RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://news.yahoo.com/us-sends-clinton-mideast-try-end-conflict-085755653.html

ANYTHING IS BETTER THAN HER TESTIMONY ON BENGHAZIGATE…..RSK

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Efforts to end a week-old convulsion of Israeli-Palestinian violence drew in the world’s top diplomats on Tuesday, with President Barack Obama dispatching his secretary of state to the region on an emergency mission and the U.N. chief appealing from Cairo for an immediate cease-fire.

Israel and Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers have staked tough, hard-to-bridge positions, and the gaps keep alive the threat of an Israeli ground invasion. On Tuesday, grieving Gazans were burying militants and civilians killed in ongoing Israeli airstrikes, and barrages of rockets from Gaza sent terrified Israelis scurrying to take cover.

From Egypt, U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon said he came to the region because of the “alarming situation.”

“This must stop, immediate steps are needed to avoid further escalation, including a ground operation,” Ban said. “Both sides must hold fire immediately … Further escalation of the situation could put the entire region at risk.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is to depart for the Mideast on Tuesday from Cambodia, where she had accompanied Obama on a visit. Clinton is to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank and Egyptian leaders in Cairo, according to U.S. and Palestinian officials.

The U.S. considers Hamas, which has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide and other attacks, to be a terror group and does not meet with its officials. The Obama administration blames Hamas for the latest eruption of violence and says Israel has the right to defend itself. At the same time, it has warned against a ground invasion, saying it could send casualties spiraling.

By Tuesday, civilians accounted for 54 of the 113 Palestinians killed since Israel began an air onslaught that has so far included nearly 1,500 strikes. Some 840 people have been wounded, including 225 children, Gaza health officials said.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The endless wars with Israel are not really about the Jewish State. Nor are the wars about the Arabs living in the territories that Israel lost in 1948 to Jordan and Egypt and recaptured from them in 1967. The rest of the Muslim world cares no more about them than Hitler cared about the Sudeten Germans or Japan really believed in the rights of Chinese and Koreans.
Israel is a sideline in a regional struggle by fractured populations, divided by ethnicity and religion, by language and natural resources, to unite into a single commonality. It is a natural target because its population consists of a people who are members of a different religious and ethnic group than the dominant religious and ethnic groups of the region.

Unlike the Persians and Turks, the Jews are not Muslims, not even Shiites, and unlike the Christian Arabs, the Jews are not even of the same ethnicity as the regional majority. Jews are neither Muslims nor Arabs and that makes them unique and alien in a region where every country is dominated by either an Arab or Muslim identity. Or both.

To the Arab Nationalist, the Persian and Turk is an alien, but the Christian Arab is a brother. To the Islamist, the Christian Arab is a Dhimmi or an infidel, but the Turk is a brother in faith. But to both, the Jew and the Jewish State are an alien presence in the region that must be removed for their own version of regional unity to flourish.

The Post-Colonial contest in the Middle East has been over how to unite the fractured ethnic minorities and the religious splits together into a single region. What do the tribal oil monarchies have in common with the former colonies ruled by military strongmen? What do any of them have in common with the Persians and the Turks?

Uniting behind something is difficult, as even the Islamists must admit. Islam split over issues of succession not too long after Mohammed’s death. But uniting against something is fairly easy. The Jews are the most alien of all the groups in the region. Unable to unite on love, the Middle East unites on hate and hating Israel gives everyone in the region a feeling of having something in common.

Israel is however only a sideline in the larger struggle between Islamists and Nationalists, Sunnis and Shiites, in a region struggling to define itself around the supremacy of a single defining identity, rather than a harmony between different identities.

Better late than never…..will the others now stand up and form a line to the Right?….rsk

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323852904578128783271088320.html

Sometimes it behooves even a pundit to acknowledge his mistakes. In 2004 as editor of the Jerusalem Post, and in 2006 in this column, I made the case that Israel was smart to withdraw its soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip. I was wrong.

My error was to confuse a good argument with good policy; to suppose that mere self-justification is a form of strategic prudence. It isn’t. Israel is obviously within its rights to defend itself now against a swarm of rockets and mortars from Gaza. But if it had maintained a military presence in the Strip, it would not now be living under this massive barrage.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/when-balance-becomes-betrayel/?utm_source=When+Balance+Becomes+Betrayal&utm_campaign=When+Balance+Becomes+Betrayal+&utm_medium=email
Universalism, Cynthia Ozick once noted, has become the particularism of the Jews. Increasingly, our most fundamental belief about ourselves is that we dare not care about ourselves any more than we can about others. Noble Jews have moved beyond difference.

This inability to distinguish ourselves from the mass of humanity, this inability to celebrate our own origins, our own People and our own homeland, I argue in my latest book, The Promise of Israel, is dysfunctional. Do we not care about our own children more than we care about other people’s children? And shouldn’t we? Are our own parents not our responsibility in a way that other people’s parents are not? The same is true of nations and ethnicities. The French care about the French more than they do about others. So do the Italians. So do the Spanish. It’s only this new, re-imagined Jew who is constantly seeking to transcend origins which actually make us who we are and enable us to leave our distinct fingerprints on the world.

That ­an utterly universalized Judaism is almost entirely divorced from the richness of Jewish heritage and the worldview of our classic texts is bad enough. But on weeks like this, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis sleeping in bomb shelters and many millions more unspeakably frightened, it’s become clear that this universalized Judaism has rendered not only platitudinous Jews, but something worse. It bequeaths us a new Jew utterly incapable of feeling loyalty. The need for balance is so pervasive that even an expression of gut-level love for Israelis more than for their enemies is impossible. Balance has now bequeathed betrayal.

Glenn’s special message for Israel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdaHa0Tj2Bk&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdaHa0Tj2Bk

I want to tell you what it’s like to live in most of Israel right now.
A missile is fired by Hamas in Gaza…
A siren goes off.
You get 15 seconds to find shelter.
I want Americans to think about what that means.
If you lived in a place where missiles were fired at you…
Hundreds a day…
And you would get just 15 seconds to hide…
How would you live?
Stop what you’re doing. Run to a basement. A shelter.
And if you can’t make it inside…
Lie flat on the ground with your arms over your head.
That’s life in Israel right now.
None of us would be willing to accept this.
None of us would have to.
Every country has a right to defend itself against terror.
But they keep telling Israel… “don’t overreact!” “don’t fire back!” “be careful!” “don’t ramp things up!”
Let me get this straight…
If Mexico fired a missile into El Paso, you know what we would do?
If Japan fired a missile into Beijing, you know what China would do?
So why does Israel have to hold back?
Why does every country get to defend itself…
But not Israel?
Why could that be?
I think we know why.
A Jewish man was walking down the street in midtown Manhattan over the weekend.
He passed by a group of people protesting on the street.
They were holding up signs, criticizing Israel.
He was wearing a yarmulke.
So they called him a “dirty Jew.”
We’ve seen this move before.
We’ve seen the terror before.
We’ve seen the sirens…and the bombs… and the threats.
We’ve even seen the insults.
“Dirty Jew.”
Nothing original there.
So I think we know what’s really going on here.
It has nothing to do with embargoes… or borders… or anything else that CAN be solved.
It’s because Israel exists. And it’s a Jewish state.
Let’s be honest with ourselves.
There are some people who can’t get past that.
The world’s oldest hatred.
Anti-Semitism.
It’s alive in our time. And it’s not hiding.
It’s right there in Gaza.

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/murdochs-israel-tweet/88085/

NOT ALL JEWISH INTEREST PAPERS FAIL TO RISE TO ISRAEL’S DEFENSE…..THE CONNECTICUT JEWISH LEDGER DOES SO EVERY SINGLE TIME….THANKS TO N.R. GREENFIELD PUBLISHER AND EDITOR….RSK

One day not long before Robert Bartley died, the long-time editor of the Wall Street Journal was honored at a banquet in Manhattan for the newspaper’s courageous support of Israel. The story was told about how Bartley was once asked how he managed to defend Israel with even more verve than some of the Jewish newspapers. “Oh, I had it easy,” Bartley was quoted as replying, “I’m not Jewish.”

By our lights, his apology was unnecessary. What he had tweeted, after all, was the opposite of the anti-Semitic jibe about Jewish newspapers being beholden to Israel. What Mr. Murdoch is wondering is why Jewish newspapers don’t rise to Israel’s defense. This is a question that is usually raised in respect of the New York Times, which in the current crisis has packaged its acknowledgement of Israel’s right to defend itself in an editorial urging Israel to be more forthcoming in giving away parts of Judea, Samaria, and Israel’s capital, Jerusalem.

If Mr. Murdoch was thinking of the Times, he wouldn’t be the first person to suspect that the paper has bent over backward to avoid being thought of as a Jewish newspaper. Several years ago, Cambridge University issued a history of the Times’ failure during World War II to front its coverage of the Holocaust. The author, Laurel Leff, made clear how uncomfortable the Times’s proprietors, the Sulzberger family, were with the Jewish issue. It led to journalistic error.

People still talk about an editorial the Times issued in 1981, when Prime Minister Begin sent a flight of U.S.-made warplanes to destroy the atomic-bomb-making facility that Iraq was building at Baghdad. The Times’ editorial derided the action as a “sneak attack” and called the raid “an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression.” Years later, the Times’s former editor, Max Frankel, wrote in a memoir that the editorial was one of his “major mistakes.”

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/profile/Hugh-Tomlinson

Iran has increased the number of public executions and amputations it carries out, taking advantage of the international focus on Gaza to reduce prison overcrowding and to issue a warning before elections in June.At least 81 people have been hanged in the past ten days.

There had been a lull during the summer for Ramadan and the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran. Iran often uses periods of unrest elsewhere to accelerate the rate of executions, and the crisis in Gaza has provided such a distraction.

When the Arab Spring broke out last year, the regime cheered on the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt from the sidelines while clamping down on its domestic opposition and putting hundreds of Iranians to death.

Western holidays, particularly the lethargic news period between Christmas and new year, are also busy times for Iranian hangmen.

“We have seen in the past that every time the international community’s attention is elsewhere we see a spike in executions across Iran. Rates are always higher when the West is distracted,” said Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam of Iran Human Rights, the non-government organisation.

Human rights groups have verified almost 500 executions across Iran this year and believe the true figure is higher. The Islamic Republic executes more people each year than any nation except China, and has the highest rate of executions per capita.

Move over, adulterous generals. It might be time to make way for a new sexual rats’nest – at America’s top financial police agency, the SEC.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/sec-rocked-by-lurid-sex-and-corruption-lawsuit-20121119

Move over, adulterous generals. It might be time to make way for a new sexual rats’nest – at America’s top financial police agency, the SEC.

In a salacious 77-page complaint that reads like Penthouse Forum meets The Insider meets the Keystone Kops, one David Weber, the former chief investigator for the SEC Inspector General’s office, accuses the SEC of retaliating against Weber for coming forward as a whistleblower. According to this lawsuit, Weber was made a target of intramural intrigues at the agency (which has a history of such retaliation) after he came forward with concerns that his bosses may have been spending more time copulating than they were investigating the SEC.

Weber vs. the SEC: The Full Complaint

Weber claims that in recent years, while the SEC Inspector General’s office has been attempting to investigate the agency’s seemingly-negligent responses in such matters as the Bernie Madoff case and the less-well-known (but nearly as disturbing) Stanford Financial Ponzi scandal, two of the IG office’s senior officials – former Inspector General David Kotz and his successor, Noelle Maloney – were sleeping together.

Weber also claims that Kotz was also having an affair with a lawyer representing a key group of Stanford victims, a Dr. Gaytri Kachroo. Where the story gets really strange is where Weber claims that Maloney last year refused to meet with Kachroo as part of the Stanford investigation. By then, Kotz had stepped down as SEC IG and Maloney had replaced him as Acting IG. The complaint describes Weber confronting Maloney over the issue, asking why she wouldn’t meet with the lawyer representing a key group of Stanford victims.

Maloney asked Weber to close the door to her office. Maloney told Weber that she would deny the following conversation if Weber were to repeat it.

Maloney then said that, “David [Kotz] was focki**g that lady . . .” Maloney stated that Kachroo had received special treatment. Maloney even questioned whether the OIG would have ever opened an investigation into the SEC’s oversight over the Court-Appointed Receivership in SEC v. Stanford.

Click here: Reporters Without Borders Shields Terrorists – Maggie’s Farm
http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/21025-Reporters-Without-Borders-Shields-Terrorists.html
Tuesday, November 20. 2012
Reporters Without Borders Shields Terrorists
Reporters Without Borders accused Israel of a war crime, targeting innocent civilian journalists. The Reporters Without Borders, first, need to better understand the Geneva Conventions. The International Committee of the Red Cross is the authority on the Geneva Conventions.

“Inasmuch as they are civilians, journalists are protected under international humanitarian law against direct attacks unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.”

That does not protect those masquerading as journalists nor does it protect terrorists hiding among journalists. Today, Israel killed five of them. Further, Reporters Without Borders has not protested Hamas directly denying journalists in Gaza their right to leave Gaza.

Reporters Without Borders are without the confining borders of journalistic ethics. Quelle surprise!

Posted by Bruce Kesler at 00:06

Effective Sanctions on Iran – Oxymoron
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought”
“Israel Hayom”, November 18, 2013, http://bit.ly/SWcN0J

Twenty eight years of unilateral and multilateral US-led sanctions, accompanied by diplomatic pressure and cyber sabotage, have failed to deter Iran’s Ayatollahs from approaching nuclear capabilities. Fifty years of proliferated sanctions – since the 1962 military coup in Burma – have been largely unsuccessful in changing policies of rogue regimes.

In fact, the US focus on sanctions and engagement – rather than confrontation – has facilitated Iran’s nuclear drive. It has provided Teheran with more time to develop and acquire critical nuclear capabilities.

Sanctions have effectively eroded Iran’s economy. Sanctions have been ineffective in diverting Iran from its nuclear path.

Effective sanctions require full multilateral cooperation, which is axiomatically unattainable. China and Russia are inherent geo-strategic adversaries of the US that aim at weakening US power projection in the Persian Gulf and throughout the globe. Therefore, they cushion Iran in its struggle against sanctions. They oppose US policy on Iran, maintain security ties with the Ayatollahs and sustain their trade relations with Teheran, as do India, Japan, Turkey and some European countries, irrespective of their supposed support of UN sanction-resolutions.

Furthermore, the US has not fully implemented its own sanction bills and executive orders – e.g., May 1995, June 2010, November 2011, February 2012, and July 2012 – which are replete with commerce-driven waivers and exemptions, rendering them ineffective and counter-productive.

Europe has fizzled more miserably and cynically, ignoring its own sanctions. Europe has sacrificed the long-term battle against a nuclear Iran on the altar of the short-term commercial interests of individual countries and companies.

Thus, the notion of “effective and biting sanctions” constitutes a classic oxymoron, as should have been concluded from the track record of multilateral sanctions against rogue regimes.

For instance, for 60 years, the US has assumed that sanctions on North Korea will convince Pyongyang to refrain from developing nuclear capabilities and moderate its aggressive policy. However, North Korea has offset the loss of the South Korean and Japanese markets by increasing trade with China, irrespective of the latter’s vote for UN Security Council resolutions 1718 and 1874 against North Korea. Just like other ruthless regimes and centrally-planned economies, North Korea has been less influenced by the global economy. It is the “Juche” ideology of national self-sufficiency and non-reliance on imports and economic aid which have made sanctions less effective. Unlike Iran, North Korea is inwardly inclined, devoid of religiously-driven megalomaniac aspirations.