RUTHFULLY YOURS

How is that the Middle East’s sole democracy prompts so much angst, loathing, and condemnation? As a veteran news service correspondent explains, when an IDF soldier’s offensive T-shirt is deemed newsworthy and neo-Nazi rallies at Palestinian universities are not, there’s your answer.

The speech below was delivered by reporter Matti Friedman before the Britain Israel Communication & Research Centre in London on January 26:

One night several years ago, I came out of Bethlehem after a reporting assignment and crossed through the Israeli military checkpoint between that city and its neighbor, Jerusalem, where I live. With me were perhaps a dozen Palestinian men, mostly in their thirties – my age. No soldiers were visible at the entrance to the checkpoint, a precaution against suicide bombers. We saw only steel and concrete. I followed the other men through a metal detector into a stark corridor and followed instructions barked from a loudspeaker – Remove your belt! Lift up your shirt! The voice belonged to a soldier watching us on a closed-circuit camera. Exiting the checkpoint, adjusting my belt and clothing with the others, I felt like a being less than entirely human and understood, not for the first time, how a feeling like that would provoke someone to violence.

Consumers of news will recognize this scene as belonging to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which keeps the 2.5 million Palestinians in that territory under military rule, and has since 1967. The facts of this situation aren’t much in question. This should be an issue of concern to Israelis, whose democracy, military, and society are corroded by the inequality in the West Bank. This, too, isn’t much in question.

The question we must ask, as observers of the world, is why this conflict has come over time to draw more attention than any other, and why it is presented as it is. How have the doings in a country that constitutes 0.01 percent of the world’s surface become the focus of angst, loathing, and condemnation more than any other? We must ask how Israelis and Palestinians have become the stylized symbol of conflict, of strong and weak, the parallel bars upon which the intellectual Olympians of the West perform their tricks – not Turks and Kurds, not Han Chinese and Tibetans, not British soldiers and Iraqi Muslims, not Iraqi Muslims and Iraqi Christians, not Saudi sheikhs and Saudi women, not Indians and Kashmiris, not drug cartel thugs and Mexican villagers. Questioning why this is the case is in no way an attempt to evade or obscure reality, which is why I opened with the checkpoint leading from Bethlehem. On the contrary – anyone seeking a full understanding of reality can’t avoid this question. My experiences as a journalist provide part of the answer, and also raise pressing questions that go beyond the practice of journalism.

Please also remember German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, another noble German who died in 1967.
He was the first post-war Chancellor of Germany from 1949 to 1963. Dr. Adenauer, known as “Der Alte” (the elder in German) was the most impassioned advocate of reconciliation between the German people and of material reparations for victims of the Nazis.
He insisted that the Germans recognize their guilt and responsibility without excuses…for their enormous crime against the Jews.

The German leader’s odyssey of reconciliation was culminated by a pilgrimage to Israel by Dr. Adenauer in May 1966 after he stepped down as Chancellor. During that visit he restated his faith in the ultimate reconciliation between the Germans and the Jews. He bore with dignity, fortitude and understanding the inevitable anti-German demonstrations which his historic visit provoked in Israel.

Because of his efforts books which exculpate or deny the Holovaust are considered crimes in Germany and subject to fines and even imprisonment…..rsk

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/01/31/former-german-president-richard-von-weizsaecker-dies-at-94/22641313/

BERLIN (AP) — Former German President Richard von Weizsaecker, who urged his country to confront the Nazi past, promoted reconciliation and denounced far-right violence during a 10-year tenure that spanned the reunification of west and east, has died. He was 94.

President Joachim Gauck’s office announced Weizsaecker’s death on Saturday. Weizsaecker, a patrician and eloquent figure who was president from 1984 to 1994, raised the profile of the largely ceremonial presidency and established himself as a moral conscience for the nation.

Weizsaecker’s May 1985 speech marking the 40th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II cemented his reputation. It won widespread praise as an effort to bring fellow Germans to terms with the Holocaust.

“All of us, whether guilty or not, whether young or old, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it,” said Weizsaecker, who served as a regular soldier in Adolf Hitler’s army. “Anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present.”

“The 8th of May was a day of liberation,” he told the West German parliament. “It freed us all from the system of National Socialist tyranny.”

Later that month, the Netherlands’ German-born Prince Claus presented the president with a Dutch translation of the speech, telling him that it enabled him finally to acknowledge his roots in a country where resentment of the Nazi occupation remained widespread.

In October 1985, Weizsaecker made the first visit to Israel by a West German head of state. His Israeli counterpart, Chaim Herzog, said the comments had won Weizsaecker “a special place in the history of your people.”

“Richard von Weizsaecker stood worldwide for a Germany that had found its way to center of the democratic family of peoples,” current President Joachim Gauck said in a message of condolences to Weizsaecker’s widow. “He stood for a federal republic that faces up to its past

The other day I quoted this letter from Mindy Alter in The National Post:

Mark Steyn reminds us of the similarities between jihadists and climate-change alarmists. Both are fanatical. Both hew to ideologies that brook no dissent or criticism. Both go ballistic — albeit in markedly different ways — when some “blasphemer” has the audacity to make withering fun of them and their orthodoxies. Most crucially, however, is the fact that both are control freaks who seek to micro-manage our lives, the climate-change alarmists via onerous environmental regulations, the jihadists via Sharia law.

To which I responded:

Oh, c’mon on, it’s not quite that bad: The Allahu Akbar crowd demand death for apostasy. So far the climate mullahs are only advocating prison terms for us apostates.

I spoke too soon: Greenpeace Activist Calls For Climate Change ‘Deniers’ To Be Beheaded

President Obama’s self-congratulatory State of the Union message last week made it sound like our nation’s problems are behind us. But on Tuesday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office set the record straight with a blistering warning.

The CBO cautioned that America’s unaffordable public programs and crushing debt will condemn us to anemic economic growth.

Total federal debt will reach $22.3 trillion by 2020. Unsustainable, says the CBO — especially when now-low interest rates return to normal.

Don’t count on spendaholics in Congress to take this warning seriously. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), for example, responded to the CBO by boasting about this year’ s $468 billion federal deficit — the smallest since Obama took office — and smirking at “Republican rhetoric about ‘a big government’ boogeyman.”

Sorry, senator. The CBO predicts you won’t be seeing deficits that small again except in the rear-view mirror. By 2020, the deficit will nearly double, as federal spending reaches a staggering $4.8 trillion.

A four-foot stack of $100 bills totals $1 million. To get to $1 billion, you need seven stacks as high as the Washington monument. To get to $4.8 trillion, you need 33,000 Washington monuments.

Or an increasing number of entitlement programs. The CBO report devotes an entire chapter to the nation’s newest entitlement, ObamaCare, presenting three distressing facts on the programs next five years:
• The cost of subsidies on the exchanges will more than triple, from $32 billion to $106 billion in 2020.
• Over the same period, federal Medicaid costs (also goosed by the ObamaCare law) will double.
• Despite all the spending, 30 million people will still be uninsured. That’s more than the number the law helps.

Nick Gray is Director, Christian Middle East Watch, a British organisation dedicated to objective and factual discussion of Middle Eastern issues, especially of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Christian leaders be careful what you link to

The extraordinary case of an English Christian vicar using social media in Holocaust Memorial week to highlight conspiracy theories that Israel perpetrated the 9/11 attacks shows how casual and unyielding hatred of the Jewish state has become in mainstream Britain

The pleasant and rather up-market town of Virginia Water in South-West London must have wondered what was going on this week as it was invaded by live-broadcast satellite TV vans and their accompanying film crews and reporters.

As random worthy citizens of Virginia Water were interviewed it came to light that it was their vicar, Rev Dr Stephen Sizer, who had brought this invasion upon them.

Stephen Sizer is an evangelical clergyman of long standing, who besides pastoring his congregation somehow manages to cause dismay and concern over speeches, writings and Facebook posts concerning Israel. In fact, it would not take too deep a reading of his material to encourage one to label him as firmly anti-Israel in both his politics and theology.

Sizer repeatedly claims that he cares “…passionately about the safety of the Jewish people and the right of Israel to exist within internationally agreed borders”. For someone making such an apparently balanced statement, Sizer’s writings and activities betray an attitude towards the conflict that is anything but balanced.

The administration makes a desperate and indefensible claim.

No doubt because of my background investigating, prosecuting, and studying terrorism, the cynical claim by White House spokesmen that the Taliban is not a terrorist organization has annoyed me even more than the Obama administration’s nonstop lying usually does. No surprise then that I could be found railing about it on The Kelly File Thursday night.

In that spirit, ten thoughts for the weekend:

1. Under federal law, there are only three requirements for a group to qualify as a “foreign terrorist organization”: It has to be (a) foreign, (b) engaged in “terrorist activity” (bombings, assassinations, etc., carried out to intimidate people and change policy), and (c) a national-security threat to the United States. The law that covers this is Sec. 1189(a) of Title 8, U.S. Code, from the federal Immigration and Nationality Act. It’s here, and it’s just the first few lines — even a president who routinely ignores the laws he is sworn to execute faithfully should be able to make some time for it, maybe on the plane ride between the golf course and the Saudi palace.

As a little girl, I was always reminded by my mother that gum chewing was in poor taste. She would recite this little ditty and it has stuck with me ever since. It seems so apropos when watching the spectacle of our President-of-Poor-Manners as he gallivants the globe and chews gum at formal events.

The gum-chewing girl and the cud-chewing cow.

What is the difference

I will allow.

The intelligent look on the face of the cow.

Obama should make every American with a modicum of decency feel ashamed and sickened as he continues his coarse and boorish behavior. We used to be known as the Ugly American, a term used to refer to perceptions of arrogant behavior by Americans abroad, but Barack Hussein Obama truly epitomizes such genuine arrogance.

In 2006 Jayne Clark wrote the following for USA Today/Travel/Destinations

. . . research aimed at discovering the roots of anti-American sentiments around the world points, in part, to the American personality. People overseas don’t just dislike our foreign policy; they dislike us. And that’s unsettling to U.S. businesses with interests abroad, as well as to the U.S. tourism industry vying for a share of incoming foreign travelers.

Historically, people would separate the American government and the American people. But that distinction is being blurred. Typically, [Americans] were admired for our way of life. It was a lifestyle that many aspired to, and that’s not the case any more.

On January 27, Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) announced the formation of a 527 committee called Our American Revival, unveiled a new website, and issued a statement which included the following:

To move this country forward we need new, fresh leadership from outside of Washington. We need leaders who are bold. That’s how we build a better future for our children and grandchildren. We’ve done it in Wisconsin and it can be done across this country with the right leadership.

Walker’s statement refers to his actions in balancing Wisconsin’s state budget, closing an unconstitutional deficit hole of $3.6B while actually cutting state taxes and capping local property taxes. He achieved this mostly by curtailing the hitherto virtually unrestrained power of public employee unions, to the intense dismay of the Wisconsin Left. Walker’s statement also comes on the heels of a major speech delivered over the weekend to Iowa conservatives, in which he urged policies that “go big and bold” in tackling such major public policy problems.

The wish of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, was that the country evolved into a modern democratic state where Muslims, as a majority population, could feel at ease.

But the modernizers who succeeded the colonial authorities in taking power aroused expectations that were simply beyond their abilities to deliver.

But religious authorities were agitating, warning the bewildered masses that these defeats were divine punishments for betraying the true message of Islam by not faithfully abiding by its requirements.

Qutb in his writings recast the division in the world from the classic Muslim one between the House of Islam and the House of War, to one between Islam and jahiliyya, a condition of paganism that preceded the coming of Islam to Arabia. Jahiliyya has now become all-pervasive in the modern world, supposedly sparing none, including Muslims, except for that small coterie of Muslims who took flight [hijra] from the corrupted world and prepared for jihad [armed struggle].

Sad news:

Lt. Col. Edward Saylor, one of four surviving Doolittle Raiders who attacked Japan during a daring 1942 mission credited with lifting American morale during World War II, has died. He was 94. Rod Saylor said his father died of natural causes on Wednesday in Sumner, Washington.

He was a young flight engineer-gunner and among the 80 airmen who volunteered to fly the risky mission that sent B-25 bombers from a carrier at sea to attack Tokyo on April 28, 1942. The raid launched earlier than planned and risked running out of fuel before making it to safe airfields. ”It was what you do … over time, we’ve been told what effect our raid had on the war and the morale of the people,” Saylor told The Associated Press in a 2013 interview.

Wounded, nearly fatally, at Pearl Harbor just four months earlier, the United States decided the way to even the score was to put planes in the air and show the Japanese that we could hurt them. The Americans didn’t withdraw to the safety of San Francisco and San Diego, nor bomb some useless atoll in the Pacific, or issue a stern warning to the emperor to turn over Tojo and Yamamoto in order to bring them to “justice.”