RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://melaniephillips.com/a-french-greek-wake-up-call

The recent elections here and in Europe have left Jews and all who care about freedom and democracy with many reasons for unease.

In Greece, around two thirds of those who voted did so for extremist parties of left and right. Chillingly, the neo-Nazi “Golden Dawn” party won no fewer than 21 seats. As I write, Greece is in chaos, with fresh elections a distinct possibility if no party can form a government.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the EU, whose founding credo was to prevent fascism from ever again taking root in Europe, is now looking at a member state with a significant fascist element in its ruling body.

Not only that, the EU itself precipitated this calamity. For the Greek debacle was a public spasm of fury against austerity measures imposed by Brussels and Berlin.

The convulsions in Europe are throwing up some curious and disturbing parallels and alliances. In France, the left-wing Francois Hollande won on the very same anti-austerity platform as the neo-Nazis in Greece.

Hollande says he is an “enemy of finance” – in effect making common cause with the far right, which identifies the Jews as controlling that financial world, which they agree with the left is a conspiracy against the interests of working people.

Behind his victory, moreover, lies an alliance between Islamic radicals and the left. Writing before the election, French Jewish commentator Michel Gurfinkiel wrote that the French left had recast the proletariat as the “multitude”, the West as “Empire” – and Jews as Zionists, the spearhead of counter-revolution.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2119/Sgt-Bowe-Bergdahl-Prisoner-of-COIN.aspx

From today’s New York Times, a story about Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the lone American POW in Afghanistan. We still don’t know the circumstances under which he was captured in 2009, but we do know something about his outlook on the counterinsurgency (COIN) disaster as conceived and executed by Gens. Petraues and McChrystal under Presidents Bush and Obama.

From the story:

Sergeant Bergdahl was assigned to the First Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, Fourth Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, based at Fort Richardson, Alaska. He deployed as a machine gunner in early May 2009 to a small combat outpost in Paktika Province, at a time when American forces were extremely sparse in the area.

At first his e-mails home were effusive. “He was happy as a clam,” Mr. Bergdahl said. He wrote of “how beautiful it was, how wonderful the people were.”

But the tone of his son’s e-mails soon darkened, Mr. Bergdahl said, although he declined to say specifically what set off the change.

Mr. Bergdahl would say only that he himself had become disillusioned by the military’s doctrine of counterinsurgency, aimed at winning over the Afghan population by building roads, schools and good governance while protecting them from insurgents. As part of the strategy, American troops often travel on roads planted with homemade bombs, or improvised explosive devices, to meet with villagers during the day to collect information about their needs — and to ask the whereabouts of insurgents so they can target them in night raids.

Cyber criminals can exploit a posting on Facebook or Twitter. A gorgeous PowerPoint attachment may harbor a malicious program. Women are more vulnerable to online security breaches, so here’s a few words from the web-wise
.http://womensenews.org/

WeNews correspondent

(WOMENSENEWS)– “Celebrating my birthday tonight at Alfredo’s!”

Supposing it was you who put up this innocent-looking Facebook post. That post would be guaranteed to worry Mark Herschberg, an MIT-trained cryptographer. As a New York-based cyber-security expert and CTO, he would find a number of causes for concern since he knows that women are particularly vulnerable to misuse of information used in social media.

“Your Facebook/Twitter status and photos say a lot about you,” he says, adding, “A determined person may already have found out that you’re a women, learned where you live and whether you live alone. With that post, the bad guy now knows that you’re not home. That post could set you up for a robbery or even a physical attack.”

He goes on to say, “On top of that, the bad guy also knows it’s your birthday, and if he’s a determined cyber-criminal, this could help him hack your identity.”

Identity theft is a serious issue for women. According to the Affinion Security Center, 17% percent of female identity theft victims have lost $1,000 or more due to the crime, versus only 10% of males.

If you were talking with Mark about this, you might answer him, “But I keep my Twitter and Facebook accounts private. Why should I worry?”

His answer: “Even if you have your privacy settings set to friends of friends, some of those friends might be easy-going and accept all friend requests, and now you have a hole in your security. Cybercriminals are out there, looking to exploit those kinds of holes.”

“Mainstream” Islamist Group Attacks Law Enforcement and Whitewashes Jihadists
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3576/mainstream-islamist-group-attacks-law-enforcement
Few organizations in the United States have been as consistent in attacking law enforcement as the Muslim Public Affairs Council and its president, Salam al-Marayati.
Marayati, who attended last year’s White House Iftar Dinner during Ramadan, has suggested that Muslim Americans are at war with both al-Qaeda and the FBI. “We in the Muslim American community have been battling the corrupt and bankrupt ideas of cults such as Al Qaeda,” he wrote in October in the Los Angeles Times.” Now it seems we also have to battle pseudo-experts in the FBI and the Department of Justice.”
Marayati was incensed over reports that the FBI and one U.S. Attorney’s office had used training materials “revealing a deep anti-Muslim sentiment within the U.S. government.” One example was a 2010 presentation by an analyst working for a U.S. Attorney in Pennsylvania which warned of a civilizational jihad that is “waged today in the U.S. by ‘civilians, juries, lawyers, media, and charities'” who “threaten our values.”

http://www.fightfiercely.com/

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The 2012 election will determine the fate of America
After George Bush doubled the national debt in just eight years, Barack Obama said he would reign his Republican predecessor’s reckless spending. Instead, he has engaged in a breathtaking spending binge of his own that is pushing America to the brink of financial Armageddon.
When America’s first black president promised to “fundamentally transform the United States of America”, few people who voted for him thought to ask, “Transform it into what?” Increasingly, the answer appears to be into the world’s latest unsustainable socialist nation. What happens in the next election will likely determine whether the economic and governing systems that made America great will survive, or be turnedinto something few Americans will recognize. You can help influence undecided voters by sharing Fight Fiercely compositions with your email and social networking contacts, and by helping promote FightFiercely.com as a source for uniquely-presented information about key issues that will decide the next election.

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http://politicalmavens.com/

In a review of Show Me A Story: Why Picture Books Matter (WSJ 5/12/12), Meghan Cox Gurdon quotes from some of the interviewees who are subjects in Leonard Marcus’ anthology of famous illustrators. Maurice Sendak, probably the most admired children’s book author since Dr. Seuss had this to say about the grotesque (Gurdon’s word) aunts and uncles who visited his family when he was a child, “God knows most of the people who came there were pigs.” He then goes on to explain that the day of his own Bar-Mitzvah was also the day his father collapsed with the news that other members of his family had been killed in the holocaust: “I remember my father falling down, and me in my little suit all ready to go, and the rage that was stirred in me by these dead Jews who constantly infiltrated our lives and made us miserable.” We’re reading the words of an adult recapturing the emotion not of a 5 year old Little Lord Fauntleroy, but of a 13 year old adolescent son of hard-working, devastated Jews . It’s hard not to remember that he was the same age as another teenager who penned her own emotional reaction to far more serious deprivation in the posthumously published Diary of Anne Frank.

In Sendak’s recent obituary in the NYTimes, Margalit Fox described him as the man “who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche.” I’m not sure what Ms. Fox considered the works of the Brothers Grimm to be but for all of us whose favorite children’s stories were fairy tales, it’s puzzling to wonder whether anything Sendak wrote was as terrifying as Hansel and Gretel or Snow White, folktales anthologized by the brothers in the early 19th century, or Little Red Riding Hood, first written in 1697 by Charles Perrault. Yes, Pierre does get eaten by the lion but the rhyme takes away the sting of the deed and even very young children smile at that part, understanding the subtle humor of the lion uttering Pierre’s refrain: They pulled the lion by the hair They hit him with the folding chair His mother asked – Where is Pierre? The lion answered – I dont care His father said – Pierre’s in there!

Yiddish, a Bisle of History

http://www.jewishmag.co.il/165mag/book-yiddish-language/book-yiddish-language.htm

Yiddish words and expressions are so common now in daily talk….mench, shlep, kvetch and nudge….and how about “I have you in the bathtub”???? There is a rich legacy of music, theater. poetry and fiction in Yiddish and even the Bard was translated….when I was a child my father took me to see “King Lear and His Bad Daughters” in Yiddish…..rsk

Once upon a time, nearly a thousand years ago, there were people with no country of their own. From the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries, they were expelled from whatever European land they had settled. At times, they were unable to take all of their physical possessions with them, however they always took what was most important — their religious beliefs and their language. The people were the Jews, their religion was Judaism, and their language was Yiddish.

When Yiddish began

In the tenth century, Jews from France and Italy migrated to the German Rhine Valley, and Yiddish began in an Ashkenazi culture. The name came from the medieval Hebrew designation for the territory and Ashkenazim or Ashkenazi Jews were literally “German Jews.”

The term “Yiddish” comes from the German word for Jewish — Judisch — and to Germans; a Jew was “ein Yid.” Yiddish developed as a blend of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages. It was the lingua franca of Ashkenazi Jews.

By the late 1200s, Jews had created a language rooted in Jewish history that they used in their daily lives and when they conducted business among themselves. When they did business with Gentiles, Jews spoke the language of their countrymen.

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/05/14/the-vatican-and-islam-has-dhimmitude-prevailed/  The Vatican and Islam: Has Dhimmitude Prevailed? Professor Sergio Itzhak Minerbi was a senior lecturer at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University and Professor in the Department of Political Science at Haifa University. His scholarly research has focused upon the relations between the Catholic Church and the Jews. He also served as […]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/14/perverse-palestinian-pride/?page=all#pagebreak

Losing an unwise war, refugees wear their predicament as a badge of honor

Thus, naqba commemorations inform us that the conflict is about Israel’s existence, not about territory, borders, holy places, refugees or any other bill of particulars.

Today, Palestinians and their supporters, as they have done increasingly over the years, mark what they call the “naqba” (Arabic for catastrophe) day. But commemoration is only one aspect of the day. The clue to the real meaning of the naqba lies on the previous day, May 14, the day Israel declared independence upon the termination of British rule.

On the actual day in 1948 now commemorated as the naqba,neighboring Arab armies and internal Palestinian militias responded to Israel’s declaration of independence with full-scale hostilities. Tel Aviv was bombed from the air, and the head of Israel’s provisional government, David Ben-Gurion, delivered his first radio address to the nation from an air-raid shelter.

Israel successfully resisted invasion and dismemberment – the universally affirmed objective of the Arab belligerents – and Palestinians came off worst of all from the whole venture. At the war’s end, more than 600,000 Palestinians were living as refugees under neighboring Arab regimes.

Will Islam Self-Destruct? — on The Glazov Gang by Jamie Glazov Fireworks set off when leftist film producer Tommi Trudeau confronts Evan Sayet and Rob Nelson on Frontpage’s television show. http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/15/will-islam-self-destruct-on-the-glazov-gang/