at their essence, by muscle mass and womb. Such conditioning erodes the male protective instinct – which, surely, is what war is supposed to arise from – and the female nurturing instinct, which surely is what a civilization depends on.

No more. Women with wombs and without manly muscle mass now count as Pentagon-approved “warriors,” modern-day knights in Kevlar, soon to be humping 80-pound packs over mountain and desert.

Or maybe not. Didn’t Gen. Dempsey indicate that dropping some of those old-fashioned strength and speed requirements might be in order? “If we do decide that a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn’t make it,” Dempsey said last week, “the burden is now on the service to come back and explain to the secretary, why is it that high? Does it really have to be that high?” Of course not! Why train Navy SEALs when Navy OTTERs will do as well?

And what about their children, when these front-line warriors bear them? And their pregnancies, when they decide it’s better for their mission, for their country, to terminate them? Don’t think Daddy Government, once again, won’t be a steady provider to his womenfolk.

And why not? “It is women who pass on the culture,” my daughters’ pediatrician – a font of human wisdom after six of his own kids and endless patients – used to tell me, his voice rising over baby girls screaming. But what kind of “gender-neutral” culture will they pass on?

http://www.city-journal.org/2013/bc0131ss.html

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WILL THEY GIVE OSCARS FOR BASHING ISRAEL? LORI LOWENTHAL MARCUS

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/will-they-give-oscars-for-bashing-israel-lori-lowenthal-marcus.html

Two of the five films nominated for Best Documentary by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this year are Israeli films. Let’s hope one of the other films wins.

Missing a Chance at Greatness
A riveting examination of Israeli counterterrorism, The Gatekeepers stacks the deck, denying viewers their own judgment.

Zero Dark Thirty is not the only Academy Award–nominated film that raises profound moral questions about how democracies can strike back at terrorism without abandoning their own liberal values. Also up for an award this year is The Gatekeepers, a searing documentary in Hebrew with English subtitles, featuring revealing interviews with six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, who testify about the methods they used in combating Palestinian terrorism.

Civil libertarians and some liberal politicians have excoriated Zero Dark Thirty’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, and screenwriter, Mark Boal, for purportedly justifying torture of captured al-Qaida operatives as a means of extracting leads that might have led to finding Osama bin Laden’s safe house in Pakistan. Because the movie seems to suggest that “torture works,” says Senator Dianne Feinstein, it “has the potential to shape American public opinion in a disturbing and misleading manner.” (Michael Totten has written a vigorous defense of Bigelow.)

The Gatekeepers, on the other hand, has won praise from liberal critics, here and in Israel, for arguing that Israel is in danger of “losing its soul,” and its democracy, because it employs similar brutal methods against Palestinian terrorists. The film’s director, Dror Moreh, is a 40-something Jerusalemite who previously made a well-received documentary about former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to withdraw the Israeli army and uproot Jewish settlements from Gaza. For The Gatekeepers, Moreh was able to convince the six Shin Bet chiefs to spill their guts about the measures they authorized to combat Palestinian suicide terrorism. They’re also asked whether these operations contributed to a solution of the conflict. Their collective answer, in one word, is no.

It may seem astonishing to non-Israelis that former spy chiefs in that security-obsessed country would be willing, or even allowed, to reveal undercover operations they directed and to criticize government policies publicly. In fact, such outspoken criticism from Israeli security officials is hardly unprecedented. In 2003, four of the same ex–Shin Bet chiefs publicly warned Sharon’s government that its harsh policies in the Palestinian territories were leading the country to “near-catastrophe.” Partly because of their warning, Sharon eventually decided to withdraw troops from Gaza.

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=5998

“The cruelest con in the schemes of Mr. Obama and the senators is the so-called “earned citizenship.” This would give “undocumented immigrants” a way to “come out of the shadows” and “play by the rules” by passing a background check, learning English and “civics,” paying their back taxes and penalties, and going to the back of the line to apply for citizenship. These are requirements almost no one could meet. The pointy-headed intellectuals (to use an apt phrase from the past) who dreamed up this scheme apparently never met anyone without tidy savings on which to draw “back taxes” and “penalties.”

The righteous cheers and applause for the latest amnesty schemes from the U.S. Senate and the White House recall the famous gathering of mice convened to deal with the cat. The cat was devouring the mice in alarming numbers.

“What we need,” said a wizened little gray fellow who looked a lot like an overstuffed senator, “is a bell for the cat. We can put it on his collar along with his identification tag, though it beats me why anyone would want to help a cat find his way home. Then we can hear the tinkling of the bell when the cat’s around. Then we can hide.”

All the mice cheered and squeaked. “What a great idea,” said one lean little mouse whose fur had gone gray around his ears. He looked something like John McCain. “Yes, yes,” echoed a mouse with a certain Carolina accent. “Let’s do it now.”

The chairman, a fair-minded fellow, asked for further comment.

“No, no, no” a mouse shouted from the back row. “No more talk. No more delay.” Another mouse, an editor from the Mall Street Journal just arrived from a two-hour business lunch at Chez Dumpster, with tiny crumbs still lodged in his whiskers, cried out: “Vote! Vote!”

And so they did, with only one dissenting vote. All the little mice screamed and cheered, mightily pleased with themselves. All but one, a plump, noisy mouse, a curmudgeon who looked like he might be a famous radio talker. He shook his head sadly. “You’ve got an interesting idea,” he said, “but who will bell the cat?”

No one spoke up. Silence fell across the room. Finally, one by one, the mice drifted away, back to their holes in the wall under the kitchen sink. The cat, from his perch on the sofa, licked his lips, and smiled true to the instincts of his Cheshire grandfathers. Lunch would soon be served.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/the_path_to_saving_the_republic_just_say_no.html Our nation is in crisis. The Obama administration is centralizing power at a level unmatched in American history with grave consequences for our future liberty and freedom. Of that there is not much debate among conservatives. Conservatives, however, are always waiting for the next Ronald Reagan, wondering if Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan or someone […]