RUTHFULLY YOURS

Warning labels are in vogue. ‘Cigarettes can seriously damage your health’. ‘Caution — hot liquid!’ Anti-Israel advocates also want to develop public fear and loathing. ‘Warning — Jewish-made products can kill!’

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4763/the_lawless_label_made_by_jews

For how much longer can the war of words over the legality of settlements rage back and forth? Even a final verdict, for or against, would be unproductive.

Legal or not, some 400,000 Jews in 130 settlement towns aren’t going anywhere, and demanding that they go reflects a desire for ethnic cleansing that we may relegate to a league for criminal maniacs.

Those without a bone to pick would accept facts on the ground and enter a war of words that will go somewhere. Europe’s trade policy for ‘occupation’ products has a murky record that looks set to get grubby. Now there’s a war worth fighting.

“There do not appear to be any European Commission laws which could be breached by a member state taking the decision to ban the import of settlement produce…”

With this ruling, Cambridge professor of international law, James Crawford gave Europe the nod. Go ahead — ban settlement products.

Observe the slippery slope. Notice how freely one can slide from labeling products to a blanket ban on products. From there to a blanket ban on everything made in Israel is no more than a slip.

Egypt claims miracle cure for HIV and Hepatitis
Almost certainly a political miracle rather than a medical one, Egypt’s claim to have an instant cure for HIV and Hepatitis shows the lengths the coup leaders will go for legitimacy

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4758/egypt_claims_miracle_cure_for_hiv_and_hepatitis

Two days ago, Egyptian media began big campaigns about a miraculous device (billed as ”Complete Cure”) invented by Egypt’s armed forces for treating HIV/AIDS and the Hepatitis C virus.

The news stories depicted the machine as a breakthrough, and a real miracle for completely curing patients of any of the two resistant diseases, giving hope for 18 million Egyptians with Hepatitis C and tens of thousands with HIV. (All this in no time at all — only 16 hours for the cure and one minute for detecting the disease.)

According to the Egyptian media, with the device there is no need to take a sample of the patient’s blood to detect the infection. Moreover, Egypt’s national TV channels ran a video that showed a physician making tests for an HIV patient using the device and telling him, “your tests are so great; you had HIV but now the disease vanished.”

The reports said that ”Complete Cure” is two machines in one: ”C Fast” (for treating Hepatitis C) and “I Fast” (for treating HIV). Furthermore, the reports confirmed that the military had been working for 22 years on the project and although ”C Fast” had been ready to go since 2006, the inventing team preferred to wait until it could test the effectiveness of the machine on HIV patients.

There’s even more. Major Dr. Ibrahim Abdel-Atti, leader of the machine-inventing team, stressed that Egypt will not export the machine to other countries so that it can be protected from international monopoly and the black market. He was quoted in the Al-Ahram newspaper as saying, “Marshal el-Sisi once said, ”we lagged behind and we should jump rather than walk so that we can compete with others”, and this is the first jump.”

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4766/a_nation_through_its_faith

Daniel Johnson is the Editor of Standpoint

It is easy to denigrate democracy while enjoying its benefits as Israel knows all too well. And it seems that Herzl’s dream of a Judenstaat, a Jewish state, is still not fully accepted in Europe

In My Crazy Century, an excellent new memoir by the Czech writer Ivan Klíma (Grove Press, £16.99), the author recalls a visit to Britain in the mid-1960s. As a journalist on the magazine Literární noviny he took full advantage of the slight thaw that preceded the Prague Spring in 1968, soon to be crushed by the Soviet invasion.

In London Klíma went to see the Leftist guru Isaac Deutscher, politely explaining that as a Czech Jew he had “barely survived one bloody dictatorship only to begin serving another” — hence his efforts to promote democratic reform.

Deutscher would have none of it, proposing instead the slogan: “Never return to the old democracies but do return to the regenerated Soviets of the people’s representatives.” Klíma was aghast: “He was recommending this to me, someone who

It is easy to denigrate democracy while enjoying its benefits. This phenomenon is most obvious in relation to Israel, still the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/how-maddows-msnbc-takeover-dooms-the-left/print/

Liberal media succeeds best when it isn’t identified as such. The reason for that can be seen in numerous polls where Americans of both parties identify themselves with conservative values.

The left is adept at selling its agenda through biased mainstream media coverage, but when it discards the disguise of objectivity on radio or television the end result is shrill, irritating and off-putting.

The playwright and director David Mamet achieved an epiphany while listening to NPR. Unfortunately for NPR the epiphany was that he was no longer a liberal. “I felt my facial muscles tightening,” he described, “and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f___ up.”

The unfiltered left with its onslaught of sanctimonious bleating often brings out that reaction.

It’s why Air America not only couldn’t compete with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other conservative talk radio hosts, but it couldn’t even remain solvent. MSNBC, the bastard child of a ridiculous union between Microsoft and NBC, spent years drifting in search of an identity only to become the new Air America.

Why does the left, which is so adept at putting its agenda across in mainstream media outlets fail spectacularly when it puts away the disguise and begins saying what it really thinks?

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/vijeta-uniyal/the-punching-bag-bigots-of-anti-israel-boycotts/print/

Reprinted from TheCommentator.com.

The Italian philosopher and politician Niccolò Machiavelli famously said: “Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception”. After decades of aggression failed to destroy Israel, deception is the “new” game in town.

This deception has a name, or to be precise, a lame sounding acronym — BDS, the campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.

The BDS campaign has two main ingredients — one is deception and the other is another kind of lie. There’s the sinister deception about the campaign’s own true nature, and a blatant lie about the state of Israel.

The otherwise vocal BDS campaign remains eerily silent about its ties and sympathies with terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The campaign lures in faith-based Christian groups, and LBGT community and feminist groups while at the same time hiding its ties with the homophobic and misogynist clerical regime of Iran.

Yes, indeed. The BDS campaign calls for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel, while doing the bidding of its masters in Tehran who offer bounties on the heads of writers abroad and hang poets for penning dissenting verses at home.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/lessons-on-the-new-left-from-the-hanoi-hilton/print/

C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb recently interviewed Lee Ellis, author of Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton. The book is a valuable primer on history that many Americans have forgotten or not know only in part. Leading with Honor is also an introduction to characters all Americans should get to know better, such as Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. Ellis came to know the pair under different circumstances.

In November of 1967 Ellis was shot down on a mission to destroy the guns that protected the Quang Khe ferry that supplied the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In the Hoa Lao prison, which POWs dubbed the Hanoi Hilton, Ellis learned firsthand about North Vietnam and its systematic torture of American POWs. As the author notes, the North Vietnamese tortured more than 95 percent of American POWs including eight tortured to death. Ellis describes the “Pretzel,” one of the regime’s favorite tortures:

After the prisoner’s legs were tied together, his arms were laced tightly behind his back until the elbows touched and the shoulders were virtually pulled out of joint. Then the torturer would push the bound arms up and over the head, while applying pressure with a knee to the victim’s back. During the torture, the circulation is cut off and the limbs to go sleep but the joint pain continues to increase as the ligaments and muscles tear. When the ropes are finally removed, circulation surges back into the “dead” limbs, causing excruciating pain.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/169426 Are we more “polarized” and “partisan” than we were in the past? Political commentators think so. In a recent Atlantic profile, conservative pollster Frank Luntz attributed his cynicism about American politics to the unprecedented polarization of the American people he has seen in his recent work with focus groups. They are “contentious and argumentative,” don’t “listen […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/an-al-jazeera-anchors-bloody-call?f=puball

A prominent Al Jazeera anchor with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood issued a statement praising the murders of police officers and advocating attacks on journalists who stand with Egypt’s current government.

Ahmed Mansour’s statement was reported Saturday on the Brotherhood’s own web site, Ikhwan Online. It blamed police and journalists for supporting last summer’s military intervention which ousted President Mohamed Morsi – the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate – from office just one year into his term.

Those who “retaliate against the criminal officers, are the ones who will help in overthrowing the coup,” Mansour’s statement said, according to Ikhwan Online. “They are those which will destroy the economy of the coup. They are those which will decisively prevent the return of tourism.”

A suicide bomber killed four people and injured 14 more last week in an attack on a tourist bus and an Egyptian police conscript was shot in the leg during an attempted ambush.

Mansour’s statement also criticized “the treasonous media” for siding with the military in toppling Morsi last July. The military violently quashed protest camps demanding Morsi’s return to power, killing hundreds of people.

“Considering the media partners in all the massacres is correct, and their being punished at the hands of the movements today is not a terrorist act, but act of heroism,” Mansour’s statement said.

The article was quickly removed by the Brotherhood, however, and Mansour denies making the statement. He claims that he is being set up by Egypt’s military government.

“Coup agencies misled dozens of news sites, including Ikhwan Online [the Muslim Brotherhood] by spreading an article in my name, with incitement to murder,” Mansour wrote on Twitter Sunday. “I proclaim my innocence of this prattle.”

Tricking the Brotherhood would be quite an accomplishment. Mansour has been identified as a Brotherhood member and has long had close relations with the group.

This is not the first time Mansour claims to have been set up. Days after Morsi’s ouster, the Brotherhood published a report attributed to Mansour which claimed Egypt’s new interim president was a Seventh Day Adventist, “which is a Jewish sect,” the article said.

The new leader wanted to move the Muslim-majority country closer to Christianity, Mansour said.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-wants-to-waste-a-billion-on-climate-change?f=puball

Barack Obama will be remembered for many things during his two terms in office, but high on the list, right after lying to everyone about everything, will be his determination to waste billions of taxpayer dollars on every Green scheme from solar and wind energy to electric cars, and now on “climate change.”

He is calling for a billion-dollar climate change fund in his forthcoming budget, due out next month. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the fund “would be spent on researching the projected effects of climate change and helping Americans prepare for them, including with new technology and infrastructure, according to the White House.

We don’t need any research and we don’t need any new technology. The National Weather Service has hugely expensive computers that enable it to predict what the weather will be anywhere in the U.S. with some measure of accuracy for up to three or four days. After that, it gets fuzzy. What will the weather be next week? Well, maybe a bit warmer or a bit colder.

As for the effects of weather events, we have centuries of knowledge regarding this. We know what happens after a blizzard or a hurricane, a drought or a flood.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/can-ukraine-avoid-partition?f=puball

I wish it were as easy as goodies against baddies, students against secret policemen, democrats against autocrats. In the early stages of an uprising – what we might call the Arab Spring Phase – Western media, wanting to simplify things for their readers, gloss over the complexities. Later, when things turn tragic, those readers can be left baffled.

Don’t get me wrong. Viktor Yanukovych was a nasty piece of work, whose goons carried out unspeakable crimes. My sympathies were with the protesters, both in general (the vision of a pluralist, market-oriented Ukraine is more wholesome than that of a country tied to Putin) and on the specific issue that triggered the demonstrations (a free trade agreement is better than a customs union, because it is non-exclusive).

But the ousting of a thug doesn’t mean that “all shall be well / and all manner of thing shall be well”. This is, after all, not the first time that Yanukovych has been toppled by street protests. Ten years ago, crowds in the same places pushed him from office and, in new elections, installed their candidate, Viktor Yuschenko. Years of corruption and failure followed, and Yanukovych came back, in an election that observers agreed had been free and fair, in 2010.

Ukraine means “edge” or “borderland” (Krajina in the former Yugoslavia shares its etymology). To Russian nationalists, Kiev is the cradle of Russian nationhood, and Ukrainians are the Little Russians who, along with the White Russians and the Great Russians, comprised the historic motherland. Plenty of Russians will tell you that Ukrainian is a Russian dialect and Ukrainian national identity a creation of, first, Polish and, later, Austrian occupiers. They point to the many famous Russians who might as easily be called Ukrainian – Gogol, Tchaikovsky, Brezhnev – arguing that the distinction is synthetic and pointless.