RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://yeshaviews.blogspot.co.il/2012/09/the-gauntlet.html

My e-pal Marc is probably the best guide to Israel….also

AMERICANS FOR A SAFE ISRAEL SPONSORS TWO ANNUAL TRIPS TO SEE THE REAL ISRAEL.

Join AFSI for the next Chizuk trip to Israel, Nov 7-15 2012.
For reservations call AFSI (212) 828-2424.
To see reports and photos of past trips, go to www.afsi.org.

The holiday season in Israel is readily noticed also by the increase of tourists arriving here. Indeed many even make their way out to Judea and Samaria, not only the biblical heartland, but where we actually started here in Israel, from Abraham onward. Always noticeably missing are the secular Jewish tourists, Jews who hail from Conservative and Reform congregations. They are in Israel, in fact there are always “missions” here, but their leadership makes sure to keep them away from the Jewish Heartland. Often claiming “too politically charged”, “dangerous” and many other pitiful excuses.

Funny how we can always find mainstream US Jewish “leadership” in Ramallah, but a visit to Shilo, Beit El and more, simply out of the question. Gd forbid they visit sites directly connected to their own history. Sites that would strengthen their own identity and connection, their congregations identity and connection, stated challenges they face in keeping their respective flocks at home. Why would they wish to keep their people disconnected and ignorant to their history? Why would they deny them the chance to walk in the steps of their forefathers? What are they afraid of?

I am not talking politics, simply the chance to visit these places that are so important to us as a people. They all claim to be so “pro-Israel”, so why should these places be so different.

Federations and so on, will always visit Jewish sites in other countries on “Heritage” tours, but to see their own heritage in Israel, to be denied them by their own leadership??? Seems suspicious.

http://dispatch-international.com/content/now-playing-washington-more-lies-tariq-ramada
WASHINGTON, DC. When I read that Tariq Ramadan would be speaking at a local bookstore in Washington, DC on September 11, the juxtaposition gave me a jolt. Was Ramadan – the world-famous and Left-celebrated Muslim “intellectual” banned from France for six months in the 1990s for alleged terror ties, and later from the US for six years (2004-2010) for reasons said to include charitable donations to HAMAS – really an appropriate choice for this darkest of anniversaries? But there was something intriguing about the prospect. What message would this scion of the Muslim Brotherhood deliver to the largely liberal upper middle class masses who would throng the bookstore to hear him?

I had never before seen Ramadan in action, but I knew his reputation for glibness, “doubletalk”, and contradiction. From these waves of words, as I would see, listeners seem to extract what is most shiny and appealing, and, as I would watch, nod their heads in recognition.

Never mind that among his favorite Muslim philosophers is Mohammed Rashid Rida, whom Islamic expert Andrew Bostom has described as a “full-throated, public supporter of the political aspirations of Ibn Saud’s Wahhabism”. Never mind that Ramadan, grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, unequivocably states there is “nothing is this heritage” that he rejects.

The Muslim Brotherhood, a shadowy organization with violent offshoots (including al-Qaeda) is best summed up by its motto: “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” But not to worry: Tariq Ramadan says he isn’t a member. Here in the bookstore, he repeatedly emphasized “dignity, justice and freedom” as the goals of so-called Arab Spring. People nodded. I doubt many realized these are the English-language buzz words of the Muslim Brotherhood, too.

Another thrill-and-spill Of late, Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority appears to be staging recurrent verbal thrills-and-spills extravaganzas. It’s almost as if, when nothing else works, generating headlines constitutes a viable alternative to actual policy and governance. And so the latest bombshell Abbas attempted to toss was the suggestion that Ramallah might abrogate the Oslo Accords with […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444032404578006101784283218.html?KEYWORDS=DAVID+Goldman+BOOK+REVIEW By DAVID P. GOLDMAN Overall returns to American venture capital have lagged behind public markets since the late 1990s, Henry Kressel and Thomas Lento note in “Entrepreneurship and the Global Economy,” and a quarter of venture-capital firms have earned all the profits. Why have results been so lopsided? Globalization is a big part of […]

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/12230

Op-Ed: Europe’s Jews: A Brit’s View on UK Palestinianism

As things stand, the political will to protect Jewish students from the effects of Muslim obsessional and reactionary ideology does not exist.

Richard Mather The writer, a former Christian, is a freelance journalist based in Manchester.

The city of Manchester in England has just finished hosting another of those tiresome events where the Jewish state is compared to apartheid South Africa and students are urged to boycott Israeli products.
A spokesperson even found time to be interviewed by Iran’s notorious Press TV.
The event was organized by UK Student Palestine Conference and it was an opportunity to gather students from dozens of UK universities. Apparently, the conference was a chance for students to go “beyond just being members of our Palestinian solidarity group and become change-makers – on campus and across Britain.”

Manchester is home to Britain’s second-largest Jewish population. But Manchester is also home to a large Muslim population and a huge student base. Together they have contributed to a wave of anti-Jewish sentiment, particularly in the city center’s university district.

Although I live and work in Manchester, I try to avoid the university area as much as possible. Buildings and bus shelters are regularly plastered with pro-Gaza posters. Palestinian flags hang from the windows of houses. Anti-Israel events are advertised around the campus. It is no surprise, then, that Jewish students in Manchester have long spoken of an atmosphere of intimidation.

this review by my e-pal Paul Schnee is posted on Amazon

“A map of the world that did not show Utopia”, said Oscar Wilde, “would not be worth consulting.” In this regard Wilde foreshadowed the preference of most of the characters described in “Radicals, Portraits Of A Destructive Passion” a new book by David Horowitz.

Horowitz has written over 20 books, numerous articles and has appeared on countless television programs. It is fair to say that he possesses a keen perception and an unusually incisive mind. As a radical during the 1960s, whose parents were staunch members of the communist party, he was the editor of Ramparts magazine and was involved in almost every cause dear to the heart of the Left. In his new book he reveals the tune the Devil is whistling and does so with a precision that comes from whistling it so long and so well himself.

The second paragraph of his introduction gives a hint of what is to come: “The desire to make things better is an impulse essential to our humanity. But taken beyond the limits of what is humanly possible, the same hope is transformed into a destructive passion until it becomes a desire to annihilate whatever stands in the way of the beautiful idea. Nihilism is thus the practical extreme of the radical project. Consequently, the fantasy of a redeemed future has repeatedly led to catastrophic results as progressive radicals pursue their impossible schemes.”

To illustrate this Horowitz describes his dealings with, and knowledge of, a cast of characters some of whom had “second thoughts” but could never quite discard the squalid sort of romantic idealism that so often led to evil confirming Benjamin Franklin’s observation that “inclination is too strong for reason.”

An American president kowtows before violent Islamic supremacist intimidation.

“Jamie Glazov is the son of freedom fighters who combated Soviet tyranny, and he knows very well what a society looks like when citizens do not have freedom. In this appearance on Michael Coren’s superb Sun TV show, he discusses how Obama is kowtowing before violent Islamic supremacist intimidation, Islamic antisemitism and its potential genocidal implications in connection with Iran and Israel, the Muslim persecution of Christians, and what the President of the United States should and must do in order to preserve the freedom of speech and our other freedoms. If only his words were heeded.”

To watch the video, click here.

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/5087/features/adorno-butler-and-the-death-of-irony/

Irony cannot exist in isolation; something is ironic only in relation to a larger pattern of events or behavior. Every three years, on the birthday of the German Jewish philosopher Theodore Adorno, September 11, the city of Frankfurt awards its Adorno Prize to honor scholarly achievement in philosophy, music, film, and theater, all areas in which Adorno worked. This year, Frankfurt gave the prize to Judith Butler. Adorno famously stated that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Giving the prize to Butler, a Jewish American feminist philosopher and Israel boycott advocate, raises the question of whether irony, like poetry, still exists.

Butler, a leading figure in “Queer Studies,” is better known as an “engaged academic.” The Adorno Prize, supposedly given for scholarship, has gone to an academic who has erased the line between intellectual endeavor and political advocacy. Her views on Israel are well known. She supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. She has described Hezbollah and Hamas as “social movements that are progressive” and “part of a global Left.” She refuses to lecture in Israel, preferring universities in the West Bank.

Butler has called for a Judaism that is “not associated with state violence.” She complains that “precisely because . . . as a Jew, one is under obligation to criticize excessive state violence and state racism, . . . one is told that one is either self-hating as a Jew or engaging anti-Semitism.” Her recent book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism is an elaborate anti-Zionist statement, explicitly animated by the spirits of Hannah Arendt and Edward Said, a kind of secular diasporic Jewish theology that calls Palestinian “dispossession” an affront which can be rectified only by the “dismantling of the structure of Jewish sovereignty and demographic advantage”—i.e., a binational Israel.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/09/a-secular-president-who-decries-blasphemy/

A secular president who decries ‘blasphemy’?

Who said the following: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

Iran’s Ahmadinejad? Egypt’s Morsi? Some little-known, fatwa-flinging cleric increasing the bounty on Salman Rushdie’s head?

None of the above. The words are President Obama’s, and he spoke them this week to the U.N. General Assembly.

No Big Media outlet reported this stunning pronouncement. It’s as if Ronald Reagan addressed the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983 and the media failed to report that he used the phrase “evil empire.” To make the comparison more direct, imagine if a Republican president declared that “the future must not belong to those who slander the messiah of Christianity” – or, for that matter, the prophet of Latter-day Saints. We would have heard all about it, and for the rest of our lives.

Of course, the Islam-Christianity comparison isn’t a perfect match, given the peculiar definition of “slander” under Islamic law (Shariah). According to such authoritative sources as “Reliance of the Traveller,” a standard Sunni law book approved by Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, “slander” in Islam includes anything Muslims perceive to reflect badly on Islam and its prophet, including the truth. In other words, any negative fact about Islam and Muhammad is, under Islamic law, deemed “slander.”

Does the president, son of a Muslim father and raised for four years as a Muslim by his stepfather in Indonesia, understand this? Shouldn’t someone in the White House press corps bother to ask?

Whether the president is ignorant or knowing, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Islamic bloc of 56 nations and the Palestinian Authority, certainly understood the Islamic meaning as its representatives sat in the General Assembly. They heard the U.S. president declare that the future “must not belong” to those who analytically or critically approach Muhammad and, by natural extension, Muhammad’s totalitarian religious/legal system of governance. According to this understanding, We the People who prize the First Amendment are out. Those who enforce and follow Shariah are in. I can’t think of another instance in which an American president has publicly uttered such a rank betrayal of American principles. And the media censored it!

But, but, but … the president also said the future “must not belong” to those who “target Coptic Christians in Egypt” (no word on Christians “targeted” in other Islamic countries) and “bully women.”

First of all, “target” and “bully” are wan verbs to describe the terror, bloodletting and systemic abuse that Christian populations and women suffer at the hands of Islam. More important, though, the violence inherent to religious cleansing and female oppression is in no way comparable to the most critical words or pictures on a page or screen. Such an equivalence is immoral. The president should be ashamed.

But we should be afraid. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last December, the Obama administration has been working with the OIC to “move to implementation” of U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18, an international law that would criminalize criticism of Islam. Obama’s “slander” speech just greases the skids.

But, but, but … the president also said: “The strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression; it is more speech – the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy, and lift up the values of understanding and mutual respect.”

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/09/26/israels-staunchest-ally-stephen-harper-has-transformed-canadas-mideast-policy

Back in 2006, Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B’nai Brith, caused a considerable stir when he described Canada’s then-new prime minister, Stephen Harper, as the answer to the Jewish community’s prayers.
Controversial because not all Jews are Conservative supporters. Indeed, historically, the default party for most Canadian Jews has been the Liberals. In addition, Harper, both in 2006 and to an even greater extent today, is a more ardent supporter of Israel than many Canadian Jews.

Or, more accurately, Harper is more comfortable with the hardline policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on everything from confronting a nuclear Iran to maintaining Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories.

But even with those qualifiers, Dimant’s remarks in praise of Harper at a B’nai Brith dinner in Toronto almost six years ago — where Harper was treated by the audience like a rock star — ring even truer today .

To many Canadian Jews, Harper is widely admired as the most unequivocally pro-Israel prime minister Canada has ever had, abandoning what his political, media and diplomatic critics describe as Canada’s historically more “nuanced” position in the Mideast as “an honest broker,” working primarily through the United Nations.

On Wednesday, which was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the Harper government again bolstered its standing among many Canadian Jews, when Canada’s delegation to the UN walked out of a speech at the General Assembly by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who described Israelis as “uncivilized Zionists.”