RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger has been demonstrating this fact for years with his demographic research….rsk

Uri Sadot, Foreign Policy. Contrary to dire predictions of a “demographic time bomb,” Israeli Jews have a healthy and largely stable demographic majority in Israel and the West Bank.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/12/the-demographic-myth/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=ecb37301d1-Mosaic_2013_12_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-ecb37301d1-41165129

If you listen to some top American and Israeli officials, Israel’s “demographic time bomb” is ticking — and it’s set to explode any day now. Secretary of State John Kerry warned on Dec. 7 that Israel’s demographic dynamics represented an “existential threat … that makes it impossible for Israel to preserve its future as a democratic, Jewish state.” Some officials in Jerusalem agree with him: Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog and senior Cabinet member Yair Lapid last week echoed similar concerns that demographic trends would turn Israel into a “bi-national state.” On all three occasions, demography was cited as an urgent reason to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The argument, in a nutshell, goes like this: The birth rate among Arab families in Israel and Palestine is higher than it is for Jewish families. Therefore, at some point in the future the Arabs will become a majority in the area Israel occupies. When that day comes, Israelis will have to choose between having a Jewish state or a democratic one, because giving every person an equal vote would mean losing the Jewish character of the state. Israel’s only hope of maintaining its identity, proponents of the “demographic time bomb” theory would argue, is to soon cut a peace deal that paves the way for an independent Palestinian state.

There’s only one problem: The numbers just don’t add up. Demography relies on more than just birth rates, and similar predictions have a long history of falling flat. Israeli Jews have a healthy and largely stable demographic majority in Israel and the West Bank, and developments in the coming years may even enhance this trend. The demographic time bomb, in other words, is a dud.

In mid-2013, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported a population of 8,018,000 citizens. A fifth of those, numbering 1,658,000, are Israeli citizens who identify themselves as Arab. The estimates for the number of Palestinians living under Israeli control in the West Bank, without voting rights, range from 1.5 million to 2.5 million. Even if one uses the upper-end estimates issued by the Palestinian Authority, then, the combined number of Israeli-Arab citizens and Palestinians amounts to less than a third of Israel’s current population. As for the residents of the Gaza Strip, it is hard to argue for their inclusion, since Israel has not exerted civilian control in the area since 2005.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/12/walker_2_unions_0.html

WHILE SENATORS AND CONGRESSMEN GENERALLY SPEND A LOT OF THEIR TIME IN GETTING RE-ELECTED, GOVERNORS ACTUALLY GOVERN WHICH MAKES THEM BETTER CANDIDATES FOR PRESIDENT…..RSK

It seems that the unions had good reason to fear Scott Walker.

In news that is unlikely to receive wide play in the legacy media, it appears that a number of Wisconsin unions failed to achieve recertification as a result of year-end member votes.

The recertification votes were a consequence of Act 10, the epoch-making collective-bargain reforms pushed through by Walker in the face of mass demonstrations, vandalism, death threats, and all but open rebellion by unions in 2011. One of act’s provisions was that public-sector unions must be annually recertified by a positive vote of at least half their members. The first such vote took place over the past few weeks, with results released Thursday.

According to preliminary results from the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, over 5,500 Wisconsin workers chose to abandon their unions. These include an entire unit of substitute teachers in Milwaukee along with food service, maintenance, and transportation units in Dane Country. Both are onetime centers of anti-Walker sentiment.

Other union failures occurred in towns as widely separated as Menomonee Falls (which saw the collapse of its entire teachers union), Lake Geneva, Fond du Lac, New Berlin, Germantown, Beaver Dam, and Elcho.

The vote marks a serious rebuke to the public-sector unions, the AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) above all, particularly in light of the fact that Wisconsin is the birthplace of public-sector unionism. It strongly implies that the hold of unions on workers may be a lot more tenuous than previously thought. It also embodies a personal triumph for Scott Walker, who put his career and reputation on the line to see Act 10 through. Walker can now start thinking seriously about 2016.

Hat tip: Bryan Demko

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303997604579238071420235120?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Venezuelans went to the polls on Dec. 8 to elect more than 300 mayors and over 2,000 city council members in a nationwide ballot. Though the opposition coalition made some important gains in the cities, the ruling socialist regime of Nicolás Maduro managed to edge out its rivals in the popular vote (49% to 43%). I now fear that my country is one step closer to becoming a full-fledged dictatorship along the lines of Zimbabwe in Africa.

Less than a year after Hugo Chávez succumbed to cancer, Venezuela is now mired in a crisis unprecedented during the 14 years of the so-called “Bolivarian revolution.” Chávez was certainly a ruthless authoritarian; I know this from firsthand experience. Between 2000 and 2005, I was an elected opposition representative challenging the comandante’s agenda in the National Assembly.

I was forced to leave after Chávez officials tried to remove my parliamentary immunity by fabricating allegations of my involvement in a U.S.-backed conspiracy.

Now Mr. Maduro, whom I knew well in parliament as a more conciliatory figure, is rapidly accelerating the late president’s economic and social policies to their deadliest conclusion.

This is happening because Mr. Maduro, who served as Chávez’s foreign minister from 2006-13, has ties with Cuba’s ruling Communists that stretch back to the 1980s, when he trained in Havana as a labor-union organizer. Having entered Chávez’s trusted circle with the support of the Cubans, Mr. Maduro emerged as Chávez’s handpicked successor and came to power in April, defeating the opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles, by a razor thin margin of 1.5%. Despite thousands of allegations of voter fraud, the regime refused a recount.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303773704579267862150314576?mod=World_newsreel_1 Russian President Vladimir Putin defended the kind of secret surveillance programs that Edward Snowden exposed in the U.S. as a “necessity,” but called the former National Security Agency contractor’s efforts to reveal them a “noble cause.” Mr. Putin, a former KGB officer in the Soviet Union, said he believed the U.S. had good reasons […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304866904579268611658114286?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTTopStories

WASHINGTON—The White House issued a rare veto threat in response to a bipartisan Senate bill that would slap Iran with new sanctions if it violates an interim deal reached last month to curb its nuclear program.
The threat sets up a standoff in the new year between President Barack Obama and more than two dozen Senate Democrats and Republicans who introduced the legislation on Thursday. The challenge to Mr. Obama is particularly stark because half of the lawmakers sponsoring the new bill are from his own party.

The bill could also imperil Mr. Obama’s efforts to reach a diplomatic end to the decadelong standoff over Iran’s nuclear program, which administration officials hope will be a signature achievement of his second term.

Iranian officials have repeatedly threatened in recent days to back out of negotiations with the U.S. and other global powers over Tehran’s nuclear program if Washington enacts new sanctions.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney criticized the Senate move, saying such sanctions would undermine Mr. Obama’s diplomatic efforts “no matter how they’re structured.”

“We don’t think it will be enacted. We certainly don’t think it should be enacted,” Mr. Carney said. “If it were to pass, the president would veto it.”

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Settlements-and-the-future-of-Zionism-335606

Controversy over “Israeli occupation,” “unilateral withdrawal” and the destruction of Jewish communities is not just about territory and the rights of Jews. It exposes a basic struggle between Zionism and post-/anti-Zionism.

Jews who live in Judea and Samaria, like those who lived in the Gaza Strip, represent an ideology whose roots are not only in modern Zionism, but in a deep attachment to Jewish history, Judaism and the Land of Israel. This ideology opposes the concept of Israel as a pluralistic, secular “nation of its citizens” like those in Europe.

This clash is inevitable and raises fundamental questions: What is Zionism? To whom does the Land of Israel belong, legally and historically? Do Jews need a state at all? Does Israel’s survival depend on establishing another Arab Palestinian state? It is not only a dispute about sovereignty and who controls land, but about what Israel represents as a society and a culture.

Deeply rooted in the fear that Israel will be wiped out, suggestions to abandon traditional Zionist ideals reflect a survivalist mentality.

Campaigns to boycott and delegitimize Israel are increasing fueled by Jew-hatred and Arab funding. In the face of this onslaught, calls to abandon the settlement movement and promoting the “inevitability” of another Palestinian state hardly seem irrational.

But it’s neither “the occupation” nor “Israeli apartheid” (Jewish racism) that makes Jew-haters so angry; it’s whether Israel as a country that defines itself as Jewish should exist.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/08/fitzgerald-the-point-of-cnns-religious-fundamentalism-series.html

OVER AT JIHAD WATCH HUGH FITZGERALD WROTE ABOUT MS AMANPOUR’S FORAYS INTO HISTORY IN 2007….RSK
Fitzgerald: The point of CNN’s religious fundamentalism series

Christiane Amanpour has at least one parent who was part of what one would have hoped to describe as the intelligent secular ancien regime. They were the people pushed out by Khomeini and his epigones, and therefore, one would have thought, comprehending the nature of Islam. Well, it turns out that not everyone who has fled Iran quite has that necessary understanding. Some like to pretend that Khomeini is a sport, when the real sport was the Shah and his father, in their de-emphasis on Islam, their emphasis on the pre-Islamic past of Iran, and their willingness to limit the power of the mullahs — and, above all, to give the non-Muslims of Iran, the Christians, Jews, and Baha’is, reasonable security and even something akin to legal equality.

But Amanpour does not realize that. Nor, in her aggressive climb through the media ranks, has she stopped to study Islam. She has not stopped to find out what happened to the Zoroastrians or what happens to them in Iran today. She has not stopped to find out why, even in the 20th century, a Jew could be killed for going out in the rain (where a drop might ricochet off him and hit an innocent Muslim with this raindrop of najis-ness, thus contaminating him).

She might, that is, have begun with the history of Islam in Iran and considered the treatment of non-Muslims, and how Shah Abbas II overnight ordered the conversion of all the Jews and Armenians in an Iranian city (possibly Tabriz), and why the real, as opposed to the Iranian exile’s dreamy fictional history of Iran, is full of such episodes. She might have gotten hold of E. J. Browne’s work on Persian literature, and studied Hafiz and Sa’adi. She might have read Omar Khayyam, and come to realize just how un-Islamic he was. She might have read the Shahnameh of Firdowsi, and seen how his literary talent was put to work preventing the linguistic and cultural imperialism of the Arabs from successfully coming to damage and then overwhelm the Iranian culture. She might have done a special program on Islam as a vehicle of Arab cultural and linguistic imperialism, and used Iran as an example of one place where it did not succeed as it did elsewhere.

Oh, there are many things that raw-boned massive Christiane Amanpour might have done, if she had allowed herself the leisure to think, and be something more than one more media star, one more mere reporter incapable of making sense of what she reports on.

http://blog.camera.org/archives/2013/12/cnns_amanpour_smears_israel_at_1.html CNN’s Amanpour Smears Israel at Mandela Memorial Service   During coverage of the December 10 memorial service for the former South African president, Nelson Mandela, held in Johannesburg, frequent Israel basher and CNN (Cable News Network) personality, Christiane Amanpour reminiscing about Mandela, drew what she thought was a key lesson from Mandela’s leadership applicable to an intractable conflict […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4102/geneva-iran-islamic-bomb On the day when the “interim agreements” were ratified in Geneva, November 24 2013, the Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, was photographed smiling. He had good reason to be pleased; not since the Munich Agreement in 1938 have Western leaders given so much for so little. As Bret Stephens wrote in the […]

http://carolineglick.com/the-left-against-zion/

In the 1960s, the American Left embraced the anti-Vietnam War movement as its cri de coeur.

In the 1970s, the Left’s foreign policy focus shifted to calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament by the US and its Western allies.

In the 1980s, supporting the Sandinista Communists’ takeover of Nicaragua became the catechism of the Left.

In the 1990s, the war on global capitalism – that is, the anti-globalization movement – captivated the passions of US Leftists from coast to coast.

In the 2000s, it was again, the anti-war movement. This time the Left rioted and demonstrated against the war in Iraq.

And in this decade, the main foreign policy issue that galvanizes the passions and energies of the committed American Left is the movement to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist.

This week has been a big one for the anti-Israel movement. In the space of a few days, two quasi academic organizations – the American Studies Association and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association – have launched boycotts against Israeli universities. Their boycotts follow a similar one announced in April by the Asian Studies Association.