RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/42108#CurDomainURL#/blog.cfm

We are saddened to report the passing today after a long illness of David Littman in Geneva, Switzerland . A funeral will be held in Geneva on Wednesday, May 23rd with interment at the Jewish Cemetery in adjacent Veyrier, France. A memorial in his honor will be held subsequently.
The following is an excerpt from his biography:
David Gerald Littman was born in London on 4 July 1933. He was an historian and a human rights activist at the United Nations (Geneva) from 1986. For several years he was main representative of the World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ). In February 1992, he joined veteran human rights activist René Wadlow (editor of Transnational Perspectives), main representative of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR), then the World Federalist Movement (WFM). Since 1997 he was affilliated with of the Association of World Citizens (AWC) and the Association for World Education (AWE), for whom Littman was accredited as representative.

EDUCATION AND BACKGROUND

Littman – the youngest son of Joseph Aaron Littman – graduated in 1951 from Canford School, Dorset where he excelled more in sports than studies. A preference for history brought him to Trinity College Dublin where he earned a “Moderatores” (B.A. with honors) and an M.A. in Modern History and Political Science. From mid-October 1955, he toured historical and archaeological sites in Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel, returning to London in late March 1956. While preparing for a family business career, he decided on postgraduate studies at London University’s Institute of Archaeology, as one of two students under Kathleen Kenyon, director of the famed Jericho excavations, and Max Mallowan, head of Mesopotamian archaeology. Among other sites, he excavated at Hazor (Galilee) under Professor Yigal Yadin in the summer 1958.

In September 1959 he married Gisèle Orebi, a Cairo-born, French speaking fellow student known by her nom de plume, Bat Ye’or, who had been forced to flee Egypt in 1957 as a stateless refugee. The next year they moved to Lausanne, Switzerland. Soon after the birth of their first child, he volunteered for a delicate humanitarian mission in Morocco. From 15 March to July 24, 1961, accompanied by his wife as secretary – and their baby daughter Diana – he ran the Casablanca office of the Geneva-based international NGO for children OSE. After returning to Geneva he continued university studies, but finally abandoned all thoughts of an archaeological career in 1963 to devote more time to the family business. Two more children were born to the Littmans in 1962 and 1964.
David Littman own own body of work was impressive, as was his activism. He facilitated the early covert migration of Jewish children from Morocco to Israel in the early 1960’s known as Operation Mural for which he was to receive the “Hero of Silence” award, the highest intelligence honor from a grateful State of Israel in 2009. That exploit was the subject of a film, Operation Mural Casablanca 1961 premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2007.
During the past few years several articles by David Littman were published in the New English Review.
Upon hearing of Littman’s passing we wrote Bat Ye’or:
We received word on David’s passing today after a valiant fight. He had great courage and you were unstinting to attend to his needs. He was a loving and courageous husband who shared your causes and interests. He was a magnificent defender of human rights for fellow Jews, Christians and others at the UN Human Rights Council and other public forums.
We were pleased to have known him as a colleague in the fight against Islamic Jihad and for Israel’s rightful place in the world at large.
His activism with your assistance and support enabled a great life saving migration of Moroccan Jewish children to Eretz Yisroel for which he received the highest honor and praise from the State of Israel.
His research, writings, speeches, and published body of work have the mark of scholarship with impeccable Churchillian turns of phrase.
He was a life partner in assisting your path breaking scholarship in dhimmitude, Eurabia and the rising Caliphate of fundamentalist Islam seeking to conquer the West through a Grand Jihad.
He was a boon companion and raconteur during our encounters and engagements here in America.
He was perhaps the most illustrious Jewish scholar athlete to have graduated from Trinity College, Dublin.
Our deepest rachmonis and condolences to you, your daughters and grandchildren.
We deeply miss our friend and colleague, David Littman, z”l (of blessed memory).

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/obama-354827-ever-white.html

It used to be a lot simpler. As E.C. Bentley deftly summarized it in 1905:

“Geography is about maps

But Biography is about chaps.”

But that was then, and now Biography is also about maps. For example, have you ever thought it would be way cooler to have been born in colonial Kenya?

Whoa, that sounds like crazy Birther talk; don’t go there! But Breitbart News did, and it turns out that the earliest recorded example of Birtherism is from the president’s own literary agent, way back in 1991, in the official bio of her exciting new author:

“Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

So the lunatic theory that Barack Obama doesn’t meet the minimum eligibility requirements to be president of the United States was first advanced by Barack Obama’s official representative. Where did she get that wacky idea from? “This was nothing more than a fact-checking error by me,” says Obama’s literary agent, Miriam Goderich, a “fact” that went so un-“checked” that it stayed up on her agency’s website in the official biography of her by-then-famous client up until 2007:

“He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister.”

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=270755 That is to say, the historical circumstances under which Israel and the Jews exist in the world today render any non anti-Semitic criticism of Israel impossible. ‘But surely you don’t believe,” they always ask you, “that all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic?” It is a noticeably patronizing question, of course, in that it is […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1912 There is no Zionism without Zion In the thick of the devastation, in the face of the immense destruction the Romans left behind in Jerusalem, the great sage Rabbi Akiva Ben Joseph was wise enough to quote Zechariah’s comforting prophecy: “There shall yet old men and old women sit in the broad places of […]

THERE WILL BE NO POSTINGS…UNTIL LATE ON MAY 21

http://jewishworldreview.com/0512/glick051712.php3 A reminder — and warning — to those who would rather attack than analyze Two weeks ago, US Congressman Joe Walsh published an oped in the Washington Times in which he called for the US and Israel to abandon the two-state solution. After running through the record of Palestinian duplicity, failed governance, terrorism and […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/300298/obama-barnard-and-women-mona-charen

BARNARD HAS ALREADY DISGRACED ITSELF…..SEE: http://barnard.edu/provost/worklife/diversity-and-development and by granting tenure to Nadia Abu El Haj whose shoddy scholarship in 2001 concluded by accusing Israel of “formation and enactment of its colonial-national historical imagination and…the substantiation of its territorial claims”.

The president dropped by Barnard College (my alma mater) this week to deliver the commencement address. It wasn’t long-planned. No, the college had lined up a woman speaker — Jill Abramson, editor of the New York Times. But in March, as part of the “war on women” gambit, the White House decided it needed a friendly, female audience before whom the president could strut his feminist stuff. Barnard, bastion of women’s rights, dumped the Times gal for him in a New York minute.

The speech got scant coverage. The main takeaway seemed to be that a member of the audience shouted out that Obama should do the “moonwalk” when he happened to mention it. Thrilling. The press is keen to remind us that Obama remains cool to the kids. Chris Matthews, call your office.

I don’t care for cool. I’d prefer competent. But as someone who once sat where the graduates were (Toni Morrison was our speaker), I was curious to see what the president would do with the opportunity.

President Obama graduated from Columbia (Barnard’s brother school) in 1983. Unwisely, in my judgment, the president reminisced: “We too were heading out into a world at a moment when our country was still recovering from a particularly severe economic recession. It was a time of change. It was a time of uncertainty.”

Yes, but in 1983, thanks to “Reaganomics,” the economy was adding 430,000 jobs per month. What was the job-growth figure for April, again? Wasn’t it 115,000? And hasn’t the population grown by 25 percent since 1983?

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/300322/cotton-rises-arkansas-brian-bolduc
BRIAN BOLDUC

This fall, Republicans hope to claim Arkansas’s 4th Congressional District, one of the few Democratic redoubts in the South. Six-term incumbent Mike Ross is retiring, and the state legislature has redrawn the district’s lines to incorporate more Republican-friendly territory. In other words, it’s ripe for a pickup. And newcomer Tom Cotton may be just the man to win it.

The Republican primary has been a hard-fought contest between the 2010 GOP nominee, Beth Anne Rankin, and Cotton, an Iraq War veteran. But in the latest Talk-Business–Hendrix College poll, Cotton has posted an 18-point lead, 51–33, over Rankin. A third candidate, John Cowart, earns only 6 percent. If Cotton wins over 50 percent of the vote, he’ll secure the nomination; if Rankin holds him under that threshold, the race will go to a runoff.

“Obviously, our campaign plan is to win on May 22,” Rankin tells NRO, but “I do think it will be a nail-biter.”

“I wouldn’t venture a prediction; I’m in the candidate’s role, not the pundit’s,” Cotton says. “But we’re certainly working hard every day to turn out our voters. It’s going to be close.”

If there is a runoff, the race will largely focus on the candidates’ personalities, as it has already. “We’ve had seven debates,” Rankin notes. “In these seven debates, we’ve seen two cents on the dollar in terms of variance on the issues. As far as what’s been publicly stated, I don’t see a huge difference between the three candidates.” All three oppose Obamacare, cap-and-trade, and Dodd-Frank, and all three support a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/18/how-islam-killed-greco-roman-civilization

“WHERE ISLAM ENTERS CIVIL SOCIETY SOON EXITS……

A number of books published in recent years have demolished the myth of an allegedly tolerant Islamic culture that preserved the Greco-Roman heritage. Ibn Warraq’s book Why the West Is Best is among the better and more accessible titles in this field. As I concluded in one of my earlier essays, the only part of the ancient Greek heritage that proved to be more compatible with Muslim than with Christian European culture was slavery, and possibly anal sex with young boys in certain parts of the Islamic world.

In early 2012 the historian Emmet Scott published Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy. If you have any interest in the subject of the Greco-Roman legacy and Islam as they relate to medieval Europe, I strongly recommend that you buy this book. For those who are interested, Scott has published some excerpts from this work online at the New English Review.

Many books claim to be groundbreaking, but rather few of them actually are. Emmet Scott’s Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited falls into the latter category.

He shows convincingly that archaeological excavations paint a very clear picture of devastation brought by the Arab conquests throughout the entire Mediterranean region, from Syria to Spain, in the seventh century AD.

The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne in his work Mohammed and Charlemagne, published posthumously in 1937, suggested that Islam and the Arab conquests constituted the real dividing line between the civilization of Greco-Roman Antiquity and that of medieval Europe. Moreover, Islamic raids in the Mediterranean partially cut Europeans off from their Classical roots. Scott supports this hypothesis but goes even further than Pirenne — who focused on Europe — by showing that the Arab conquests and Islamic repression largely destroyed Greco-Roman Classical civilization in North Africa and parts of the Middle East, which were more urbanized than Europe.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/18/israel-to-hizbullah-next-time-we-fight-to-win/ This week AFP published an important report that shouldn’t slip under the radar. It quotes a “senior military official in Israel’s northern command” saying that, while Hizbullah may not want another war with Israel, Iran would order it to attack Israel in case of an Israeli strike on Iran. In that case, says the […]