RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1958

Talking turkey about Ankara

Two years ago almost to the date, the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” set sail from Turkey in an attempt to break the Israeli naval blockade on the Hamas-led terrorist enclave. Organized by the Free Gaza Movement and the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH), the Ankara-backed, six-ship flotilla was ostensibly bringing medical and construction supplies to the people of Gaza.Since this was the ninth attempt on the part of activists to pull such a stunt, the Israeli government and military were prepared. Or so they thought.

For a few weeks before the scheduled event, Israeli naval commandos had practiced boarding ships from speedboats and helicopters, as well as dealing with potential chaos. They were told to expect all kinds of provocations (such as being spat on, having lit cigarettes thrown at or stubbed out on them, being pelted with garbage, and maybe even suffering a few blows). They were instructed not to allow such actions to rile them. After all, there were going to be camera crews on the ships, waiting eagerly to catch the Big Bad Wolf pouncing on Little Red Riding Hood.

When the fateful day arrived — May 31, 2010 — and the flotilla reached a certain point in the international waters of the Mediterranean, the commandos were sent in. Because no major violence had been anticipated, most of them were only equipped with paintball (!) guns, some tear gas, and a few smoke bombs for riot dispersal. Only a few were armed with real rifles and live ammunition.

The captains of the ships were notified that they could dock at the Ashdod port, where their cargo would be inspected. Any non-blockaded items would then be delivered to Gaza by land. (This would be nothing new for Israel, which has provided humanitarian aid to the inhabitants of the Islamist mini-state all along.) But the activists rejected the proposal. So the commandos began to board the ships.

http://www.steynonline.com/5007/it-not-our-world

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, and even more of it in the nation’s publishing catalogue. Robert Kagan has noticed the resurgence of declinism; he doesn’t care for it; and The World America Made is his response to it. For the record, I am not a declinist: I’m way beyond that, and am more of a collapsist, as may be adjudged from the title of my own contribution to the genre, After America, and even more from its subtitle, “Get Ready for Armageddon.” As I’m always at pains to point out, an author doesn’t get into the apocalyptic doom-mongering biz because he wants it to happen. As anyone who’s tried enforcing his copyright in China or the old Soviet Union or your average nickel-‘n’-dime Third World basket case well knows, in a world without Western civilization the royalty checks are going to be a lot smaller. So you write the head-for-the-hills stuff in hopes of preventing the need to.

Similarly, Kagan’s entry into the field is designed to help ensure that it doesn’t happen. He is an eminent thinker, consulted by Romney, quoted favorably by Obama, but don’t hold either against him. I have a high regard for him, too. In the early years of the century, he came up with a line that, as geopolitical paradigmatic drollery goes, is better than Jon Stewart’s writing staff could muster: “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.” Granted, even at the time, one was aware that many Americans were trending very Venusian, but the gag was worth it just for the way it infuriated all the right Continentals. Nothing so deftly distilled emerges from The World America Made, an extended essay that paints with a very broad brush. This time around, Kagan hangs his thesis on the film It’s a Wonderful Life, although he’s not quite confident enough in the conceit to call the book It’s a Wonderful World. Instead, he offers section headings like “Meet George Bailey: What Is American about the American World Order?”

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/301250/chicago-way-john-fund Every president comes to Washington with a coterie of outside advisers, friends, and fixers they’ve picked up during the course of a career. Eventually one or more of them becomes controversial. Richard Nixon had Bebe Rebozo. Jimmy Carter had his brother Billy and Bert Lance. Ronald Reagan had Mike Deaver. Bill Clinton had many […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/301119/two-three-many-obamas-victor-davis-hanson As the campaign heats up, one problem is that we continue to meet lots of different Barack Obamas — to such a degree that we don’t know which, if any, is really president. I think the president believes that private-equity firms harm the economy and that their CEOs are at best indifferent and sometimes […]

Raul Castro’s Daughter Endorses Obama

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/30/raul-castro%e2%80%99s-daughter-endorses-obama/

“If I were a U.S. citizen I’d vote for Obama for president,” boasted Mariela Castro during her San Francisco conference last week. “I think he is sincere, I think he speaks from the heart.” To cheers and applause from the San Franciscan crowd Raul Castro’s daughter also proclaimed that “what we want is the power of emancipation through socialism.”

Last year, former Democratic president Jimmy Carter thoroughly charmed Mariela’s father and uncle in Havana. “We greeted each other as old friends,” gushed Carter regarding his meeting with Fidel Castro.

“In 2002, we received him warmly,” reciprocated Castro. “Now, I reiterated to him our respect and esteem.”

“Jimmy Carter was the best of all U.S. Presidents,” gushed Raul Castro while seeing his American guest off personally and jovially.

Peter Beinart: Trojan Horse in the Temple

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/30/peter-beinart-trojan-horse-in-the-temple/

Peter Beinart, author of the recently published The Crisis of Zionism and editor of the Daily Beast’s “Open Zion” blog, has been criss-crossing the nation on a speaking tour for months, speaking at synagogues and to Jewish student groups on college campuses. He sometimes lectures alone, and sometimes engages in “debates” with individuals whose areas of disagreement with him are limited.

American Jews are not alone in laying out the welcome mat for Beinart. Within the past week, the Jerusalem Post published an editorial welcoming Beinart into the “big tent” of “Zionism,” and commending his call for a boycott of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as “well-intentioned” and somehow different from similar calls by foreign governments. In an unprecedented move, the Jerusalem Post’s weekly columnist Isi Leibler was compelled to condemn his own newspaper’s editorial as “idiotic.”

Why are we Jews laying out the red carpet to this man? And why, in general, are we Jews so friendly and deferential to our worst enemies?

One reason is that, despite the efforts of our enemies through the ages to portray us as super-sophisticated criminal masterminds, we Jews are actually very simple-minded and naive, at least where our enemies are concerned.

Beinart professes at every opportunity to love Israel and to even be a “Zionist.” He boasts that he even has an Israeli flag displayed on the wall of his six-year-old son’s room. This seems to render his Jewish audiences oblivious to Beinart’s repetition and endorsement of nearly every element of the Arab world’s anti-Israel narrative and his overwhelmingly negative characterization of Israel as an “undemocratic” society.

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/30/bold-bill-in-senate-to-stop-palestinian-refugee-scam
The US Senate Appropriations Committee has approved an important amendment to a bill. Proposed by Republican Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois, the amendment would change the definition of “Palestinian refugee” such that the number of people now given that status would shrink from about five million to about thirty thousand.

The U.S. currently contributes annually about $250 million of the approximately $600 million budget of UNRWA, the UN agency that provides housing, education, and welfare to Palestinian “refugees.” The U.S. has funneled a total of $4.4 billion to UNRWA since it was founded in 1948.

Under the Kirk amendment, the funding to those no longer considered refugees would not necessarily end; they could be defined as poverty cases. But only the thirty thousand, instead of five million, would still be designated as refugees.

What explains the vast differential in numbers? Before and during Israel’s 1948-49 War for Independence, about 650,000 Palestinian Arabs (many of them very recent immigrants from other Arab countries) left the territories that became Israel. About thirty thousand of them are still alive today.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/30/texas-university-cancels-book-with-israeli-authors/

Texas University Cancels Book with Israeli Authors

A female Arab author claims a “cherished victory” by forcing the University of Texas to scrap the publication of an anthology of women’s voices from the Middle East – because two of the twenty-nine writers were Israeli.

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UT Austin was planning to publish the book in honor of the late American scholar Elizabeth Fernai, a professor there whose life and work were focused on the Middle East.

At first, novelist Huzama Habayeb was delighted to contribute as one of fifteen Arab writers. But that turned to “horror,” as a Gulf News editorial put it, when she realized that the collection would also feature two Israeli women, Yehudit Hendel and Orly Castel-Bloom. Habayeb withdrew her manuscript, complaining to the Center that Israel is an “occupier” of her land “Palestine” – although she was born in Kuwait, raised in Jordan, lives in Dubai, and has never set foot in Israel.

The university accepted her withdrawal but moved forward with plans to publish. Taken aback by this, Habayeb determined to ban the book altogether. She urged other Arab contributors to withdraw their manuscripts. A friend, Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour who is married to a Palestinian poet, was the first to go along. Then others got onboard.

The Center shrugged and said the book was already at the printers and would be published as is. Habayeb wasn’t about to give up. “There are academic boycott movements around the world protesting the Israeli occupation,” she said, then incorrectly claimed that “the only two countries where they don’t exist are the United States and Israel.” She threatened to embarrass the university: “It doesn’t need a genius to figure out that the Texas center wanted to resolve the issue quickly and silently.”

How Can Obama’s Middle East Policy Possibly Get Worse? Answer: Look at Syria

http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2012/05/29/how-can-obamas-middle-east-policy-possibly-get-worse-answer-look-at-syria/?print=1

Some of my readers are unhappy that I keep criticizing President Barak Obama and his government. The problem, however, is that this administration keeps doing terrible things in the Middle East. And the most damning evidence on these actions comes not from Obama’s enemies but from the administration itself and the supportive mass media.

Here’s the latest such item:

“U.S. Hopes Assad Can Be Eased Out with Russia’s Aid,” by Helene Cooper and Mark Landler, in the New York Times.

For almost three years, Obama insisted he would win over the Syrian dictatorship and make it America’s friend rather than Iran’s number-one ally. That was ludicrous. Forced by the uprising to back away from Damascus, the Obama Administration has spent almost a year bumbling about what to do.

The U.S. government’s main activity was to entrust to the Turkish Islamist regime the job of forming an umbrella Syrian opposition leadership. Not surprisingly, Ankara pursued its own interest by assembling a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated group, the Syrian National Congress. Though several members resigned, complaining of the radical Islamist control, the Obama Administration is still trying to force hostile oppositionists to join.

Now the administration has unveiled a new and equally terrible policy. I’ll let the New York Times’ reporters explain it:

“President Obama will push for the departure of President Bashar al-Assad under a plan that calls for a negotiated political settlement that would satisfy Syrian opposition groups but that could leave remnants of Assad’s government in place. The success of the plan hinges on Russia, one of Assad’s staunchest allies, which has strongly opposed his removal. Obama, administration officials said, will press the proposal with President Putin of Russia at their meeting next month. Obama’s national security adviser raised the plan with Putin in Moscow three weeks ago.”

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/05/old_tyrants_never_dietheyre_honored_by_the_un.html at May 30, 2012 – 06:02:07 AM CDT

THIS THUG WASTED AND TRASHED ZIMBABWE AND TURNED IT INTO A FAMINE AND EPIDEMIC RIDDEN SEWER. RHODESIA WAS THE MOST PRODUCTIVE AND SELF SUFFICIENT NATION IN AFRICA AND MUGABE (WHO WAS ELECTED BY A POPULAR MAJORITY) WAS THE POSTER BOY FOR THE “NEW AFRICA- ONE MAN ONE VOTE” MOVEMENT….RSK

No, this move by the UN to ask Robert Mugabe, former tyrant of Zimbabwe, accused of ethnic cleansing and bankrupting his country by allowing 10,000% inflation, to be a “leader for tourism” does not show the dysfunctionality of the United Nations. Nor does it show that the UN is a useless, hopeless gaggle of muddle headed nincompoops.

Right on both counts.

Using Robert Mugabe in any capacity, for any reason, under any circumstances reveals the UN to be just plain evil.

Guardian:

Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe has been asked by the UN to champion tourism. Photograph: Aaron Ufumeli/EPA/Corbis

With a line-up that includes Drew Barrymore, David Beckham, Orlando Bloom, and Ricky Martin, the UN’s choice of ambassadors has been known to cause raised eyebrows or the odd smirk.

Seldom, however, has there been such anger, or questioning of the organisation’s credibility, as that greeting the appointment of a new international envoy for tourism: Robert Mugabe.

Improbable as it seems, the Zimbabwean president, who is widely accused of ethnic cleansing, rigging elections, terrorising opposition, controlling media and presiding over a collapsed economy, has been endorsed as a champion of efforts to boost global holidaymaking.