RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/andrew-harrod/the-way-to-peace-emet-vs-j-street/print/

Some policymakers “shape policy while intoxicated” when it comes to the Middle East, former Israeli Ambassador Yoram Ettinger recently observed at a Capitol Hill briefing. Ettinger’s remarks emphasizing Israeli power undergirding Middle East peace unwittingly contrasted with other speakers the following day who place hardly substantiated hopes in diplomatic agreements.

Ettinger addressed issues of Israel’s Jewish demography and Iran’s nuclear threat at a March 25, 2014, briefing at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center sponsored by the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET). Drawing upon past research by him and others, Ettinger in particular rejected a “demography of doom” consigning Jews to a minority status in the Holy Land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. A “maxim oft-cited on Capitol Hill” is a longstanding prediction of an ultimate Arab ascendancy in this area, according to EMET President Sarah Stern.

Yet Ettinger calculated that Jews in the combined Israeli and Palestinian territories excluding Gaza formed a 66% demographic majority. This majority would only grow through what Stern described as “Jewish demographic momentum” and Arab “demographic fatalism,” as measured by birthrate and immigration. Confidence in such a Jewish majority significantly affected Israeli willingness to make territorial concessions for the sake of an oft-invoked Two State Solution (TSS) to the Arab-Israeli conflict, which would create a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

“The number one interest must not be peace, the number one interest must be security,” Ettinger argued when discussion turned specifically to a peace settlement with Israel during audience questioning. “There is no such thing as peace-driven security” in the Middle East he elaborated, only “security-driven peace.” Demanding a “realistic” approach to the “two state delusion,” Ettinger declared that in any Middle East peace process the “aim should never be the production of a document.” While Western society views contracts as binding, in the Middle East “agreements are not carved in stone; they are signed in ice.”

An agreement might last ten, 15, or even 60 years, but can easily fall victim to political turmoil, as events in Egypt and elsewhere indicated during the “Arab Tsunami.” Particularly in Israel’s case, if “you’ve lost the Golan Heights, the piece of paper you have is worthless.” A “disastrous impact” would also come from Israeli abandonment of the Jordan Valley heights.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/islamic-human-slaughterhouses-for-christians-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang episode was joined by Walid Shoebat, a former Muslim Brotherhood terrorist who turned to love and Christianity. He is the author of his most recent book The Case for Islamophobia and heads the organization RescueChristians.org.

He joined the program to discuss Islamic Human Slaughterhouses for Christians:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/islamizing-britains-schools/print/

“Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.“

– Jesuit aphorism

Real Muslims understand the critical importance of teaching the young. The critical importance, that is, of teaching them the “right” things and not teaching them the “wrong” things. The most important single element of stealth Islamization is the effort to convert Western schools from centers of secular education into hubs of Islamic indoctrination. Fortunately, there are plenty of dhimmi teachers and school administrators eager to help out, convinced that they’re serving the interests of multicultural peace and harmony. These days, for some reason, this form of dhimmitude seems to be most prevalent – and to take its acutest form – in England.

Take, for example, Lynn Small, headmistress of a state elementary school in Huntington, England, who last November wrote a letter to parents of fourth- and sixth-grade students warning that if they didn’t let their children attend an “Explore Islam” workshop at Staffordshire University, a “Racial Discrimination” note would be placed in the kids’ permanent records. Fortunately, parents kicked up a fuss, and the media took notice, and Small backtracked – kind of – while still insisting that since some of the school’s “pupils and teachers…belong to the Islam faith,” it was only “right for the children to understand and appreciate their faith as well as their own.”

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4241/ukraine-russia-american-world-order

Putin shows that what Western elders call “international law” only exists if Western powers are strong enough to enforce it. He shows they are not.

Rogue leaders around the world are watching and drawing their own conclusions.

If massing troops on the borders of Ukraine and annexing Crimea are signs of “weakness,” by its evident impotence, America appears even weaker.

In a result known in advance, on March 16, the residents of Crimea, who include vast numbers of retired Russian army officers, voted overwhelmingly to leave Ukraine and join Russia.

Reactions in the Western World were also known in advance. The U.S. government and European leaders said they would not recognize the vote, and they did not recognize it — or the subsequent annexation.

Angela Merkel suggested that Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, had “lost touch with reality.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry accused Putin of behaving as if it were the “nineteenth century”. Barack Obama criticized Putin for “violating international law” and announced toothless sanctions on a few of his friends and one company.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4242/uk-schools-islamist-trojan-horse

“[The tactics are] totally invisible to the naked eye and allow us to operate under the radar. I have detailed the plan we have in Birmingham and how well it has worked and you will see how easy the whole process is to get the head teacher out and our own person in. … Whilst sometimes the practices we use may not seem the correct way to do things you must remember this is a ‘Jihad’ and as such using all means possible to win the war is acceptable.” — Quote from document leaked to the Sunday Times.

The Guardian — an otherwise inveterate enforcer of British multiculturalism — quotes senior teachers and school officials in Birmingham who say they recognize the tactics outlined in the document as having been used by Islamic hardliners to try to gain influence in the city’s schools for over a decade.

British authorities are investigating the source of a document that purportedly outlines a plot by Muslim fundamentalists to Islamize public schools in England and Wales.

The four-page document describes a strategy—dubbed Operation Trojan Horse—to oust non-Muslim head teachers and staff at state schools in Muslim neighborhoods and replace them with individuals who will run the schools according to strict Islamic principles.

A copy of the undated and unsigned document was sent to the Birmingham City Council in November 2013, but its existence did not become publicly known until March 2014, when it was leaked to the London-based newspaper, the Sunday Times.

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/winners-and-losers-in-the-war-on-poverty/

Progressives and liberals love William James’s idea of a “moral equivalent of war.” As Jonah Goldberg defines this concept, “The core idea, expressed in myriad different ways, is that normal democratic capitalism is insufficient. Society needs an organizing principle that causes the citizenry to drop their individual pursuits, petty ambitions, and disorganized lifestyles and unite around common purposes. Naturally, the State must provide leadership and coordination in this effort, just as it does in a war.” The redefining of social problems as battles in a “war” also expands the regulatory and intrusive power of the federal government, and justifies its appropriation of wealth in order to finance the programs that are de facto redistributions of property. The fundamental purpose of the Constitution, limiting the government in order to allow problems to be solved at the closest possible level to the people, is gutted by a false analogy.

Up until Obamacare, no greater example of costly failure of this idea has been Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” a congeries of various federal programs legislated 50 years ago. Johnson’s grandiose utopian aim for his “unconditional war on poverty” was the “total victory of prosperity over poverty.” Recently the House Budget Committee issued a report surveying this effort, and its conclusions are stark: after spending $15 trillion, the war on poverty has led to an expensive stalemate at best. But it has been a winner for the party of big government.

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/theodore-feder/gunter-grass-and-the-waffen-ss/

On April 7, 2012, Gunter Grass, German novelist and Nobel Laureate, published a poem, titled “What Must Be Said” (“Was gesagt werden muss”) in which he chastised the nuclear power Israel for threatening Iran and endangering world peace. It garnered worldwide attention.

The poem states in part,

Why is it only now I say in old age, with my last drop of ink, that Israel’s nuclear power endangers an already fragile world peace? Because what by tomorrow might be too late, must be spoken now, and because we—as Germans already burdened enough—could become enablers of a crime.

He allowed himself to do this, he says, in spite of being a German and at the risk of being labeled an anti-Semite, which he averred he most assuredly was not. What better proof of his objectivity than that he, a good German of the left, was impelled by his conscience to sound the alarm, regardless of the consequences to him personally, though his poem was met with considerable approval in Germany and elsewhere?

Of course, he could have decried other threats to international harmony, posed for instance, by the nuclear power of North Korea, by the instability in a nuclear-armed Pakistan, by the events in the Sudan, Rwanda, and Somalia, by the regime of Bashar al Assad, by the Taliban, Al Qaeda and the world-wide jihadist movement, or he could have focused on the threats to annihilate Israel that have emanated from Iran itself. There, its past president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was wont to describe Israel as an illegitimate entity “that should be wiped off the map,” as a “germ of corruption that will be wiped off” and as “an insult to all humanity.”

Ahmadinejad’s successor, Hassan Rouhani, reputed to be more moderate, stated on the occasion of the Al-Quds Day celebrations in Tehran that “Israel is a wound on the body of the world of Islam that must be destroyed.” Grass would appear to prefer that the Jews of Israel proceed compliantly to their deaths, as they did under the careful ministrations of the SS during World War II, which brings us to a not-unrelated subject.

It happens that after 60 years of concealment and silence, Gunter Grass admitted in August 2006 that during the war he had been a member of the Waffen SS. He made this admission in an autobiography released that same month titled Peeling the Onion (Beim Heuter der Zwiebel). Asked about this in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Grass replied,

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-cancels-tomahawk-missile-spends-400k-on-camel-sculpture-in-pakistan/#.UznXcXWq51A.twitter

Obama is tossing out the A-10, the Hellfire and the Tomahawk missile. In the future, we won’t win wars with hard power. We’ll do it with soft power camel sculptures.

The State Department wants to plunk down $400,000 in taxpayer money for a camel sculpture at the new U.S. Embassy being built in Islamabad, Pakistan, according to a report Monday.

“Camel Contemplating Needle,” created by American artist John Baldessari, depicts a 500-pound white camel made of fiberglass staring at the eye of an oversized needle, Buzzfeedfirst reported.

Officials explained the decision to purchase the sculpture in a four-page document justifying a “sole source” procurement.

“This artist’s product is uniquely qualified,” the document states. “Public art which will be presented in the new embassy should reflect the values of a predominantly Islamist country.”

State Department press spokeswoman Christine Foushee told Buzzfeed that the proposed purchase comes from the department’s “Office of Art in Embassies.”

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-310314.html

By any standard, the Palestinian problem involves the strangest criteria in modern history.

To begin with, refugees are defined as individuals who have been forced to leave their land of origin. A new definition of refugee status, though, was invented exclusively for Palestinian Arabs, who count as refugees their descendants to the nth generation.

All the world’s refugees are the responsibility of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, except for the Palestinians, who have their own refugee agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine.Among all the population exchanges of the 20th century – Greeks for Turks after World War I, Hindus for Moslems after the separation of India and Pakistan after World War II, Serbs for Croats after the breakup of Yugoslavia during the 1980s – the Palestinians alone remain frozen in time, a living fossil of long-decided conflicts.

Some 700,000 Jews were expelled from Muslim countries where they had lived in many cases more than a thousand years before the advent of Islam, and most of them were absorbed into the new State of Israel with a territory the size of New Jersey; 700,000 or so Arabs left Israel’s Jewish sector during the 1948 War of Independence, most at the behest of their leaders, but few were absorbed by the vast Muslim lands surrounding Israel.

Instead, the so-called refugees were gathered in camps (now for the most part towns with a living standard much higher than that of the adjacent Arab countries thanks to foreign aid) and kept as a human battering ram against Israel, whose existence the Muslim countries cannot easily accept.

Some 10 million Germans who had lived for generations in what is now Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic were driven out at the end of World War II (more than half a million died in the great displacement).

Imagine that Germany had kept these 10 million people in camps for 70 years and that their descendants now numbered 40 million – and that Germany demanded on pain of war restitution of everything from the Sudetenland to Kaliningrad (the former Konigsberg). That is a fair analogy to the Palestinian position.

It is a scam, a hoax, a put-on, a Grand Guignol theatrical with 5 million extras. Because polite opinion bows to the sensibilities of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims, it is treated in all seriousness.

As a matter of full disclosure, I want to put my personal view on record: The mainstream view amounts to a repulsive and depraved exercise in hypocrisy that merits the harshest punishment that a just God might devise.

In this looking-glass world of hypocrisy and hoax, though, the most noteworthy deception is the physical existence of the Palestinians themselves: in Judea and Samaria (sometimes called the occupied West Bank), there are perhaps half the number of Arabs as the Palestinian Authority’s census has counted, or the international community acknowledges. As Jerusalem Post reporter Caroline Glick reports in her new book, Israeli researchers have demonstrated that

Obama’s Foreign Policy Failures Lead to Disaster at UN

Anne Bayefsky is director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. Follow her @AnneBayefsky.
President Obama’s hemorrhaging foreign policy is creating an increasingly embarrassing mess at the United Nations. A four-week session of the U.N.’s top human rights body, the Human Rights Council, ended in Geneva on March 28, 2014, with a series of humiliating defeats for the president’s calling card of indiscriminate engagement.

Joining, and legitimizing, a U.N. Human Rights Council with no human rights conditions for membership was one of President Obama’s first foreign policy moves. Hence, the United States was elected to the council in 2009, re-elected in 2013, and currently sits alongside such human rights luminaries as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia.

This session took place against the backdrop of Russia’s aggressive takeover of parts of a sovereign country, in gross violation of the human rights of Ukrainians. And yet the Council itself couldn’t manage a peep. A U.S.-backed resolution at the U.N. General Assembly adopted on March 27, 2014, criticized Russia, but failed to take what would have been the truly isolating step of removing Russia from the Council.