RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203391104577122330360675426.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

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Demystifying the Myths of WarInterview with Andrew Roberts, Author of “The Storm of War” Rael Jean Isaac

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10965/pub_detail.asp
Europe Cries Wolf, Britain Calls Its Bluff David Cameron’s veto of Europe’s proposed fiscal union does not spell doom for the U.K. Quite the contrary.
‘Bye-bye England,” shouts the Bild. In Der Spiegel, a cartoon shows Prime Minister David Cameron being dropped into a rowboat as the great European liner steams ahead. Headlines in the New York Times and Financial Times agree: Britain is “isolated” from the euro zone. What could make a Briton feel warmer this Yuletide, or more nostalgic?

Britain has been warned ever since the European Coal and Steel Community was created by Jean Monnet in the 1950s that if she didn’t get onto the “top table”—sometimes it was “in at the ground floor”—then terrible things would happen. Europe would surge ahead without her

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2011/12/27/main-feature/1/apologia-for-ben-gurion/e

“Between Weizmann and Jabotinsky, it’s hard to know whom Ben-Gurion hated more. He schemed with Weizmann against Jabotinsky—but had contempt for Weizmann’s hesitancy and ultimately sidelined the elder statesman. True differences of principle separated Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky. Ben-Gurion favored class struggle and an agrarian economy; Jabotinsky was a classical liberal who wanted to foster an urban middle class. Ben-Gurion also scorned Jabotinsky’s demand for the territorial integrity of Eretz Israel. But it went deeper: Jabotinsky died of a heart attack in 1940 in New York; when the state was founded, Ben-Gurion refused to allow his adversary’s remains to be reinterred in Israel.”

At this year’s yahrzeit ceremony in Sde Boker for David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with Iran clearly on his mind, emphasized—eight times—Ben-Gurion’s capacity for making hard decisions. This theme permeates Ben-Gurion: A Political Life. The book is a “conversation” between the author, advocacy journalist David Landau, and Israeli President Shimon Peres. Landau calls it a “fusion of memory and history and multiple competing narratives.” Here we have truth in labeling, for what this slim volume is not is reliable history.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The masses weeping over the death of Kim Jong Il and the frantic online defenders of Ron Paul have something in common, it isn’t the man they care about. It’s what he represents.

The course of events that took a cranky Texas congressman and turned him into the made man of a motley crew of online gambling entrepreneurs, racists, conspiracy theorists and the whole big circus tent filled with offshore accounts, UFO landing sites and copies of the Turner Diaries is an odd one, but not a completely unusual one.

Cults of personality are not about the man, but about the need that he fills in his followers. There is a point at which every dictator, rock star and celebrity realizes that it is the people who adore him that are in charge and all he can do is ride the wave of adulation. The men don’t matter, the reasons why people seize on them do matter.

Why Ron Paul? Because like so many at the center of a cult of personality, he is everything to everyone. The big tent he presides over is full of people who don’t agree on very much. They are a nexus of opposition to ‘everything’, but they’re also a collection of groups that splinter faster than old wood in a thunderstorm.

http://times247.com/global
Egypt turning into a ‘house of dust’
Foreign Policy Research Institute
Monday, December 26, 2011
Commentary
German poet Heinrich Heine famously warned, “Where they have burned books, they will end by burning people.” But the December 17 burning of Cairo’s Institut d’Egypte on the first anniversary of the self-immolation of the Tunisian vegetable vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, which sparked the Arab Spring, stands the oft-used dictum on its head. Read more…

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

MAURER: Limiting government limits on our speech
The Washington Times
12/27/2011 12:21 AM
Commentary

Sen. Bernard Sanders has proposed an amendment to the Constitution to remove First Amendment protections from individuals who gather together to form corporations. New advocacy groups, run by influential media and political figures, are springing up to overturn “corporate personhood” so they cannot participate in elections.
Read more…

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

President says he won’t abide by spending bill he signed
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/dec/26/obama-blows-off-congress/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS
When the president of the United States signs a bill into law, it’s expected that he will abide by it. That’s not the case with President Obama, who has a sudden interest in novel legalistic interpretations getting him off the hook from laws he doesn’t like.

On Friday, the president signed the $1 trillion omnibus spending bill, which funds the government for the remaining nine months of the fiscal year. Afterward, he released a statement saying he won’t abide by the law because the Justice Department had advised that certain provisions are “subject to well-founded constitutional objections.”

House Speaker John A. Boehner’s spokesman Kevin Smith told The Washington Times, “This president used to condemn the type of signing statements he is now embracing to ignore the will of Congress and the American people.”

One of the presidential pet peeves is that Capitol Hill put the kibosh on his czars. Those high-level White House appointments aren’t confirmed by the Senate but are central to implementing Mr. Obama’s liberal agenda. Lawmakers specifically blocked funding for salaries and offices for four of his nine czars: health care (who coordinates Obamacare), automobile industry (“car czar”), urban affairs and climate change.

http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=2539

It has been a full year since the earth was relieved of the weight of one Richard Holbrooke on December 13, 2010. I wanted to mark the one-year anniversary of his death since it is still many years before the world will recover from his life. While I feel I’ve already written apt eulogies, some things came up afterwards, most notably a painful-to-read piece of praise in Jerusalem Post at the time by Israeli former UN ambassador Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Gold may be “one of the good ones,” as my philo-Semitic Italian friend puts it, but he is woefully wrong about what sort of man Holbrooke was.

For those who can stomach it, Gold’s Dec. 17, 2010 rhapsody about Holbrooke was titled “If Holbrooke had been given the Israel-Palestinian file” – A former UN ambassador praises the accomplished US diplomat who died this week, and wonders what he might have achieved in this region.

Probably something is amiss when an Israeli ambassador praises a man who was also being praised by the anti-Israel Christiane Amanpour ( “Why I Mourn,” Dec. 20, 2010). And notice that this Iranian-British woman, married to yet another confused Jew, was a key instrument in getting the West to help spread Jihad in Europe, even reporting from a Christian Serb cemetery as if from a Muslim one, the dead there attributed to “Serb” brutality.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/11042

Arabic Scholar Ibn Warraq Tells “Why the West is Best”

A scathing critique of Islam from within. Interview with Ibn Warraq, the man the NY Sun called “the Bertrand Russel of Islam: “The Ayatollah Khomeini once said that there are no jokes in Islam”. You’d better believe it.

Prior to 2007, Ibn Warraq refused to show his face in public due to fears for his personal safety.

With “Why I Am Not A Muslim”, his 1995 most famous book, he became Islam’s most outspoken critic and the mentor of personalities such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christopher Hitchens.

The New York Sun called him “the Bertrand Russell of Islam”, while others compared him to Voltaire and Spinoza. His new book, “Why the West is Best”, which has just been published by Encounter, is the most generous homage to the Western values ever written by a Muslim-born intellectual.

“Millions of people risk their lives trying to get to the West—not to Saudi Arabia or Iran or Pakistan, they flee from theocratic or other totalitarian regimes to find tolerance and freedom in the West, where life is an open book”, explains to us the English-educated Ibn Warraq. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: this triptych succinctly defines the attractiveness and superiority of Western civilization”.

Under Islam, life is a closed book. “Everything has been decided for you: the dictates of sharia and the whims of Allah set strict limits on the possible agenda of your life. A culture that engendered the spiritual creations of Mozart and Beethoven, of Raphael and Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt does not need lessons in spirituality from societies whose vision of heaven resembles a cosmic brothel stocked with virgins for men’s pleasure.

http://dailybayonet.com/2011/12/everything-you-ever-needed-to-know-about-man-made-global-warming-in-one-sentence-and-a-graph/

Man-made global warming is scientific fraud propounded by ‘scientists’ unfit to shine Einstein’s shoes, promoted by misanthropic scoundrels, anti-energy wastrels and hippies with an Oedipal complex about Mother Earth.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“While Mecca grows, its arrogance stirring up wars around the world, as Riyadh, Dubai and Kuwait City have their day, the cities of the West crumble and Jerusalem stands besieged on all sides. The choice between Mecca and Jerusalem has civilizational implications, it is the choice between slavery and freedom, between ignorance and knowledge, and between darkness and light.”

Forget Athens and Jerusalem, the new dialectic is between Mecca and Jerusalem. On one side is support for the spread of a repressive theocratic ideology across the region and around the world through violence and intimidation, on the other side is the rise of indigenous states from the pre-Islamic era employing technology and ingenuity to transform the region.

Next Steps in North Korea Posted By Alan W. Dowd
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/26/next-steps-in-north-korea/

“North Korea as we know it is over,” according to Victor Cha, Asian affairs specialist to President George W. Bush from 2004 to 2007. “Whether it comes apart in the next few weeks or over several months, the regime will not be able to hold together after the untimely death of its leader, Kim Jong-il.”

For the sake of discussion, let’s stipulate that Cha is correct. If the Kim Dynasty’s days are indeed numbered, what will the end look like?

History offers some helpful, if not always uplifting, examples of how North Korea could collapse.

The ideal parallels—the economic liberalization of China and the bloodless reunification of East and West Germany—also seem the least likely.

The prospect of North Korea following China into quasi-capitalism seems remote, at least for now. This is a closed society, an economy smaller than virtually every state in the U.S., a country whose most lucrative exports are retrofitted Soviet-era missiles and counterfeit $100 bills, a place where citizens are required to donate food to the armed forces.