RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is a myth promulgated by “Orientalists” including Bernard Lewis of a great golden age of comity between Moslems and the Jews…..this addresses the question…. “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn by Andrew G. Bostom and Ibn Warraqrsk does it best….rsk
Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors? Lessons from Medieval Interfaith Relations – By Alex J. Novikoff

In Neighboring Faiths, a recently published collection of essays, the historian David Nirenberg explores the relationship among the three religions during the Middle Ages. Alex Novikoff writes in his review:

Medieval Iberia has often been held up as a mirror to our own society, and for quite understandable reasons. For some, this bygone era represents a beacon of interfaith tolerance and cultural exchange of the sort we might learn from today. Convivencia (“living together”) has long been the descriptive term of choice, a word that over the years has achieved a sort of sublime meaninglessness. . . .

For others, medieval Iberia is best seen as a harsh and unrelenting mill that, through the grating and grinding of competing cultures and hostile takeovers, churned out some of the worst templates of religious intolerance: jihad and crusade, forced conversions, torture and inquisition, racial exclusion, wholesale expulsions, and more. . . . Yet other scholars . . . favor a more nuanced middle ground of [simultaneous] conflict and coexistence. . . . In this stimulating and deeply learned collection of essays . . . David Nirenberg reaffirms his mastery as an original and challenging expositor in this third category of historical interpreters.

After decades of wariness, the two nations are being drawn together by common interests and shared fears.

alk down a side street in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Eshkol and you may came across a group of students chatting loudly in Hebrew as they review their Bible lessons of the day. Hardly an extraordinary sight in Israel—except that these aren’t Israelis. They’re young Japanese on student visas who have assumed hybrid names like Asher Sieto Kimura and Suzana Keiren Mimosa. And they’re Makuyas: members of a Japanese religious group that’s been fervently supportive of Israel since 1948.

The movement’s founder—“Makuya” is Japanese for ohel moed, the biblical tent of meeting or tabernacle—was Ikuro Teshima, a Christian businessman who adopted the name Abraham in the belief that the birth of Israel marked the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. His dream, finally realized in the 1960s, was to send groups of young Japanese to Israel, there to study Hebrew and Jewish thought and to volunteer in hospitals, schools, and senior centers. Since then, over 1,000 Makuyas have attended the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the University of Haifa, the Technion, and other institutions of higher learning. In Japan itself, the Makuya newsletter reaches more than 300,000 subscribers.

The Obama administration recently made changes to the Oath of Allegiance to the United States in a manner very conducive to Sharia, or Islamic law.

On July 21, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced some “modifications” to the Oath of Allegiance that immigrants must take before becoming naturalized.

The original oath required incoming citizens to declare that they will “bear arms on behalf of the United States” and “perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States” when required by the law.

Now the USCIS says, “A candidate [to U.S. citizenship] may be eligible to exclude these two clauses based on religious training and belief or a conscientious objection.”

The GOP in 2016 can consolidate five years of historic election victories—or blow it.

How many Republican presidential candidates can dance on the head of an elephant? The answer arrives Thursday evening as Fox News stages the party’s first primary debate. In fact, so many people have piled into the GOP primary that Fox has divided them into Medallion Gold, lifting off in prime time, and Medallion Silver in afternoon economy.

Trivia question: When is the first Democratic primary debate? Answer: The party hasn’t scheduled one yet.

President Obama’s Iran deal has been losing support in the polls and on Capitol Hill, and so on Wednesday he tried to reason with his critics. “It’s those hardliners [in Iran] chanting ‘death to America’ who have been most opposed to the deal,” he said in a speech at American University. “They’re making common cause with the Republican Caucus.”

So Republicans in Congress equal Revolutionary Guards in Tehran. Nice. Name-calling and immoral equivalence are always the best way to win over skeptics.

In truth, Mr. Obama isn’t trying to persuade anyone. He’s trying to keep enough partisan Democratic support across the country so he can hold one-third of the House and Senate. That’s all he needs to implement his deal. This explains his other rhetorical tactic Wednesday, which was to equate opposition to his deal with a vote for war in Iraq in 2003 and a lust for war generally. He’s essentially banking on the Senate’s Elizabeth Warren wing to save him from what is building into a bipartisan majority repudiation of the deal.

Stance complicates the International Atomic Energy Agency’s probe into suspected nuclear-military program

WASHINGTON—Iran so far has refused to allow United Nations inspectors to interview key scientists and military officers to investigate allegations that Tehran maintained a covert nuclear-weapons program, the head of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog said in an interview Wednesday.

Iran’s stance complicates the International Atomic Energy Agency’s probe into Tehran’s suspected nuclear-military program—a study that is slated to be completed by mid-December, as required by the landmark nuclear agreement forged between world powers and Iran on July 14 in Vienna.

On a professional note that is also personal, Robert Conquest’s tremendous body of work — and, I would add, the consternation and controversy his work engendered amid the “intelligentsia” — has been and will remain a guiding inspiration. In many ways, American Betrayal is itself a paean to Conquest.

Some relevant passages from the book follow.

p. 94

British historian Robert Conquest is one such magnificent exception. Conquest’s special branch of Soviet history might well be called Soviet exterminationism—a new “ism,” perhaps, but one that fittingly encapsulates the history of mass murder Conquest has immersed himself in, cataloging and analyzing the boggling scale of murder and tragedy deliberately wrought by the Communist regime in Russia. His macabre exercise began, most notably, with his history of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, The Great Terror. The book came out in 1968, a time when no other historians were even acknowledging the existence of this hulking wound of a subject, a time when, amazingly, Joseph E. Davies’s twenty-seven-year-old pro-Stalin tract, Mission to Moscow, was still the first and last word on the subject. Noting the Conquest book’s uniqueness in 1968, Andrew and Mitrokhin called it “a sign of the difficulty encountered by many Western historians in interpreting the Terror” (emphasis added).45 When Conquest finally marshaled the available research and put a number on the horror— twenty million killed during the Stalin period—it was as though the historian had additionally become a cold-case criminologist and, further, by implication, a hanging judge. As crunched by columnist Joseph Alsop, commenting in 1970 on a particularly callous review of the Conquest book and its themes, those twenty million souls killed by the regime represented one-eighth of the entire Russian population “of that period, in peacetime and without provoking a whisper of protest.”46

President Obama, in his desperation to save his Iran deal, has taken to attacking its opponents in personal ways. He has accused critics of his deal of being the same Republican warmongers who drove us into the ground war against Iraq and has warned that they would offer “overheated” and often dishonest arguments. He has complained about the influence of lobbyists and money on the process of deciding this important issue, as if lobbying and money were not involved in other important matters before Congress.

These types of ad hominem arguments are becoming less and less convincing as more Democratic members of Congress, more liberal supporters of the President, more nuclear experts and more foreign policy gurus are expressing deep concern about, and sometimes strong opposition to, the deal that is currently before Congress.

David Harris is the executive director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC)

When the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was announced in
Vienna on July 14, AJC issued a press release indicating that we would
first study the full text and its implications, and then take a
position on the deal, as the U.S. Congress launched into its 60-day
review period.

Over the past three weeks, AJC engaged in a very intensive,
open-minded, and thorough process of external consultations and
internal deliberations, involving many lay and staff leaders.

Obama attacks his critics (guess who) as ignorant, deceptive and trying to pull a fast one on the American people.

This critical period during which Congress is mulling over the nuclear deal made by U.S. negotiators and their P5+1 partners with Iran has turned into a hotly contested debate between those committed to preventing the deal from being approved and those who are desperate to ensure that it will be approved.
Yesterday, Aug. 4, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, spoke to thousands of Americans and explained why he believes the deal is a bad one. It boiled down to “Keep or Cheat.” However Iran decides to act under this agreement, it will attain nuclear threshold status.
Today President Barack Obama gave a midday televised speech from American University in Washington, D.C.. During the speech he ridiculed those who criticize the deal, and explained why, according to him, the choice is either the deal or war.