RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/books/yossi-klein-halevis-like-dreamers-focuses-on-1973-war.html?_r=0

“The story’s most significant sections help us grasp how the settlers have driven the nation’s agenda for the past four decades. This has been partly the result of sheer grit by people who shunned personal comfort in the name of playing a role in Jewish history. One of the most important lessons the settlers teach, if you spend time with them in the West Bank or on these pages, is that history is made by those who do not give up — for good and for ill.”

7 Paratroopers and Paths They Took Through an Israel at a Crossroads
Yossi Klein Halevi’s ‘Like Dreamers’ Focuses on 1973 War

Much has been made over the years, and rightly so, of the messianic fervor that swept Israel after its spectacular victory in the 1967 war. The conquest of Sinai from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, all in a biblically epic six days, seemed to religious Israelis — and many secular ones — like a miracle, a sign that God wanted to reunite his people with their promised land. Not long afterward, settlement beyond the 1967 borders began.

Yossi Klein Halevi, in his powerful book “Like Dreamers,” adds an important dimension to this story by focusing on Israel’s near-defeat in the next war, in 1973, as the catalyst for the settler movement and much else that has shaped Israel in the past 40 years. That war was a trauma; a hubristic Labor government made up of secular, European kibbutz veterans was caught unawares by Egyptian and Syrian forces. Nearly 3,000 Israelis died, as did many dreams.

Some saw this as a moment to seize, an opportunity to remove not only the failed leaders but also the entire enterprise of Labor Zionism and to install its competitor, the national religious movement. The kibbutzim, cradle of the nation’s leadership, were waning economically and socially. They could now be replaced in the vanguard by the West Bank settlements. The new power-seekers called themselves Gush Emunim, or bloc of the faithful, and were typified by men like Hanan Porat.

Mr. Porat was badly wounded in battle in 1973. As he lay in his hospital bed, he understood that Israel was at a crossroads and that it was his job to help choose its new direction.

As Mr. Halevi describes the moment: “A plan was forming in Hanan’s mind. A response to despair. A new settlement movement, modeled on the pioneering movements that had built the state. But this time the movement would be led by religious Jews.” It was a movement, Mr. Porat believed, of “those who understood that Zionism was about not refuge but destiny, redemption.”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13877#.UkVeQ0bD-Uk The Global Church ignores the threats to itself from the very Palestinian Arabs it supports, for the sake of Israel-bashing. The World Council of Churches, an ecumenical body which claims to represent 590 million Christians worldwide and based in Switzerland, will sponsor an event supporting the partition and Islamization of Jerusalem. The ”World Week […]

Another Tack: Thanks for the revelations With the Syrian thriller and its spin-off machinations keeping us at the edge of our seats, who had time to at all notice much less care about the volubility of Ramallah’s honchos? Too much distracting din made it difficult to pay much mind to Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority […]

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/a-group-of-jewish-people/88427/

“. . . we condemn the crimes by Nazis in the World War II and regrettably those crimes were committed against many groups, many people, many people were killed including a group of Jewish people. And we condemn their crimes. In general, we condemn the murder and killing of innocent people always. It makes no difference to us. When that person is innocent and is killed, whether he or she was Jewish, or Christian, or Muslim, there’s just no difference in our eyes. We condemn crimes as such. But the argument here is that if the Nazis committed a crime, this does not mean that the price paid for it should be done by other people elsewhere. This should not serve as any justification to push out from their homes a group of people because of what Nazis did.”

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Those are the words of the new president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, as distributed this evening by the Council on Foreign Relations. It sent out a cable boasting that it was Mr. Touhani’s “sole public event during his visit to New York City to address the United Nations General Assembly.” The president used the opportunity make what the Council called a “surprise announcement” of his country’s latest gains in the so-called P5+1 talks, namely an agreement to “jumpstart” the process with the idea of “finalizing” in a year’s time some kind of deal.

The fact is that the mullah’s words are a mockery of history and of the Jews. This is who was killed in Germany and Poland and the rest of Europe — “a group of Jewish people”? And now all of a sudden his regime is opposed to the Holocaust? His country has been supporting, in Hezbollah, an organization that has said it wants every Jew on the planet to come to Israel to save it the trouble of sending agents to kill them in other countries. The idea that Israel is a price to be paid for the Nazi crimes is bizarrely disconnected from the fact that political Zionism was launched a half a century before the Holocaust. And for good reason.

http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=327188 US President Barack Obama’s rapidly changing positions on Syria have produced many odd spectacles. One of odder ones was the sight of hundreds of lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee fanning out on Capitol Hill to lobby members of the House and Senate to support Obama’s plan to launch what Secretary of […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3994/iceland-mosque The Muslim Association of Iceland now admits that foreign donors will be paying for the mosque’s construction costs. The former mayor of Reykjavik says he believes it is outrageous for the city to give Muslims a site at no cost at a great location in the center of the city, and asks why political […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ ISLAM IS THE MOTIVE In Westgate, a Kenyan mall oriented toward expats, terrorists separated Muslims from non-Muslims before killing them. The Muslims were allowed to go free if they could recite a Muslim prayer. “I don’t understand why you would shoot a five-year-old child,” one of the survivors said. But the five-year-old was not […]

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/09/08/israel-leper-or-light-unto-the-nations-part-6-europe-loves-jews-just-hates-judaism-and-israel/

See the previous installments of P. David Hornik’s fascinating series:

Israel: Leper or Light Unto the Nations? Part 1: The Whole World Against Us

Israel: Leper or Light Unto the Nations? Part 2: That Bird Could Be a Mossad Agent!

Israel: Leper or Light Unto the Nations? Part 3: From Woodstock to the Promised Land

Israel: Leper or Light Unto the Nations? Part 4: Why Is Israel So Lousy at Making Its Case?

Israel: Leper or Light Unto the Nations? Part 5: Whichever It Is, I’ve Married It

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This summer a total of about 800 Jewish immigrants from France are expected to arrive in Israel. They’re part of a total of about 2500 who are expected to make their way here from France over the course of the year—an increase of 40 percent over last year.

As Sabrina Kozirov, arriving in August with her husband and two teenage daughters, told Israel’s Ynetnews:

The situation in France had become unbearable. There is a large Muslim community and harsh political criticism of Israel. Therefore we preferred to leave.

Her words dovetail with a report by an Israeli institute on the bleak situation of France’s Jews and Europe’s generally, and with a much-read article by French Jewish intellectual Michel Gurfinkiel on the same theme.

Along with the problems Sabrina Kozirov alludes to—the animosity (not infrequently violent) of Muslim populations and an intense anti-Israeli atmosphere generally—many of the European countries have been banning or trying to ban kosher slaughter and even circumcision, a Jewish practice going back to Abraham’s time in the Book of Genesis.

The attempt to “rebuild Jewish life” in post-Holocaust Europe was, of course, problematic from the start. A continent that could have produced the Holocaust could not, realistically, have been expected to make an abrupt about-face and become Jew-friendly. But the form European antisemitism now takes—particularly the animus against Israel—is not without some striking ironies.

The Zionist ideology that produced the state of Israel took a dim view of Jewish life in the Diaspora. Zionist leaders like Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky warned that the Jews of Europe were in grave danger and should get out before it was too late. Zionism also embraced the doctrine of shlilat ha-Golah—negation of the Diaspora, positing that even in countries that were Jew-friendly, Jews would disappear quietly through assimilation.

But while Zionism was all too right about the dangers of antisemitism, it was not necessarily right in its diagnosis of it.

As many Zionist thinkers saw it, the Jewish state in the Land of Israel would not only be a refuge from antisemitism, but the solution for it. Antisemitism, in this view, arose from the anomaly of Jewish life in the Exile, dispersed among other peoples. Once Jews became a “normal” people in their own state, antisemitism would wither on the vine.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/26/bill-clinton-vladimir-putin-he-can-be-trusted/

Former President Bill Clinton said during a gathering at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York on Wednesday that President Vladimir Putin is trustworthy — that he’s never gone back on a promise.

“He kept his word in all the deals we made,” Mr. Clinton said, United Press International reported.

Mr. Clinton made the comments in context of speaking about Syria, and the plan forged by Russia to strip President Bashar Assad of his chemical weapon stash and turn it over to the international community to control.

At the same time he said Mr. Putin was trustworthy, Mr. Clinton also admitted he couldn’t predict a successful outcome with the Syrian agreement.

“[The U.S.] will just have to see what happens” with that deal, he said, UPI reported. “You work for the best and prepare for the worst in this business. But I think it would be a terrible mistake not to take advantage of the opportunity. And you know, look, Mr. Putin is very smart.”

Mr. Clinton also said his working relationship with Mr. Putin had been marked by candor. The Russian leader is “brutally blunt,” he said.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/an-encomium-for-an-unsung-writer?f=puball

Daniel Greenfield, the Sultan Knish columnist and frequent contributor to FrontPage’s The Point Blog, is one of the most perceptive, objective, prolific, and ruthless observers of contemporary politics and culture in the country. He writes things Charles Krauthammer would be hesitant to publish, and says things no one on Fox News would dare utter.

This is because he is an intellectual, a thinker in fundamentals, and so he has a far wider perspective on things Islamic than has any newspaper pundit or TV anchor or teleprompter reader.

One of the first tasks I perform when returning to my computer after a night’s sleep is to hunt up and read his latest pieces. I do not know how he keeps up the pace and the output. I’ve often kidded him by asking him if he has a time warp device that allows him to vanish into a timeless realm to cover and produce as much copy as he does, and then emerge from it to have a bite to eat and take a nap. That way he could keep to the twenty-four hour day with the rest of us.

He will only admit that it is “like racing along a treadmill manned by Marxist clowns.”

More often than not his Sultan Knish columns are evocative of H.L. Mencken at his best: wryly ironic, sometimes bitter, always contemptuous of politicians and activists who suffer from foot-in-mouth disease or who have been lobotomized by political correctness, or who are just plain morally and/or politically corrupt. Regardless of his mood, he will make an unforgettable point. A few times he might over-write, and occasionally a grammatical error might creep in, but such lapses are so infrequent it would be picayune to dwell on them. Given the caliber of his intellect and his bare-knuckles honesty, readers are getting a bargain.