RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-loses-the-middle-east/print/

There are things that Obama just doesn’t understand. Like math. And health care. And alliances.

Alliances are as vital to foreign policy as a website that works is to online health care enrollment, but Obama has given every sign of not understanding the concept of alliances. When Hillary Clinton came to Moscow bearing her misspelled Reset button, the button was real and reset every alliance to zero.During his two terms, Obama has managed to wreck nearly every alliance the United States had. The only alliances that survived were so low-pressure that even he couldn’t manage to destroy them.Obama’s alliance vandalism pushed aside allies and courted enemies. If a country hated the United States, overtly and openly, then he was there bowing to it as low as he could go. If a country had an existing alliance with us, it was in big trouble.

From Latin America to Eastern Europe to the Middle East, the shock waves of the Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton reset passed leaving behind destroyed relationships and empowered enemies.

Poland learned that Obama cared more about showing Vladimir his flexibility than about defending the nations liberated from the grasp of the red bear. Israel learned that Obama would put Iran first and Egypt and Tunisia found out that Obama only had eyes for the Muslim Brotherhood.

It took a lot for Obama to lose the Saudis, but now even they have turned on him. America’s greatest Middle Eastern frenemy was an enemy who pretended to be our ally. The frenemy game had paid off for Saudi Arabia with American soldiers being sent off to protect the House of Saud, but by Obama’s second term, the Saudis had figured out that they could do better by being our open enemies than by pretending to be our friends.

The Saudis, who had always been noted for being subtle, stopped being subtle when a member of one of their think tanks openly declared, “We are learning from our enemies now how to treat the United States.”

There is no better metric of contempt in a region where everyone wears a false face than honesty like that. The Saudis have decided that we are no longer even worth lying to. They believe that we have become so worthless that they can tell us what they really think of us.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Our technocracy is detached it is from competence. It’s not the technocracy of engineers, but of “thinkers” who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance.

These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn’t fix a toaster.

The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or how it works.

It’s hard to have a functioning technocracy without engineers. A technocracy made in Silicon Valley with its complete disregard for anything outside its own ego zone would be bad enough. But this is a Bloombergian technocracy of billionaires and activists, of people who think that “progress” makes things work, rather than things working leading to progress.

Healthcare.gov showed us that behind all the smoother and shinier designs was the same old clunky government where everything gets done because the right companies hire the right lobbyists and everything costs ten times what it should.

If the government can’t build a health care website, how is it going to actually run health care for an entire country is the obvious question that so many are asking. And the obvious answer is that it will run it the way it ran the website. It will throw wads of money and people at the problem and then look for programs it doesn’t like to squeeze for extra cash.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/10/dialing_1-800-fk-you.html I just had the worst dream. I was standing center stage, eager to unveil my fancy new website. I pressed the button; the website crashed, and 7 billion people started laughing at me. Do you think Obama ever had that dream? Nah, neither do I. Images like that spring from an inborn sense of […]

Europe’s outrage over NSA spying ignores its own history and practice. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303615304579157711264482456?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Maybe the leaders of the European Union should have issued a communique at their summit in Brussels Friday, publicly thanking Edward Snowden for stealing U.S. secrets and thus giving them something to talk about other than their own economies.The euro zone’s unemployment rate […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304069604579158293350301588?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

Alas, Bolivia…..I was born and nurtured there. Thousands of Jews found a haven in Bolivia where they were treated hospitably by the residents and never harassed or oppressed. ….Dictators came and went. They were tin pot tyrants but none as brazen and criminal as Evo Morales, a cretinous Hugo Chavez clone…..rsk

The country is a hub for organized crime and a safe haven for terrorists.

In the years after a brutal 10-year Soviet occupation, Afghanistan became a petri dish in which a culture of organized crime, radical politics and religious fundamentalism festered—and where Osama bin Laden set up operations.

Now something similar may be happening in Bolivia. The government is an advocate for coca growers. The Iranian presence is increasing. And reports from the ground suggest that African extremists are joining the fray.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, who is also the elected president of the coca producers’ confederation, and Vice President Alvaro García Linera, formerly of the Maoist Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army, began building their repressive narco-state when they took office in 2006.

Step one was creating a culture of fear. Scores of intellectuals, technocrats and former government officials were harassed. Many fled.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/prez-clueless-over-mideast-mayhem This week the president plugged the toll-free number for Obamacare, urging citizens to join by calling in rather than logging in if they want a health care policy. My question: Which toll-free number do we call if we’re looking for a foreign policy? The fact is that while we’ve been understandably distracted by domestic […]

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/10/still-bickering-over-balfour/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=96e25acaf1-Mosaic_2013_10_28&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-96e25acaf1-41165129 Still bickering over Balfour Last year, on the 95th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the former Palestinian minister, Nabil Shaath, wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph attacking Britain for issuing its famous statement of support for the establishment in Eretz Yisrael of a national home for the Jewish people. Shaath called the Balfour […]

Will We Ever Be Forgiven for the Holocaust? The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? Never.

“Criticism of Israel functions as a sort of antiseptic bath, or mikveh — no matter how mired in the impurities of anti-Semitism you might be when you go in, you come out as fragrant as a bride awaiting her groom.”

http://forward.com/articles/185720/will-we-ever-be-forgiven-for-the-holocaust/#ixzz2ivRxpyfz

Howard Jacobson, Man Booker Prize winner and author of such novels as “Kalooki Nights” and “The Finkler Question,” delivered this year’s Jerusalem Address at the B’Nai Brith World Center in Jerusalem, from which this essay has been adapted.

The shocking psychological truth is that man rejects the burden of guilt by turning the tables on those we have wronged and portraying ourselves as the victims of their suffering. The Roman historian Tacitus spells it out. “It is part of human life,” he wrote, “to hate the man you have hurt.” Those we harm, we blame — mobilizing dislike and even hatred in order to justify, after the event, the harm we did. From which it must follow that those who are harmed the most, as in the case of the Shoah — are blamed the most.

Holocaust denial, in any of its forms, obeys this pattern. For foisting the lie of the 6 million upon the world, Jews are accused of compounding the wickedness that was the just cause of the Holocaust — had it only happened — in the first place. By virtue of the way Jews cynically exploit the Holocaust to serve their political and financial purposes today, are they shown to be deserving of what they suffered yesterday or, rather, since there was no Holocaust, what they ought to have suffered yesterday.

Must the terrible logic that ensures — that an irreparable wrong will never be forgiven — induce in us an equally terrible vigilance: Instead of Never Forget, must our motto be Never Mention? Is silence the only precaution we can take against its happening again?

The creation of the State of Israel was meant to settle that question for us. In many ways it does, and in many ways it still doesn’t. For some Jews, it is precisely Israel we need to stay shtum about. Such a refusal of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust, grounded in this modern rehashing of the libel of the grasping, heartless Jew, is retrospective blame in action.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/10/24/hebron-always-and-for-eternity/

Forty years ago I was invited to participate in a journey to Israel that transformed my life. Ironically, it was sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, which had once been resolute in its opposition to a Jewish state. But Yehuda Rosenman, a Polish refugee who became a Committee executive, believed that even disaffected American Jewish academics might discover something about themselves in Israel. It was birthright before Birthright.

Midway during the two-week trip, we were bussed to Hebron to meet with Mayor Ali Ja-abari. Driving through the city, I glimpsed a massive rectangular stone structure topped by twin turrets. What is it, I asked our guide Tuvia. Me’arat haMachpelah, he responded. I had never heard of it. After Mayor Ja-abari’s talk, Tuvia whispered to me: “Ask him what his family did in 1929.” I didn’t understand the significance of the date, but dutifully asked. The mayor gave me a sharp glance and turned away.

I left Hebron with unanswered questions, eager to return for answers. During my Fulbright professorship in Israel the following year I spent endless hours wandering through Jerusalem’s Old City, determined to overcome my ignorance of Jewish history. Along the way, a friendship of sorts, fueled by my burgeoning collection of ancient Israelite pottery, developed with an Arab antiquities dealer.

When Ibrahim sold me an ancient pot from Hebron, I casually suggested that I would love to visit the city. The following week he closed his tiny shop for the day and drove me there with my two young children. We walked through the crowded shuk near the abandoned Jewish Quarter and climbed the steps to Machpelah. By then I knew that Muslims, in an early example of Jewish identify theft for which Palestinians have become notorious in the modern era, had converted the revered burial site of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs into a mosque that Jews were prohibited from entering for seven centuries before 1967.

www.HumanRightsVoices.org. The United Nations is gearing up for yet another attack upon Israel – even more outrageous on this occasion because it has been arranged in the name of equality. The so-called “Universal Periodic Review” (UPR), will take place in Geneva on October 29, 2013, under the auspices of the UN Human Rights Council. The […]