RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Hugo Chavez’s death was met with tributes from Iran, Bolivia, China and El Salvador. The Western left did not waste much time adding their withered roses to El Comandante’s coffin. George Galloway called him another Spartacus. Jimmy Carter described him as a leader who fought for the “neglected and trampled”. Michael Moore praised him for declaring that the oil belongs to the people.

Whether or not the oil belongs to the people is a matter of some debate considering how much of it seemed to end up in Chavez’s pocket.

Chavez died with an estimated net worth of 2 billion dollars making him the 4th richest man in Venezuela and the 49th richest man in Latin America. For a while, Chavez weathered attacks from the media empire of Gustavo A. Cisneros, the richest man in Venezuela. Then before the 2004 election, their mutual friend Jimmy Carter brokered an agreement between them. Cisneros’ media stopped criticizing Chavez and both men bent to the task of getting even richer.

While the Bolivarian Spartacus lined his pockets with oil money, Venezuela’s middle-class was struggling to get by in a country where the private sector had imploded. Income increased on paper, but decreased in reality as inflation increases ate the difference. Around the same time that Comrade Hugo was launching the third phase of his Bolivarian Revolution, inflation had decreased household income 8.8 percent while consumer goods prices increased 27 percent.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/annmarie/the-lefts-romance-with-tyranny-and-terror/

Dr. Jamie Glazov’s brilliant book, “United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror,” explains the bizarre love affair that the Left has had for every mass-murdering Communist, Dictator and/or Marxist throughout time. It chronicles their dangerous obsession with evil from the likes of Stalin and Mao to their current tolerance for all-things-Islam, all the while shouting their anti-capitalistic mantra that “human blood purifies the earth”.

“To be materially comfortable meant to be empty and selfish,” writes Glazov. “They consider free expression their inalienable right, but hated the society whose institutions gave it to them…”

An especially disturbing case-in-point is found in Chapter 7, “Flirting with Mao’s Executioners” when in 1972, actress/believer Shirley MacLaine toured communist China. Charmed by the propaganda thrown her way by Mao and company, MacLaine viewed China as a leftist utopia instead of the oppressive, murderous country it really was. Unfortunately, her belief that the Chinese had caused “the better side of human nature to dominate” involved ignoring the fact that over 70 million Chinese who had been exterminated by her beloved Mao. As Glazov writes, “The Chinese children who had not died of starvation or been eaten by their starving parents greatly impressed MacLaine.”

Another interesting aspect covered in “United in Hate” is the fact that despite the Left’s “anything goes” mentality here in America, they adore oppression in other countries. They cheer the unisex clothing of China and the burqas of the Middle East, hypocritically proud of women for covering up any type of sexuality as opposed to the “evil ways of the West”. Of course what they forget to mention (or choose not to think about) is the fact that these women aren’t given a choice about what to wear and, in fact, are beaten mercilessly if they dare to show their faces in public.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2444/The-Senate-Strikes-Back-But-Watch-Out-for-the-Old-Bulls.aspx “One of the stranger results of the popular Paul filibuster was the instant coalescence of an ad hoc “Calm down, Rand” (read: shut up) effort. This political eruption loosely and overlappingly linked “surge” and Arab Spring diehards, neocon-esque conservative journals and blogs, and establishment pooh-bahs such as Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham.” Republican […]

Another Tack: Why it matters There might not be any point to responding if it were only Shaul Mofaz who wondered why we need harp on Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Mofaz has just barely managed to cross the Knesset entry threshold (having started out not too many months back with a 28- […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3639

The death of Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela President Hugo Chávez may have been untimely, but it couldn’t have come soon enough for those of us who believe in the values of the free world. This is why many experienced what my son Noam wittily referred to as “Chávezfreude” when the 58-year-old tyrant was laid to rest on Thursday.

Much has been written over the past two days about the Chávez legacy, with discussions on whether he was actually a dictator. Whatever one wants to call his 14-year stranglehold on power, it was characterized by socialist policies and Communist methods that turned Venezuela into the most backward and broken-down country in Latin America.

It was also marked by a despotic quashing of opposition, and employing narcissism and megalomania to try to control the hearts and minds of the masses. This Chávez did by constantly appearing on television, giving performances that were a creepy mixture of charisma and clown-like craziness.

Contrary to what progressives like former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and documentary filmmaker Michael Moore assert about El Presidente’s concern for the poor, Chávez was far more focused on his hatred of Western democracy than on easing the economic, social and educational plight of his people. They were his pawns, not his project.

This is not only illustrated by the untreated sewage, power outages, and poverty to which his citizenry was subjected; it is also reflected in the global alliances he forged.

Let’s start with Iranian President Mahmound Ahmadinejad, whose close political and personal ties with Chávez were born of a mutual hatred for the United States. Both leaders spent their lives denouncing American “colonialism and imperialism.” Ahmadinejad calls it the “Great Satan.” Chávez attacked Christopher Columbus for being “the spearhead of the biggest invasion and genocide ever seen in the history of humanity.”

This match made in hell — also cemented by shared anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism — resulted in the establishment of an “Axis of Unity” against the U.S., which involved Venezuela’s assisting a nuclearizing Iran to get a foothold in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. Chávez visited Ahmadinehad in the Islamic republic 13 times. Ahmadinejad’s trip to Caracas for the funeral was his seventh.

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/6086/features/coming-home/
THIS TOPIC IS ALWAYS INTERESTING….AND SO I ANTICIPATE READING P.DAVID HORNIK’S “Choosing Life In Israel RSK
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Returning to Israel this past January for the first time in 20 years carried a deep emotional charge for me. After World War II my British-born parents, young Labor-Zionist idealists, helped found a kibbutz in the northern Galilee. I was born there, but we moved back to England when I was seven. I’ve visited and lived in Israel since then, but mostly I’ve been in London and the United States. By most measures, every city in which I’ve put down roots in is an easier place to live than just about anywhere in Israel. I’ve never felt so British as when I’ve struggled to hold my place in what passes in Israel for a queue.

Yet I’ve also pined for the brash, aggressive country I had last seen in the mid-1970s, when public rudeness was a point of pride, when every stranger felt free to get into your business—but would reflexively rescue you in a pinch. In the early 1970s, in a small town north of Tel Aviv, I once fainted from heat and woke up lying on a sidewalk surrounded by a circle of faces, their voices theorizing about why I’d passed out. An old lady who could barely walk insisted on taking me home on the bus, where she barraged me with advice about what she was certain was my pregnancy and broadcast my “joyous news” to the passengers around us.

The noisy, busybody intrusiveness of Israeli public life could be a pain in the neck. But, having spent most of my life in two countries known for their surface good manners, I missed the directness and, sometimes, the rough charm. On a vacation in Tel Aviv in the early 1990s, the airline lost my luggage. I complained to the company’s Israeli representative—who spread his arms wide and answered genially, “Mah haba’aya?” What’s the problem? “Sometimes I don’t change my underwear for a week!”

On my recent two weeks of running around Israel with my 15-year-old daughter, I rarely encountered this kind of brazen chutzpah. The land of pioneering socialism and proliferating red tape has caught on to the capitalist service ethic big time. At the El Al desk at Heathrow Airport, a preternaturally polite young security guy with a mini-Mohawk apologized profusely for having to ask “a lot of questions.” No apologies were necessary: we were a walking red flag. I speak fluent Hebrew but do not carry an Israeli passport. Neither does my daughter—who is Chinese. We get stopped, frisked, grilled, just about fried in every airport we pass through. With courtly politesse, the young man questioned me for 15 minutes—then asked my daughter what her favorite Jewish holiday was. Flustered, she blurted, “Passover!” He said he’d never met a kid whose favorite holiday was Pesach. She shrugged and said she loved matzah ball soup. That did the trick. One more apology, and we were on our way.

And so it went from the moment we landed at Ben Gurion airport, now bustling with souped-up boutiques and fancy eateries. Everywhere—from the posh, scrubbed and renovated Jaffa quarter of Tel Aviv, to a now-privatized Galilee kibbutz whose members own their own homes, to the small town of Rosh Pina, once known as the “armpit of the Middle East” but now a gentrified home to artists, hipsters and nouvelle cuisine restaurateurs—it was please, thank you, can I help you and, to my horror, have a nice day.

When I marveled about this, Israeli friends laughed said that if I wanted to see the old churlishness, I just had to stick around a while. And it’s true that if you know where to look, you’ll still find the old belligerence in abundance, notably in government offices and on public transportation. After we stood in line for nearly two hours at the Jerusalem bus station to reserve our place for a trip to the north, a couple of latecomers elbowed my daughter out of the way and breezed onto the bus without so much as a by-your-leave.

Once in the early 1970s, when I was a graduate student commuting home from Tel Aviv University, I had to duck when two men in coveralls started throwing punches around my head over political differences. It’s not recommended behavior, but I loved that sense of engagement with public life. Israelis may still be great political brawlers, but they don’t seem to talk politics as much as they used to. Politically, our Israeli hosts were all over the map: friends living across the green line in suburban Jerusalem, a woman working for Palestinian rights, Golan kibbutzniks anxious about the Syrian civil war. Yet even with Hamas rocket attacks fresh in memory and national elections imminent, few Israelis seemed interested in political debate beyond laughing their heads off at Eretz Nehederet, “Wonderful Land,” the satirical TV program that skewers corrupt posturing by local politicians and the ridiculous proliferation of tiny political parties on the electoral landscape.

True, as the headlines scream, Israel is polarized these days; and perhaps Israelis are as weary of politics as I am of being the schizoid Israeli-abroad who sounds like Jabotinsky when defending Israel to the hard Left and fiercely criticizes the occupation when debating the hard Right. Neither of these shrieking groups understands that Israelis, in their daily lives, know how to improvise a precarious harmony.

http://dailycaller.com/2013/03/07/andrew-mccarthy-challenges-to-islamic-totalitarianism-are-suppressed-in-the-media-video/

In an interview with The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas, Andrew C. McCarthy, the former assistant United States attorney who successfully led the prosecutions of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, explained why he thinks more people don’t focus on threats posed by extremists.

“Political correctness is a big part of the problem of not confronting other ideologies,” he said. “That is an idea that is suppressed in the media, it’s suppressed on the campus, it’s suppressed almost pervasively throughout society.”

“The most important thing that ordinary citizens can do is insist on our ability to communicate robustly — that is, to insist upon our free-speech rights. It’s the free-speech rights that actually move the politicians.”

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/03/07/blasphemy-mucho-how-sharia-kills-free-speech/ [1]Losing free speech via the toxic synergy of mainstream, supremacist Islam, and Western self-loathing *** Al Qaeda’s English language magazine “Inspire [2],” in its latest edition, has expressed the jihad terror organization’s outrage over the “Innocents of Muslims” video trailer, an amateurish production, which merely depicted some of the less salutary aspects [3] of […]

www.shmuelkatz.com On Feb. 28, at a meeting of something called the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations, Turkey’s Prime Minister Tacip Erdogan called Zionism “a crime against humanity.” Another day, another vicious slur on Israel, in this case from the leader of a country that only yesterday had been its strategic ally in the region. All that […]

Spring is coming, and so is Israel Apartheid Week to campuses across the country.Here in Boston, Harvard students already got an “eviction notice” pasted on their doors by the Palestine Solidarity Committee who likened the notices to the “Illegal displacement of Palestinians” in Israel. At Northeastern University a full week of activities, films, an “apartheid wall,” etc. is being planned starting next week. At Boston University, an “academic” panel on “Right of Return” is being set up.What can our side do?Tell the truth: that this is a lie and that the real apartheid in the Middle East is Arab Apartheid, where women, gays, Christians, Jews and other minorities are subjugated, humiliated, raped, and slaughtered.We need the Jewish students on campus to use THIS argument – not to say, as some of our feckless leaders are telling them to say: “We are not so bad as they say we are.”You can help make Arab Apartheid a meme (an idea that spreads). Here’s how:Read this wonderful article by Professor Ephraim Karsh that explains it all very simply and with easily remembered facts and arguments.Then spread it around to everyone you know. Charles Jacobs

http://www.meforum.org/3186/middle-east-apartheid

In light of Israel Apartheid Week, which hit cities and campuses throughout the world recently, supporters of the Jewish state find it difficult to agree on the best response to this hate fest. Some suggest emphasizing Israel’s peacemaking efforts, others propose rebranding the country by highlighting its numerous achievements and success stories. Still others advocate reminding the world of “what Zionism is – a movement of Jewish national liberation – and what it isn’t – racist.” Each of these approaches has its merits yet none will do the trick.

Peace seeking and/or prosperity are no proof of domestic benevolence and equality. The most brutal regimes have peacefully coexisted with their neighbors while repressing their own populations; the most prosperous societies have discriminated against vulnerable minorities. South Africa was hardly impoverished and technologically backward; the United States, probably the most successful and affluent nation in recent times was largely segregated not that long ago.

Nor for that matter is the apartheid libel driven by forgetfulness of Zionism’s true nature. It is driven by rejection of Israel’s very existence. No sooner had the dust settled on the Nazi extermination camps than the Arabs and their western champions equated the Jewish victims with their tormentors.