RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Bill Clinton was many things, but stupid was never one of them. Even his supporters were eventually forced to admit that most of those things were true. Sloppy, corrupt, impulsive, amoral, vindictive, petty and loving every minute of it. Sure. But not stupid. Clinton was of the left, but he was a politician first. He understood politics as more than just gamesmanship, a set of rules, procedures and technicalities, powerful people to court, an image to cultivate and opponents to destroy.

What Clinton understood, and Obama doesn’t, is that politics is about people. And that politics is nothing without people. 400 glowing articles don’t compare to what people are feeling when they’re unemployed, when they’re not sure how they’ll make payroll next month and when they sit toting up the numbers late at night and worrying about the future.

Obama isn’t so much a machine politician as he is a politician of the machine. A man whose career was made by one machine after another. Smooth gleaming urban monstrosities guiding him from one organization to another, from handshakes to dinners to ballots to signatures. Politics to him is nothing but a power game almost completely detached from the people. They’re spectators, showing up to faint, cheer and buy him drinks afterward.

Politics to Obama is its own game, like law or basketball. The people in the stands and benches make it necessary, but they don’t really figure into it except as a nebulous crowd providing moral support. What really matters are how you win the game, the rules and the way you can break the rules. It’s all that matters.

Considering his level of emotional detachment, Obama has been good at faking it. But most of the fakery is second-hand. The work of an army of advisers and a grass-roots movement determined to create a Hollywood idea of the hero, who wins elections, defeats conservatives, and like at the end of every political movie, connects with the voters by delivering a speech that sets out the stakes.

Bill Clinton knows that’s a load of crap. He’s played that game, he’s had those advisers, and he’s given those speeches, but he has enough of a background in real world elections to know that nobody really gives a damn about the speeches. They’ll listen to them when they’re first getting to know you or when something important happens, but mostly people elect politicians to do things for them.

Clinton, like McCain, underestimated the power of the machine behind Obama. The new world order of digital power, manufactured cult-of-personality media complex and sheer arrogant rule-breaking. Slick Willy had tasted two out of that three in his time, but no one ever worshiped him as a god. And certainly no one was going to faint on listening to his wife or build statues to her. Hillary would not inspire works of art or paeans of praise.

But Bill also had the last laugh. Because gods are not allowed to let you down. Gods are not allowed to keep blaming Bush or the Republicans. They’re not allowed to promise to take care of things later. That’s not what people elect gods for.

There’s no doubt that he saw this coming early on and that in the dregs of his bitterness at losing, not just failing to win, but the humiliation of defeat, he knew that the day would come when the statues would fall. When people would stretch out their hands expecting help… and when it did not come, the hands would clench into fists.

People expect less of Presidents, than they do of gods. They expect more of men who claim to be able to lower sea levels and change history. And they don’t take “no” for an answer. Being ignored only makes them angrier.

Unlike Clinton, Obama isn’t able to step out there with an apologetic shrug and a heartfelt speech about tough times. The speech can be written for him by the campaign that never ends, which will find a poet from Chicago who writes rhymes about the Great Depression that reflect class and social divisions, while sipping a craft beer, to do the hard work of laying out all those words, it will be touted for two weeks by the media as the final response to an ungrateful nation, it will upstage three television programs that people actually enjoy watching in these hard times, and it will sound and feel exactly like the time your neighbors sent over their spoiled brat to apologize for breaking your window on pain of losing his trip to Disneyland.

Obama’s detachment is his gift. That coolness which convinces supporters that his mind is exploring other realms, contemplating deep thoughts on racial identity and postmodernism or probing the moral paradoxes of soft power. It makes his occasional bouts of attentiveness seem more intense, like a coma patient occasionally waking up to check in, before checking out again.

His pathological need for attention is wholly self-centered and he is not at all surprised to find that the world revolves around him. But it’s an attention that he has never had to fight for. It was the birthright that he gained from his dysfunctional family, his coddled educational background and his red carpet ride through politics.

Bill Clinton has never checked out in his life. Of the two men, he looks like the lazy one, but is the genuine hard worker. Even after serving two terms, he is still searching for something to do. After a term or two in office, you won’t find Obama frothing at the mouth to run someone else’s campaign. Chatting with the folks on Martha’s Vineyard, maybe. Delivering speeches on facing the challenges of tomorrow, for a cool million a pop, to Chinese corporations, almost certainly. But not working.

When it comes to attention, Clinton fights for it. His permanent campaign is a personal one that never goes away. Give him five minutes anywhere and he will make himself the center of attention, not because he deserves it and certainly not because it’s handed to him as a token prize for his race or his coolness, but because he wants it more than anyone else in the room.

There is an emptiness in many entertainers that drives them to be the center of attention and from there into explosive bouts of self-destructive behavior. Clinton is of their breed. Give him five minutes in any room and he will own the room. And then the next room. But he isn’t an actor. The actor is his rival, the cool man with the big ears, who spends more time entertaining himself than anyone else. Who reads his lines, waits for the peasants to applaud and takes off for the next venue.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3100/egypt-honor-killing

A day before, a Muslim man in Germany beheaded his wife in front of his six children – while screaming “Allahu Akbar!” or, “Allah is Greater!” – ” throwing her dismembered head from the roof of their apartment.”

According to yesterday’s edition of Youm7, two brothers in a village in Assuit, Egypt, slaughtered their mother, sister, and aunt, “after discovering their sister’s actions were contrary to morality.”

After chaos erupted in the house, including gunfire, local police surrounded and broke into the home, only to find the aunt, Saida Muhammad Mukhtar, 55-years-old and a housewife, “with her head sliced off”; the mother, Amina Ahmed Muhammad, also 55 and a housewife, found “drowned in blood by the entrance of the house”; and the sister, Sana Mukhtar, 39-years-old and a widow, found butchered in a room.

The two brothers—Ahmed Mukhtar, 35, and Abd al-Basit, 24—were subsequently arrested, and confessed to the murders in detail.

Such slayings are not rare occurrences in the Islamic world, and even in the West—wherever there are Muslims. A day before this story emerged, a Muslim man in Germany beheaded his wife in front of their six children—while screaming “Allahu Akbar!” or “Allah is greater!”—”throwing her dismembered head from the roof of their apartment.”

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
2012.06.09 (Muangdaw, Myanmar) – Four Buddhists, including a doctor and an elderly man, are stabbed to death by Muslim rioters following Friday prayers.
2012.06.08 (Maiduguri, Nigeria) – A Religion of Peace suicide bomber sends five Nigerians to Allah.
2012.06.08 (Baghdad, Iraq) – A brutal ambush of a family vehicle by Mujahideen leaves a married couple dead and their three children injured.
2012.06.08 (Peshawar, Pakistan) – Four women and a child are among nineteen innocents on a bus torn to shreds by a Sunni bomb.
2012.06.07 (Quetta, Pakistan) – Five children are among fifteen people blown up by sectarian Jihadis outside a Sunni seminary.
2012.06.06 (Narathiwat, Thailand) – A woman is among two villagers shot to death by Muslim ‘insurgents’, who also burn down a school.

http://www.yolohub.com/featured/the-fastest-growing-religion-in-america-is
The Fastest Growing Religion in America Is…

Do you know what the fastest growing religion in America is? It isn’t Christianity. According to the latest U.S. Religion Census that was just released on May 1, 2012, the fastest growing religion in America is Islam. The data for the census was compiled by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, and the results were released by the Association of Religion Data Archives. From the year 2000 to the year 2010, the census found that the number of Muslims living inside the United States increased from 1 million to 2.6 million – a stunning increase of 66.7 percent. That is an astounding rate of growth. Meanwhile, most Christian denominations had rates of growth that were far below the overall rate of population growth in the United States, and some Christian denominations actually lost members. Sadly, when Barack Obama once said that “we are no longer a Christian nation” he wasn’t too far off the mark. Christianity is rapidly losing influence and other religions such as Islam are rapidly gaining members and building new places of worship. As other major religions such as Islam continue to grow in the United States, it is inevitable that this will reshape America in many different ways in the years ahead.

http://www.teapartytribune.com/2012/06/09/president-obamas-much-needed-walk-down-memory-lane/

As many have already noted, June 5th through 10th of this year marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the Six Day War. Up until then, Arabs had refused to accept an Israel that was a mere 9-15 miles wide via the 1949 armistice lines. For some perspective, many people travel farther just to go to work or for a visit to the shopping mall. Indeed, President George W. Bush stated that Texas had driveways larger than that. Israel is the problem–not its size. As I like to suggest, find it on a world globe without a magnifying glass…I dare you.

Armistice lines are not borders. They merely mark where fighting officially stops in wars. Those in question here designated where fighting ceased after the invasion of Israel by a half dozen Arab nations in 1948. The U.N. did nothing to halt that blatant aggression, but jumped in only after Jews turned the tide to limit Arab losses.

Recall that from 1949 to 1967, Arabs controlled Gaza and the West Bank, and no one demanded a second Arab state in the original April 25, 1920 Mandate of Palestine’s territory at that time. Jordan was created in 1922 from almost 80 percent of the area, a gift from British imperialist shenanigans. So much for the Arab claim that Jews got most of Palestine.

Having been (once again) blockaded by Egypt at the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba (a casus belli); witnessing over 100,000 Egyptian troops, tanks, and so forth amassed on the armistice line after Egypt ordered the U.N. peacekeeping force out of the area; and subjected to other hostile acts as well, a beleaguered Israel desperately struck out to cancel Arab plans for another Holocaust. In six days in June 1967, it was over…at least temporarily. I have a large cooler filled with original newspaper articles from those frightening days–pictures of tens of thousands of Arabs calling for Israel’s destruction, the massacre of Jews, and so forth.

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/99711/the-end-of-the-jewish-left?print=1

ADAM KIRSH, A POET, IS AUTHOR OF AN EXCELLENT BIOGRAPHY OF DISRAELI…RSK

“If the left in Europe and, increasingly, the United States is so hospitable to anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic ideas, what does that mean for the future of “Jews and the Left”? Michael Walzer explained the historical Jewish affinity for the left as a straightforward matter: “We have supported the people who support us.” The historical insights of the “Jews and the Left” conference suggested that things were never so simple—or mutual. So, when that basic equation no longer holds—if the left are no longer “the people who support us”—will we continue to support them? The “rising generation” of the left will contain its share of Jews, maybe even more than its share; but whether it will be a Jewish left, as it was in the past, is very much in doubt.”

“Why so many alte kockers? Where is the rising generation?” The grumbler sitting behind me at the conference [1] on “Jews and the Left,” sponsored by YIVO last week at the Center for Jewish History in New York, was not exactly being fair. Any academic conference will attract an older-skewing audience, and for all the gray hair in the seats and on the dais, the YIVO conference did have its share of eager young attendees.

Behind the complaint, however, it was possible to hear a larger, more painful question. For the first two-thirds of the 20th century, from the first immigrant generation through the baby boom, the radical and revolutionary left played a hugely important role in defining how the rest of America saw Jews and how Jews saw themselves. From Mike Gold’s proletarian novel Jews Without Money all the way down to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the literature and mythology of American Jewish radicalism has often appeared identical—to a certain audience—with Judaism itself. Even now there are people who revel in bygone lore about the Forverts and the Freiheit, Jay Lovestone and Max Shachtman. But living heirs to that tradition can be hard to find. Somewhat plaintively, my neighbor at the conference—like many of the participants—seemed to be asking, Is there still such a thing as a Jewish left? And if not, ought we to regret it?

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2012/6/10/main-feature/1/the-six-day-war-day-six/e

But to see victory as a worse outcome for Israel than defeat is to forget that Israel fought the war just to survive; victory was the only option. As Moshe Dayan’s daughter, Yael, wrote in the Daily Telegraph just a year after the war:

A year ago I was in uniform with a division on the Egyptian border. We, in the front, had no doubt as to the inevitability of war. We also knew we were going to win it. We were not going to win because we were more numerous, more battle-happy, or more ambitious. We were going to win, at whatever cost, because losing meant extermination . . . . These obvious facts should be remembered, simply because we were victorious. When a David wins, he stops being David in a way, and his motives become suspect. On June 5, 1967, we risked all we had.

If Israel exchanged the sympathy of a beleaguered minority for the moral dilemmas of a majority in 1967, it is only because peace with her Arab neighbors was impossible. To quote Yael Dayan again: “If our face is changed, it is only because security and peace did not prove to be synonymous and we have chosen the first, are not offered the second, and have to live with the results.”

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2012/6/9/main-feature/1/the-six-day-war-day-five/e

“The Syrians braced themselves for the Israeli onslaught. “Pave the roads with the skulls of Jews,” Assad ordered. “Strike them without mercy.” The fight, Damascus held, was not over.”

Once Dayan decided against a limited attack in the Golan and opted instead to take the entire Heights, Israel’s air force pounded the Syrians. The Syrians had supposed the Israelis to be tired and intimidated by their incessant shelling; unprepared for the ferocity of the barrage, their morale suffered, and some officers and soldiers deserted. But the bulk of Syria’s forces remained in place, ready to give fight, while hoping for UN intervention.

Traffic jams delayed Israeli reinforcements from other fronts, retarding an assault from the south; the attack proceeded in the center, but involved exhausted Israeli tank crews climbing the rocky terrain of steep (2000 ft) hills in broad daylight, totally exposed to Syrian fire from the enemy’s most formidable forces. Upon hearing of the plan, some commanders described it as “suicide.” But they proceeded unafraid.

Golan tanks
Israeli tanks climbing a steep hill in the Golan Heights

With tank maneuverability reduced by the terrain, the Israelis found themselves at the mercy of dug-in Syrian tanks. Pressing on, the fighting was intense and confused as tanks fired at extremely close range. Maps were lost, bulldozers were destroyed as they tried to clear away barbed wire, and the threat of landmines was everywhere. The Israelis also underestimated the ability of the Syrian bunkers to withstand massive bombing.

“The Syrians fought well and bloodied us,” recalled one Israeli commander, but after a whole afternoon in battle, the IDF had made important advances. The successes were not without cost, however, in men and arms. The Syrians did manage to stop the IDF’s movement, but they too had taken a beating, and were left fearful and chaotic.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ THAT MUSLIMS FIRST FOREIGN POLICY The United States voiced concern Friday about the mob killing of Muslims in Myanmar and called for the country’s reform-minded government to move forward in reconciling with minorities. When was the last time that the United States expressed concern about the Muslim persecution of non-Muslims? Muslim massacres of Christians […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ RADICAL RADISHES Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. The left has been looking for a narrative in the mess and it has fished out the usual suspects. 1. Wisconsin was really a victory because it could have possibly succeeded. Which is almost a win. 2. If we massage the numbers, […]