RUTHFULLY YOURS

What is the Meaning of Religious Freedom? Molly Pitcher

From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. Both the leaders and the people themselves would soon forget the importance of these principles and stop fighting for their preservation.

Thomas Jefferson, 1782 1

Virginia’s initial draft of the Declaration of Rights and constitution was written by George Mason, who drawing from John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, wrote:

All men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the magistrate, unless, under color of religion, any man disturb the peace, the happiness, or safety of society, or of individuals. 2

James Madison proposed,

All men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience, unpunished, and unrestrained by the magistrate, unless the preservation of equal liberty and the existence of the State are manifestly endangered.3

With this language, Madison turned freedom of conscience into a “Natural and absolute right.”4

James Madison, father of our country, was nothing short of brilliant when putting forth an argument for what he believed truth. One of the clearest examples of his power of reason took place in a debate with Patrick Henry over “A Bill for Establishing a Provision for the Teachers of the Christian Religion.” 5

The bill was intended to encourage religion through taxation and was based on a widely held belief that Christianity guided men’s morals, restrained their vices, and helped to preserve the peace. Patrick Henry’s bill had wide support, including that of George Washington. With his bill, “Voters could designate the denomination or even the specific church that their tax dollars would go to. Those who didn’t want to support religion could target their tax dollars toward education more broadly.”6

Congressional Elections – Critical to US-Israel Relations
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought”
“Israel Hayom”, July 25, 2012
http://bit.ly/M8nOOA

During a June 15, 2012 seminar at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Dr. Bill Schneider, a leading expert on US politics, reaffirmed that both chambers of Congress play a key role in determining US-Israel relations.

In 1990, US Secretary of the Navy asked Senator Inouye, Chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, to delete from the proposed defense bill an amendment to upgrade the port of Haifa for the benefit of the Sixth Fleet: “Senator, I am the Secretary of the Navy, and I know that the Six Fleet does not need the upgrade.” Inouye retorted: “Mr. Secretary, according to the US Constitution, I supervise you, and I have determined that the Sixth Fleet would benefit from such an upgrade.” Inouye’s position derived from the end of the Cold War which eroded the importance of the port of Naples, and from the gathering sandstorms from the Persian Gulf (leading to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait) which enhanced the significance of the port of Haifa for the Sixth Fleet. The port of Haifa was upgraded despite opposition by President Bush and Secretary of State Baker who orchestrated Secretary Lehman’s appeal.

The recent Egyptian turmoil exposes the uncertainty surrounding US-Egypt relations and the reliability of the port of Alexandria. Therefore, it has elevated the relevance of the Israeli ports of Haifa and Ashdod to the Sixth Fleet. It underscores the vitality of Congress as a joint-front-seat-driver in setting the national security agenda.

In November 2012, Americans will elect all 435 members of the House of Representatives, 33 U.S. senators and thousands of state and local elected officials, some of whom will eventually reach Capitol Hill. According to a July 23, 2012 Rasmussen national poll, since mid-2009, Republican congressional candidates have been systematically more popular than Democrats. 43% of likely voters would vote for Republican congressional candidates, if the election were held today, while 40% would elect Democrats.

www.TheEttingerReport.com

Israel’s Economic Culture Praised by Philips Global

Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought”
Straight from the Jerusalem Boardroom #166, August 3, 2012

While global economy deteriorates and its ripple effects erode Israel’s economic indicators (e.g., unemployment increased to 7%):

1. Frans Van Houten, the CEO of the Dutch giant, Philips Global: “Israel’s economic and organizational culture is consistent with Philips’ requirements…. Philips owes part of its enhanced performance (2nd quarter’s earnings – 17% above projections) to Israel’s excellent engineers in the imaging, data processing and data storage areas. Philips has expanded its Israeli presence and acquisitions since 1999, when it acquired part of Israel’s Elscint, then Israel’s CDP and CDC…. Philips will expand its current 600 employee research & development center (Globes Business Daily, Aug. 2, 2012). “

2. Marcos Battisti, Head of Intel Capital in Europe and Israel, hired additional investment directors in Israel, expanding Intel’s pursuit of Israeli start ups. Since 1991, Intel Capital invested in 60 Israeli companies, collaborating with Intel’s four research & development centers and two manufacturing plants in Israel (Globes, July 26). Israel’s Kayak raised $91MN in a Wall Street IPO led by Morgan Stanley (Globes, July 23). Abingworth Ventures, 7 MedHealth Ventures, Arch Ventures, MPM Capital and F3 invested $38MN in a round of private placement by Israel’s Chiasma (Globes, July 24). Battery Ventures and Bessemer Ventures led a $12MN round of private placement by Israel’s Vayyar Imaging (Globes, Aug. 3).

http://www.jinsa.org/fellowship-program/evelyn-gordon/levy-report-chance-regain-lost-diplomatic-ground

Adopting a blue-ribbon legal report reasserting the validity of Israel’s claim to the West Bank wouldn’t undermine Israel’s international image, but bolster it.

JINSA When a blue-ribbon panel of Israeli legal experts issued a report this July declaring that the West Bank isn’t “occupied territory,” but territory to which Israel has a legitimate claim, and that settlements therefore cannot be considered ipso facto illegal, it raised an outcry both in Israel and overseas. A group of prominent American Jews even wrote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to urge him against adopting the report, arguing that it would imperil both “the two-state solution, and the prestige of Israel as a democratic member of the international community,” because the latter depends on persuading the world that Israel is “committed to a two-state vision.” Many Israeli pundits voiced similar concerns.

Since the Levy Report essentially reiterates the official position of all Israeli governments, this concern seems strange. Nevertheless, its opponents are right to see it as a potential game changer. Where they err is in deeming it a negative one. In reality, the report offers Israel a golden opportunity to start regaining the diplomatic ground it has lost over the last two decades.

No honest appraisal could deny that Israel’s international standing has deteriorated since it signed the Oslo Accords in 1993. Anti-Israel boycotts, once confined to the Arab world, are now routine agenda items for universities, certain Western churches, and trade unions. Courts in several European countries have considered indicting Israeli officials for war crimes, and European polls routinely deem Israel a prime threat to world peace. References to Israel as an “apartheid state” have become commonplace, and academics and journalists openly question its very right to exist. All this would have been inconceivable 20 years ago.

This deterioration has many causes, but one is directly germane to the Levy Report: Though officially, Israel still insists on the validity of its claim to the West Bank, post-Oslo Israeli leaders have generally downplayed this claim. Instead, they have touted the Palestinians’ “legitimate and political rights” to the territory, at times even adopting the Palestinian rhetoric of “occupation.”

Their goal was well-intentioned: to show that Israel was indeed “committed to a two-state vision,” thereby creating an atmosphere conducive to peace. But once Israel stopped asserting its own rights in the West Bank, there was nobody to counter the Palestinian claim that it is “occupied Palestinian land” to which Israel has no rights whatsoever. Consequently, the unchallenged international narrative now views Israel not as a magnanimous peace-maker willing to cede territory for peace, but as an unrepentant thief who stole land and refuses to return it.

http://www.markgreenbergforcongress.com/

THE CLEAR CONSERVATIVE CHOICE ARTICULATE, SMART AND STRONG ON DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN POLICY AND DEFENSE

FOR THOSE WHO MISSED TED CRUZ ON THE CHRIS WALLACE SHOW…THE MAN IS SO HEAD AND SHOULDERS ABOVE SO MANY OF THE CANDIDATES…HE IS A REAL CONSERVATIVE, REALLY BRILLIANT, A REAL THINKER AND HE WILL BE A REAL WINNER…..

http://www.tedcruz.org/

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/08/06/renewable-fools-standard

The drought should mean an end to the ethanol subsidy — the last thing the EPA and Obama will ever surrender.

Your car will get better mileage if the price of your Thanksgiving turkey goes down, and my chain saw will start more easily. It all comes down to the price of corn, and how much ethanol the federal “Renewable Fuel Standard” mandates to be blended in gasoline.

The price of corn is going to go up sharply in the coming months because the worst drought in fifty years has brought disaster to corn farmers. According to the EPA, which has control of the Renewable Fuels Standard created by the 2005 Energy Policy Act, America grew about ten billion bushels of corn in 2000, almost half of the world’s production of 23 billion bushels. Corn was plentiful and cheap, so congressional “experts” mandated that a minimum of 7.5 billion barrels of ethanol be included in gasoline sold in 2012. (It takes about one bushel of corn to produce a gallon of ethanol.)

The actual production of ethanol in 2011 topped 11 billion gallons, more or less all of which was included in gasoline, according to an April 2012 Congressional Research Service report. Last week, the Agriculture Department lowered its projection of the 2012 corn crop by 12%.

Since 2005, the ethanol mandate has driven the average price of corn from about $2 per bushel to almost $8 per bushel, according to a January 23, 2012 CRS report. But all of the supposed benefits of the mandate have not appeared. According to that same report, our dependence on foreign oil hasn’t been reduced at all, and there is no evidence that the ethanol mandate has driven energy prices down.

If those benefits were going to happen, they would have in times when the corn crop was plentiful. But now because of the drought, only about 40 percent of the 2012 corn crop is being rated “good to excellent,” i.e., worth harvesting. The rest may have to be abandoned. Corn futures prices are rising, which means the cost of the most-used feed for chicken, cattle, and other livestock will rise as much or more than the price of feed corn.

The arithmetic is simple: the more feed corn is used to produce ethanol, the less is available to feed those chickens, cattle, and turkeys. About 40 percent of our corn crop is used for ethanol, not for feeding livestock or people. Simply put, the ethanol mandate is forcing the prices of protein foods to rise and will continue to do so as long as it exists. And the mandate costs the federal government billions because gasoline blenders are given a reported 45 cents per gallon tax credit for using ethanol in their gasoline.

Last week, a broad coalition of meat and poultry producers petitioned EPA administrator Lisa Jackson to waive the ethanol mandate, saying the Renewable Fuel Standard “directly affected the supply and cost of feed in major agricultural sectors of this country, causing the type of economic harm that justifies issuance of an RFS waiver.”

If only facts mattered, the EPA would waive the ethanol mandate for this year and Congress would kill it for the years that follow. There is no good reason for it: the price of corn will drop slightly, but every American who buys corn for food or to feed his livestock will benefit. And all of us who have to use gasoline containing ethanol will find that our machinery works better and more efficiently.

Ethanol is corrosive and has a lot of water in it, so you can’t leave your gas-powered mower or generator filled over the winter unless you want the inevitable ethanol sludge to destroy its carburetor. Ethanol cannot be shipped by pipeline as pure petroleum-based fuels can, making it still more expensive.

Cruz: Tea party ‘overwhelmingly’ behind Romney
Sean Lengell

Ted Cruz, who rode a tea party wave to win the Texas Republican Senate nomination last week, said Sunday the movement will “overwhelmingly” support Mitt Romney in the November presidential election. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz22lduwKXl
EDITORIAL: Obama arming al Qaeda

EDITORIAL: Obama arming al Qaeda

Presidential ticket: Roseanne and Cindy ON THE YUCH PARTY….RSK
CNN
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Blogs
Actress and comedian Roseanne Barr won the presidential nomination of the Peace and Freedom Party Saturday in Los Angeles. Barr’s vice presidential running-mate is anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz22leW5FWQ
UAE defends crackdown on political dissent
Associated Press
Monday, August 6, 2012
News
The United Arab Emirates attorney general says suspects detained in an ongoing crackdown on political dissent have confessed to plans to jeopardize security and to having links to foreign groups. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz22les3TBu

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/%e2%80%9cour-streets-are-islamic%e2%80%9d-sharia-on-the-west-bank/

The Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida reported last week that six people have been arrested in the West Bank and one of them sentenced to a month in prison for “desecrating the holiness of the month of Ramadan by eating in public during daytime.” “Our streets are Islamic,” said the chairman of the Palestinian sharia court, and legislation should be enacted to “severely punish” anyone who eats publicly during the Muslim holy month.

Fasting during Ramadan is one of the five pillars of Islam, and under Islamic law, eating and drinking, smoking, and sexual relations are prohibited from sunrise until sunset during that month. According to the Times of Israel, article 274 of the Palestinian penal code states that citizens who violate Ramadan by eating or smoking in public can be punished by a month in prison or a fine of 15 Jordanian dinars – about 21 U.S. dollars.

In addition to his warning about the gravity of violating Ramadan, Sheikh Ida’is, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority Supreme Court for Sharia Law, said even non-Muslims and those who cannot fast for health reasons should be prohibited from eating in public. He explained in a Palestinian TV interview:

We have to monitor the streets and severely punish anyone who [eats] in public during Ramadan, and this is the responsibility of the security forces. Our streets are Islamic, praise Allah. Any person caught committing this sin in public during Ramadan has to be imprisoned until the end of Ramadan, as an example to others. I call upon others [non-Muslims] to be considerate of Muslims’ feelings.

Approximately 10 per cent of Palestinians in the West Bank are Christian, so presumably those Christians and other infidels are expected to respect Muslim feelings at risk of being thrown in jail or, if the sheikh gets his way, of more severe penalties. The host of that same TV program said:

If someone doesn’t fast for some reason [during Ramadan] because he follows a different religion or has health reasons, it’s his right. However, he breaks the spirit of Ramadan by eating or drinking in public or at work.

And anyone, even non-Muslims, “breaking the spirit of Ramadan” is considered to have committed a serious offense against Islam itself. The Egypt Independent reported on a fatwa delivered last week by Dar al-Ifta, a centuries-old institute within Cairo’s Al-Azhar University that issues sharia-based religious opinions, declaring that authorities take steps to ensure that no one, including non-Muslims, openly violates the fast in public places. The fatwa reads, in part, that such an act

is not a personal freedom, but a form of chaos and an attack on the sanctity of Islam. Those who openly break the fast during Ramadan commit an overt sin, which is forbidden. It also goes against public taste in a Muslim country, and is a clear violation of the sanctity of the community and respect for religious freedoms. [Emphasis added]

In Saudi Arabia too, authorities issued their standard Ramadan warning this year to all non-Muslim foreigners to “show consideration for feelings of Muslims” and “preserve the sacred Islamic rituals” by observing the fast in public until the end of the month; otherwise, a ministry statement said, Saudi authorities will cancel violators’ work contracts and expel them.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/alan-dershowitz-vs-david-solway-on-obama-and-israel/print/

Et Tu, Dershowitz?
By David Solway

A year and a half ago, I posted an article on this site expressing my skepticism of Alan Dershowitz’s insights into American politics and questioning his bias in favor of President Obama and the Democratic party. I wrote there: “when it comes to the international figure who may well be the most serious threat to Israel’s well-being and perhaps even to its survival—by whom I mean not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but Barack Obama—Dershowitz’s pen tilts to the “sinister” side of the page as he no doubt meditates his still unwritten The Case for Obama.” I pointed out that Dershowitz does not so much as notice what National Post columnist George Jonas called “the malodorous miasma of gall, social engineering zeal, anti-Semitism and Arabist agenda that emanates from the Obama administration.” Mark Steyn probably said it best: “I suppose it’s conceivable that there are a few remaining suckers out there who still believe Barack Obama is the great post-partisan, fiscally responsible, pragmatic centrist he played so beguilingly just a year ago.”

True to form, Dershowitz has just published a column in The Jerusalem Post in which he declares his support for Obama as the president who is “best for America and for the world,” and, of course, for Israel. As a trained and practiced lawyer, he proceeds to marshal the evidence for his case. But as critical readers, we must see that the evidence is, to put it mildly, unpersuasive, if not disturbingly misleading.

Dershowitz argues that Obama is “a pragmatic, centrist liberal who has managed—with some necessary compromises—to bring us the first important healthcare legislation in recent history, appointed excellent justices to the Supreme Court, supported women’s rights, eliminated the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, maintained the wall of separation between church and state [and] kept up an effective war against terrorism.”

Well, let’s see. A “pragmatic, centrist liberal” is, by all reasonable counts, precisely what Obama is not. His record and his antecedents show beyond the slightest doubt that he is a far-left ideologue who wishes to “fundamentally transform” America into a redistributionist welfare state on the failing European model. The “excellent judges” he has appointed to the Supreme Court include Sonia Sotomayer (of “wise Latina” fame) and Elena Kagan, who did not recuse herself when voting for the Affordable Care Act, though she had “participated as ‘counselor or advisor’ of the law when she was solicitor general, and…is clearly not impartial about the fate of ObamaCare.” Obama’s support of women’s rights is arguable and many disapprove of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, but we can leave these issues to debate and opinion. As for the separation of Church and State, the Catholic Church would surely not agree following the contraception flap. His “effective war against terrorism” consists of scrubbing terms like “Islam” and “jihad” from U.S. security documents and inviting the Muslim Brotherhood, in the person of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, to the White House. (The hunting down of Osama bin Laden was already in progress during the tenure of the previous administration.)

“President Obama has kept his promises,” Dershowitz avers. But Obama’s broken promises are legion, whether it is his promise to close Guantanamo, to reverse President Bush’s anti-terrorist policies, to establish “an unprecedented level of openness in Government,” to constrain the lobbying industry, to create five million more energy jobs and keep unemployment under 8 percent, to bring down health care premiums, to halve the deficit by the end of his first term (the 2013 budget envisions a deficit of more than $1 trillion)—the list is nigh endless.