RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israel Affairs, 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13537121.2013.778088

The idea of a Jewish state is rooted in ancient Jewish peoplehood based
upon essential features of collective identity and ties to the territorial
homeland. From this emerges the natural goal of statehood in modernSE
times that was propelled by the dynamic and revolutionary Zionist
movement. Nonetheless, a major campaign of de-legitimization has sought
to invalidate Israel’s right to exist. Israel’s Arab citizens charge their state
with racism while adamantly rejecting its Jewish demographic, cultural,
and political character. In defending Israel’s national existence, unique in
the annals of human history, one highlights the principles of life, truth, and
justice, as inherent in the Jewish state’s historical rebirth in its ancestral
homeland.

http://www.worldtribune.com/ That loud noise you hear now coming out of the Middle East is the sound of a  frighteningly dangerous game of chicken between Russia and Israel [and inferentially the U.S.}. Last minute pleas by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Soviet President Vladimir Putin, delivered at Sochi on the Black Sea where Moscow has […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3720/russia-strategic-challenge The current administration is in a poor position to negotiate with Russia. There are press reports that the administration will attempt to evade Congressional approval of a new arms control agreement. Russia clearly represents an increasingly serious strategic challenge. Russia has steadily become more anti-democratic and hostile to the US. The Kremlin encourages nationalism; […]

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/05/16/the-shavuot-holiday-in-israel-joy-in-the-law-joy-in-the-land/?print=1 The holiday of Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks, falls this year on Wednesday in Israel and on Wednesday and Thursday in the Diaspora. It falls every year exactly seven weeks after Passover. The latter holiday celebrates the Israelites’ liberation from slavery in Egypt; Shavuot (which means “weeks”) celebrates the giving of the Torah on Mount […]

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/pi_the_fail_on_the_donkey_75AD9tpaTdPp0AjOEIjzcK

The IRS, AP and Benghazi scandals were all about making Obama look better. Now they’ll drag down the Democrats for years to come

The Obama administration’s sudden plunge into scandal territory has two aspects — the actual and the political.

The first, and most important, has to do with what actually happened. Why did the administration promulgate a false account of the terror attack on Benghazi? Why did the Internal Revenue Service target conservative groups for special scrutiny? Why did the Justice Department act in an unprecedented fashion toward The Associated Press for publishing details of a foiled terror plot the White House was planning to discuss openly the next day?

Illustration by Leah Tiscione

It is inevitable we will find all of this out. On Banghazi, for example, the White House was forced to release 100 pages of e-mails on Benghazi but seems to have left out hundreds more; it will be unable to shield them forever.

CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson released a highly revealing story on Friday in which administration officials said they regretted not sending a terrorism-response team to Benghazi and regretted not having convened their panel of high-level terrorism advisers afterward. One official told Attkisson, “We’re portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It’s actually closer to us being idiots.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348552/islamist-war-women-lee-habeeb The facts just keep coming out of Ohio. It is hard to comprehend what they went through, those young women. What they felt while trapped by a monster through those lost years of their early adulthood is almost impossible to fathom. How did they cope? How did they get through each day? A close […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/islam-vs-islamism-a-case-for-wishful-thinkers/?print=1 “Our killer question is ‘How do you propose to defeat Islamism?’ Those who make all Islam their enemy not only succumb to a simplistic and essentialist illusion but they lack any mechanism to defeat it.” This is what historian and Middle East analyst Daniel Pipes asks [1] in his recent Washington Times article. To support […]

http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/of-course-iran-is-chairing-the-un-disarmament-conference/ In the parade of United Nations absurdities, here comes Iran’s four-week presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament — an arrangement that the U.S. Mission to the UN has described as “unfortunate and inappropriate,” and Hillel Neuer of UN Watch has more accurately compared to “putting Jack the Ripper in charge of a women’s […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/hope_and_fear_obama_into_2014.html In the days before the 1905 Russian Revolution, there was great discontent with the Tsar’s dictatorship.  The revolution was a “wave of mass political and social unrest that spread through vast areas of the Russian Empire. Some of it was directed against the government, while some was undirected. It included terrorism, worker strikes, peasant […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/israel_triumph_of_resilience.html Israel, having attained its 65th anniversary, resists easy definition.  Sixty-five years ago, on May 14, 1948, David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, declared independence, to which American and Soviet recognition was forthcoming the next day, following the expiration of British rule.      Any reckoning on Israel, its successes and failures, is also […]