RUTHFULLY YOURS

At a special event Wednesday, Nobel Prize winner Professor Yisrael Aumann told students at Bar Ilan University that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was “making many mistakes” in his policies towards the Palestinian Authority, Iran, and in dealing with foreign pressure to withdraw from areas of Judea and Samaria.

Aumann was speaking at the University’s Student Union sponsored by Project Yuvalim, a new initiative meant to broaden the discussion of Zionist issues on campuses throughout Israel. Headed by activist Yigal Brand, the Project is sponsored by Zionist Council of Israel, a part of the World Zionist Organization.

“Concessions and ‘gestures’ do not bring peace,” Aumann said. We need to understand that if we do not have a right to Hevron, Gush Etzion, or Ariel, we do not have a right to Tel Aviv,” Aumann said.

“We are all ‘Palestinians’,” he said, referring to the fact that until relatively recently, the term “Palestinian” referred not to a particular nation, but to those living in the geographical area that was termed by world powers as “Palestine”.

“Before we try to convince our enemies that the land belongs to us, we must convinced ourselves that this land is holy for us as well. I do not say that as a right-wing supporter of full settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel,” the Nobel laureate said, but from a purely geopolitical point of view.

“The only chance for peace is not to choose the path of concessions – that only leads to war,” Aumann said. “If we were playing soccer, we would look at the best teams in the world in order to learn the best strategies.” In the same way, he said, Israel should look at the powers that managed to keep the peace the longest – with the ancient Romans the most relevant example. “Look at the Roman Empire,” he said. “They managed to keep the peace for 238 years, by preparing for and being ready to fight in wars.”

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/nov/21/november-22-1963-and-why-we-wept/ November 18, 2013 — The news refused to sink in. Perhaps Walter Cronkite got it wrong. For many of us it came as a rumor. We heard that President John F. Kennedy had been “seriously wounded” and because we refused believe, we were advised to find the nearest TV. The bistros along Bleecker Street […]

Hans Joachim Morgenthau was one of the leading twentieth-century figures in the study of international politics. He got this one right.

“In an essay published in January 1962, Hans Morgenthau, an eminent political scientist, faulted Kennedy for approaching issues of foreign policy, such as the proposed invasion of Cuba or the crisis over Berlin, as a politician. That is, when faced with a choice between two incompatible alternatives, he tended to opt for a half-measure, seek a middle ground or temporize by claiming to need more information (or fresh ideas). A statesman, Morgenthau said, “must cross the Rubicon or refrain from crossing it, but he cannot have it both ways. . . . There is no riskless middle ground.” The statesman, he added, must act in spite of his “ineluctable ignorance” of the consequences.”
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304373104579108182048878474?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Book Review: ‘Camelot’s Court,’ by Robert Dallek By Robert K. Landers

Recently, in the wake of another diplomatic disaster for the Obama regime, Secretary of State John Kerry said, “We are not blind and I don’t think we’re stupid.” He and the President may not think they’re stupid, but the leaders of nations around the world most certainly do.

In a recent Wall Street Journal commentary by Brett Stephens, titled the “Axis of Fantasy vs. Axis of Reality”, he cited the French rejection of the negotiations with the Iranians, saying “the French also understand that the sole reason Iran has a nuclear program is to build a nuclear weapon…This now puts the French at the head of a de facto Axis of Reality, the other prominent members of which are Saudi Arabia and Israel. In this Axis, strategy is not a game of World of Witchcraft conducted via avatars in a virtual reality.”

Stephens said of Kerry’s remark on Meet the Press, “When you’ve reached the ‘don’t call me stupid’ stage of diplomacy, it means the rest of the world has your number.”

The Secretary of State carries out the President’s foreign policies, but when both are ideologically blind to reality and both harbor a deep disdain for an American history of global leadership since the end of World War Two, they are going to initiate and stumble around in ways that convince other nations to seek leadership elsewhere or to pursue they own interests without looking to the U.S. for support.

John Kerry has one of the worst records imaginable to be our Secretary of State. I have always regarded him as a moron with strong anti-American beliefs. I shudder to think he was the Democratic Party’s candidate for President in 2004, losing to George W. Bush who thankfully had previously defeated Al Gore. Two worse candidates for the presidency are hard to imagine.

Kerry first came to my attention and that of most Americans when he testified on April 22, 1971 before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, claiming that American veterans of the Vietnam War had committed war crimes that were “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels.” Kerry had, at that point, become a spokesman and organizer for the group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Towards that end, he was working closely with people, many of whom could only be described as revolutionary Communists.

President Obama says he can “fix” the millions of canceled health insurance plans with an administrative change. He’s claiming more executive power – power for himself – than the Constitution allows, and is playing fast and loose with the truth.

The culprit behind the cancellations is not an administrative regulation, as he claims. It’s Section 2702 of the Affordable Care Act. It says all plans sold in the individual market or small-group market on Jan. 1, 2014, or later must include the Essential Benefits Package.

This means 10 categories of health coverage the Washington “experts” deem essential, such as maternity care even if you’re 50 years old. Plans are being canceled because they don’t have all 10.

Only Congress can dispense with the deadline. Last Friday, the House of Representatives passed a bill to do that.(Insurers and insurance commissioners in several states have said the “fix” is too late to retool by Jan. 1.) Nevertheless, the House bill is a legal attempt to stop the mass cancellations.

Amazingly, our arrogant president says he will veto that bill if it reaches his desk because it would allow insurers to sell the noncompliant policies to new customers as well as old. The real reason is that Obama wants to rule by edict.

This particular edict could put taxpayers on the hook for a hefty amount. The American Academy of Actuaries warned that the fix is likely to cause healthy people to stick with their old plans, leaving the sickest in the new exchanges. That will clobber exchange insurers.

The “racist concept” of a Jewish national state is an “impediment to peace,” Philip Farah of the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Palestine (PCAP) judged during the panel “Myths about the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and Impediments to Peace.” Farah spoke at the November 8-9 (with Sunday worship following on November 10), 2013, Waging Peace in Palestine & Israel conference. Farah’s anger towards Israel was typical among the event’s self-professed Christians who consistently undermined the Jewish state’s legitimacy in numerous ways.

The conference sponsor was the Alliance of Baptists (AB), founded in 1987 as a “prophetic voice in Baptist life” among “people of diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, theological beliefs, and ministry practices.” “[C]ombining progressive inquiry” and “prophetic action,” these diverse individuals are “married, divorced, single, committed and somewhere in between.” AB’s partner congregation in Washington, DC, Calvary Baptist Church, was the conference host.

AB in the conference’s program described the event as an “effort to be faithful to our Statement of support to Palestinian Christians.” Reprinted in the program, The Alliance of Baptists Respond to the Kairos Palestine Document is also available at the AB website. In this statement AB affirmed the December 15, 2009, declaration Kairos Palestine-A Moment of Truth: A Word of Faith, Hope, and Love from the Heart of Palestinian Suffering as representing the “most prevalent views of Palestinian Christians living in the occupied territories.”

Read online, A Moment of Truth set the conference’s troubling tone. The declaration invokes a “Palestinian people who have faced…clear apartheid for more than six decades,” namely since Israel’s very founding in 1948, and not since any post-1967 Six Day War occupation. The declaration describes Israel solely as an attempt by the “West…to make amends for what Jews had endured in the countries of Europe…on our account and in our land.” Yet half of Israel’s present Jewish population is of Middle Eastern/North African (Mizrahim) origin, many of them descended from Jews expelled by Arab countries in the years before and after Israel’s 1948 establishment. Such charges call into question A Moment of Truth’s subsequent attribution of hostility with Israel to its post-1967occupied territories, namely that “if there were no occupation, there would be no resistance, no fear and no insecurity.”

The well-worn notion that much of the public has been fed is that Senator Ted Cruz, along with Mike Lee and many Republican House members, caused the government shutdown which was, itself, a disaster. While far from true, the real battle is whether Republicans will learn the proper lessons and how they will move from here, together or in internal disarray, toward their own private sector reform or submit to a pre-planned Democrat drive toward a single payer system.

While extremist radicals such as Sean Penn called for Cruz to be “institutionalized,” the prominent attack on Cruz, primarily by “reasonable” Republicans such as John McCain and Peter King, has been that he chose the wrong “strategy” in his attempt, first to defund Obamacare and later, to cause a delay in its individual mandate and elimination of Congress’ own exemption. It was argued that even if Cruz had convinced enough Senators to vote with him, President Obama would have exercised his veto. Further, no matter how it occurred, any government shutdown would be blamed on Republicans. Instead, they insist, Obamacare would have imploded on its own.

It is certainly true Republicans have taken a beating in the polls. The real cause, however, was the constant bantering of messages by Democrats and their key ally, the media. For months before the shutdown, the media essentially installed critical notions in the minds of the public such as “Republicans will be blamed,” “Obama will not budge,” “a shutdown will result in a national, if not international crisis,” and so on. We tend to think we are sophisticated evaluators of incoming information but, for the most part, our minds find it difficult to fend off that which is constantly barraging them. And once those ideas were force fed to the public, the public tended to feed them right back in the form of polls which, in turn, caused further amplification of the notion.

Accordingly, rarely was the more accurate proposition that Obama and the Democrats were responsible for the shutdown because they refused to negotiate with Cruz and House Republicans given much airtime. Similarly, if Cruz had been successful in converting enough Senators, Obama would have had a difficult time standing alone with his veto trying to do what he does best- blame others. The game would have been very different if the Senate had gone against Obama. And even if the Senate did not fully fall in line with Cruz, many borderline seats would then be better poised for Republican rebounds in the 2014 elections. The only thing that ultimately made Cruz’s actions “bad strategy” is that the “reasonable” Progressive Republicans chose not to join.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/when-obama-said-hes-sorry/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by an All-Star Cast: Ann-Marie Murrell, National Director of PolitiChicks.tv, Basil Hoffman, a Hollywood Actor (“The Artist”) and Monty Morton, a Conservative Entrepreneur.

The Gang gathered to discuss When Presidents Lie. The dialogue weighed Nixon’s, Clinton’s and Obama’s falsehoods — on the scales of damage to the American people.

Islam is a religion of Peace. That is as certain as the three slogans of the Ministry of Truth; War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength.

These three slogans of the Party in George Orwell’s 1984 are especially applicable to Islam; a religion of war that claims to be a religion of peace, whose political parties (such as the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party) use “Freedom” in their name but stand for slavery, and ignorance of its true nature creates an illusion of strength for industrialized nations that imagine that they are only battling a tiny handful of outmatched extremists.

The Orwellian world finds its natural expression in our world of unnamable wars against unnamable enemies who are peacefully at war with us in the name of a religion that our leaders assure us is wholly peaceful and should not be identified with the people killing us in its name. There is enough convoluted reasoning in a single press conference after any act of Muslim terror to have provided Orwell with material for three sequels.

But in a Doublethink world where everything means the opposite of what it truly is, even Orwell isn’t immune from inversion. Instead of censoring him, the Doublethinkers, in the fashion of the Ministry of Truth, rewrote him.

Dubai, a city in a totalitarian state that practices censorship and fills jails with political prisoners, will host its Inaugural George Orwell Lecture under the auspices of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum; a billionaire ruler with more wives and yachts than human rights.

Considering Dubai’s international reputation as a glittering city for the wealthy built on the backs of slave labor and a party city where women have fewer rights than kidnapped child camel jockeys; there ought to be plenty of material for an Orwell lecture.

Israel—and Sunni Arab states of the Middle East led by Saudi Arabia—watched with trepidation on Wednesday as the P5+1 countries and Iran reconvened in Geneva for another round of nuclear talks.

British foreign secretary William Hague spoke of narrow differences and a historic deal being in reach. “It is the best chance for a long time,” he told an Istanbul news conference, “to make progress on one of the gravest problems in foreign policy.”

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov—whose country is not exactly a foe of Iran, having helped it build its Bushehr nuclear reactor—said: “We hope the efforts that are being made will be crowned with success at the meeting that opens today in Geneva.”

In a sort of prelude to this lovefest, on Tuesday Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif released a YouTube video in which he said:

For us, nuclear energy is about securing the future of our children, about diversifying our economy, about stopping the burning of our oil, and about generating clean power.

In other words, meet the new, hip, enlightened Iran, second to none in its concern for clean power and diversity.

Zarif did not explain why, if those are Iran’s innocent aims, it has been spending billions of dollars for decades in developing bomb-grade uranium, a reactor for making plutonium bombs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear triggering devices, and so on. But sometimes diversity and clean power come with certain accoutrements.