RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5697

The philosopher George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The current global situation proves him wrong.

Take this week, for example — a biggie where commemoration is concerned. It marks 40 years since the Yom Kippur War, 20 since the signing of the Oslo Accords, and 12 since the 9/11 attacks. Though different in nature and scope, these three events share a crucial element: the refusal of Western democracies to read and interpret the Arabic writing on the wall — even when it is translated into their own languages.

In spite of all the looking back for the purpose of avoiding particular pitfalls in the future, the repetition remains in full throttle. This is both perplexing and pleasing to the enemies of the West. They are amazed at how easy it is to hoodwink Americans, Europeans and Israelis, without even having to update their rhetoric.

Nor could the despots of the world have hoped for a better patsy in the White House than Barack Obama. In one fell swoop, the U.S. president gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to two vipers whose power on the world stage was in question: Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and former KGB honcho Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was a twofer worthy of the Guinness Book of World Records.

To prevent the United States from taking military action against the Assad regime for its use of chemical weapons against its opposition, Putin — a long-time chum of the mass murderer in Damascus and his supporters and suppliers in Iran — stepped in to “broker a deal.” Like his radical-Muslim friends, who received propaganda training in the Soviet Union, Putin knows how to talk like a diplomat while loading his cannons.

This is not something that requires heeding Santayana’s warning by remembering the past. It is happening right now, in front of everyone’s eyes.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/saul-landau-death-of-a-propagandist/ Saul Landau died Monday at 77, receiving laudatory obituaries in major media outlets like The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. Landau was an award-winning filmmaker of dozens of documentaries that addressed issues ranging from war and poverty to racism. He was also, in his own words, a propagandist for socialism whose famous […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-youtube-wars/ Last September, Barack Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly to denounce a YouTube video, calling it “crude and disgusting” and assuring Muslims everywhere that this particular YouTube video did not represent America. Finally Obama delivered what is surely one of the most famous YouTube negative video comments ever, “The future must not belong […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/orwell-obama-and-totalitarianism

Reading many of George Orwell’s essays leaves one with the impression that he was an integrated man, that is, his mind was steadfastly anchored to reason and reality. It wasn’t. His prescient essays on totalitarianism may lead one to believe that he was 100% rational and had no chinks in his intellectual armor. He wasn’t, and the chinks are evident.

The most visible chink in Orwell’s intellectual armor was his steadfast belief in the beneficent advantages of socialism, while at the same time he detested communism. Communism, he wrote, is but totalitarianism by another name. Totalitarianism, or Communism, embraces the totality of an individual’s existence, from what he pays for necessities to his social relationships to what goes on in his mind. Orwell observed this totality in Stalin’s Russia, also in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and, to a lesser extent, in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy.

Stalin and Hitler were the inevitable heirs to every wistful vision from time immemorial that men could be organized into benign collectives, communes, or “cooperatives” to corral and control the selfish nature of men to live their own lives for their own reasons. We could begin with the ethics of St. Augustine or Marcus Aurelius, but would need to go back to Plato. Among the minor contributors to the ideal of a collectivist paradise were Auguste Comte and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Along came Karl Marx who distilled all those wishes into a system which reduced individuals into mere insensate atoms of an impersonal evolution towards perfect, stateless, selfless socialism. Or, stateless communism.

Orwell never grasped that his ideal, “stateless socialism,” is a contradiction in terms. Socialism cannot be imposed on men except by force. And whether the force compels men to accept socialized medicine, or the redistribution of their private wealth to alleviate state-caused poverty, or mandated florescent light bulbs, or any other altruistic scheme that shackles men together and compels them to become dependent on fiat law and legislated extortion, it must be employed by the agency of a state. A “mixed economy” of economic and even social controls, must, if not opposed and corrected, lead to total regulation and control.

The ideal of a “classless society” might have been reached by undisturbed tribes in the most inaccessible reaches of the Amazon jungle, but even they have their pecking orders. In any industrialized or semi-industrialized society, under socialism, classes emerge defined by how much loot one gang can accumulate, extort, or seize from another. Ayn Rand dramatized the progress from “socialism” to totalitarianism in We the Living and Atlas Shrugged.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/israel-sobered-by-syria-debacle/print/ Saturday marks Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar and, this year, the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, the greatest trauma in Israeli history. On the morning of October 6, 1973—the day on which Yom Kippur fell that year—Chief of Staff David Elazar met with Prime Minister […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/09/venezuela_from_crazy_to_insane.html A couple of stories from Venezuela bring home the reality that the country is falling apart and freedoms are disappearing. President Maduro has just announced that the government launched a news network to tell the public the truth about the situation in the country: “Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announced on Tuesday at a public event […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/lessons_of_oslo_after_twenty_years.html Twenty years ago today, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed the initial Oslo agreements in a ceremony on the White House lawn that captured the world’s attention and seemed to many the start of genuine peace between Israel and the Palestinians.   Later that day, on Jordanian television, Arafat explained to his Palestinian constituency […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324463604579042904257147952.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wants us to believe that anti-Semitism is the devil as the devil is envisioned by revealed religion. That it has no parallel in the history of prejudice. That it has been at the core of Christian civilization for two millennia. That, inscribed in the Quran, it is the constituent feature of Arab and Islamic civilizations. Anti-Semitism, moreover, has had its reach vastly expanded by the new, anti-Israel, form it has taken—as well as by the fact that Jew-hating populaces have been migrating around the world, specifically from Arab and Islamic countries to Europe and elsewhere.

With “The Devil That Never Dies,” Mr. Goldhagen hopes to present “a fundamentally new perspective” on this phenomenon and a systematic analysis of the causes and consequences of enmity toward the Jews and of the role played by the Internet and other digital technologies in its spread.

Anti-Semitic expression, according to Mr. Goldhagen, has exploded in the past 10 years in both volume and intensity, notwithstanding that no politician in Western Europe or the U.S. would dare to propose an eliminationist program, nor any legal restrictions on Jews. Yet much anti-Semitism lurks beneath the surface, among political, religious and other influential leaders—not just in the U.S.—and among those leaders who when speaking publicly give no reason to suspect that they harbor such views. In country after country, in democratic country after country, Jews must hide their identity lest they be physically, not to mention verbally, attacked.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3971/spain-catalonia-burqa-ban It remains to be seen whether Catalonia will succeed in reframing the debate over burqas as an issue of public safety rather than one of freedom of religion. A jihadist group affiliated with Al Qaeda has threatened to carry out terrorist attacks in Catalonia, an autonomous region in northeastern Spain that is home to […]

Eight years ago today, Israel completed its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza – one of Israel’s biggest, avoidable, self-inflicted wounds. In recollection of it, I’m reposting Daniel Mandel’s May 2005 piece published in the Boston Globe ––one of the only opinion piece to oppose the withdrawal published in any major American liberal newspaper. Unfortunately, the idiotic move was supported by many of Israel’s ostensible friends. More important, nothing has been learned as Israel is again enmeshed in peace processing….rsk

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/05/02/retreat_from_gaza/

SINCE December 2003, Ariel Sharon has astonished friend and foe alike, embracing the very idea he opposed in the elections that confirmed him in power in January 2003.
The idea is ”unilateral disengagement,” whereby Israel, without a peace agreement, withdraws its military and civilians from the territories administered by Israel since the 1967 war — in this case, the Gaza Strip. The Labor opposition’s Amram Mitzna lost badly campaigning on this very platform, coming in for incisive criticism from not a few figures, not just among the governing Likud, but from a bevy of informed Israeli observers. To cite just two:

Historian Michael Oren: ”The minute you pull out of Gaza you signal to the Arabs that you’re in retreat. It’s a huge victory for the Palestinians. Palestinians will have huge celebrations in Gaza. You think they’ll sit down and talk after that?”

Respected centrist journalist, Yossi Klein Halevi: ”If unilateral withdrawal could happen in a void, it would be the right decision But it is not happening in a void . . . The psychological implications are to reinforce the post-Lebanon withdrawal perception in the Arab world that we are a defeatist society and with enough pressure we’ll simply withdraw.”

Indeed, Ariel Sharon himself could not have been clearer at the time: ”A unilateral withdrawal is not a recipe for peace. It is a recipe for war.”

If these criticisms are correct, then unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza is a victory for terrorism; bloodshed is likely to flow from it, and Sharon of all people must know it.

What, then, is Sharon’s rationale? According to his supporters, both right and left, the withdrawal represents Israel seizing the initiative, setting its own lines of defense, and preempting noxious diplomatic initiatives from Israel’s ill-wishers. But all this looks doubtful. True, the Israel Defense Forces will be relieved of the onerous duty of defending isolated Jewish communities in a sea of enemies, but its absence from Gaza will also afford Palestinian terrorist groups a freer hand for mounting further attacks. And an initiative that stimulates the aggression of terrorists will not be altered by its originating in Jerusalem, as the terrorists themselves make clear.

Thus, Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, has opined, ”all the Israeli statements about a withdrawal from Gaza Strip are due to the Palestinian resistance operations. We are completely confident that as the Hezbollah Organization managed to kick the Israeli forces out of Lebanon, the Palestinian resistance will kick them out of the Palestinian territories, and we will continue our resistance.”