RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nearly a week after election day in Israel, the country is still reeling from the results. In a rare case of uniformity, the political echelon, the pundits and the public are sharing the same sense of shock.

Surveys conducted over the past three months, since the government was disbanded and new elections were called, indicated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party was in deep trouble. Though he himself received relatively high marks as a statesman when compared with rivals, respondents to polls simultaneously expressed dissatisfaction with their lot, both economically and in terms of Israel’s standing internationally.

At 10 p.m. on Tuesday night, when the voting was concluded and the exit poll was released, the Left was devastated. Five minutes earlier, the assumption had been that the Zionist Union (the joint list formed by the merger of the Labor party, led by Isaac Herzog, and the Hatnuah party, headed by Tzipi Livni) was going to come out ahead; and the only question remaining had been by how much.

The Likud and its supporters had been hoping against hope for a tie or a single-seat loss — a situation that still would have enabled the Right to form the next government, even if the Zionist Union was given the first shot at doing so.

The worry all around was that the two major parties would be forced into forging a national unity government.

Juan Williams should check his facts before speaking on national media.

To say that Jewish people can’t live wherever they want to live, is the same as saying Black people need to ride the back of the bus.

To say that Jews must be restricted from building in certain neighborhoods is to say that you support Jim Crow racial separation.

To say that Jews must be confined to particular zones and may not be permitted to move freely is to reintroduce the Nuremberg Laws.

We are accustomed to racist slurs, but it was doubly hurtful to hear you, Juan Williams, a leading African American spokesman, a confidante of Barack Obama, jump in with that comment. How about a moratorium on backstabbing from you and from our supreme leader?

“So here we are again, getting more of the same from our #hashtag/travel log ambassador Michelle Obama. It’s spring 2015, and both she and her husband are still focusing on trivial things. They continue to use shallow slogans to advance superficial ideas that accomplish absolutely nothing, spend our hard-earned money on personal indulgences, and assume the American people don’t recognize flagrant hypocrisy when we see it.”

It’s official! Mrs. Obama has gone #hashtag crazy. Remember when she pleaded with Boko Haram to release the 276 kidnapped girls using the hashtag “#Bringbackourgirls?” Well, that didn’t work! The girls were either sold into slavery, murdered, or married off to terrorists, and despite Michelle Obama’s solemn effort haven’t been seen or heard from since.

Moving right along, using the excuse that she’s promoting a #letgirlslearn education initiative, FLOTUS has taken a break from dancing the “Uptown Funk” with Ellen and sponsoring her #givemefive campaign.

Instead, as part of her usual spring fling, Mrs. Obama decided to take Asia by storm.

A few notes on this first weekend of spring:

~France goes to the polls tomorrow. Marine Le Pen was excluded by the French Government from the #JeSuisCharlie rally in favor of less controversial figures like, er, Mahmoud Abbas and President Erdoğan. But, when all the unlikely free-speech opportunists bleating that “the pen is mightier than the sword” have faded away, it may be that the biggest beneficiary of the post-Charlie Hebdo environment will be Mme Le Pen’s Front National:

“She’s my queen!” gushes Patricia, waiting for the arrival of Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Front.

“Marine represents everything the people of France want. I don’t know what to say – she’s wonderful, magnificent…”

The political momentum is firmly behind the National Front (FN) whose anti-immigration and anti-EU platform saw it take first place in European elections and win control of 11 town halls last year.

It is again topping polls ahead of Sunday’s vote.

The Picardy countryside is a picturesque but barren stretch of territory with little to offer its young people, making it an ideal recruiting ground for the FN which is polling over 40 percent across much of the region.

Not everyone is as happy as Patricia, though:

Back at the Noyon community hall, some wait to greet Le Pen with shouts of “fascist”.

“Even if she hides it behind her beautiful blonde hair, there are neo-Nazi ideas underneath,” said one of the protesters, 47-year-old Pierre, who declined to give his last name.

“After she’s kicked out the immigrants, it’s us who will be next – the people who think.”

Got yer dose of schadenfreud for the day right here…

The co-founder of the granddaddy of green groups, Greenpeace, explains in a Heartland editorial why he is a climate skeptic. Patrick Moore, who left Greenpeace in 1986 because, in his words, it “took a sharp turn to the political left” and “evolved into an organization of extremism and politically motivated agendas,” pulls no punches when criticizing his former colleagues in the green movement:

I am skeptical humans are the main cause of climate change and that it will be catastrophic in the near future. There is no scientific proof of this hypothesis, yet we are told “the debate is over” and “the science is settled.”

My skepticism begins with the believers’ certainty they can predict the global climate with a computer model. The entire basis for the doomsday climate change scenario is the hypothesis increased atmospheric carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel emissions will heat the Earth to unlivable temperatures.

In fact, the Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years, since the Little Ice Age ended, long before heavy use of fossil fuels. Prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, when it was warmer there than today. And during Roman times, it was warmer, long before fossil fuels revolutionized civilization.

The idea it would be catastrophic if carbon dioxide were to increase and average global temperature were to rise a few degrees is preposterous.

At this point there is no honest doubt that Obama is not just pro-Muslim, but that he favors Jihadist imperialism, whether by infiltration or violence. Or both.

Iran is an outright jihadist imperialist power, and it has been called the biggest terror sponsor by our State Department — before Obama told it to shut up. Iran now controls the Syrian regime of Assad, the Houthi conquerors in Yemen’s capital of Sanaa, parts of Iraq, much of Lebanon, and at times the Hamas-occupied Gaza strip. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are fighting in Iraq and Syria. Contrary to New York Times propaganda, the “smiling Ayatollah” Rouhani is actually grinning like a tiger after a big kill.

Obama’s so-called “nuclear agreement” by the US and Europeans is simply a retreat before the most dangerous new rogue nuclear power. This is so barefaced a betrayal that even the US Congress is alarmed.

The rise of Iran as a nuclear and missile power has predictably freaked out the Sunni nations, Saudi Arabia (50 miles from Iran), Egypt (the Saudis’ biggest protector), Jordan, and even Pakistan. These are Sunni powers, and in the case of the Wahhabi Saudis, they basically agree with the ISIS doctrine of barbaric killings, rapes, and slave-taking. The Saudis have already paid for Pakistan’s nukes, and can call on them in a crisis, and may be taking steps to acquire its own production capability. Obama’s “good friends” Turkey and Qatar have turned radical jihadist as well.

Michael Kuttner is a Jewish New Zealander who for many years was actively involved with various communal organisations connected to Judaism and Israel. He now lives in Israel and is J-Wire’s correspondent in the region.

It soon turned out to be the gnashing of teeth and wailing laments emanating from Washington and Brussels accompanied by dirges of disbelief from every media journalist and political pundit.

The week prior to Election Day saw a huge influx of media from overseas most of whom based themselves in Jerusalem. They pontificated from their own little bubbles and preconceived prejudices. Virtually all of them sent reports back to their offices predicting doom and destruction for Netanyahu and his Likud party. These premature eulogies were written by journalists with a transparent agenda who salivated at the prospect of an electoral massacre and waxed joyously at the prospect of their left leaning idols being swept to power by an Israeli electorate fed up and eager for peace at any price. In this skewed perception they were not alone because their left wing Israeli colleagues also enthusiastically contributed to this chorus of the politically correct.

Early last year, he began posting stern religious pronouncements and snippets of scripture. By April 2, a day after turning 20, he hailed Islamic fighters: “If the sky would be proud of the existence of the stars, the land should be proud of the existence of the Mujahideen.”

On May 29, the day he disappeared, he posted, “I Thank Allah For Everything No Matter What!” Soon he was in Turkey, rebuffing his mother’s and sister’s anguished pleas to come home. In late July, he declared, “What A Beautiful Day in Raqqa,” the de facto capital of the Islamic State in Syria. Last Aug. 7, he posted a picture of himself online with his finger on the trigger of a Kalashnikov.

Mr. Nur had become one of a small number of Americans enticed by the apocalyptic religious promise of the self-described Islamic State, which has seized large sections of Syria and Iraq and claims to be building a caliphate.

Last Sunday, Tzipi Livni passed through the noisy hall of her Tel Aviv campaign headquarters. It was two days before Israel’s election, and Livni—who, a few months earlier, had been the chief negotiator with the Palestinians and the Justice Minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—was feeling bullish about her chances, with running mate Isaac Herzog, of unseating her former boss. Netanyahu is “the one who broke his own government, and he regrets it now,” she told us. Livni turned around and flashed two fingers at one of the blue-and-white posters featuring her and Herzog. “Because of this.”

“This”—the merger between Herzog’s Labor Party and Livni’s upstart Hatnuah—was the big story of the campaign. It resurrected Livni as a candidate and put Labor in serious contention to form a government for the first time since 1999. For months, Herzog and Livni’s Zionist Union and Netanyahu’s Likud had traded a one-seat edge in the polls, but over the past week the opposition had opened a three-to-four-seat lead. Suddenly, Israelis were seriously considering the prospect that someone other than Netanyahu might be Prime Minister. But now, less than forty-eight hours before the polls opened, the campaign had taken a turn, and just about everyone at the Zionist Union headquarters but Livni seemed worried.

After months of carefully projecting an aura of invincibility, Netanyahu had suddenly launched what was being dubbed the “gevalt campaign” (after a Yiddish expression of alarm), warning that Israel was at imminent risk of being taken over by “a left-wing government supported by the Arabs” that would “create a second Hamastan in Judea and Samaria” (the right’s preferred name for the West Bank). Internal polls in all campaigns were detecting a last-minute exodus of voters from Naftali Bennett’s hard-right Jewish Home party to Likud.

“The gevalt is working,” Amos Yadlin, Labor’s candidate for defense minister, admitted in the same hallway—a claustrophobic space plastered with campaign signs and movie posters with Herzog’s face pasted onto James Bond and Captain America. Yadlin was still optimistic that Herzog would get more seats than Netanyahu, but he noted that the final outcome would depend on whom some of the smaller parties supported the morning after.

“Shocked and appalled by their failure to finish him off politically –
only to see him reelected stronger than ever – the Left immediately
intensified its campaign of distortion and demonization.”

In the most educated and progressive circles, who is considered to be
the archfiend of the Middle East, the person who most imperils life
and freedom and the safety of the world?