RUTHFULLY YOURS

We should all feel better. Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, columnist for the New York Times and apologist for the Obama Administration recently headlined an op-ed: “Newsflash: There was no debt crisis.” He references the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projection that the U.S. federal debt will be no higher in 2039, as a percent of GDP, than it had been at the end of World War II! In doing so, Comrade Krugman accepts as absolute the prophecy of a vision-impaired seer. He appears unconcerned that today’s federal debt borrowers lack the discipline of their post-World War II compatriots. He seems unwilling to account for the fact that while the last baby-boomer turns 65 on 2030, life expectancy continues to rise. Given current trends, there will only be two workers for every retiree in 2039. No matter. He sums up his opinion, in case anyone misunderstands him: “We don’t have a debt crisis, and never did.”

The federal deficit has declined from a $1.4 trillion peak in 2009 to an estimated $500 billion this year, which is good news. The reasons: slowly rising GDP has resulted in rising tax revenues; sequestration helped on the expense side; and the wind-downs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have reduced defense spending. Those three points are positives. But two other factors exude a whiff of the ephemeral: One, the real cost of ObamaCare has not yet kicked in. Keep in mind, nothing is ever free, especially a government program that is advertised to be so. And, two, average interest rates on federal debt are currently 450 basis points below where they were in 2000 and 300 basis points below where they averaged during the post-War years. Were rates at their long-term historic levels, interest costs on $17 trillion in debt would be $500 billion higher – a meaningful increase on a $3.9 trillion budget.

The CBO’s projections, as to the future of interest rates, assume that markets have down-shifted permanently to the current level. Perhaps the Federal Reserve can work its magic and keep interest rates low. But history has shown that price fixing (including the cost of money) does not work over the long term. In times of crisis, for brief periods such as we had in the fall of 2008, it may be necessary for government to intervene in an extraordinary way, but over time free markets self-adjust and work best. I may not have learned much in forty-seven years in capital markets, but the one thing I feel pretty comfortable forecasting is that prices of all asset categories, including money, will fluctuate. At any rate, combined, all of the above factors have produced an unusual level of complacency about the possible threat of rising debt.

I was instrumental in establishing the “Israeli National Skin Bank”, which is the largest in the world. The National Skin Bank stores skin for every day needs as well as for war time or mass casualty situations.

This skin bank is hosted at the Hadassah Ein Kerem University hospital in Jerusalem where I was the Chairman of plastic surgery.

This is how I was asked to supply skin for an Arab woman from Gaza, who was hospitalized in Soroka Hospital in Beersheva, after her family burned her. Usually, such atrocities happen among Arab families when the women are suspected of having an affair.

We supplied all the needed Homografts for her treatment. She was successfully treated by my friend and colleague, Prof. Lior Rosenberg and discharged to return to Gaza.

She was invited for regular follow-up visits to the outpatient clinic in Beersheva.

One day she was caught at a border crossing wearing a suicide belt. She meant to explode herself in the outpatient clinic of the hospital where they saved her life. It seems that her family promised her that if she did that, they would forgive her.

This is only one example of the war between Jews and Muslims in the Land of Israel. It is not a territorial conflict. This is a civilization conflict, or rather a war between civilization & barbarism.

Bibi (Netanyahu) gets it, Obama does not.

As many people as possible must come to an understanding of what radical Islam is — and what awaits the world if it is not stopped.

Dr. Arieh Eldad is an M.D. at Hadassah Hospital in Israel.

Jews have been accused of harming and murdering non-Jews since the twelfth century in England, when Jewish convert to Catholicism, Theobald of Cambridge, mendaciously announced that European Jews ritually slaughtered Christian children each year and drank their blood during Passover season.

That medieval blood libel, largely abandoned in the contemporary West, does, however, still appear as part of Arab world’s vilification of Jews—now transmogrified into a slander against Israel, the Jew of nations. But in the regular chorus of defamation against Israel by a world infected with Palestinianism, a new, more odious trend has begun to show itself: the blood libel has been revivified; however, to position Israel (and by extension Jews) as demonic agents in the community of nations, the primitive fantasies of the blood libel are now masked with a veneer of academic scholarship and published as politicized scientific study.

Just this month, for example, the British medical journal Lancet further degraded its academic respectability and credibility by publishing something entitled “An open letter for the people in Gaza,” signed by 24 doctors and scientists. In the language of propaganda and politics—as opposed to the reasoned language of science and academically-based inquiry—the signers had as their purpose “denouncing what we witness in the aggression of Gaza by Israel.” These doctors and scientists, none of whom has had to live under an unceasing barrage of more than 10,000 rockets and mortars launched from Gaza into Israel, nevertheless denounced what they see as “the perversity of [Israel’s] propaganda that justifies the creation of an emergency to masquerade a massacre, a so-called ‘defensive aggression.’” Instead, the signers believe there is no basis for Israel’s self-defense, that it is actually no more than “a ruthless assault of unlimited duration, extent, and intensity” and an “unacceptable pretext of Israel eradicating political parties and resistance to the occupation and siege they impose.”

“The massacre in Gaza spares no one,” the letter continued in its hyperbolic, not factual, tones, and, according to the signers, “these attacks aim to terrorise [sic], wound the soul and the body of the people, and make their life impossible in the future, as well as also demolishing their homes and prohibiting the means to rebuild.”

Of course, there is no mention of the Palestinian’s complicity in their own situation, no reference to the nine years of genocidal aggression by Hamas since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, no examination of the failure of Palestinian leadership to even attempt to start building a civil society and functioning government. Every pathology and failure, including the health and well-being of the entire Gazan society, is the fault of Israel—as a result of its siege, its blockade, its oppression, and its current incursion to suppress Hamas rocket attacks.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/robert-spencer-on-arab-winter-comes-to-america-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of thirteen books, including two New York Times bestsellers, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). His latest book is Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In.

Robert joined the show to discuss Arab Winter Comes to America, analyzing the threat of Islamic Jihad and the West’s denial about it. He shed light on ISIS’s Islamic Inspirations, How Jihad Denial Enables Jihad, Why Jihadists are Welcome in the UK But Not Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, and much, much more.

Don’t miss it!

“We are faced with an enemy whose goal is to conquer the world by subversion and infiltration or, if necessary, by open war.”

The speaker was Senator John F. Kennedy and he was discussing the Communist Control Act that he had co-sponsored. The Act did what had been previously thought impossible; it outlawed the Communist Party.

The latest bill to fight an enemy whose goal is also to conquer the world by subversion, infiltration and open war doesn’t have a Kennedy co-sponsor. Instead it has the two members of Congress who have fought the hardest to expose the Muslim Brotherhood; Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert.

The Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act goes to the heart of the beast by designating the entity a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Plenty of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates and splinter groups, from Hamas to Al Qaeda, have already ended up on the FTO list.

But the Brotherhood has been able to keep spewing out new front groups that enjoy immunity.

The Act lists some of the Brotherhood groups and Brotherhood leaders already on the FTO list. These include the Kuwaiti Muslim Brotherhood and the head of the Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood’s political party who served as the coordinator for the bombing of the USS Cole. The Act documents, briefly, the Brotherhood’s history and some of its more recent involvements in worldwide terrorism.

From the original World Trade Center attacks to the recent Brotherhood attacks on Coptic Christians, the Act comprehensively makes the case that the Muslim Brotherhood is a violent terrorist group.

Putin Restores a Cuban Beachhead The Kremlin and the Castros are chummy again, and Moscow is offering military aid.

Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes was the highest-ranking Pentagon intelligence analyst ever to be busted for working for the Castros. What’s also notable, in light of Vladimir Putin’s visit to Havana earlier this month, is that she was nabbed in 2001, long after the Cold War ended.

Besides leaking classified material and blowing the cover of covert U.S. intelligence agents, Montes seems to have been charged by her handlers with convincing top brass in Washington that Fidel Castro —who had wanted the Soviets to drop the bomb on this country during the 1962 missile crisis—no longer presents a threat to the U.S. Montes, who rose to become the U.S. military’s resident intelligence expert on Cuba, partly accomplished that mission. The Pentagon’s 1998 Cuba threat assessment played down its military and intelligence capabilities.

The best Cuba watchers were less sanguine. The Castros remain as paranoid, power-hungry and pathological as ever. They may be economic fools, but they run a good business making the island available to criminal governments, like Iran and North Korea.

Mr. Putin’s Cuba trip reinforces the point. The old Cold War villains are up to no good one more time.

Russia’s president is trying to rebuild the Soviet empire. Eastern Europe won’t cooperate and in Asia the best he will ever be is China’s junior partner. But in Latin America Mr. Putin’s KGB résumé and willingness to stick his thumb in the eye of the U.S. gives him traction. Colonizing Cuba again is an obvious move.

We want to control what you read, see, and hear, so very much.
I couldn’t have asked for a better lead-in for this column than Hillary “I Wannabe Prez and Order You All About and Make You Eat Your Veggies” Clinton’s complaints about three anti-Clinton books that are making her Hard Choices eat their dust in sales. Clearly, the pseudo-autobiography of all her non-accomplishments is destined overload the remainder tables of bookstores and the shelves of book warehouses, because its sales are so dismal.
I do not know the quality of the three books critical of the Clanton Gang – excuse me, the Clinton Clan – but even a book of Clinton caricatures or of political cartoons without text would be preferable to reading the ghost-written mush of Hard Choices. (I have read excerpts of it – yawners.)
Or perhaps she deserves a book in which Hillary moderates a panel of would-be mentors in the acquisition of political power: Darth Vader, Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Pol Pot, FDR, Otto von Bismarck, Adolf Hitler, and Hubby, with her fielding leading questions from an audience of one. As for her potential for censorship, see my article, “The OIC Organizes for Censorship” from December 2013.
Clinton spared us her spittle and let a spokesman express his anger over the anti-Clinton books. Alexander Marlow, writing for Breitbart, reported on July 25th :
The First Family Detail by Ronald Kessler, set for release next month, will join Clinton, Inc. by the Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper and Blood Feud by Ed Klein on bookshelves. Yesterday we reported that Clinton, Inc. has shot up the charts and now both Halper and Klein’s books are outselling Hillary Clinton’s recent memoir Hard Choices.
“With Klein, Halper and Kessler, we now have a Hat Trick of despicable actors concocting trashy nonsense,” Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “Their behavior should neither be allowed nor enabled, and legitimate media outlets who know with every fiber of their beings that it is completely made up should not get down in the gutter with them.”
What does he mean “not allowed”? The interview doesn’t detail any specific behavior that drew Team Hillary’s ire beyond the simple act of writing a book. Without the benefit of full context, it appears as though Hillary’s flack is suggesting the books be banned. At a minimum he is imploring the overwhelmingly pro-Clinton mainstream press to freeze out these authors and prevent their ideas and findings from being discussed on the media stage.

The ongoing existential battle in Israel is a potent reminder that even after the vileness of the Shoah, better known as the Holocaust, there are those people whose sole purpose in life is to annihilate Jews and subsequently destroy Judaism. They seek to extinguish the advancements in civilization and institute hell on earth.

Moreover, they are aided by others who will not stand in defense of Israel or the Jewish people. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a breath of fresh air in this regard but he stands very much alone in his defense of Israel. Anti-Semitism is the oldest disease known to mankind and while it always starts with the Jew, the hatred eventually spreads its tentacles to others.

It is a never ending screed whose irrationality is, quite frankly, hard to fathom. These haters look like humans but act like beasts; they dare to use their own children as human shields. Such lacko f moral rectitiude should elicit outcries from the world but it rarely does.

Clearly, Europe has learned nothing from 20th century horrors. And so the haters are all too familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of Jewish history. To wit, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stated “that the only solution for the region is the destruction of Israel, and that the armed confrontation must expand beyond Gaza.”

Daniel Greenfield reports that from the 48 Hamas prisoners that Israel has recently captured and interrogated, a most “terrifying and horrific picture is being built about tunnels that have been dug under many kibbutzim that surround Gaza.” Had the plan gone through there was to be an invasion of over 200 terrorists into the settlements in the area including all the kindergartens, dining rooms and other areas within the kibbutzim. The plan was to invade on Rosh HaShanah (September 2014), occupy the whole area and “kill as many Israelis as possible.”

Those Palestinians who were born into this cauldron of hate could have a better life instead of being intimidated and brainwashed by terrorists. Indeed, they are pawns of the United Nations that also promotes the hate literature that teaches Palestinian children to kill Jewish children.

And, finally, far too many of the media can no longer be trusted to be objective reporters. Instead, they couch Israel as the victimizer and simply ignore the terrorists who will stop at nothing to destroy Israel. Sadly, the lies, misinformation, distorted context and selective omissions in the news world are to use a Yiddish word — a shanda — shameful actions. The media has within its power the means to clarify issues, and to shed light on the diseased culture that is permeating the Arab Middle East. Yet it rarely does. Instead it “blatantly ignores the facts” and there is no moral clarity. The news media misuses its power and is guilty of imbalanced reporting and opinions disguised as fact. They do not even try to hide their indifference about the truth. There is no conscience so there is no shame and propagandists have taken over the airwaves.

Operation Protective Edge has put a significant spotlight on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) after munitions were found in one of the agency’s schools.

Following the discovery, UNRWA came out, “strongly condemn[ing] the group or groups responsible for placing the weapons in one of its installations. Such an infiltration is a flagrant violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law. The discovery, which is the first of its kind in Gaza, endangered civilians including staff and put at risk UNRWA’s vital mission to assist and protect Palestinian refugees in Gaza.”

However, none of this is new and seemed only to be surprising to UNRWA itself. The group has a long-documented history of terrorist ties, something UNRWA’s former Commissioner General Peter Hansen openly admitted in 2004 to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation stating, “I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll … and I don’t see that as a crime.”

There have been examples relations between UNRWA schools and staff with dubious affiliations. In 2008, Awad al-Qiq, a headmaster of a top prep school in Gaza, was discovered to also be the chief rocket-maker for Islamic Jihad. He was also a science teacher who worked for an UNRWA school.

In 2002, Nidal Abd al-Fattah Abdallah Nazzal, an ambulance driver for UNRWA from the West Bank town of Qalqiliya, admitted that he was a Hamas member and that he transported munitions in his ambulance, taking blatant advantage of the freedom of movement afforded to UNRWA vehicles by Israel.

UNRWA’s involvement in Palestinian society is unique. Its role as serving the Palestinian refugee population has made it one of the most important and influential Palestinian institutions. The agency now employs nearly 30,000 people, most of whom are Palestinian. This makes UNRWA the single largest employer in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and indispensable to the Palestinian economy. As such, there is a strong economic incentive to keep the organization afloat.

he most righteous of men cannot live in peace if his evil neighbor will not let him be.
– Wilhelm Tell, Act IV, Scene III, by Friedrich von Schiller, 1804

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his.
– Gen. George S. Patton Jr.

There is always a cost to defeat an evil. It never comes free, unfortunately. But the cost of failure to defeat a great evil is far higher.
– Jamie Shea, NATO spokesman, BBC News, May 31, 1999, on civilian casualties inflicted by NATO in the Balkans.

As Operation Protective Edge – which could have been dubbed “Pillar of Defensive II” or “Cast Lead III” – drags on, it is becoming increasingly clear that the government is misconstruing its role..

Running the country vs. leading the nation

It seems to believe that its primary role is to run the country, rather than lead the nation. This is a disastrously inappropriate misperception of its task

The manner in which the current round of military operations is being conducted clearly reflects a state of mind preoccupied with tactical management of existing realities, rather than strategic leadership, which strives to forge new realities.

The objective of the campaign – articulated as the restoration of calm – makes any other conclusion difficult to reach. Indeed, when “calm” is chronically impermanent, the desire for a return to the precarious status quo ante has a ring of despairing resignation to it, and conveys little hope of any better realities.

This debilitating syndrome was diagnosed in a perceptive opinion piece titled “Defeatism at its worst” (Jerusalem Post, July 14) by Anya Zhuravel Segal – who interestingly enough served on Binyamin Netanyahu’s staff prior to the 2005 disengagement from Gaza: “We are facing a deep crisis of political leadership, and a deep disbelief in our power to shape reality.”