RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1391

Though Israel always gets caught in the crossfire no matter what the battle, I admit to experiencing bouts of schadenfreude whenever its enemies engage in internecine warfare. I am not, for a change, referring to Fatah-Hamas struggles or Arab Spring strife — though they certainly apply on occasion. Far more enjoyable, I find, is when the hard Left in the West gets entangled in imbroglios born of its own relentless and tiresome idiocies.

A recent case in point is an interview with Norman Finkelstein, conducted by Frank Barat at Imperial College London on Feb. 9. The two rabidly anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian radicals could have been, and indeed were, expected to have a more-than-friendly one-on-one chat, particularly since the topic of “debate” was the boycott/divestment/sanctions (BDS) campaign led by the Palestinian Solidarity Movement.

After all, Barat, like Finkelstein, is a great admirer of Noam Chomsky. Barat, like Finkelstein, considers Israel to be an abomination. And Barat, like Finkelstein, thinks Hamas and Hezbollah have every right to target Israelis with missiles and bombs in “retaliation” for having been targeted first, if not for merely breathing the same air as the rest of the world since 1948.

Police accuse Occupy protesters of targeting elderly. Squatters arrested at homes owned by elderly, infirmed By Jim Redden http://portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=132918808448956400 Police are accusing Occupy Portland protesters of exploiting the elderly by squatting in their houses. According to police, at 11 a.m. on Feb. 9, officers assigned to the North Precinct Neighborhood Response Team , with the […]

http://www.investigativeproject.org/2506/gov-christie-strange-relationship-with-radical

JAN.2011

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s nomination of Sohail Mohammed to be a state judge shows the governor’s tin ear for radical Islam. Not only did he appoint a longtime mouthpiece for radical Islamists to be a judge, but Christie has also turned a blind eye to the activities of one of Mohammed’s clients – radical imam Mohammed Qatanani, head of one of New Jersey’s largest mosques.

Qatanani has a history of Hamas support and was related by marriage to a leading Hamas operative in the West Bank. This fall, Qatanani will return to a New Jersey immigration court, where the Department of Homeland Security is fighting to have him deported. In his initial application for a green card filed in 1999, government lawyers say Qatanani failed to disclose a conviction in an Israeli military court for being a Hamas member and providing support to the terrorist group.

Oddly, Christie – a Republican who was then the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey – sided with Qatanani against DHS, allowing a top lieutenant, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles McKenna, to testify as a character witness at Qatanani’s first immigration trial, and publicly embracing the imam at a Ramadan breakfast at his mosque. Christie later appointed McKenna as New Jersey’s head of homeland security..

http://www.timesofisrael.com/charlie-chaplin-or-israel-thornstein-a-mystery-even-in-modern-times/

LONDON (AP) — They foiled plots and cracked Nazi codes, but Britain’s spies were unable to solve the mystery of Charlie Chaplin’s birth.Although the entertainer is celebrated as one of London’s most famous sons, newly declassified files reveal that Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence service found no records to back up Chaplin’s claim that he was born in the city on April 16, 1889.

Uncertainty about Chaplin’s origins linger to this day — a mystery Chaplin himself may have helped to nurture.

The previously secret file, released Friday by Britain’s National Archives, shows that MI5 investigated the silent film star in the 1950s at the request of US authorities, who had long suspected him of communist sympathies. MI5 historian Christopher Andrew said the FBI’s red-hating chief, J. Edgar Hoover, privately denounced Chaplin as “one of Hollywood’s parlor Bolsheviks.”

To the spies’ surprise, there was no record of the performer’s birth.

http://melaniephillips.com/middle-britains-amoral-drift

An invitation to appear as a Question Time panellist always sees your columnist dusting off her tin helmet, not to say donning full body armour and making her last will and testament.

Its audiences have been known to be less than universally friendly, and never more so than when Israel crops up. Indeed, the words “baying” and “mob” come to mind.

My most recent appearance was three weeks ago in Plymouth. The audience was notably less aggressive than others I have encountered: more benign and “Middle Britain”-ish.

Suicide Bomber Allegedly Planning To Attack US Capitol Arrested. (Where Is CAIR Now?)

A Moroccan man allegedly planning to detonate himself at the U.S. Capitol has had his plans foiled by the FBI.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/abigailesman/2012/02/17/suicide-bomber-allegedly-planning-to-attack-us-capitol-arrested-where-is-cair-now/

Arrested earlier today, the man was picked up after visiting a local mosque, heading towards the Capitol building. According to the Washington Post, the man, in his thirties, ” was carrying with him a vest that he believed was packed with explosives but that actually contained harmless material.” The arrest is the culmination of a lengthy investigation involving undercover FBI agents, and comes on the heels of the sentencing of the so-called “ underwear bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to life imprisonment earlier this week.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which claims to be against Islamic terrorism but who maintains ties to terrorist organizations, and which protested loudly against the documentary “The Third Jihad,” which warns of the possibility of such attacks, has yet to make a statement on the arrest.

Iran offers to restart nuclear talks
U.S. and European leaders expressed …
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Obama seeks to raise ‘green’ car tax credit to $10k
The president’s latest budget propos…
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Christie vetoes gay marriage bill
Gov. Chris Christie has backed up hi…
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EDITORIAL: Obama’s unilateral disarmament
Washington Times
02/17/2012 12:35 AM
President Obama is working to realize the leftist dream of unilateral nuclear disarmament. This will leave the United States pitifully weak and create conditions for catastrophic deterrence failure. Read more…

Read more at: http://times247.com/

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/291404/first-ahmadi-then-everybody-else-andrew-c-mccarthy

Their crime? These Muslims have the temerity to suggest that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, an Indian who died in 1908, was the promised Mahdi — the redeemer of Islam — and not one of the false prophets about whom Mohammed had warned. They compound their offense with condemnations of violent jihad, maintaining that man’s inhumanity to man is ultimately conquered by love and kindness. So, of course, the Ahmadi Muslims have to die.

They are killed in Muslim Pakistan. They are killed in Muslim Bangladesh. They are killed in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Islamic country and, putatively, its most moderate. It was there, in a village in West Java last year, that hundreds of Muslims wielding machetes, sharpened sticks, and stones set upon on an Ahmadi home, brutally murdering three men and maiming several others. True to form, Islamic clerics raced to the fore to rationalize the savagery as being provoked by Ahmadi heresy. The ringleaders were sentenced to less than six months’ imprisonment, with the country’s minister of religious affairs callously explaining that religious freedom was certainly not freedom to “modify” Islamic beliefs — and equating Ahmadi preaching, which is banned, with flag-burning.

The barbaric treatment of religious minorities in Islamic countries, and its roots in Islamic law, is undeniable . . . unless we choose not to see it. So, true to form, we are choosing not to see it.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/291383/contraception-misdirection-mark-steyn
Contraception Misdirection
A universal birth-control mandate is a curious priority for a dying republic.

Have you seen the official White House version of what the New York Times headline writers call “A Responsible Budget”? My favorite bit is Chart 5-1 on page 58 of their 500-page appendix on “Analytical Perspectives.” This is entitled “Publicly Held Debt Under 2013 Budget Policy Projections.” It’s a straight lin e going straight up before disappearing off the top right-hand corner of the graph in the year 2084 and continuing northeast straight through your eye socket, out the back of your skull, and zooming up to rendezvous with Newt’s space colony on the moon circa 2100. Just to emphasize, this isn’t the doom-laden dystopian fancy of a right-wing apocalyptic loon like me; it’s the official Oval Office version of where America’s headed. In the New York Times–approved “responsible budget” there is no attempt even to pretend to bend the debt curve into something approaching reentry with reality.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

WASTED PRIMARIES

Ideally the primaries should have built momentum for the emergence of a winning candidate to represent the Republican Party, instead they have dampened enthusiasm and made everyone involved look worse for just being involved. The best hope for winning a national election is the hope that few non-Republicans were paying attention or will remember what went on.

Much of the blame goes to Romney and the Republican establishment which was determined to win at any cost and went negative hard and fast. The rest is history. Obama’s standing is improving and he’s tipped to win the election. The game will change once the primaries are over and the party has a nominee, but it’s clear that the acrimony and pettiness has alienated a lot of people.

Instead of competing on a vision for the country, the candidates, with media help, spent months hurling smears at each other. Among the candidates, Romney benefited the most from that type of campaign, but Obama is the one who really scores. The media successfully painted Republicans as being hateful and divisive and the material for that smear job came from within.

The Not-Romneyites are often criticized for focusing more on beating Romney than defeating Obama, and while that is occasionally true, it is truer to say that the establishment cares more about making sure that Romney is the nominee than about defeating Obama. For the Not-Romneyites it’s about principles, for the Romneyites it’s about power.

The Romney establishment has acted with the same elitist arrogance and insufferable disdain that has characterized the Obama Administration, dismissing popular dislike for their approach by pushing forward and waiting for the peasants to fall in line. But the peasants aren’t falling into line. Romney is still flailing. The entire election has been a survey of candidates that most voters prefer to Romney and the last few months have shown that they prefer just about anyone to him. That isn’t good news, but the establishment doesn’t care. And that’s scary. For people who claim to want to win the election, they aren’t taking the situation too seriously. If we do end up with a brokered convention, it will be their obtuse unwillingness to pay attention to their own electorate that will be the cause.