RUTHFULLY YOURS

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/the-agony-of-moral-defeat/

Perhaps when literary critic C.S. Lewis despaired of “omnipotent moral busybodies . . . who torment us for our own good,” he was speaking about those well-meaning, but naïve college students who “torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” Lewis’s observation seemed to have been given credence in the past weeks by the very public, tendentious rants of two coeds, one at Harvard University and one at UCLA, as they railed against a world in which their dreams of social justice for the oppressed and weak was not being realized, despite their best efforts.

In the first instance, in an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson entitled “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom,” Sandra Y.L. Korn, majoring at Harvard, tellingly, in the history of science and studies of women, gender and sexuality, decided that academic freedom was undeserved by those who hold beliefs different than hers and her fellow “moral busybodies”— those who have decided what is moral, what is right, and what is acceptable speech and behavior on Harvard’s campus and in the world beyond. “Why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of ‘academic freedom?’,” she asked, seemingly without embarrassment. Academic freedom, she contended, should be put in check so that unwelcomed viewpoints can be suppressed. As an alternative virtue, she suggested “a more rigorous standard: one of ‘academic justice.’”

Israel’s Homicidal Peace Partner URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/israels-homicidal-peace-partner/ Solomon Yahya was born in Yemen in 1915. He worked as a gardener for forty years in Israel. Even long after retirement he continued doing the work that he loved. A month before the Madrid Conference at which Israel was forced to negotiate with the PLO, he […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7609

Rocking the boat?

On Wednesday, Israeli Navy commandos intercepted a commercial ship in the Red Sea between Eritrea and Sudan that was transporting weapons from Iran to terrorists in Gaza.

Because the commandos that boarded the vessel were wearing helmet cameras, there is real-time footage of the operation. And what the pictures reveal are dozens of Syrian-made long-range missiles, hundreds of pounds of payload and sacks of concrete with a “made in Iran” label in plain English.

According to sources in the Israeli defense establishment, this event is merely the tip of the iceberg. At its epicenter is the Quds Force of the Iranian Republican Guards, the unit in charge of “exporting the Islamic Revolution” worldwide. Key to the success of its goal is arming and financing terrorist networks bent on Israel’s annihilation.

Israeli intelligence has been closely monitoring the activities of Iran’s global reach and Middle East stronghold. Wednesday’s interception of the Klos C ship was one among many thwarted attempts by the ayatollah-led regime to transfer arms to Palestinian terror groups. One shudders to think of all the successful efforts emanating out of Tehran that Israel was unable to block.

It is this that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keeps trying to hit home with the American administration. His constant warning (reiterated during his speech on Tuesday at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference) that Iran has not become more moderate with President Hassan Rouhani at its helm — and that time is running out before it acquires nuclear weapons — sounds like a broken record.

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/exclusive-irs-currently-employing-convicted-terrorist-associate/

While IRS officials were targeting Tea Party groups [1] for special scrutiny of their 501(c)3 tax exempt applications, the IRS also hired a policeman who had been prosecuted by the Justice Department — and convicted in federal court — of using his access to the FBI’s NCIC system to tip off a terror suspect about the bureau’s surveillance. The leak wrecked a major terror investigation.

He is still at the IRS.

Weiss Russell (he has changed his name from “Weiss Rasool,” the name under which he was convicted), is currently employed as a financial management analyst in the IRS Deputy Chief Financial Officer’s Office.

In 2008, Russell/Rasool was prosecuted for his role in tipping off Abdullah Alnoshan, a close associate of al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and a friend of Russell’s from their mosque. According to the Justice Department’s Statement of Facts [2] filed at the time of Russell’s indictment, Alnoshan provided license plate numbers to Russell for cars he believed were conducting surveillance on him. Russell then checked those plate numbers in the FBI’s NCIC database, which came back to a leasing company which federal prosecutors claimed would have tipped off Russell to the bureau’s surveillance.

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2014/03/06/what-game-of-chess/?print=1

Last week, as the Obama administration scurried to remove the large quantities of egg that Vladimir Putin had deposited on its collective countenance, Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers commented [1] that Putin was playing chess while Obama was “playing marbles.”

I think that was unfair. Marbles are inherently attractive, and their deployment is an innocent pastime that has beguiled the innocent hours of many a boyhood. What’s more, playing marbles takes skill. What is happening in Ukraine is anything but innocent, and the astonishing incompetence on display in Barack Obama’s hesitant but sullen maunderings has been the opposite of skillful.

Vladimir Putin is playing a dangerous game of chess, all right, but the only thing Obama can be said to be playing is the fool.

This morning, it was revealed that Crimea has just voted to “join” Russia. “Crimea’s parliament voted to join Russia,” Reuters reported [2], “and its Moscow-backed government set a referendum within 10 days on the the decision.” What do you suppose that means?

http://pjmedia.com/blog/rep-price-obamacare-causing-economic-destruction/

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) warned Thursday about the effects of Obamacare on jobs, saying it creates perverse incentives for businesses by compelling them to seek ways to avoid the health care law’s burdens.

“You know who the 29ers and the 49ers are?” Price asked the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “29ers are folks who have seen their hours reduced from 40 hours a week to 29 hours a week so that their employer can get out from under the incredible burden of Obamacare. The 49ers are those employers who have decreased the number of employees to under 50 so that they’re not exposed to the burdens of Obamacare.”

He said a car dealership in his district with 168 full-time employees has gone down to two full-time employees, while the remaining 166 workers have moved to part-time employment.

“That’s economic destruction. This law is not just harming people’s healthcare lives, it’s harming their economic lives,” Price said.

Price said it was “astounding” to hear Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s claim last week that all the “horror stories” being told about the effects of Obamacare are untrue.

“It’s actually astounding that the leader of the U.S. Senate could make such a statement and mislead and deceive the American people in that way,” he said.

President Obama’s “If not now, when?!”
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
“Israel Hayom”, March 7, 2014, http://bit.ly/1f5YvJm

President Obama assumes that regional and global circumstances are now conducive for a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. According to Obama, such a peace accord would require Israel (once again) to undertake tangible, critical, territorial concessions, in return for (once again) intangible Palestinian commitments. “If not now, when!?” he asked Prime Minister Netanyahu, in a March 2, 2014 interview

However, the editorial headline of the March 3, 2014 Washington Post, a solid supporter of President Obama, stated: “President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy.” According to the Washington Post, “For five years, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was [supposedly] a world in which ‘the tide of war is receding….’ Secretary John Kerry displayed this mindset, [saying that] Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a 19th century act in the 21st century…. Unfortunately, Russian President, Putin, has not received the memo on the 21st century behavior. Neither has China’s president Xi Jinping, who is engaged in gunboat diplomacy against Japan and weaker nations of Southeast Asia…. Assad is waging a very 20th century war against his own people….”

Thus, President Obama considers the non-Palestinian-related Arab Tsunami a transition towards peace and democracy, in spite of the proliferating conflicts throughout the globe. Therefore, he pressures Israel to retreat and concede, in defiance of the receding tide of peace and democracy in the boiling globe and the tectonic Middle East. Contrary to the early assessments of the “Arab Springers,” the real Middle East is increasingly stormy, ruthless, oppressive, Islamist, anti-American, intolerant, fragmented, unstable, unreliably treacherous and violently unpredictable. Moreover, Obama bullies Israel to conclude a peace agreement in a region which has never experienced comprehensive intra-Muslim/Arab peace; a region that has always displayed intra-Muslim agreements signed on ice, rather than carved in stone; a region which features prominently in the clash of civilizations between Western democracies and rogue Islamic regimes.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/why-i-write/?print=1

Some years back I was interviewed by Montreal’s French language daily La Presse concerning the nature and purpose of my writing and teaching. The interviewer, unlike the majority of his colleagues, had acquired a pretty decent familiarity with his subject, a rarity in today’s journalistic profession. I was surprised to learn that he had read some of my translated work, in particular a long essay in which I compared the state of Western civilization to the sinking of the Titanic. Why, he wanted to know, did I continue teaching and persist in writing articles, essays and books if I felt that the future was hopeless and there was little point in the whole enterprise.

Well, I replied, there was the little matter of earning a living. But apart from that desideratum, pedagogy and writing were by no means anomalous or contradictory, since even though I knew the vessel was foundering and could not be saved or hauled back to port for retrofitting, I was intent on helping to keep it afloat for as long as possible. Teaching and writing, I said, were essentially pumping, or bailing. I felt it worthwhile to work to delay the inevitable; better to go down later than sooner.

Things have changed. I quit teaching some time ago, convinced of the uselessness of the profession in the brain-cramped intellectual environment of a nearly defunct civilization. Such plenary impoverishment is daunting and probably irreversible. The canard of “green energy,” the massive “climate change” scam that has co-opted vast segments of the Western public, the relentless advance of blasphemy laws putting a chill on freedom of speech and debate, courts declaring that truth is no defense in cases where offense is given, the campaign against the unborn (abortion on demand) and, in some countries, the elderly (selective euthanasia), the politicized university as a locus of indoctrination rather than learning, the sentimental empowerment of the transgendered and the two-spirited who must be accorded every social benefit as if they represented the quintessence of human progress, the successful feminist war against common manhood, the setting in place of redistributive economics as a form of legalized theft, open-door immigration policies for illegal aliens or members of primitive, antithetical cultures—all these developments are signs of rampant and likely terminal intellectual and social decay.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/is-muslim-brotherhood-in-america?f=puball The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) was founded in Egypt in 1928 and is considered a terrorist organization by many countries, including Islamic countries. Its stated goal  is to instill the Qur’an as the sole religion and political body in the life of every individual and country worldwide.   According to Richard Clarke, former Chief counterterrorism advisor […]

http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/735/a-stone-for-his-slingshot/

Thanks Joan Swirsky!!!

“But these are only words I speak—words to wake up Jews if there are any asleep. He will not lose. No cause that had behind it the sweet and powerful dream of freedom—has ever lost. This dream does not stand on the battlefields alone. It stands in us. There are twenty-eight million Arabs. There are British wealth and British officers—and British military equipment. There are eight hundred thousand Jews—besieged and encircled by this Goliath tonight.A David stands against Goliath. I ask you Jews—buy him a stone for his slingshot.” Ben Hecht….1948

Tucked amid the Ben Hecht Papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago is an undated typescript of 21 pages, with a penciled heading: “Speech at dinner at Slapsy Maxie’s, L.A., financed by Mickey Cohen.” Hecht was, of course, a fabled writer for stage and screen, Mickey Cohen was the notorious Los Angeles gangland boss (recently portrayed by Sean Penn in the movie Gangster Squad), and the speech, which has never before been published, is one of the most riveting and remarkable Jewish fundraising speeches ever delivered. What gives?

The outrageously prolific Hecht—writer of reportage, novels and short stories, Broadway theater and Hollywood movies, and eventually Jewish propaganda—was always attracted to outlaws. The first of his six or seven dozen produced (though not always credited) screenplays was Underworld, a 1927 silent film directed by the Austrian-Jewish immigrant Josef von Sternberg. In his freewheeling autobiography, A Child of the Century, Hecht wrote:

I made up a movie about a Chicago gunman and his moll called Feathers McCoy. As a newspaperman I had learned that nice people—the audience—love criminals . . . It was the first gangster movie to bedazzle the movie fans and there were no lies in it—except for a half-dozen sentimental touches introduced by its director.

Hecht won an Academy Award for Underworld, at the very first awards in 1929. (He was nominated five more times but never won another.) In 1932, he wrote Scarface for Howard Hawks, proudly claiming that “two Capone henchmen” showed up after midnight demanding assurance (which he disingenuously provided) that Scarface was not about “the great gangster.”