RUTHFULLY YOURS

One Albanian author has the intellectual honesty to say what he thinks.

The France Presse journalist asked Ismail Kadaré: “But here, in Jerusalem, the Palestinians could object to you that their freedom is restricted”. And the Albanian writer and poet Kadaré replied: “I come from one of the few countries in the world that helped the Jews during the war. That’s why I never thought of this other problem (of the Palestinians)”.

Many people were disappointed by Kadaré’s behaviour, especially those who wanted to see this most famous Albanian writer boycotting the ceremony in which he received the Jerusalem Prize. But Kadaré didn’t submit to anti-Semitic public opinion, unlike British writer Ian McEwan, who accepted the prize three years ago, but also used the ceremony to preach to the Israelis.

Leftist, Muslim and a candidate every year to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ismail Kadaré had all the requisite characteristics to embarrass the Israelis. There was also a precedent: South African writer Nadine Gordimer, who refused the prize for political reasons. Instead, Kadaré said that Israel faces “the danger of disappearance”.

We keep on trusting these masters of deceit.
Just when I started feeling sorry for the guy, Brian Williams, along came a report from Sherri Mandell, the award-winning writer.

Mandell, an American Israeli from Judea/Samaria, met Williams before he became a famous TV anchorman and liar.

Back in 2001, Koby, Mandell’s 13-year-old son was murdered at the hands of Palestinian Arab savages, beaten with rocks, and in Williams, then a reporter, she thought she had a sympathetic ear. Well, he acted sympathetic. A perfect story about what Israelis are up against? Not quite. The story ended up on NBC Nightly News and by slippery insinuation blamed the “settlers” for the attack and for everything else.

Read Mandell’s searing book, “The Blessing of a Broken Heart.”

Israelis and plenty of Americans – we keep on trusting these masters of deceit.

Back home, Williams publicly shamed President George W. Bush (a Yale scholar) for his taste in books, smirking that Bush knew nothing about literature except for books about baseball. If you watched closely, you could see Williams winking to his pals on New York’s Upper West Side. Bush is a Republican. He must be dumb.

He certainly cannot be as smart as us.

It was a cold, rainy and miserable day– either late 1951 or early 52. I was unemployed but had taken part-time work to help do a piece of market research for a friend’s firm. With my little clipboard, I was importuning what we thought would be an upper-class, sophisticated sample in rush hour in front of New York City’s Grand Central Station. Most of the passersby annoyingly brushed aside my attempt to talk to them, assuming I was just one more panhandler.
But when I did manage to collar someone, it was to ask them if they knew what SAS meant. No reason that they would unless they were veteran Atlantic airline commuters, not a large commodity in those days. But my friend’s client was spending a great deal of money trying to establish Scandinavian Airlines System’s name and its acronym, SAS, in the public mind. And they wanted some proof that it was happening.
Bored after a while, instead of the normal: way of asking my question, “Do you know what SAS means?” I began to play with it: That would become, Do YOU know what SAS means?” Or maybe I would ask, “Do you what SAS means?” Or I would put it into, “D’ya know what SAS MEANS?” with a rising intonation which always produced an affirmative response, although a follow-up question would prove they didn’t. Our second question, “Do you know where Scandinavian Airlines flies?” produced equally negotiable results. “Do YOU know where Scandinavian Airlines flies?” produced a different answer from “Do you know where SCANDINAVIAN Airlines flies?” and still another if it were “Do you KNOW where Scandinavian Airlines flies?”

Just when everyone’s attention has been directed toward ISIS and some of the most despicable crimes ever committed, and our government is loathe to war with our planet’s unequalled brutality, Jordan’s King Abdullah assumed the role of world leader. Such activity continues to distract us so that we ignore the evils unfolding within our own country – the war of the Moderates who exploit children in incalculable ways.

ISIS and Boko Haram, who hope to establish a shared Muslim empire, have lured thousands of American and European children to join their jihad against Western civilization. The UK mirror reported that, within a single two-week period alone, the Islamic State kidnapped about 3,000 Yazidi women and children, and Boko Haram kidnaps young girls by the hundreds from private schools for sexual slavery. European teenage boys are persuaded to join ISIS with cash offers, rap videos, and tales of adventure. Young women are enticed by adventure and romance, only to be forced to live in the nude as sex slaves, beaten, shared among friends, and raped to bear the next generation of jihadists. The International Labour Organization estimates 1.2 million children are trafficked for exploitation each year.

Netanyahu Invites Jews to Seek Refuge in Israel

Denmark’s Jewish community was in shock Sunday after a gunman attacked a Copenhagen synagogue, in a weekend of violence that echoed the deadly events in Paris last month and rekindled a debate over the dangers of being a Jew in Europe.

Police said they shot and killed the gunman, who killed a guard and wounded two policemen at the synagogue a day after attacking a seminar on free speech that featured a Swedish cartoonist who has lampooned Islam. One man, a participant in the conference, was killed and three policemen were wounded in the first assault.

At the synagogue, the gunman killed 37-year-old Dan Uzan, who was guarding the door of a bat mitzvah ceremony in a parish hall. None of the reported 80 guests were injured.
A stream of Danes converged on the synagogue to pay their respects to the victims, laying flowers along a stone-and-iron fence.

Islamist attacks are becoming routine on the Continent.

Islamist violence visited Denmark twice on the weekend, underscoring Europe’s new terrorist normal. Homegrown or immigrant Muslim terrorists targeting innocents and the Western way of life are becoming a feature of Continental life.

The alleged assailant didn’t choose his victims at random. First he fired dozens of rounds at a cafe in Copenhagen during a debate on free speech, killing one and wounding three. Police believe the same man attacked a synagogue hours later, killing a Jewish civilian guard and maiming two officers. Early Sunday police killed the man they believe committed both attacks. Witnesses heard him cry “Allahu Akbar” during the cafe assault.

Among those attending the debate at the Krudttoenden cafe was Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who has received death threats and an al Qaeda bounty since the 2007 publication of a cartoon he drew that mocked Muhammad. A failed suicide bomber attacking downtown Stockholm in 2010 mentioned Mr. Vilks’s name in an email explaining his motives, and later that year the cartoonist’s home was the target of arson. He lives under police protection.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/02/14/cia-headquarters-in-langley-reportedly-on-lockdown/

According to accounts from a McLean, Virginia resident, the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia are on lockdown for an unknown reason.

Photos provided to Breitbart News show the entrance from the road barred and police tape around the perimeter. Patrol cars were reportedly on hand as well. The local resident also stated that the rear entrance to the facility was also blocked.

This is a developing story.

Yesterday evening’s Copenhagen synagogue shooting is yet another attack on Jews as Jews — just as we have witnessed such attacks at the Toulouse Jewish primary school, the Brussels Jewish museum, the Paris kosher supermarket, the firebombing of the synagogue in the German city of Wuppertal, and at many other places in recent years, from the Jewish communal centers in Mumbai and Casablanca, to the ancient synagogues in Istanbul and Jerba.

Yet only last week, President Obama and his spokespeople were suggesting that it was just some kind of “random” accident that Jews were being killed.

The Obama team has consistently demonstrated a willful lack of understanding about the nature of Islamism, about anti-Semitism, and about the intentions of the Islamic revolutionary government in Iran. They seem more interested in disparaging the prime minister of America’s ally Israel, than in preventing the regime in Tehran going nuclear – a regime which has already de facto taken control of large swathes of Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. Its terrorist actions outside the Middle East spread to, among other places, Thailand, Bulgaria (where Jewish tourists were blown up in 2012) and Argentina, where 85 people were murdered at the AMIA Jewish centre in Buenos Aires. Only last month an Iranian diplomat in Montevideo was expelled from Uruguay for planting a bomb designed to kill Jews. (This foiled attack was barely reported on outside the Uruguayan and Israeli media.)

When a large number of foreign-policy experts—both Republicans and Democrats—falsely attribute many of the world’s ills to the Jewish state, they are channeling an ancient hatred. The time has come to say so.

Schizophrenia is a much-abused metaphor. Those of us who have ever cared about someone who suffers from the illness have a hard time with all those pundits who get it wrong, confusing it with split-personality disorder, and then applying it metaphorically to anybody who carries two contradictory thoughts.
But knowing about the disease can still be helpful in talking about politics—giving us a much better metaphor to describe the conversation about Israel taking place in Washington today.
Schizophrenics suffer not from multiple personalities, but from an inability to tell the difference between things they encounter or imagine on the one hand and reality on the other. It’s been described as a kind of filtering problem: If they overhear someone on television saying, “the court awarded me $5 million,” a schizophrenic may easily believe she is owed that money and say so repeatedly for years. Schizophrenics also suffer from all manner of delusions, believing things happened that never did. And if they are also paranoid, they will try to convince you that secretive people and forces are conspiring to hurt them.
I can’t tell you how often I have been made to feel like many of Israel’s critics suffer from this disease—or at least are eager to imitate it with shocking fidelity. The use of words like “apartheid,” “genocide,” or “ethnic cleansing” to describe a country that I and millions of other educated, sensitive human beings have visited and lived in without noticing anything resembling South Africa, Rwanda, or Kosovo—a regular Western democratic country I have traveled through, including in the very territories and checkpoints and settlements some are insisting I am in denial about—is on the face of it silly, and remains so no matter how many people repeat it.

“Wherever it goes now, in many respects PEGIDA has already served part of its purpose, in starting a debate on immigration, citizenship, and integration that has been silent for decades…. Perhaps it could even kick-start a new era of openness and discussion in Britain too.” — Oliver Lane, British commentator.

The future of the German grassroots anti-Islamization movement known as PEGIDA has been thrown into doubt after a leadership split resulted in key members leaving the group.

Only 2,000 people attended a weekly rally held in the eastern German city of Dresden on February 9, a sharp decrease from the 17,000 who assembled at the previous rally held on January 25.

PEGIDA — named after the German abbreviation for “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West” — has been organizing “evening strolls” (Abendspaziergang) through downtown Dresden on Monday evenings since October to protest against runaway immigration and the Islamization of Germany.