RUTHFULLY YOURS

EdZiegler.Blogspot.com

For many years our elected officials have stated that Israel is an important ally to the United States. As with any political issue there are differences of opinions. The treatment of Israel is one such issue. The opinion, actions and lack of actions toward Israel by the current Administration presents a picture of how the President considers Israel.

While campaigning for the presidency in 2008 the then Senator Barack Obama said, “We must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state with Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided.” In August 2012 Obama’s Press Secretary Jay Carney, avoided a direct answer as to which city the U.S. recognizes as the capital of Israel. It should have been an easy answer since, in 1995, Congress passed a law that states the U.S. recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

In 2010 President Obama humiliated Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu by not extending the usual red carpet treatment given to visiting dignitaries, and this to an ally. There was no press conference, no photographed handshake and Netanyahu was taken through a side entrance. President Obama also decided not to eat (as normal) with the dignitary (Netanyahu) and eat with his family instead.

During 2009, 2010 and 2011 President Obama visited approximately 46 countries including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq and Egypt where he bowed to King Abdullah showing respect to a higher leader. Yet In the three plus years he did not make time to visit Israel supposedly, a good ally.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/frank-gaffney/norquist-repudiates-romney-ryan-on-defense

Norquist Repudiates Romney-Ryan on Defense

On Monday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, were sharply criticized over their commitment to reverse massive budget cuts Team Obama is making at the expense of our military capabilities and national security.

What made this attack notable – and potentially very damaging to the GOP standard-bearers – is that it came, not from the Democrats, but from a prominent Republican political operative, Grover Norquist. It is hard to see how his contention that Messrs. Romney and Ryan can’t be trusted to spend wisely on defense will help anybody but their opponents.

In remarks to the bipartisan Center for the National Interest, Norquist threw down the gauntlet to the Republican ticket. He declared he would fight defense spending increases, or even relief from the next, debilitating round of cuts. These amount to a further half-a-trillion dollars in across-the-board cuts over ten years under what has been called a “doomsday mechanism” known on Capitol Hill as “sequestration.” What makes matters much worse is that these cuts come on top of nearly $800 billion in Pentagon budget reductions already in the pipeline – a fact the anti-tax activist studiously ignores.

For a guy whose ostensible expertise is domestic economic matters, it is doubly surprising that Grover Norquist fails to recognize another disastrous effect these enormous reductions in defense spending will have – on employment and communities all over the country. Estimates run as high as 1 million jobs lost and $59 billion in direct lost earnings and $86.4 billion in gross state product in the first year alone. (For a detailed analysis of the impact by congressional district, see the Defense Breakdown Reports at www.FortheCommonDefense.org/reports.)

What Norquist did do, however, is directly take on the GOP ticket by opining that “Other people need to lead the argument on how can conservatives lead a fight to have a serious national defense without wasting money,” Norquist said. “I wouldn’t ask Ryan to be the reformer of the defense establishment.”

The question occurs: Just who does Grover Norquist think would be better suited to be stewards of the “defense establishment” and the national security it is charged with providing? Having no expertise on these matters himself, in whom does he have more confidence than the people the Republican Party hopes will lead this nation for the next four years?

http://sarahhonig.com/2012/08/17/another-tack-denial-of-denial/

No matter how much denial is smugly stuffed down our throats by homegrown swaggering braggarts, any and every territory which Israel has ever ceded to its still-vital and still-implacable enemies became a breeding ground for festering terror and aggression against the still-vulnerable Jewish state.

It takes stupefying cerebral contortions to deny that this was unequivocally demonstrated in Lebanon (where Hezbollah mushroomed to monstrous proportions after Ehud Barak’s unilateral midnight flight of 2000), in Judea and Samaria (whose cities Israel relinquished post-Oslo), in the Gaza Strip (which in 2005 we ditched for the third time via Ariel Sharon’s disastrous disengagement) and in Sinai, whose border with Israel now looms as the most potentially explosive.

No degree of denial-neurosis can belittle this. Each Israeli retreat, without a single solitary exception, comes back to haunt us with vicious vengeance.

Reckless retreat allowed Hezbollah rockets to reach Hadera (they can probably do harm further south too). Reckless retreat allowed Jenin and its sisters to fill our streets, markets and buses with suicide bombers.

Reckless retreat allowed Gaza to rocket Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheba, Yavne, Gedera and more. Rishon Lezion was put on notice.

Nevertheless, incomprehensively, a self-destructive denial syndrome was sanctified over and over as Israel’s nationally sanctioned policy. Withdrawing from territory has become a cyclical compulsion for Israel – nearly as old as the state itself.

We got into the routine already in 1949 at the end of our War of Independence – after seven Arab armies invaded newborn Israel with hoarsely broadcast genocidal intent. By the time their blusterous belligerence was thwarted at great cost – 6,000 Israeli dead out of a population of 600,000 – the improvised army of the tiny, terrifyingly out manned and terrifyingly outgunned Israel ended up controlling a chunk of the Sinai Peninsula. Incredibly against the odds, infant Israel had defeated the mighty Egyptian army that moved menacingly toward Tel Aviv with the avowed goal of obliterating the upstart “Zionist entity.”

But Israel withdrew in the framework of the Armistice Agreement (whose green-tinted non-border demarcations begot the now-hallow “Green Line”). In no time, Sinai was filled to the brim with military-hardware and marauders called Fedayeen.

After seven years of bleeding, Israel reentered Sinai again in 1956. At that time, Israel also took the adjacent ever-threatening Gaza Strip that jutted along the coast in the direction of Israel’s dense population centers.

However, the fruits of 1956’s stunning victory were surrendered in 1957 at Washington’s insistence.

It was the second time Israel departed from Sinai and the first time it abandoned Gaza. After regaining dominion, Egypt’s head-honcho Gamal Abdel Nasser perpetrated gruesome purges and frightened Gazans off ever cooperating with Israelis.

Thereafter, Sinai was supposed to be overseen by UN forces, but in 1967 Nasser effortlessly booted them out to facilitate his imminent attack on Israel.

That spawned the Six Day War in which he again lost Sinai and the Gaza strip.

In 1979, though, Israel and Egypt signed their peace treaty which obligated Israel to give up every inch of Sinai. Israel’s pullback was completed in 1982. Things were never quite nifty after that, despite prodigious bamboozlement by serial denial merchants.

Sinai’s Beduin were scarcely likely to toe Cairo’s line. Lawlessness and smuggling are their livelihood and their insubordination went chronically unchecked, under all Egyptian regimes. Any attempts to control them were met by violent opposition.

International agreements made no impression on the tribal gangs that de facto rule Sinai.

Similarly unimpressed is Egyptian bureaucracy, the regime notwithstanding. Its super-snarled red tape effectively stymies all governmental executive decisions. Even topmost policy edicts are unrecognizably ground down as they’re subjected to arbitrary whims enforced along the way by inflated cadres of sluggish officials. Egypt being Egypt, Cairo’s commands are never dependably implemented.

Disorderly domains of this sort irresistibly beckon al-Qaida – be it in Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Eritrea etc. Sinai fits well into this pattern. Assorted jihadist extravaganzas – from targeting tourists to blowing up gas pipelines – proliferated in the peninsula’s opportune setting. But the Arab Spring has opened new vistas for the forces of obdurate Islam and enhanced preexisting ones. Foreign firebrands, whose strings are pulled from Gazan control centers, are flocking in.

The fact that the Muslim Brotherhood now holds sway in Egypt makes little difference. In the world of Osama bin Laden’s successor, Egyptian Ayman al- Zawahiri, even Cairo’s current headliners are categorized as infidels because he alleges they make nice to the West. It’s all a question of gradation. What to us appears inherently anti-Western, from Zawahiri’s perspective is not nearly enough.

There’s more than a little irony here. New president Mohamed Morsy’s Brotherhood credentials didn’t spare him from the onus of having to replicate the repressive crackdowns practiced by his despised predecessors. He cannot afford failure to assert authority as it’ll allow al-Qaida and linked outfits to make mockery of him. This is doubly ironic because Morsy’s Cairo had ridiculed pinpointed Israeli warnings about havoc in Sinai.

http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/20390-Democrats-Line-Up-Against-Special-Operators.html Larry Bailey unleashed a prepared Democrat chorus to discredit former military special operators who oppose President Obama’s re-election. “I have to admit that I’m a Birther,” said SOS founder Larry Bailey, a retired 27-year veteran of the Navy SEALs, in an interview. “If there were a jury of 12 good men and women and […]

Israeli gas, Iranian Missles, and the Russian Price Tag http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3287/israeli-gas-iranian-missiles-and-russia-price-tag In the on-going debate over an Israeli attack on Iran, attention has largely focused over the last few weeks on Israel and America, for good reason. But what about Russia? A very senior person in the Israeli gas industry tells me: “The Russians have been […]

The ‘Chains’ of Progressive Politics By Frank Salvato
http://www.basicsproject.org/
The uproar over the “chains” comment made by Vice President Joe Biden continues, and rightly so. The comment Mr. Biden made while addressing a predominantly Black audience at a campaign rally in Danville, VA – a town on the border of swing states Virginia and North Carolina – was not only racist in nature (whether intentional or not), it was also operational. That is why President Obama, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, senior campaign advisor David Axelrod and the full contingent of Obama campaign mouthpieces issued statements in defense of Mr. Biden; statements that refused to condemn the language.

During the August 14th rally, the Vice President said:

“[Romney] said in the first hundred days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, unchain Wall Street…They’re going to put ya’ll back in chains.”

True, it is a documented fact that Mr. Biden has a long and incredible history of making racially insensitive gaffes, but a cursory examination of the stage at the event shows that the dais was adorned with teleprompter hardware, meaning that his talk was scripted. Whether Mr. Biden chose to go off script we will never know, but his perceived gaffe certainly achieved four things:

1) It changed the subject from the nomination of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate;

2) It changed the national dialogue from a serious dialogue about the ideological crossroads a which our nation stands (Liberty v. Democratic Socialism), back to the inanity of yet another Progressive Chicago Machine smear side topic that has nothing to do with the very real issues facing our country this election cycle.

3) It got the race-baiting slavery innuendo out there for the media and Progressive activists to feast on;

4) And, most importantly, at a time when the Obama Administration’s Justice Department is under fire for myriad racially charged actions of “social justice” bias, it afforded Mr. Obama to state – for the record – that he and his campaign do not engage in racial politics.

To the last point, a greater affront to the truth has never been uttered by a President of the United States. Mr. Obama’s entire “social justice” crusade is an exercise in divide-and-conquer, Alinsky-inspired racism. The fact that Mr. Obama intentionally went out of his way to defend the racist words of Mr. Biden – the man who said, on camera, “In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking…” – suggests that that there is some semblance of agreement with Mr. Biden’s statement regarding the “chains” of slavery.

And why should we not feel that the President may identify with Mr. Biden’s so-called “gaffe”? Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, spent twenty years in the pews of the Trinity United Church of Christ, a church that preaches Black Liberation Theology, identified by DiscoverTheNetworks.org as:

“…closely related to the broader phenomenon of liberation theology, which calls for social activism, class struggle, and even violent revolution aimed at overturning the ‘capitalist oppressors of the poor’ and installing, in its place, a socialist utopia that will finally enfranchise the poor and downtrodden. As an extension of this movement, black liberation theology similarly seeks to foment Marxist revolutionary fervor but one founded on racial rather than class solidarity.”

Now, I am not one who signs on to the blatant impossibility that someone can sit every Sunday in a church pew listening to – arguably – a dynamic speaker like Rev. Jeremiah Wight and not take anything from it. The congregation at Trinity United Church of Christ isn’t like a congregation that attends out of a sense of obligation. It is a congregation that is engaged; that feeds off the message being delivered. To believe that Mr. and Mrs. Obama “didn’t take anything away” from their time at Trinity United Church of Christ is to believe in the tooth fairy.

This is why I believe that Mr. Obama defended his Vice President; there was a part of him – and maybe a large part of him – that agreed with what Mr. Biden said. Given the dogma of Black Liberation Theology the argument can be made successfully.

But I digress…

While the President may or may not (ahem) agree with the statement Mr. Biden made – contemptible at best, racist in the least, it was an operational statement. What do I mean by an operational statement? Mr. Biden’s statement served several purposes, as stated above. It is a tactic used by unscrupulous lawyers, opportunistic Chicago politicians and disingenuous tyrants.

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/08/17/huma-abedins-muslim-minority-affairs-its-not-just-a-journal/

“Assimilation is a crime against humanity.” So said Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamic supremacist who is both prime minister of Turkey and a close chum of President Obama’s.

The assertion ought to be infamous. But this is, after all, Islam we are talking about — meaning, we are not talking about it. You won’t read it in the American media, nor will you hear it from our bipartisan Beltway profiles in courage. Both the Obama Left and the Republican establishment are deeply invested in the fantasy that Erdogan, like Islam itself, is our moderate ally — ironic, given that Erdogan himself is profoundly offended at the very suggestion that there is such a thing as “moderate Islam.” Yup, what you have been told is the plinth on which American Middle East policy rests is, according to Erdogan, not only a house-of-cards but “an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that’s it.”

The prime minister is an excitable sort. Waxing metaphoric about his aggressive, ascendant ideology, he has observed, “The mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets, the cupolas our helmets, and the faithful our soldiers.” But he is inspired to new heights of fury by the admonition that Muslims living in Europe and North America should assimilate into Western societies. He first called that suggestion a “crime against humanity” in 2008, speaking to a throng of Turkish immigrants in Cologne. It was the obligation of Muslims, he elaborated, to cling to the tenets and culture of Islam. Yes, Muslims in places like Germany must integrate, in the sense of becoming politically active, of pressuring Western societies to give Islam a wide berth. But Muslims should never assimilate – they should use that wide berth to establish Islam’s authority.

Two years later, given an opportunity to recant during a joint press conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Erdogan doubled down. “Assimilation,” he maintained, is “the permutation of the values of humans.” It puts “pressure on individuals to leave aside their customs and traditions, and such a behavior happens to be a crime against humanity.”

The message could not have been clearer: Muslims are in the West to change the West, not to be changed by it.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/sound-the-trumpet-the-united-states-and-human-rights-promotion-interview-with-lawrence-j-haas

In the introduction to his remarkable book Sound The Trumpet-The United States and Human Rights Promotion, Lawrence J. Haas avers that the United States has been the world’s leading promoter of human rights over the course of modern history, by example and by determination to pressure repressive regimes and engage with and inspire their dissidents.

While giving requisite credit to other religions and cultures, Haas states that the concept and practice of these essential freedoms is generally a Western and Judeo/Christian phenomenon which evolved from the Protestant Reformation, the Founding Principles of the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism. However, in this book, Haas, a senior fellow for United States foreign policy at The American Foreign Policy Council and former Communications Director for Vice President Albert Gore, concentrates on the period since World War 11, and discusses the contradictions between the desire to promote human rights in every corner of the world and the inherent collision with national interest, the sovereignty of other nations, unwillingness to commit military force and the possible aftermath that replaces one thug with another, that confounded every administration.

The first chapter “America the Essential” is a paean to America. As Haas eloquently states, America is special in “…that we have values to cherish and a system to emulate, that we are a tool of Providence with a mission to fulfill, that we can inspire others around the world and change the course of history, and that our system of government is simply better than the alternatives.”

These are strong and welcome and inspiring words in the present cultural climate when the media, politicians and academics so often deride our values, our mission, our goals and our religious beliefs. How often do we hear from the left the word “imperialist” coupled with the claim that we trample on people’s cultural legacies when we seek to impose freedoms they neither crave nor need. How often have we heard purveyors of “real-politick” and isolationism scoff at popular uprisings and the notion that a principled and muscular stance on human rights imperils our trade, our supply of energy, our alliances and our national security? Haas gives the lie to both in chapter after chapter by demonstrating how successive Presidents have used the “bully pulpit,” and economic sanctions as well as foreign aid to persuade tyrants and encourage their opposition. One need only revisit the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union which is meticulously detailed to be convinced.

A powerful polemicist in defense of Jews, Israel By ARNOLD AGES

From Chicago Jewish Star Vol. 22 (Aug. 17-30, 2012), p. 9

I must confess to have experienced an initial disquiet upon approaching Edward Alexander’s collection of very literate reviews, essays and think pieces, some of the latter based on books and articles which he has analyzed.

This is a genre which, in past encounters with several examples, has inevitably left me somewhat disappointed because of the lack of internal unity in the themes explored.

Alexander’s book, The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal (Transaction Publishers, 2012, 248 pp., $34.95), however, is a welcome exception because he has, in each exquisitely polished entry, identified what Rabelais used to call la substantifique moelle (“the essential marrow”) of the issue.

The marrow here is the disgraceful assault on Jews and the State of Israel coming from both gentiles and Jews in the last decade.

In the 10 full-length book reviews and the 17 essays and think pieces (derived in part from his Gargantuan reading habits) Alexander proceeds first, in an orderly fashion, to document the anti-Semitic rot which courses through the thinking of some of the luminaries of English literature, before moving to the more current war against Jews and Israel, a war aided and abetted by misguided members of the Jewish tribe.

Some of those tribal members who live in Israel are also the special target of the author’s critical volleys.

“The other country, right or wrong” is the way Alexander characterizes the attitudes of some of the more repugnant representatives of the Israeli left.

Alexander is a powerful polemicist who possesses a biting sense of humor, which he deploys in an essay about how deceased Jewish grandmothers are being converted to radical anti-Israel positions by extreme Jewish leftists today and made to parrot anti-Zionist and anti-Israel tropes. (And we thought that only the Mormons were engaged, mutatis mutandi, in this kind of mischief!)

17 08 2012 Joel Fishman Makor Rishon

The Dangerous Link between Delegitimization and Sedition: When we think about the campaign of delegitimization against Israel, the international efforts of the Palestinians and their allies to isolate and harm Israel come to mind. We may also recall the Durban debacle of 2011, the boycott of Israeli products, and the refusal of some performers to appear before audiences in Israel. In reality, boundaries are unimportant, because a basic type of delegitimization takes place unrelentingly in far off lands and within Israel’s domestic discourse.

I am referring to the ongoing campaign to discredit the idea of the Jewish state and particularly its prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu. Most recently, a group of agitators, prominent intellectuals, and fashionable authors have accused the Prime Minister of being a dictator, a megalomaniac, and war criminal. Moreover, they have claimed that the existing form of government is not a real democracy. According to them, the Prime Minister, the government, and the Jewish State lack legitimacy and virtue. They no longer deserve to hold office and even to exist.

This aggressive and confrontational form of delegitimization exceeds the bounds of civil discourse. In social-science terms, these adversaries reject the basic paradigm of the State of Israel, its social and political fabric, its legal organization and in its most basic sense, its constitution.

We constantly receive these messages in our social environment, in the media, and in the marketplace of ideas. They have become so pervasive that the public nearly does not pay attention to them, and this is dangerous. Words are used like weapons, and the violence of words can easily mutate into physical violence, as it has during the past two years. We should be mindful of the ease with which such ideas and slogans can be internalized.

At present the timing of a major assault on the Prime Minister and the Israeli system of democracy is related both to Israel’s current security situation and to the recent visit of the Republican frontrunner in the American elections. Mitt Romney’s visit to Jerusalem may have been much more successful than reported in the press and, to the surprise of many, his message about the relationship between a nation’s culture and accomplishments received a surprisingly sympathetic resonance worldwide.