RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/vaclav-havel-dissident-playwright-and-former-czech-president-dies/2010/09/21/gIQATAeD2O_story.html

Vaclav Havel, a Czech writer who was imprisoned by his country’s communist rulers, only to become a symbol of freedom and his nation’s first president in the post-communist era, died Dec. 18 at his weekend home in the northern Czech Republic. He was 75.

The death was announced by his assistant, Sabina Tancevova, the Associated Press reported. Mr. Havel underwent surgery for lung cancer in 1996 and had suffered from lung ailments in recent months.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/12/18/havel-dissent-communism-democracy/

The death today of Vaclav Havel at the age of 75 reminds us what it truly means to speak up for liberty against tyranny. A playwright who became a symbol of dissent against an evil Soviet empire, Havel spent years in Communist jails for his activities and writings that championed individual freedom. He co-authored the Charter 77 manifesto that gave new life to the cause of human rights in his own country and helped inspire others elsewhere living under the Soviet yoke. Eventually, he helped lead his nation to freedom after the fall of the Berlin Wall and served as the first president of a free Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic after the Slovaks left to form their own nation.

But there is more to be learned from recounting the story of Havel’s sacrifices and triumphs than just a tale of individual heroism. What ought to be remembered about Havel and the “Velvet Revolution” that he led to victory is that it was won by an uncompromising defense of the principle of democracy and individual rights when many unenlightened Western “realists” and liberals made it clear they were more interested in accommodating the Soviets than working to free those suffering under their tyranny. Havel’s struggles also gives us a yardstick by which we can measure the worthiness of contemporary protest movements around the world that now claim the mantle of dissent.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/company-ron-paul-keeps_613474.html

The Republican Jewish Coalition announced this month that congressman Ron Paul would not be among the six guests invited to participate in its Republican Presidential Candidates Forum. “He’s just so far outside of the mainstream of the Republican party and this organization,” said Matt Brooks, executive director of the RJC, adding that the group “rejects his misguided and extreme views.”

Paul’s exclusion caused an uproar, with critics alleging that his stand on Israel had earned the RJC’s ire; an absolutist libertarian, Paul opposes foreign aid to all countries, including the Jewish state. “This seems to me more of an attempt to draw boundaries around acceptable policy discourse than any active concern that President Dr. Ron Paul would be actively anti-Israel or anti-Semitic,” wrote Reason editor Matt Welch. Chris McGreal of the Guardian reported that Paul “was barred because of his views on Israel.” Even Seth Lipsky, editor of the New York Sun and a valiant defender of Israel (and friend and mentor of this writer), opined, “The whole idea of an organization of Jewish Republicans worrying about the mainstream strikes me as a bit contradictory.”

While Paul’s views on Israel certainly place him outside the American, never mind Republican, mainstream, there is an even more elementary reason the RJC was right to exclude him from its event. It is Paul’s lucrative and decades-long promotion of bigotry and conspiracy theories, for which he has yet to account fully, and his continuing espousal of extremist views, that should make him unwelcome at any respectable forum, not only those hosted by Jewish organizations.

http://shmuelkatz.com/wordpress/?p=840&Source=email

“Trying to portray Obama as pro-Israel is not a simple task. From the outset of his tenure in office, Obama has distinguished himself as the most anti-Israel president ever,” Caroline Glick writes in a September op-ed for The Jerusalem Post.

After providing a laundry list of historic presidential firsts against Israel, Glick adds: “Given Obama’s record – to which can be added his fervent support for Turkish Prime Minister and virulent anti-Semite Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his courtship of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and his massive weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and Egypt – it is obvious that any attempt to argue that Obama is pro-Israel cannot be based on substance, or even on tone.”

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/12/18/obama-israel-reform-iran/

As I noted earlier, President Obama’s pitch for the Jewish vote has more to do with his appeal to knee-jerk liberalism on a host of non-Jewish issues than it does with concern for Israel’s welfare. Nevertheless, it is a misnomer to think liberal Jews such as those who cheered Obama Friday at the Reform biennial, don’t care about the Jewish state.

However, their willingness to accept Obama’s claims on the topic says more about their desire not to turn on a Democrat than it says about his virtues. One must ignore much of what has transpired in the last three years in order to believe the president’s claims.

The main element of Obama’s claim is that he has done more for Israel’s security than any of his predecessors. It is true he has done nothing to interfere with the security alliance that has grown since it was initiated during the Reagan administration. Military aid has flowed in large amounts, and for that Obama deserves some credit. But to speak, as he does, as if this relationship was invented by him, is absurd. On Friday, he alluded, as his defenders often do, to the Iron Dome missile defense system the two nations have created. But that project was initiated and funded by the Bush administration. The most we can say of Obama’s involvement is that he chose not to prevent it from being deployed.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11041/pub_detail.asp
Climate Scientists: Not Evil, Maybe a Bit Stupid And definitely in a world all of their own.
The Durban climate conference has been an abject failure. But that hasn’t stopped those who were there desperately trying – with all the plausibility of Monty Python’s Black Knight – to spin their disaster as though it represents some kind of massive triumph. Among them is a man named Michael Jacobs, formerly climate adviser to Gordon Brown.

In his Guardian column, Jacobs argues that “the conference that has ended in Durban, South Africa, amid considerable drama, should be regarded as very much a success.”
I disagree. And today we met on Sky News to discuss it.

By the time Jacobs left he was not a happy bunny. He left the set very quickly, apparently not a little discombobulated that I had just accused him (off camera, unfortunately) of talking “weapons-grade b***ocks”. But then, he had started it by turning to me immediately after we’d done our recording and saying: “You are entitled to your opinion. What you are not entitled to are your own facts.”

http://www.climatedepot.com/a/14156/Fmr-Thatcher-advisor-Lord-Monckton-to-pursue-fraud-charges-against-Climategate-scientists-Will-present-to-police-the-case-for-numerous-specific-instances-of-scientific-or-economic-fraud

Fmr. Thatcher advisor Lord Monckton to pursue fraud charges against Climategate scientists: Will present to police the case for ‘numerous specific instances of scientific or economic fraud’

Monckton: ‘I have begun drafting a memorandum for prosecuting authorities…to establish…the existence of numerous specific instances of scientific or economic fraud in relation to the official ‘global warming’ storyline…they will act, for that is what the law requires them to do’

Go to www.ClimateDepot.com for more

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/218263/run-newt-run/rich-lowry

Run, Newt, Run! Gingrich 2008?

“What thrills Republicans about Gingrich’s media appearances is the sense of intellectual mastery — that he has the arguments, along with the words, to beat all comers. And he hasn’t been shy about criticizing the Bush administration or the Republican Congress. This puts Gingrich in the enviable position of being a keen Beltway player, but one not associated with an unpopular GOP establishment.”

The casual TV viewer has probably noticed two things during the past few days — there’s a war in the Middle East, and Newt Gingrich is commenting on it.

Gingrich has been a ubiquitous analyst on the war — ubiquity being one of the tireless, outsized former House speaker’s favorite qualities. In between appearances in his role as a commentator for the Fox News Channel, Gingrich announced on Meet the Press that we are in the midst of World War III. A few days later, Hezbollah declared that it welcomed World War III, nicely capturing the moment: Simultaneous with its shooting war with Israel, Hezbollah is in a war of words with Newt Gingrich.

The old conventional wisdom about Gingrich was that we wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore. The new conventional wisdom is that he’s back, and he’s doing the kicking. Ousted by his own party after its losses in the 1998 midterm elections, Gingrich has reestablished himself as a party leader through sheer intellectual energy. He has had something intelligent to say about literally every issue of the hour, from health care to Katrina to the war on terror. “He has helped himself immensely — he’s all over the place,” says former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie.

http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2011/12/more-on-palestinian-inventivism.html

Not “inventiveness” but now: “inventivism” *.
Here:
THE PALESTINIAN NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT emerged in the early 1960s with the primary goal of “liberating the land and the people” from Zionist settler-colonialism. Today, with colonization accelerating throughout Palestine and with Palestinian refugees—mostly deprived of their national, civil, and human rights—still dispersed around the world, this aim sounds like an embarrassing echo of a distant past [1]. The failure of the strategy of armed struggle to deliver its maximalist (pre-1967) or even more limited (post-1988) goals became patently clear with the quelling of the second intifada. Meanwhile, the alternate strategy of seeking to liberate a fraction of historical Palestine by negotiations and diplomacy has proven equally futile.

“emerged in the early 1960s”? “pre-1967 armed struggle”?

But we know this movement is ancient, old, no? And we know the “settlements” cause the terror.

That’s what they tell us.

Who wrote that?

Raja Khalidi and Sobhi Samour.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=2232

At Hamas rally, Haniyeh threatens Israel with ‘millions of martyrs’

Days before Israel releases 500 prisoners in second part of Shalit deal, Hamas leadership holds mass rally in Gaza City to mark movement’s 24th anniversary, touting the “1,365 Israelis killed” over the years • Israel likely to release low-level terrorists in coming days as “gesture” to Egypt.

Under a sea of fluttering green flags, to the sounds of cheers and fiery rhetoric, some 100,000 Palestinians gathered Wednesday at Gaza City’s Al-Katiba Square for a mass rally to mark Hamas’ 24th anniversary.

Just days before Israel completes the second phase of the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap by releasing an additional 500 Palestinian prisoners, the chief figures of Gaza’s ruling Islamic movement stood proudly on stage under a banner emblazoned with the words, “We are on our way to liberate Jerusalem.”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/10998
Harvard has come to the aid of Islamic fundamentalists in their quest to dominate India and South Central Asia by their dismissal of Indian Prof. S. Swarmy for writing of Muslim persecution in India. For shame!

Prof. Phyllis Chesler is the author of fifteen books, including Women and Madness (Doubleday, 1972), The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and most recently, The New Anti-Semitism. She is the co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology and the National Women’s Health

First they came for the pagans and the Jews. Then they came for the Christians. And then they came for the Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, and Ba’hai.

What am I talking about? I am talking about the Islamic persecution of infidels on every continent—a persecution which is still ongoing; about forced conversions to Islam; and about the genocidal extermination of 80 million Hindus over a period of six centuries (1000-1500 CE).

What I’ve just written is historically true as is Islam’s history of anti-Black racism, slavery, and gender and religious apartheid. Ibn Warraq has a new and very important book just coming out on this very subject. It is titled: Why the West is Best. A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy.