RUTHFULLY YOURS

“There’s no Saudi-Israeli alliance or friendship today, nor will there be one tomorrow. But a wise American policy would seek quietly to explore and to expand these first seedlings of contact. I doubt that the Obama administration can do that, because its failings are in no small part what brings Israelis and Arab states to talk in the first place. Our next president, however, should make it a priority to see if the ice can be cracked a bit more.”

Two new developments may suggest an opening in relations between Israel and the Gulf states.

The first is a new survey of public opinion in Saudi Arabia, conducted by telephone–from Israel, by students at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. Result:

The poll found that 53 percent of Saudis named Iran as their main adversary, while 22 percent said it is the Islamic State group and only 18 percent said Israel….A whopping 85 percent also support the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative, which calls for peace with Israel in return for a full Israeli withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders.

In Washington D.C., the new director-general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and a former Saudi Major General, both of whom run think tanks with close ties to their respective governments, shook hands.

It wasn’t their first time.

Obama wasn’t there when it happened, but in a way he was responsible for it.

Both men are foreign policy experts who help shape the foreign policies of their countries and had conducted five previous meetings. The topic of the meetings was Iran.

Obama wouldn’t have been pleased by their meeting or by what it represented, but he had brought them together. While Dore Gold, the Israeli, insisted that they had common ground because “We’re both allies of the United States”, it was Obama’s betrayal of both countries that had led them here.

On June 2, 2015 the Washington Times published a report about how massive failures of screeners employed by the TSA, an agency that operates under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), failed to find weapons, in the great majority of instances, when undercover operatives went through the screening process. The article, “TSA chief ousted after airport security flunks test, misses most weapons, explosives [2]” included this excerpt:

The acting chief of the Transportation Security Administration [3] was ousted late Monday night after an embarrassing new report found that airport security officers badly failed a new test, missing almost every firearm and explosive investigators tried to sneak by them.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson [4] announced the move, saying Melvin Carraway had been “reassigned” to another part of the department and his deputy would take over, serving until the Senate can confirm a new chief.

Earlier in the night Mr. Johnson [4] had said he’d just been given a classified briefing on the inspector general’s findings that found a major loophole in security that could allow people to sneak prohibited items by TSA [3] screeners and into what were supposed to be secure areas of airports.

Mr. Johnson [4] said the preliminary findings were classified and said it wasn’t “appropriate or prudent” to talk about them — but ABC News reported that IG investigators managed to sneak contraband material by TSA [3] screeners in 67 of 70 tests.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 and contains a number of agencies that are charged with addressing the failures that enabled the terrorists who carried out those attacks, to enter the United States, embed themselves in the United States and then hijack airliners, using them as de facto “cruise missiles.”

Recently several progressive professors have publicly complained that their students are hounding them for failing to consider their tender sensibilities by straying beyond the p.c. orthodoxy on sexual assault, sex identity, linguistic correctness, and a whole host of other progressive shibboleths. Northwestern “feminist” professor Laura Kipnis found herself in a Title IX star chamber for an article she wrote decrying the immaturity of her legally adult students. Over at Vox, another progressive confessed (anonymously, reminding us that academics are an invertebrate species) he was so “scared” and “terrified” of his “liberal” students that he self-censors his comments in class and has changed his reading list.

These incidents follow the complaints of other progressives like Kirsten Powers and Jonathan Chait that the intolerant ideology at the heart of progressivism is now getting out of hand––something that many of us have been writing about for nearly 3 decades. That these progressives should now be shocked at such intolerance and persecution after decades of speech codes, disruptions of conservative speakers, campus inquisitions which ignore Constitutional rights, cancellations of commencement speakers, and ideological litmus tests imposed on new hires and curricula, bespeaks not principle, but rather indignation that now they are on the receiving end of the bullying and harassment long inflicted on conservatives and people of faith.

Finally, proclaim Jews’ rightful and millennial ties to their ancestral homeland.

“Then said Satan: This besieged one, how shall I overcome him?He has courage and ability, he has weapons and imagination.

“So he said: I shall not take his strength, nor muzzle nor bridle him.Nor soften nor weaken his hands, only one thing I shall do;“I shall dull his brain and he will forget that he is in the right.”

So wrote the Israeli poet, Natan Alterman, in his poem, Gone like a Dream. He was expressing his deep anxiety over the weakening resolve of Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora to proclaim Jewish historical rights throughout the reconstituted Jewish homeland.

This inevitably led to a fateful abandonment by so many Israeli politicians and successive governments to the paramount needof responding effectively to Arab and pro-Arab propaganda, which sought to deny the reconstituted Jewish state every inch of sovereign ancestral Jewish land from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan and delegitimize Jerusalem as Israel’s unitedcapital.

For 48 long years, since the liberation of east Jerusalem and biblical Jewish Judea and Samaria from illegal Jordanian occupation – territory the world grotesquely prefers to call the West Bank – the beloved Jewish heartland has remained in a political limbo and not fully annexed. Instead, too much has been sinfully abandoned.

“Addressing Ex-Im’s future, Adam Andrzejewski Chairman & Executive Director of OPEN THE BOOKS…http://www.openthebooks.com/
says: “The fate of the bank is an important test that will show whether Congress is on the side of taxpayers, and basic market principles, or special interests that are capable of bending markets in their direction.”
The Export-Import Bank generates headlines because, after more than three-quarters of a century, it is about to go away. But it won’t go away if Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and Republican Senator, can do something about it.

Ex-Im, or the Export Import Bank, was created by Executive Order in 1934 by Franklin D. Roosevelt to make loans to the Soviet Union and aid trade with Cuba. With the Export-Import Bank Act of 1945, Congress made Ex-Im an independent agency and required that Ex-Im be reauthorized every four-to-five years. Ex-Im’s current authorization expires on June 30.

Ex-Im has historically enjoyed bipartisan support. However, the need to cut spending—coupled with watchdog reporting—brings reauthorization into question. Under the Obama Administration, Ex-Im lending has increased 248 percent. Taxpayers now hold nearly $140 billion in Ex-Im exposure.

The Supreme Court ruling in the so-called Jerusalem passport case certainly hands a disappointing bar mitzvah gift to Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky. He is the American who was born at Jerusalem in 2002 and sought American papers listing his birthplace as Israel. He acted under a law passed almost unanimously by Congress requiring that such papers be granted. It took two trips to the Supreme Court for the judicial branch to reach a conclusion, and the youngster lost.

To the young man — and his heroic parents — all Americans who love Israel owe a debt of thanks. We were rooting for them all the way. But it may yet be that in the long run the big winner in the case will be Jewish state. For one result of Zivotofsky v. Kerry, as the case came to be called, will be that those Americans born in Jerusalem who want documents listing their birthplace as Israel will have to become Israelis. That is, in a way, a restatement of the raison d’etre of Zionism.

No less a figure than Menachem Begin warned against trying to answer the Jerusalem question on Capitol Hill. The fact is that the only duly constituted authority to decide the Jerusalem question is Israel. It has been sovereign in the part of Jerusalem where Master Zivotofsky was born since 1948 and in the rest of Jerusalem since 1967. It is up to the world to adjust. Nothing in the opinion of the Supreme Court changes that, a point that will grow ever more clear.

Europe’s impoverishment, resulting from its economic underperformance and unrestrained immigration, mostly from Islamic countries, has caused its voters to opt for national identity, nationalism, regionalism, and the chance to express themselves through a referendum on Europe. Austria’s Freedom Party warmed voters of the prospect of becoming “strangers in their own country.”

Thanks to this promise — a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union — and that Britain never adopted the euro as its currency, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron was the only sitting European leader not punished by the voters.

Everywhere in Europe, electorates have lost confidence in the bureaucrats of the European Union in Brussels and those of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. They want once again to be empowered to decide their own political and economic fate.

The media’s unethical coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict seems to be the number one reason why people in Turkey have remained so misinformed and brainwashed about the issue. It is not just anti-Semitism, but also anti-Zionism, that is racist and hateful.

The houses and apartments Israelis built in their historic homeland are called “illegal settlements.” But there were no “settlements” before 1967. What, then were the Israelis supposedly “occupying” between 1948 and 1967? Why was the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) even then trying to destroy Israel? What did it think it was “liberating”?

This “occupation” myth seems, instead, to have a lot to do with the “Islamization” of history and geography. Since the creation of the world, it goes, there has been only one religion: Islam. All our religious teachers have taught us that earlier historical figures were prophets — Isa [Jesus], Musa [Moses], Davut [David] and so on — were Muslims and that the original religions they brought were Islamic. These prophets, we are told, preached the teachings of Allah, but their followers, who came later, distorted their messages, changed the writings in their holy books, and fabricated these fake, untrue religions called Judaism and Christianity. Then Islam came as the last, the perfect and the only true and unchanged eternal word of Allah, which led to Muhammad to this world as a “liberator.”

Hillary Clinton changes her principles, values and convictions with the ease of changing her socks, and now she has a new strategy.

She’s banking on hitting the presidential jackpot with Elizabeth Warren’s nickel. Or maybe it’s Bernie Sanders’ nickel. It’s a worn nickel. It’s similar to the nickel George McGovern used in a different time and place. We have the word of The New York Times, the media arm of the Clinton campaign, on that.

Some Democrats concede that moving as far as she can before falling off the edge of the world is risky business, but when even her staunchest friends say they’re for her no matter what because she’s all they’ve got, the risk doesn’t seem so great.