RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/2/pruden-more-fake-peace-middle-east/

Here we go again, processing peace in the Middle East. Processed peace is no more peace than Velveeta is cheese, but it beats suicide bombing and killing children. So let the Kerry Games begin.

Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians actually expect to accomplish much, but autumn in Washington can be very nice, with warm days and cool nights, and the restaurants are good. Not a bad place to spend the next eight months, pretending to negotiate “a diplomatic breakthrough to end more than a century of conflict,” as one optimist puts it.

Jaw, jaw is always better than war, war, as Winston Churchill famously put it, and who can argue with that, so long as you don’t lay down your arms or shut your eyes to the peril all around. The Israelis can expect to feel pressure from the White House, if not to lay down their arms, to shut their eyes to the peril and leave the looking to President Obama and his friends. They’ll hear a lot of advice from their friends in Europe, too, the “friends” with considerable experience in sleeping through the run-up to wars of attempted annihilation.

“They have zero chances of reaching an end of conflict, end of claims agreement,” says Yossi Alpher, an Israeli analyst and the former director of the Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies, as reported by Ben Lynfield in the Jewish World Review (jewishworldreview.com). “The positions are too far apart on narrative issues like the future of the holy places and the right of return.”

The usual voices, hired optimists all, are saying the usual hopeful things that nobody believes. “I travel with a feeling of deep responsibility and great hope,” Tzipi Livni, the justice minister and chief Israeli negotiator, told reporters on her departure from Tel Aviv. “There is a chance for the two sides to pave a way to bring about the solution of the conflict.”

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4006/israel_boycotters_a_kabbalistic_mission

On their maligned target, Israel, the boycotters ruffle scarcely a hair. If anything, the harder boycotters go at the baby juggernaut the more furiously – infuriatingly – the heart pumps and muscles move and milestone metrics go by – economic, scientific, social, cultural. Will it slow down the beast now that a really big irritant, the EU, has settled on the juggernaut’s rump?

The boycotters’ predicament is as old as the bible. Hard as the Israel-hating Moabite, Balaam, plotted and laboured to curse Israel he ended by blessing the nation profusely.

This divine umbrella, it would seem, does not extend to the Diaspora where boycotters are making life uncomfortably hostile. And worse may be to come. Robert Wistrich, head of the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the study of anti-Semitism, is one of several who ring alarm bells.

Wistrich claims that anti-Semitism has become an irreversible trend that must eventually make conditions for European Jewry unbearable. South Africa, near the end of a golden age for Jews, became the first democracy to make Israel boycotting a domestic policy when the government baited its hook with Jews in order to catch Muslim votes. World-wide, the yellow star is making a comeback.

Hitler’s henchmen would have found a modern feature quite delicious – the enthusiastic involvement of Jews. The world over, Jews are boycotting the Jews, and being paid for doing that. European and American funders practically fling cash at Jewish boycott bodies, so that tiny Israel ends up with more human rights protectors per square mile than anywhere on earth.

Their value is obvious. For one thing, Israeli boycotters especially protect phony human rights celebrities like Alice Walker or churchmen Desmond Tutu and Stephen Sizer from claims of anti-Semitism. For another, such people can rely on Jewish cohorts for credibility and so channel their hatreds without let or hindrance. Jewish boycotters then act as a buffer, giving blatant brown-shirt mobs an easy ride.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4016/israel_boycotters_la_trahison_des_clercs

Steve Apfel is director of the School of Management Accounting, Johannesburg. He is the author of the book,’Hadrian’s Echo: The whys and wherefores of Israel’s critics’ (2012) and a contributor to, “War by other means.” (Israel Affairs, Special Issue. July 2012)

A piano recital at a campus hall in Johannesburg was invaded for no better reason than the artist was born in Israel. A boycott mob burst onto the stage and blew football hooligan horns, forcing Yossie Reshef to flee and patrons to go home shocked. At a theme park outside Johannesburg a jamboree to mark Israel Independence Day turned chaotic when boycotters threw stink bombs, clashed with security, and contrived a bomb scare.

Clearly, not merely the events were violated but freedoms and principles. And, lest we forget, Jews fell on both sides of the evil; they were the victims and also among the perpetrators.

The human rights violated are simple – security, gathering, equality and so forth. But they open no window into the mind and soul of a boycotter, except for one. Rights allow another peep at the perfidy tucked into the depths of that kabbalistic mission (Part 1 of this series) The boycott campaign, we were told, “is a global movement which works in peaceful ways..”

So here is the principle to be plucked from the rights Jews were denied at the campus and theme park. Boycotters know it well, but let’s have it down in black and white so it’s there when we need it. “Any statement that suits the public face of the boycott campaign is true.”

Generally, principles are the tricky ones, and only to be coaxed out by some careful spade work and artful delving. A pair of questions will make the initial indent:

A) After the outrages on Jewish events did any boycott figure condemn the mob behaviour publicly?

B) Did any boycott figure stand up and say that Jews have the same rights as everybody else — the rights boycotters insist on for themselves?

They may look simple questions, yet are only approachable through a swampland infested by a hundred coiled vipers. Academics, never the easiest of people to pin down, are also involved. And waiting for a clear cut response could be in vain if academics are steeped in a cultish broth. Thankfully, facts ease the burden, a little, and are helped further along by first hand experience and even a confession or two.

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/08/02/only-benghazi-can-save-us-from-hillary/ Is it time for the GOP to start ignoring Obama and concentrating on Hillary? After all, Peggy Noonan [1] has informed us that most of the country is tuning him out already. Well, not quite. As Daniel Henninger [2] pointed out the other day, there’s plenty of damage our increasingly authoritarian president can yet […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323681904578642044155155894.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion Florida is the New Selma, and not for the first time. On a visit to Tallahassee Tuesday, Jesse Jackson “used the phrase ‘Selma of our time’–a reference to civil rights marches in Alabama that helped prompt change in the 1960s,” the Miami Herald reports. By way of explanation, the paper quotes an earlier, ungrammatical […]

http://unitedpatriotsworldwide.com/vinienco/2013/08/01/1000-people-killed-iraqi-slaughter-fest-july/ Update Nigeria: Three Christians Churches Bombed, 45 People Dead Update Nigeria: Three Christians Churches Bombed, 45 People Dead: The Boko Haram group set off four bombs that hit two churches in Kano city on Monday night (July 29), killing at least 45 people, sources said. The Rev. Ramsey Noah, chairman of the Kano state […]

  http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/10098 The Obama administration hardly regards itself to have failed at anything. In fact, it judges itself by its intentions, not by its results. Hillary Clinton, in her first major foreign policyspeech in 2009, put the Obama approach on the table. To paraphrase: If we succeed around the world, it will be because of our […]

http://nsroundtable.org/as-we-see-it/about-painful-sacrifices/

Brilliant, simply brilliant. And KUDOS to Professor Eugene Kontorovich for his response to the so-called “prominent American Jews,” who released a letter last week calling on Israel to make precisely the kind of sacrifices the former have refused to make (see below).

As we’ve written before on these pages, SHAME on these Jews, who periodically send “painful concession” letters to Israelis. Living in America, perhaps they’ve forgotten the fruits of appeasement, so here’s a quick video reminder for them, and for all who talk about painful sacrifices.

Of course, these prominent folk could always follow Prof. Kontorovich’s sage advice, and make their own painful territorial sacrifices for peace.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/painful-concessions-and-american-jews/

Painful Concessions and American Jews By Eugene Kontorovich

Women make up over 50 percent in IDF staff officer schools, indicating a rise in leadership positions. Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Courtesy: businessinsider.com

A group of prominent American Jews released a letter last week, calling on painful compromises for peace. The sacrifices they envisioned potentially include hundreds of thousands of Jews leaving their homes and livelihoods behind, being uprooted and relocated, all for the sake of a Jewish majority in Israel. Similarly, in April, 100 prominent American Jews signed a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu also calling for the proverbial “painful sacrifices” for peace. Apparently, such painful concession letters have become a trend.

The inevitable destruction resulting from fanaticism wound with fantasy.

Why those who are pro-Israel — Jew and gentile alike — should be on high alert
JewishWorldReview.com |

W ERUSALEM— Standing next to US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday morning, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni gushed that through his indefatigable efforts to bring Israeli and Palestinian officials to Washington, Kerry proved that “nothing can stop true believers.”

As usual, the cognitively-challenged Livni told us something she hadn’t intended to say. The term “true believer” was coined by Eric Hoffer in his classic work The True Believer from 1951, which Livni has obviously not read. Hoffer’s epic study of the psychological roots of fanaticism, described a true believer as a person so fanatically committed to a cause that no amount of reality can make him abandon it.

And that just about sums up Kerry, and the man he works for, US President Barack Obama.

Kerry visited Israel six times in the four months leading up to the meetings in Washington this week, during which Americans, Palestinians and Israelis discussed the size of the table they will be sitting around in the coming discussions.

During the sam

http://myprivateselfmeandyou.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-moral-defeat.html E-PAL  Joel Fishman is a fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Chairman of the Foundation for the Research of Dutch Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Sometime in the early seventies, I lived in the Boston area and attended a shiur (class in Jewish texts) of Joseph Ber Soloveitchik (1903 […]