RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/10/25/its-the-obonomy-stupid/

“Business investment in the US has ground to a halt” is the lead story on MarketWatch this morning. The site reports, “For the first quarter since late 2009, shipments of U.S.-made capital investment goods declined, falling at a 4.9% annual rate, according to Census Bureau data released on Thursday.”

There’s an investors’ strike underway of proportions we have never seen before. Corporations are hoarding $2 trillion worth of cash. Private equity funds have $1 trillion of unused commitments. Pension funds and life insurance companies are gasping for returns. Yet Americans refuse to take risk on other Americans. Households, corporations, and institutional investors would rather keep money under the figurative mattress in ultra-safe investments than invest in future productivity.

This isn’t like the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, to be sure, investment collapsed, but no-one had money to invest. Now everyone has money to invest (and the Federal Reserve keeps shoving new money into the system by purchasing securities from the open market), yet no-one wants to invest.

There’s no textbook description for this condition, so we’ll give it a name: the Obonomy. The anti-business toxicity in Washington is so intense that that no-one will take risks.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203897404578078803373321988.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion “What’s welling up in America’s ruling Democrats is not yet a full-throated scream of desperation,” observes commentator Neil Macdonald, who is Canadian and therefore a neutral observer. “But as Samuel Johnson famously remarked, the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight concentrates the mind wonderfully.” True, as Macdonald says, “for the most part, Barack […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/european-parliament-delegations-trip-to-iran-a-despicable-visit?f=puball#ixzz2AOl75ro6 Once again the oppressed Iranian people were shocked to hear that European Parliament (EP) will soon be embarking on an official visit of their lawmakers to Iran. The visit is scheduled from October 27 to November 02, 2012. The question on every Iranian mind is: “How can they even think of going to Tehran […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/economy-obama-project-weakness Despite President Obama’s snarky jabs at Mitt Romney in Monday night’s debate, claiming command of international affairs, the truth is that after nearly four years the emperor’s foreign and national security policy still has no clothes.First, there’s no denying the Middle East is a mess. The Arab Spring released hard-line Islamist forces, not moderate […]

Britain’s historic responsibilities for the Israel-Palestine conflict:
starting an honest conversation

0930-1700 Friday November 2nd 2012

Quaker Meeting House, 7 Victoria Terrace, Edinburgh EH1 2JL

Space in the hall is limited, 3 places still available at 25 Oct.

The Balfour Project, in association with the Church of Scotland, is organising a one-day conference on the British involvement in Palestine in the first half of the last century. This is a first step in exploring how to mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration in exactly five years on 2nd November 2017.

The Balfour Project has been created by a group of academics and activists who believe that this anniversary should not pass unremarked. Mindful of Britain’s responsibility for what has come to pass in the Middle East, the Balfour Project will encourage understanding of what led to the Balfour Declaration, and what flowed from it. Through our website, we plan to facilitate a network of educational, political, religious and humanitarian groups who share this conviction. We aim to stimulate conferences, cultural exchanges and the production of multimedia resources. Above all, we believe that the search for the truth of what took place, and the acknowledgement of wrong-doing, can contribute to justice, peace and reconciliation in the Middle East.

In the morning Dr Mary Embleton, whose special interest is Britain’s involvement in the Middle East, will outline the contradictory promises Britain made to Arabs and Jews, and their consequences for all parties before and during the British Mandate in Palestine. This will be followed by keynote papers from Rev Dr Stephen Sizer, who will talk about the ideas that shaped this period, Professor Mary Grey will talk about the main players and Dr Imad Karam will talk about the consequences for Palestinians today. In the afternoon John Bond OAM, former Secretary of Australia’s Sorry Day campaign, will use the 2008 national apology to Aboriginal Australians to discuss the impact of acknowledgement and apology.

This will be followed by workshops where you can both interact further with the main speakers and pool ideas on how we move forward. How can we create a momentum over the next 5 years towards an acknowledgement of our responsibilities? Can there be a cascade of events, not centrally organised, but all working to the same ends?

Registration is £20 which includes lunch and refreshments. Space is limited so please book your place on the attached registration form. We hope you will find it an informative and stimulating day.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2012/10/angling-for-apology-britons-battling.html
Angling For An Apology: Britons Battling The Balfour Declaration

“With the Balfour Declaration of 2nd November 1917 Britain unleashed a series of events in Palestine that have not only caused enormous suffering and loss to the Palestinian people but also unleashed recurrent waves of terrorism affecting many parts of the world to this day. The British Government must accept its historic responsibility and issue an apology.”

So runs a silly doomed-for-the-dustbin e-petition to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office concocted last year by an anti-Israel activist. Tweeted at intervals by its framer, who also happens to head a small Palestine Solidarity Campaign branch somewhere in the British boondocks, the e-petition closed in August this year, having attracted just 155 signatures.

The idea behind the petition, however, has evidently stirred independently in other breasts.

Step forward the Steering Committee of an initiative calling itself The Balfour Project:

Dr Mary Embleton, Historian
Professor Mary Grey, Theologian, writer and activist.
Dr Imad Karam, Academic and film maker
Peter Riddell. Peace activist
Dr Monica Spooner, Medical Doctor
Professor Roger L Spooner OBE, Scientist
Rev Dr Stephen Sizer Anglican vicar and author

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1919/jewish_settlement_in_the_west_bank_is_not_the_issue Palestinian Authority leaders pay a great deal of lip service to their desire to create a state of their own, even turning to the United Nations to try to achieve some kind of unprecedented observer status for their as yet nonexistent state. At the same time the Palestinians, their friends, and even elements of […]

http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?llr=e6zyq5bab&v=0015qcJ7P_42YgKkXk9gM0LkccrwZXidwa_yye0QrqpHmSL74HZPRXEbW-6kbencIRKDWtEZ4PwRr1Vk_nW7I7Pq6FbT0QbBTlBr_AScPwif_8%3D The decision to award this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union – announced as the EU edges ever closer to disintegration is no mere foolishness. It reflects a worldview that is largely responsible for Israel’s marginalization in the international community. The decision to award this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to the European […]

Another Tack: When the darling departs Israel’s agenda-driven pundits are strict mono-measurers with no other political yardstick but how any hullabaloo impacts on the Likud – or, more specifically, on its headliner Binyamin Netanyahu. They cheer whatever damages the Likud or diminishes Netanyahu. Look at how the second coming of Shas’s Arye Deri’s was greeted. Regardless […]

http://www.d-intl.com/articles/international/2012-10-25/french-jihad-cell-dismantled

It has nothing to do with Islam, say the government, the experts and the media

PARIS. The day after the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Serge Haroche, a French Jew born in Casablanca, material to make IEDs were found in a garage rented by Jérémie Bailly, alleged ringleader of the jihad cell dismantled on October 6th. The Naouri grocery store in Sarcelles, hit by a grenade attack on September 19th, is at the top of the list of a dozen Jewish targets found in Bailly’s apartment. One suspect, Jérémie Louis-Sydney, was killed in a shootout with the police and twelve suspects were arrested in a coordinated operation in Cannes, Strasbourg, and Torcy, a banlieue of Paris. Five have been released and seven charged with terrorist associations, attempted assassination aggravated by anti-Semitic motivations and/or recruiting jihadis to fight in Syria. The story dominated the French news stream for several days, triggering belated recognition of twelve years of anti-Semitic violence at a level unknown since the Shoah. The lid has finally been lifted on a seething cauldron whose explosive powers are slightly dampened by the breakup of one cell among how many?

The torrent of news report, commentary, and official declarations gave a false impression of ample information. Looking back, it seems that we know next to nothing about the suspects and their projects. Only three have been named—the Antillais Jérémie Louis-Sydney, the failed soccer player of Congolese origin Yann Nkusa, and Jérémie Bailly. Not a word, not a detail, not a leak about the others except that they are all born in France, delinquents and, save one, converts to Islam. Because Louis-Sydney had served a brief prison term, it was assumed the others, too, must have been “radicalized” in jail. Hours of discussion were devoted to the problem of criminals converting to Islam or getting radicalized in jail. Now it turns out only one or two of them had been in prison. So how did they get to be Muslim?

The attack on a kosher grocery store in Sarcelles with a bizarre kind of “low-level” grenade seemed minor on the scale of physical violence perpetrated on Jews over the past twelve years—bashed, stabbed, stomped and, in the worst cases, tortured, murdered, mutilated. The grocery store didn’t burn or explode, the window was smashed with a brick, one person was slightly injured. The story dropped out of sight.

And reappeared with the dawn raid on the 6th of October. The investigation had been transferred from local police to the anti-terrorist unit when the DNA of Louis-Sydney, who had attracted the attention of internal security (DCRI) last spring, was found on the grenade. Officials did not want to repeat the error of passive surveillance that had left Mohamed Merah free to commit heinous murders before he was finally cornered and killed. Investigators, convinced that the jihadis were preparing an imminent major attack, moved in on them swiftly.