RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.romirowsky.com/14167/romirowsky-joffe-new-book-palestinian-refugees

To purchase Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief directly from Palgrave Macmillan at a 20% discount, visit here then enter the code XP356ED

PHILADELPHIA – Released today by Palgrave Macmillan, Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief documents the history of Palestinian refugee relief from its inception. The refugee problem is what fuels the Arab-Israeli conflict and the leading obstacle to peace. Romirowsky and Joffe illustrate how the problem began, the international community’s first responses, the successes and failures, and offer concrete recommendations on how to deal with the issue going forward.

Efraim Karsh, Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies, King’s College London, UK, author of Palestine Betrayed endorsed the book and states,

“Drawing on a wealth of recently declassified documents, this groundbreaking book tells the little-known story of the creation of the United Nations Relief and Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). A must read for anyone seeking to understand how the international community helped transform a secondary post-World War II humanitarian predicament into the world’s most enduring refugee problem and the foremost obstacle to Arab-Israeli peace.”
About the book

This book examines the leading role of the Quaker American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in the United Nations relief program for Palestine Arab refugees in 1948-1950 in the Gaza Strip. It situates the operation within the context of the AFSC’s attempts to exercise new influence on the separate issues of pacifism and disarmament at a time marked by US efforts to construct a Cold War security regime in the Middle East and British efforts to retain influence and bases in Arab countries.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4100/israelophobia While vows are always made to fight anti-Semitism, its existence is not even admitted where it is found in its most frequent and obvious forms: among media and university “intellectuals;” among certain NGOs; in international institutions, such as the United Nations and its offshoots; within the European Union; in “liberal’ organizations ostensibly promoting human […]

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/156687/brandeis-withdraws-from-american-studies-association Brandeis University has become the second institution to withdraw from the American Studies Association, following the organization’s decision to boycott Israel. “We view the recent vote by the membership to affirm an academic boycott of Israel as a politicization of the discipline and a rebuke to the kind of open inquiry that a scholarly […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4090/europe-anti-semitism It is inexplicable that the EU Fundamental Rights Agency has removed its very own “Working definition of anti-Semitism” from its website, while more than half of OSCE Member States continue to be in breach of EU laws to monitor anti-Semitic incidents. Serious questions must be asked of the EU about its resolve to tackle […]

http://politicalmavens.com/

The NYTimes of Dec 17 reported the following in its front page article about the American Studies Association (ASA) vote to boycott Israeli academics:

“Members of the American Studies Association voted by a ratio of more than two to one to endorse the boycott in online balloting that concluded Sunday night….With fewer than 5000 members, the group is not one of the larger scholarly associations. But its vote is a milestone for a Palestinian movement known as B.D.S. for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions, which for the past decade had found little traction in the United States.”

What the Times purposely withheld is that only 1252 of the 5,000 academicians bothered to vote and only 60% of those approved the resolution. In other words, 751 people out of a total membership of 5000 agreed with the decision to boycott, a far cry from the ratio of 2 to 1. Jodi Rudoren, the Times Bureau Chief in the Middle East has proven to be a reporter with an obvious anti-Israel bias so her participation in fudging these numbers is no surprise. What is inexcusable is that the Times issued a correction about another inaccuracy in this article on Dec 18th but failed to mention the enormous discrepancy in the reporters’ tally.

Readers who have remained blinded to the Times’ yellow journalism when it comes to Israel should need no further proof than this outlandish distortion. Figures don’t lie but liars can figure.

http://politicalmavens.com/ The conceit of HER, Spike Jonze’s highly praised film is that as humans become more and more dependent on the increasingly sophisticated programs in their tech devices, the programs become more dependent on the humans as well.  It’s a clever concept and would have made an amazing shorter film with its elegiac mood set […]

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/12/16/a-bad-night-on-92nd-street/

DPS Note: Has it really come to this? Have the enemies of the Jewish State really succeeded in turning so many of us against Israel? Have we so easily forgotten history’s lessons? Is it the Y with its penchant for left-wing, anti-Israel speakers which draws a self-selected audience or is this truly indicative of where far too many – apparently “progressive” American Jews have migrated in their views of the dangers the State of the Jewish people faces. This is beyond troubling.

Ever had a bad night? I just had one. Ever lost your cool? I just did.

I was on a panel at the 92nd Street Y in New York about what it means to be pro-Israel. The panelists were Jeremy Ben-Ami of JStreet, David Harris of the American Jewish Committee, and I; the moderator was Jane Eisner of the Forward. In the middle of the panel, I chose to walk off the stage rather than continue.

Eisner has written an account of the event, almost comic in its level of detail, in which she calls me a “rude, angry man.” So let me offer some notes on what may be the least significant tempest-in-a-teapot in the history of world Jewry.

In the course of her account, she claims that “mystifyingly,” I “encouraged” the audience to boo and hiss me. In fact, after a prolonged bout of booing, I responded by suggesting—in a manner that was intended, for what I would have thought were obvious reasons, to be ironic—that the crowd might try hissing too. Which they did. Maybe they didn’t pick up on the irony; Eisner apparently didn’t, given her level of mystification.

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/shushed-and-booed-podhoretz-walks-out-on-92nd-st-y-panel/2013/12/18/

John Podhoretz (seen here on The Daily Show) was booed by the 92nd Street Y audience and shushed by the moderator, Forward editor Jane Eisner, when he defended Israel from claims that Israel was responsible for a recent academic boycott
There have already been several reports of the ruckus that occurred during a talk entitled, “What Does it Mean to be Pro-Israel in America Today?” which was held at the 92nd St Y in Manhattan Monday night, Dec. 16.

But no accounts thus far examine the role of the audience in inciting a panelist to get up and walk out of the event. There were first hand accounts by John Podhoretz , the editor of Commentary and the panelist who walked out of the event, and another by Jane Eisner , the editor of the Daily Forward, who was the moderator of the event.

The other two panelists were Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, and David Harris, president of the American Jewish Committee.

The JTA ‘s original account can be found on this website. Haaretz and the New York Times weighed in with their own versions, based, loosely, on the earlier accounts.
The rabidly anti-Israel blog Mondoweiss headlined the story “Podhoretz leaves 92nd St Y stage after saying Swarthmore Hillel deserves to be ‘spat on.'”
Over on planet Mondoweiss, the editor was so eager to prove his true lefty street creds he expressed outrage that the event was held without a single Palestinian Arab on the panel. He mused: “I wonder what liberal Jewish forum would have staged a debate on Jim Crow back in the ’60s without black leaders…” Earth to Mondoweiss: the topic for the evening was “What Does it Mean to be Pro-Israel in America Today?”

http://nsroundtable.org/as-we-see-it/meet-major-m./

Meet Major M., an immigrant from Tehran who’s been helping the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) understand the Islamist regime in Iran. Today he serves as deputy commander of a unit in the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate, after having escaped Iran as a child and spent most of his military service combating Israel’s top security threat, Iran (see below).

Major M.’s story and the role he fulfills in IDF Military Intelligence (which can only be sketched in faint detail), illustrate a small part of a “large and still-ongoing pivot that has helped Israel in its diplomatic struggle with Iran, its alleged operations on Iranian soil, its roiling shadow war abroad, and its larger understanding of the changing Middle East.”

It’s a FASCINATING story and although somewhat long, well worth the read.

The Times of Israel | December 17, 2013

The Israeli Intelligence Officer Who Really Knows What The Iranians Are Talking About

The Times of Israel meets Major M., an immigrant from Tehran who has been helping the army understand the Islamist regime, and still hopes to return

By Mitch Ginsburg

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 called for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth, an uproar ensued. Had the Iranian president called for genocide — foreshadowing future characterizations of Israel as a germ and a cancer — or had this, as some translators suggested, merely been a poor government rendering of a rather nuanced metaphor, which called more gently for the “occupation regime” to vanish, ever so passively, from the pages of time?

A Talmudic-level discourse ensued. The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele, siding with the co-founder of the Mossadegh Foundation, called the genocidal interpretation “propaganda distortion” that enabled Western hawks to “bracket the Iranian president with Hitler as though he wants to exterminate Jews.” Ethan Bronner of The New York Times, after speaking with translation experts in the US and Iran, ruled that the passive “vanish” was wrong and that, while the word “map” had never been spoken — the quote referred to the pages of time or history — the phrase, in the original Persian, “certainly seems” to contain a similarly destructive intent.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

ON THIS ISSUE PLEASE ALSO READ THE THREE PART REPORT CARD ON “COMMON CORE CURRICULUM” BY GAMALIEL ISAAC:http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamacore-the-travesty-called-the-common-core-standards-part-i?f=common%20core….RSK

Everyone knows that America’s education system is broken. It’s the one thing that Republicans and Democrats can agree on. Committees are convened, grants are dispensed and new studies are rolled off the educational assembly line every few months that purport to change everything by showing that the entire process of educating children from medieval to modern times was wrong.

Education has come to be a science of its own with a jargon full of nebulous pseudo-scientific
terminology impenetrable to the ordinary person. The majority of public school teachers now have master’s degrees because it takes more than some ignorant BA to tell little Johnny to shut the hell up and pay attention in class or he’ll never amount to anything in life.

Unfortunately the majority of teachers were also so busy getting their graduate degrees that they didn’t actually put in any classroom time. The students of tomorrow are being taught by other students who have an MA and papers on educational unleveling through cognitive disequilibrium across multiple modalities but very little actual experience with students.