RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1dbda574-f16d-11e1-a553-00144feabdc0.html#axzz25UZhSSvt

After decades of importing every drop of fuel, Israel has struck it rich, uncovering vast reserves of natural gas in the Mediterranean

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The black and yellow helicopter heads north from Tel Aviv, passing over empty beaches, a yacht harbour and a string of sprawling seafront residences that house some of Israel’s wealthiest families. After a few minutes the pilot makes a sharp turn to the left and steers his ageing Bell 412 towards the open sea.

For more than half an hour, all there is to see is the blue waters of the Mediterranean. Then suddenly a hulking mass of brightly painted steel rises from the midday haze. Towering more than 100m above the water, this is the Sedco Express, a drilling rig that has been operating in this stretch of ocean for almost three years. As the helicopter touches down on the landing pad, we see a small blue and white Star of David flag fluttering in the wind. It is the only sign that the Sedco Express sits atop one of the greatest treasures that Israel has ever found. Far below, connected to the rig by a slender steel pipe that runs through 1,700m of ocean and another 4,500m of rock and sand, lies a vast reservoir of natural gas known as the Tamar field.

The men on board the Sedco Express are busy testing the field’s multiple wells in preparation for the long-awaited day next April, when a US-Israeli consortium will start pumping the gas onshore. With reserves of almost 10 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the Tamar field is a hugely valuable asset for the Israeli economy. Discovered in January 2009, it was the biggest gas find in the world that year, and by far the biggest ever made in Israeli waters. But the record held for barely two years. In December 2010, Tamar was dwarfed by the discovery of the Leviathan gasfield some 20 miles farther east – the largest deepwater gas reservoir found anywhere in the world over the past decade. The two fields, together with a string of smaller discoveries, will cover Israel’s domestic demand for gas for at least the next 25 years, and still leave hundreds of billions of cubic feet for sale abroad. The government take from the gasfields alone is forecast to reach at least $140bn over the next three decades – a staggering sum for a relatively small economy such as Israel’s.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/no-cats-in-america-for-hanan-ashrawi/

“Clearly, Israel will raise the question in all serious negotiation that may in time be conducted over the rights of the Palestinians…. Israel’s arguments take approximately the following form: “It is true that we Israelis brought about the exodus of the Arabs from their land in the war of 1948… and that we took control of their property. In return however you Arabs caused the expulsion of a like number of Jews from Arab countries since 1948 until today. Most of these went to Israel after you seized control of their property in one way or another. What happened, therefore, is merely a kind of ‘population and property transfer,’ the consequences of which both sides have to bear. Thus Israel gathers in the Jews from Arab countries and the Arab countries are obliged in turn to settle the Palestinians within their own borders and work towards a solution of the problem.”

Now we know: there is no such thing as Jewish refugees from Arab countries. You heard it from no less than Hanan Ashrawi, PLO executive member and spokesperson.Here is what Ashrawi wrote in an article printed in a number of Arab media outlets:

“The claim that Jews who emigrated to Israel, which is supposed to be their homeland, are “refugees” who were uprooted from their homelands is a form of deception and delusion.”

Denial is a river in Egypt, but it’s also, sadly, the default position of many Arabs and Muslims when it comes to facts they would rather not acknowledge. The Holocaust? It didn’t happen. Israel? It doesn’t exist — not on Arab maps, anyway. Jewish refugees from Arab countries? They left willingly. Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism? A fabrication. (Arabs and Jews have always lived in harmony, haven’t they?) “There are no cats in America“, sang the delusional mice migrants.

What is new about Hanan Ashrawi’s assertion is that she is probably the most senior Palestinian official to have made it in over 60 years.

Her motivation? Alarm, even desperation. The Palestinian monopoly on victimhood is being challenged. Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, is stepping up his campaign to raise awareness of the Jewish refugee issue. He will be holding a conference this coming weekend in Israel ; he will be taking the issue to New York for the next UN General Assembly meeting on September 21.

Dear reader, I won’t waste your time trying to prove to you that Ashrawi’s assertion is a bold-faced lie. Legal experts will point to the fact that the UN Agency for refugees (UNHCR) recognized Jews fleeing Arab countries on two occasions as bona fide refugees. A cursory look at the blog Point of No Return will provide plenty of evidence that Jews interned, persecuted, intimidated, expelled with nothing but the shirts on their backs, and housed in makeshift camps, were indeed refugees. A glance at Ayalon’s new Facebook page “I am a Refugee“ will show you documents forbidding Jews from returning to their countries of birth, shipfuls of refugees from Libya and video testimonies from Jews thrown out of Egypt and Iraq.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/09/03/double-review-%E2%80%98millions-of-jews-to-rescue%E2%80%99-and-%E2%80%98herbert-hoover-and-the-jews%E2%80%99-review/#

Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel, by Sonja Schoepf Wentling and Rafael Medoff (Washington: Wyman Institute, 2012).

Millions of Jews to Rescue: A Bergson Group Leader’s Account of the Campaign to Save Jews from the Holocaust, by Samuel Merlin. Edited and annotated by Rafael Medoff (Washington: Wyman Institute, 2012).

One of my earliest childhood memories is politically tainted. In November 1944, when I was not yet eight, my father assigned me to distribute “Vote for FDR” leaflets near (probably illegally near) a Brooklyn polling station. It was not a task that required courage. In my Brownsville neighborhood, it would have been easier to find a Jew who ate pork than one who would deny Roosevelt a fourth term as president in favor of Republican Thomas Dewey. Every segment of American Jewry embraced Roosevelt. From right to left, east European to German, working class to middle class, Jews adored the Commander in Chief of the war against Hitler. Rabbi Stephen Wise, the most important American Jewish leader of the time, said that American Jews “rightly look up to [FDR], revere him, and love him…No one would more deeply sorrow than I…if this feeling of Jewish homage…should be changed.” Wise sycophantically (Jeremiah might have said, idolatrously) referred to FDR as “the All Highest.”

Yet the record of Roosevelt’s administration with regard to the European Jews being hunted and murdered by Nazism was shameful. Wise himself wrote to a colleague in 1933 that “FDR has not lifted a finger on behalf of the Jews of Germany.” Indeed, ever since the publication of David Wyman’s Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-41 (1968), and Henry Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue (1970), it has been common knowledge that although the U.S. under FDR admitted more Jewish refugees than other Western nations between 1933 and 1945 its record was actually worse than theirs. “American ability to absorb immigration,” Wyman wrote, “was vastly greater than that of the small European countries …Viewed in relation to capacity, the English, Dutch, French and others …were more generous than the United States.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/world/middleeast/settlers-of-west-bank-outpost-evicted.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

THIS IS HEARTBREAKING AND CRUEL AND APPEASEMENT….SHAME ON ISRAEL….SHAME,SHAME…..AND WHAT ABOUT ALL THE ILLEGAL ARAB BUILDING ON JEWISH LAND? NOT A PEEP FROM ISRAEL’S SUPREMES….RSK

MIGRON, West Bank — The police officers went door to door on Sunday morning in this hilltop settlement outpost east of the West Bank city of Ramallah, handing out final eviction notices and waiting patiently for residents to come out.

One young couple, the Altheims, left quietly, walking down the short path from their mobile home to their car, with a tattered Israeli flag flying from the front window, and then drove off. The police said they could hear a television on in the neighboring trailer, but when the officers knocked, nobody answered. By early afternoon, however, all 47 of the outpost’s families had gone, the police said, well ahead of Tuesday’s court-ordered deadline.

The evacuation of this outpost, one of the largest and most established of the wildcat Jewish settlements set up in the West Bank without Israeli government permits over the past 15 years, but often with government infrastructure aid, sent a mixed message about the future of settlements.

The evacuation was ordered by Israel’s Supreme Court because the outpost had been built on privately owned Palestinian land. Coming years after the Israeli military issued demolition orders against all the structures, it was seen by many as a modest victory for the rule of law.

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/german-jews-warn-against-yarmulkes/2012/08/31/

IN MOSLEM OCCUPIED BERLIN THE PERPS JUST HAPPEN TO BE ARABS…..RSK

After an attack on a rabbi in Berlin, Gideon Joffe, the head of the Berlin Jewish community, said he would “not recommend that any Jew go around in parts of Berlin with a kipah.”On Tuesday, Rabbi Daniel Alter of Berlin was violently attacked while picking up his daughter from a piano lesson. He currently is recovering from surgery for a broken cheekbone. The attackers, reportedly Arab youths, asked Alter – who was wearing a kipah – if he was Jewish before hitting him in the face. They then allegedly verbally threatened Alter’s 6-year-old daughter.

Many Jewish religious leaders in the country advise their congregants against openly wearing Jewish garb in public; men routinely wear baseball caps or other hats over their yarmulkes when in public. Concern about openly wearing the skullcaps grew following an anti-Semitic attack on the Chabad Jewish kindergarten in Berlin in 2007.

Meanwhile, Inforadio, a Berlin station, reported Thursday that Ayman Mazyek, head of the Central Council of Muslims, said such attacks are “disgusting” to Muslims and pledged his organization’s solidarity and empathy with Jews in Germany.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany said the attack proved once again that violent anti-Semitism is a reality for Jews in Germany. Berlin’s mayor Klaus Wowereit decried the attack as being against all Berliners.

In 2006, Alter was among the first rabbis ordained in postwar Germany. He is a graduate of the Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam, a Reform seminary.

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/09/02/shirtsleeves-to-hair-shirt/?print=1

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry hates the idea of the wealthy being considered risk takers. But who built the network that broadcasts her?

And now, a few spittle-flecked words from MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry regarding those who take umbrage with Mr. Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech:

Harris-Perry’s folk-Marxist freakout isn’t that surprising – while the polls are still close, there does seem to be plenty of flopsweat on the left right now. Of course, that’s an ideology that’s always in search of a new Two-Minute Hate; it doesn’t need much to set its adherents off.

But consider the venue: MSNBC, and the history wrapped up in that network’s call sign. Microsoft was, of course, formed by Bill Gates after he dropped out of Harvard in the mid-‘70s, when the idea of a personal computer still seemed like something out of Star Trek or 2001: A Space Odyssey. NBC, the other half of the equation, has much deeper roots; it was formed by David Sarnoff, a Russian immigrant who began as a paperboy in New York, before rising from office boy to commercial manager of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America, before building first the NBC radio network in the 1920s, and then the NBC television network after WWII.

NBC is currently owned by a consortium that includes GE, which was formed by Thomas Edison (himself a dropout, even if such language probably wasn’t used in the 1850s) before he went on to invent the phonograph, the electric light bulb, and the motion picture camera. Which brings us to another business with a stake in MSNBC, which is Universal Studios, founded in 1912 by Carl Laemmle, who Wikipedia notes was “a German-Jewish immigrant from Laupheim who settled in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he managed a clothing store. On a buying trip in 1905 to Chicago, he was struck by the popularity of nickelodeons,” before founding a movie studio of his own. And finally Comcast, which was founded by 1963 as a cable TV consortium, back when most people considered TV to be three fuzzy channels brought in by a pair of rabbit-ear antennas.

Last week, Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller chided Mitt Romney for his emphasis on entrepreneurialism in his speeches at the Republican Convention. Certainly, Lewis is right that Romney needs to remember “all the voters who aren’t entrepreneurs.” But in an era when the current occupant of the White House can utter to his supporters that “you didn’t build that,” it’s worth reminding that men with foresight did build this country, and the businesses the president and his supporters take for granted — or rail against, as seen in the above clip.

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2012/09/03/is-villaraigosa-spanish-for-village-idiot/

Is “Villaraigosa” Spanish for “village idiot”?

Claro que no, but it might as well be, considering the remarks [1] of the Los Angeles mayor, a sleazy party hack who — as most Angelenos know — spends more time chasing skirts than doing anything for this city, which is in by far the worst shape it has been in any time since I arrived here in 1968. And those who are suffering most are the Hispanics and blacks Villaraigosa relied upon for his election and pretends to help.

To set the record straight, yes, I know Antonio Villaraigosa’s name is actually a combination of Vilar and Raigosa [2], taken when Antonio Vilar married Corina Raigosa back in 1987 to affirm their “lifetime of fidelity.”

According to The New Yorker, Corina first filed for divorce in 1994 when she, in the midst of treatment for thryoid cancer, discovered Antonio was having an affair. They reconciled two years later. Multiple affairs thereafter Corina finally dissolved the marriage in 2007. Not surprisingly, Villaraigosa’s serial philandering continued with other partners after the divorce. (You can check the sorry history on Wikipedia [3], if you want to bother. The Villaraigosas have four children and eighteen grandchildren.)

So why are the Democrats trucking out [1] this smarmy creep — who has the knowledge base of a high school junior with absolutely no genuine accomplishments of which I am aware — for the election?

Because he’s Hispanic, obviously. If Villaraigosa were an Anglo, they’d be hiding him under the bed.

This is yet another example of the deeply destructive race politics game played by the Democrats. Since they have no real ideology or program anymore, Keynesian economics having been shipwrecked off the coast of Greece, the Dems are reduced to exploiting racial and ethnic groups while accusing Republicans of racism that even a few Democrats must know does not exist.

(Andrew Breitbart, as will be recalled, offered 100K [4] to anyone with concrete evidence of Tea Party racism and never got a single taker. Of course, some, like Lawrence O’Donnell [5], are so around the bend they claim acknowledging that Obama plays golf is coded racism. I better stop drinking those Arnold Palmers or they’ll be after me next.)

This race politics is a form of sadism that is only marginally unconscious. The more these group are exploited, the worse their condition becomes. All the way back to the “Great Society,” minorities have been seduced by the Democratic Party into a permanent dependency situation, which, as most would recognize from their personal lives, only encourages negative self-worth and depression. It certainly hasn’t improved their economic position in any significant way.

U.S. to Iran: America won’t join Israeli attack
Israel National News
Monday, September 3, 2012
News
Senior officials in the Obama Administration sent a message to Tehran in the past few days, according to which the U.S. does not intend to join Israel’s side if it decides to attack the Iranian nuclear installations on its own. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz25P6XvBGx

Obama: Romney will prolong Afghan war
The Washington Times
Sunday, September 2, 2012
News
Campaigning in the adoring embrace of yet another college audience, President Obama blasted Mitt Romney on Sunday for ignoring the war in Afghanistan at the GOP convention, and suggested that his rival will prolong the war if elected president. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz25P6MdTDh

Biden claim: Romney wants war in Syria, Iran
CNN
Sunday, September 2, 2012
News
Vice President Joe Biden claimed Sunday that Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, might engage in war with Syria and Iran if elected president in November. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz25P6CuQqJ

Obama’s 1995 housing lawsuit leads to misery
Daily Caller
Monday, September 3, 2012
News
Obama’s 1995 housing lawsuit leads to misery
President Obama was a pioneering contributor to the national subprime real estate bubble, and roughly half of the 186 black clients in his landmark 1995 mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank have since gone bankrupt or received foreclosure notices. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz25P65e8yl

http://news.yahoo.com/young-iraqis-face-religious-fashion-crackdown-063038582.html BAGHDAD (AP) — For much of Iraq’s youth, sporting blingy makeup, slicked-up hair and skintight jeans is just part of living the teenage dream. But for their elders, it’s a nightmare. A new culture rift is emerging in Iraq, as young women replace shapeless cover-ups with ankle-baring skirts and tight blouses, while men strut […]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/02/afghanistan-police-training-green-on-blue_n_1850065.html

KABUL, Afghanistan — The U.S. military has halted the training of some Afghan forces while it digs deeper into their background following a surge of attacks by soldiers and police on their international partners, officials said Sunday. The move only puts about 1,000 Afghan trainees into limbo, a small fraction of the country’s security forces. But it shows how these attacks have the potential to derail the U.S.-Afghan handover of security so essential to the international drawdown strategy.

Officials say that the international coalition ultimately hopes to recheck the backgrounds of the entire 350,000-strong Afghan army and police.

The United States and its allies are pushing to have Afghan forces take over security for the country by the end of 2014. This effort has been imperiled by the spike in insider attacks that have killed 45 international service members this year, most of them Americans. There were at least 12 such attacks in August alone, resulting in 15 deaths.

The attacks are straining an alliance already stretched by a tense relationship with a notoriously corrupt Afghan government and disagreements over NATO tactics that Kabul claims endanger civilians.

Coalition authorities have said about 25 percent of this year’s insider attacks had confirmed or suspected links to the Taliban. The militants have sometimes infiltrated the ranks of the Afghan army and police and in other cases are believed to have coerced or otherwise persuaded legitimate members to turn on their coalition partners.