RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/a-new-attack-on-islams-critics/print/

The partiality of the news media, heaven knows, is an international phenomenon. But there are few places on this fragile blue planet of ours where consumers are forced to shell out so much money to be fed so much outright, shameless, and (not infrequently) downright vile propaganda as is the case in little Norway. At present every Norwegian household that owns a TV must pay an annual “license fee” of $451.00 a year to subsidize NRK, the government-owned TV and radio network. (Next year the fee will climb to $568.57.) You have to pay, even if you never, ever watch NRK, most of whose programming is not unlike a triple dose of Ambien. Take the schedule for Wednesday, October 24, which consisted of a blizzard of national and local news programs (one of them in Sami); “Murder, She Wrote”; reality shows, one set on a remote Finnish island, another on a Danish chestnut farm whose proprietors run it “the good old-fashioned way”; an investigative program that asked why the number of moose in Norway has tripled in the last decade; and a musical tribute to United Nations Day by the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. (You may not know that October 24 is United Nations Day, but I can assure you that every kid in Norway does.)

But what’s worst about NRK is not the comical dullness of much of its daily menu but, well, two things: first, the day-to-day, knee-jerk, petty mendacities of its news reporting, which is almost invariably tilted against the U.S., Israel, capitalism, and so on; and, second, the larger, grander, more sweeping, and even, at times, utterly breathtaking duplicities of some of the few high-profile prime-time programs that NRK actually produces itself. Case in point: Brennpunkt, or “burning point,” a series that pretends to be devoted to investigative journalism, and that, on the evening of October 23, served up an hour entitled “Intet kommer i en lukket hånd.” It was explained that this title, which literally translates as “Nothing comes in a closed hand,” was a quotation from Indira Gandhi; a quick Google search established that the original quotation was: “You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/escalation-in-gaza/print/ Those who have long dreamed of a Palestinian state need dream no longer. Hamas-ruled Gaza, while not internationally recognized as a state, is now a self-governing entity in every meaningful sense. On Tuesday it even had its first official visit, with full pomp and splendor, by a foreign head of state—the emir of Qatar, […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203630604578074840878757714.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

Obama would need Romney’s Navy to fulfill his own military strategy.

‘And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships. It’s what are our capabilities.

That was President Obama at Monday night’s debate, rebuking Mitt Romney for noting that the U.S.Navy is the smallest it’s been in nearly a century and may soon get smaller. It would be nice to think the President has been up late reading Alfred Thayer Mahan. To judge by the rest of his remarks on the subject, he hasn’t.

We mean Mr. Obama’s well-rehearsed jibe that “we also have fewer horses and bayonets” than we did during World War I. This was followed by the observation that “we have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.”

Yes, Mr. President. And we have fewer of all of those things, too.

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the Navy counted 529 ships in the fleet, including 15 aircraft carriers and 121 nuclear submarines. In 2001 the Navy was down to 316 ships, with 12 carriers and 73 subs. In 2011 the numbers were 285, 11 and 71, respectively. On current trajectory, Mr. Romney said, “we’re headed down to the low 200s,” a figure Mr. Obama did not dispute.

The President is right that the ships the U.S. puts to sea today are, for the most part, much more capable than they were 20 or 30 years ago. But that’s true only up to a point. Aegis cruisers and destroyers responsible for defending their immediate battle space are now taking on the additional role of providing ballistic missile defense. The tasks multiply, but the ships aren’t getting any additional missile tubes.

A smaller fleet is also more stressed. The usual model for ship rotations—one-third deployed, one-third preparing for deployment, and one-third in overhaul—has given way to a reality in which 40% of the fleet is deployed and another 19% is underway for training operations. As one Naval friend with recent command experience tells us, “we are crushing our sailors.”

http://www.jidaily.com/d4f9e?utm_source=Jewish+Ideas+Daily+Insider&utm_campaign=28ff584279-Insider&utm_medium=email

While Roosevelt was resisting calls to admit child refugees from Germany (and badmouthing Jews in private), his predecessor was out campaigning on behalf of European Jewry.

Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel, by Sonja Schoepf Wentling and Rafael Medoff (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 238 pp., $15)

As a Jewish liberal-turned-conservative, I am asked the question with mind-numbing regularity: how can Jewish voters remain so attached to a Democratic Party seemingly so often hostile to their interests? Given Barack Obama’s stance toward an Israel facing the threat of Iranian nuclear annihilation, needless to say, that question has been posed with particular urgency and confusion during the 2012 campaign.

Generally, I offer a variation of the answer Norman Podhoretz put forth in his 2010 book on the subject, Why Are Jews Liberals?: that for a great many secular Jews, liberalism itself constitutes a kind of religion; that since Jews were historically subject to unending violence and oppression, fighting injustice and championing the powerless is at the heart of our ethical and moral tradition; and that, indeed, for all its occasional shortcomings, the Democratic Party fundamentally embraces that tradition, while Republicans, representing the interests of the cosseted rich and powerful, are inimical to it. In innumerable Jewish homes, these assumptions are beyond question; or, more precisely, to question them is nothing less than to question a communal faith in which a handful of magic phrases—“tolerance,” “human rights,” “social justice”—are apt to be invoked with outraged certainty that puts an end to any contrary argument.

That said, there is necessarily another factor at play: the striking ability of such voters to deny, or willfully misinterpret, the evidence before their eyes. That this has been the case for generations is the unhappy but inescapable conclusion of a recently published book that examines Jewish political behavior during the crucial years from the end of World War I through the achievement of Israeli independence in 1948: Herbert Hoover and the Jews, by historian Sonja Schoepf Wentling and Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. Its intriguing title aside, the book’s principal character is Hoover’s successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, still revered in many Jewish homes as the ultimate champion of the little guy and the most devoted friend of the Jewish people ever to hold the nation’s highest office.

http://jcpa.org/article/hizbullahs-unspoken-war-in-syria/

Col. (ret.) Dr. Jacques Neriah, a special analyst for the Middle East at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, was formerly Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Deputy Head for Assessment of Israeli Military Intelligence.

The fighting in Syria has already spilled over the border into Lebanon, threatening the fragile sectarian balance holding that country together. Cross-border attacks have become customary, with the Syrian Army shelling and shooting into Lebanese villages that it says are harboring Syrian rebels.

Across from El Hermel in northeastern Lebanon and inside Syrian territory, a string of villages inhabited by Shiites has been clashing with majority-Sunni villages that back the Syrian opposition forces in the countryside of Qusayr, on the outskirts of Homs. Hizbullah is interfering directly and militarily in Qusayr under the pretext of protecting the Shiite villages in the area. It currently claims control of 18 villages along the widest part of the Orontes River Basin.

The French Mandatory authorities delineated the Lebanon-Syria border in the years following the creation of Greater Lebanon in 1920, but the border was never finalized. What is happening on the ground could be called de facto demarcation since Hizbullah has a presence in the string of Shiite villages (annexing them de facto to Lebanon), while the Free Syrian Army is present in most Sunni villages, thus annexing them to Syria.

Hizbullah appears to be carving out a 20-kilometer (12-mile) border corridor to the Syrian Alawite enclave on the coast. Hizbullah appears to be seeking to control strategic access to the Orontes River Basin in Syria and Lebanon to form a contiguous Alawite-Shiite mini-state. Yet the Shiite belt would likely face a major challenge from Sunnis on both sides of the border.

For the first time, Hizbullah is “exporting” its military know-how and might for use against Arab neighbors, in order to respond to Tehran’s strategic scheme to protect the Assad regime from falling. But by doing so, Hizbullah has alienated the Sunni majority in Syria and also in Lebanon. It would be fair to assess that in case Assad’s regime falls, Hizbullah will also have to fight for its life in the Lebanese context.

Hizbullah has been fighting for years to prove its “Lebanese” credentials. Fighting alongside the Alawite regime has turned Hizbullah back into what it really is: just another Lebanese armed militia, a Shiite army at the service of its patrons, sponsors, and protectors in Tehran.

The Syrian Conflict Spills into Lebanon

As the fighting in Syria intensifies, the conflict has already spilled over the border into Lebanon, threatening the fragile sectarian balance holding that country together and sparking yet another blood-spattered internal conflict. Although the clashes are still limited to the ill-defined border areas between the two countries and in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli, still, the latest car bombing in Beirut on October 19 (the first since 2008) which targeted senior Lebanese intelligence official Wissam al-Hassan, who led the investigation that implicated Syria and Hizbullah in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, was most probably the result of Syrian–Hizbullah cooperation and could herald an expansion of the domestic Lebanese conflict between supporters and opponents of the Assad regime. Hassan was the brains behind the uncovering of a bomb plot that led to the arrest and indictment in August 2012 of former Lebanese minister Michel Samaha, an ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad, in a setback for Damascus and its Lebanese allies including Hizbullah.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203897404578076841543944634.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

A revealing interview about his priorities in 2009—and 2013.

President Obama doesn’t give many interviews these days outside Comedy Central, so it caused a stir Wednesday when editors at the Des Moines Register managed to pin him down and even elicit some news. Specifically, Mr. Obama said he wants to pursue immigration reform in a second term, as well as a budget “grand bargain” with Republicans that includes tax reform.

This will come as a surprise to voters reading the President’s just-released 20-page brochure on his second-term agenda, which makes little or no mention of these priorities. Perhaps that’s why the White House first demanded that the interview be off the record, making the transcript public only after the Register editor objected in a public blog post.

But the larger reason to be skeptical concerns Mr. Obama’s answer to another Register question: Whether he regrets pursuing ObamaCare and other liberal social priorities in his first two years rather than focusing on the economy.

“Absolutely not,” Mr. Obama told the Iowa journalists. “Remember the context. First of all, Mitch McConnell has imposed an ironclad filibuster from the first day I was in office. And that’s not speculation.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/10/obamas_epa_plans_for_2013.html The November elections will determine the direction of US climate policy — and therefore also energy policy and the pace of economic growth: jobs, standards of living, budget deficits and inflation. Obama has already promised to make climate change the centerpiece of his concern — with all that implies: “Green” energy policy, linked to […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/331580 Why is Mitt Romney rising? Americans who watched the GOP nominee debate President Obama never met the cold, greedy, sexist, racist, carcinogenic tax cheat that Team Obama promised would appear. The calm, steady, and reasonable gentleman who opposed Obama was no Gordon Gekko. Americans might like Romney even more if they understood his random […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/331566/us-should-withdraw-unesco-brett-d-schaefer Last fall, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) granted membership to the Palestinian Authority. President Obama then stopped all U.S. financial contributions to UNESCO, as required by U.S. law. This didn’t sit well with UNESCO director general Irina Bokova. Earlier this month, she ramped up her campaign to get the U.S. […]

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/10/24/secretary-of-state-clinton-grins-laughs-while-answering-question-about-benghazi-white-house-downplays-emails/
Minutes ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton answered a singular question about the new emails showing that the Obama administration knew that the Benghazi assault was a terrorist attack two hours after it began. Clinton once again said that “No one wants to get to the bottom of what happened more than I do,” before touting her “independent review board” and its progress in investigating the attack. That board will not report any of its findings prior to the election, and it is operating under the secretary’s control. The State Department has not even released the names of the board members. As Clinton described the board’s work, she said that it is reviewing every piece of evidence, and not “cherry picking” pieces here and there. As she said the words “cherry picking,” Clinton nervously grinned and chuckled.

The White House, meanwhile, is downplaying the import of the emails that Reuters and other media outlets obtained late Tuesday. Despite the fact that the emails show clearly that knowledge of Ansar al-Sharia’s claim to have launched the attack reached the highest levels of the government, the White House is insisting that that was but one piece of information obtained that night.