RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/american-leadership-when-reagan-spoke-people-listened?f=puball

In celebrating the 50th anniversary of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, [see The Future Creates the Present: Martin Luther King’s Gift to America”] most of the commentary was about the promise of his ministry and the reality of life for Black people here in America and the need for the latter to approach the former. Left largely unsaid was the nature of Dr. King’s leadership, particularly his ability to change the nation and with it our future.

Americans today of all political stripes are very much in search of leadership. I believe they thirst for someone to tell it to them straight, lay out the options and take them into a future most of us can embrace. They want to believe in America’s future again. It may be such leaders come along all too infrequently and we are therefore stuck where we are. But I do not believe we have to accept what we have.

What is leadership then? Our recent history contains lessons for us.

Some twenty years after King’s famous speech on the Washington Mall, before the largest gathering of evangelical Christians in our nation’s history, President Ronald Reagan concluded his remarks on that Saturday, May 14, 1983, with: “The Soviet Union is the focus of evil in the modern world.”

Max Kampelman, a Democratic Washington lawyer long close to former Vice President Humphrey, a key negotiator of the follow up agreement to the Helsinki Accords, and destined to be a negotiator of nuclear arms reduction agreements with the Soviets during the Reagan administration, (and a major supporter of SDI and missile defense), said at the time to me as we listened to the President’s speech: “Reagan just changed history with that speech.”

Years later, having been proven correct, Kampelman would more fully explain what he had meant. In a 1991 speech to the American Bar Association, at which he was given the Bar’s highest award, he noted: “With those twelve words, Reagan announced to the Soviets that he had no illusions about what they were about, and he wanted their allies and friends to know this. He also was sending a message to the refuseniks, the camp inmates, and the dissidents. He was with them. And America was with them. And the free world was with them.”

Just as Martin Luther King years earlier had said that America could not exist both free and unfree, so Reagan was saying the free world could not coexist with the world of totalitarian communism, because the world of communism headed by the USSR had as its very objective the destruction of the free world. Kampelman explained: “You can’t believe that totalitarian communism could exist peacefully in a world of sovereign democratic nations founded on the idea that God-given rights were the foundation of civil society. And America had begun to fool itself that you could really believe this”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-middle-easts-peace-of-the-grave After both great wars of the last century nations got together to create organizations that would ensure that large conflicts would not occur again. After World War I, it was the League of Nations. When Woodrow Wilson (who was reelected in 1916 after promising to keep the U.S. out of the war in Europe) […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/lost_chance_at_g20.html President Obama has lost a golden opportunity at the G20 Summit in St. Petersburg to step back from undertaking a military assault on Syria, that promises to create hell for Syria’s civilian population and to unleash consequences that can extend far beyond Syria’s borders. At his press conference held after the summit, President Obama […]

http://tiborkrausz.com/html/features/The%20battle%20of%20the%20bloggers.html In the early afternoon of August 9, 2001, Palestinian terrorism became terribly personal for Arnold and Frimet Roth. The Jerusalem couple’s precocious 15-year-old daughter, Malki, was meeting a friend at the Sbarro Pizzeria in the center of the city when a Hamas suicide bomber detonated his nails-packed explosive belt inside the crowded eatery, killing […]

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

So it’s not surprising that the mega-star of the pro-Israel blogosphere features prominently in an article by Tibor Krausz on blogging in defence of the Zionist Entity, and has some interesting things to say about the role and status of those of his ilk:

‘Much of political blogging,’ observes Krausz,

‘is the online equivalent of pamphleteering, an unabashed form of partisanship masquerading as informed commentary. The blogosphere is home to a ceaseless cacophony of invective and hyperbole; and a myriad of virulently anti-Israel bloggers — white supremacists, conspiracy nuts, self-styled “friends of Palestine” — find common cause in demonizing the “racist,” “Nazi,” “apartheid” state of “Israhell.”

On mainstream media sites, meanwhile, the comments sections under even the most innocuous news items about the Jewish State invariably become hotbeds of vicious rants against the country, drowning out the rare dispassionate voices….

Pro-Israel bloggers clearly have their work cut out for them, but that doesn’t faze perhaps the most influential one of them. “We definitely make a difference,” insists the New York-based IT professional who goes by the cyberspace nom de guerre of Elder of Ziyon and enjoys regular attention from mainstream media outlets for his investigative scoops.

Elder, who chose his pseudonym to poke fun at cockamamie conspiracy theories about Jewish power, began frequenting Yahoo message boards a decade ago to challenge the views and logic of Israel’s garrulous detractors. “Arguing one-on-one with people emotionally invested in hating Israel was a big waste of time,” the blogger, who prefers to remain anonymous and describes himself as a “fairly ordinary middle-aged Jewish guy,” tells The Report. “I looked for alternatives where I could write more freely and expansively for a larger audience.”

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4125/more_forlorn_stuff_from_palestinian_authority_israel_turning_us_into_druggies Why oh why do the Palestinians persist with this self-defeating defamation campaign? Do they think it helps their cause? The latest utterly pointless garbage from the Palestinian Authority is just… well… garbage. Apart from firing up their own people against any possible peace agreement with Israel, this is a tired old theme which adds […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323595004579065022169566560.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion As Congress returns and prepares to take up President Obama’s request for an authorization to use military force in Syria, William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, tries to reassure queasy Republicans that “yes” is not only the right vote but the expedient one: A Yes vote is in fact the easy vote. It’s […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3969/europe-homeschoolers One of the largest Jewish schools in Belgium is at risk of losing its state recognition and subsidies because it is “too conservative.” Meanwhile, the Belgians have opened their own Islamic school, subsidized by the authorities, who evidently do not see Islamic education as “too conservative.” A German SWAT team stormed a house in […]