RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/orwell-obama-and-totalitarianism

Reading many of George Orwell’s essays leaves one with the impression that he was an integrated man, that is, his mind was steadfastly anchored to reason and reality. It wasn’t. His prescient essays on totalitarianism may lead one to believe that he was 100% rational and had no chinks in his intellectual armor. He wasn’t, and the chinks are evident.

The most visible chink in Orwell’s intellectual armor was his steadfast belief in the beneficent advantages of socialism, while at the same time he detested communism. Communism, he wrote, is but totalitarianism by another name. Totalitarianism, or Communism, embraces the totality of an individual’s existence, from what he pays for necessities to his social relationships to what goes on in his mind. Orwell observed this totality in Stalin’s Russia, also in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and, to a lesser extent, in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy.

Stalin and Hitler were the inevitable heirs to every wistful vision from time immemorial that men could be organized into benign collectives, communes, or “cooperatives” to corral and control the selfish nature of men to live their own lives for their own reasons. We could begin with the ethics of St. Augustine or Marcus Aurelius, but would need to go back to Plato. Among the minor contributors to the ideal of a collectivist paradise were Auguste Comte and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Along came Karl Marx who distilled all those wishes into a system which reduced individuals into mere insensate atoms of an impersonal evolution towards perfect, stateless, selfless socialism. Or, stateless communism.

Orwell never grasped that his ideal, “stateless socialism,” is a contradiction in terms. Socialism cannot be imposed on men except by force. And whether the force compels men to accept socialized medicine, or the redistribution of their private wealth to alleviate state-caused poverty, or mandated florescent light bulbs, or any other altruistic scheme that shackles men together and compels them to become dependent on fiat law and legislated extortion, it must be employed by the agency of a state. A “mixed economy” of economic and even social controls, must, if not opposed and corrected, lead to total regulation and control.

The ideal of a “classless society” might have been reached by undisturbed tribes in the most inaccessible reaches of the Amazon jungle, but even they have their pecking orders. In any industrialized or semi-industrialized society, under socialism, classes emerge defined by how much loot one gang can accumulate, extort, or seize from another. Ayn Rand dramatized the progress from “socialism” to totalitarianism in We the Living and Atlas Shrugged.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/israel-sobered-by-syria-debacle/print/ Saturday marks Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar and, this year, the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, the greatest trauma in Israeli history. On the morning of October 6, 1973—the day on which Yom Kippur fell that year—Chief of Staff David Elazar met with Prime Minister […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/09/venezuela_from_crazy_to_insane.html A couple of stories from Venezuela bring home the reality that the country is falling apart and freedoms are disappearing. President Maduro has just announced that the government launched a news network to tell the public the truth about the situation in the country: “Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announced on Tuesday at a public event […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/lessons_of_oslo_after_twenty_years.html Twenty years ago today, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed the initial Oslo agreements in a ceremony on the White House lawn that captured the world’s attention and seemed to many the start of genuine peace between Israel and the Palestinians.   Later that day, on Jordanian television, Arafat explained to his Palestinian constituency […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324463604579042904257147952.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wants us to believe that anti-Semitism is the devil as the devil is envisioned by revealed religion. That it has no parallel in the history of prejudice. That it has been at the core of Christian civilization for two millennia. That, inscribed in the Quran, it is the constituent feature of Arab and Islamic civilizations. Anti-Semitism, moreover, has had its reach vastly expanded by the new, anti-Israel, form it has taken—as well as by the fact that Jew-hating populaces have been migrating around the world, specifically from Arab and Islamic countries to Europe and elsewhere.

With “The Devil That Never Dies,” Mr. Goldhagen hopes to present “a fundamentally new perspective” on this phenomenon and a systematic analysis of the causes and consequences of enmity toward the Jews and of the role played by the Internet and other digital technologies in its spread.

Anti-Semitic expression, according to Mr. Goldhagen, has exploded in the past 10 years in both volume and intensity, notwithstanding that no politician in Western Europe or the U.S. would dare to propose an eliminationist program, nor any legal restrictions on Jews. Yet much anti-Semitism lurks beneath the surface, among political, religious and other influential leaders—not just in the U.S.—and among those leaders who when speaking publicly give no reason to suspect that they harbor such views. In country after country, in democratic country after country, Jews must hide their identity lest they be physically, not to mention verbally, attacked.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3971/spain-catalonia-burqa-ban It remains to be seen whether Catalonia will succeed in reframing the debate over burqas as an issue of public safety rather than one of freedom of religion. A jihadist group affiliated with Al Qaeda has threatened to carry out terrorist attacks in Catalonia, an autonomous region in northeastern Spain that is home to […]

Eight years ago today, Israel completed its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza – one of Israel’s biggest, avoidable, self-inflicted wounds. In recollection of it, I’m reposting Daniel Mandel’s May 2005 piece published in the Boston Globe ––one of the only opinion piece to oppose the withdrawal published in any major American liberal newspaper. Unfortunately, the idiotic move was supported by many of Israel’s ostensible friends. More important, nothing has been learned as Israel is again enmeshed in peace processing….rsk

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/05/02/retreat_from_gaza/

SINCE December 2003, Ariel Sharon has astonished friend and foe alike, embracing the very idea he opposed in the elections that confirmed him in power in January 2003.
The idea is ”unilateral disengagement,” whereby Israel, without a peace agreement, withdraws its military and civilians from the territories administered by Israel since the 1967 war — in this case, the Gaza Strip. The Labor opposition’s Amram Mitzna lost badly campaigning on this very platform, coming in for incisive criticism from not a few figures, not just among the governing Likud, but from a bevy of informed Israeli observers. To cite just two:

Historian Michael Oren: ”The minute you pull out of Gaza you signal to the Arabs that you’re in retreat. It’s a huge victory for the Palestinians. Palestinians will have huge celebrations in Gaza. You think they’ll sit down and talk after that?”

Respected centrist journalist, Yossi Klein Halevi: ”If unilateral withdrawal could happen in a void, it would be the right decision But it is not happening in a void . . . The psychological implications are to reinforce the post-Lebanon withdrawal perception in the Arab world that we are a defeatist society and with enough pressure we’ll simply withdraw.”

Indeed, Ariel Sharon himself could not have been clearer at the time: ”A unilateral withdrawal is not a recipe for peace. It is a recipe for war.”

If these criticisms are correct, then unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza is a victory for terrorism; bloodshed is likely to flow from it, and Sharon of all people must know it.

What, then, is Sharon’s rationale? According to his supporters, both right and left, the withdrawal represents Israel seizing the initiative, setting its own lines of defense, and preempting noxious diplomatic initiatives from Israel’s ill-wishers. But all this looks doubtful. True, the Israel Defense Forces will be relieved of the onerous duty of defending isolated Jewish communities in a sea of enemies, but its absence from Gaza will also afford Palestinian terrorist groups a freer hand for mounting further attacks. And an initiative that stimulates the aggression of terrorists will not be altered by its originating in Jerusalem, as the terrorists themselves make clear.

Thus, Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, has opined, ”all the Israeli statements about a withdrawal from Gaza Strip are due to the Palestinian resistance operations. We are completely confident that as the Hezbollah Organization managed to kick the Israeli forces out of Lebanon, the Palestinian resistance will kick them out of the Palestinian territories, and we will continue our resistance.”

The Center for Security Policy announced today that the 2013 recipient of its Mightier Pen Award will be Diana West, a nationally syndicated columnist and author of The Death of the Grown-up:How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, co-author of Shariah: The Threat to America, and most recently author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. The award will be presented at a luncheon on November 20th at the Union League Club in New York City.

Diana West’s weekly newspaper column is syndicated by Universal Uclick, and appears in over 100 publications nationwide, as well as at her website www.dianawest.net. West also serves as Washington correspondent for the European weekly newspaper Dispatch International. Her work has appeared in many publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The New Criterion, The Public Interest, Women’s Quarterly, The Weekly Standard, and The Washington Post Magazine; her fiction has appeared in Atlantic Monthly. She has made numerous radio appearances and as a former CNN contributor, she made frequent television appearances on the former CNN show, “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” She was recently featured in the Glenn Beck TV documentaries “The Project” and “Rumors of War III.”

Ms. West joins an illustrious group of authors, journalists and essayists who have received this recognition for their commitment to a robust national security and their efforts to educate our countrymen and women about the need to practice the philosophy President Reagan called “peace through strength.” Previous recipients include: Mark Helprin, Charles Krauthammer, Roger Ailes, William F. Buckley, Jr., A.M. Rosenthal, Andrew C. McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Claudia Rosett, and Monica Crowley.

In announcing this recognition, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., President and CEO of the Center for Security Policy, observed:

“Diana West is among America’s most thoughtful and intellectually invigorating writers of our time. Her efforts to illuminate the contemporary threats to our society and culture – and to map out their historical antecedents and the appropriate responses to them – in order to preserve our freedoms, Constitution and nation are exemplary. We take great pride in bestowing this recognition on a cherished friend and admired colleague.”

For information about the Mightier Pen Award event and to make reservations to attend, please contact Tracey Johnson atJohnson@centerforsecuritypolicy.org, or 571-228-2949.

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The Center for Security Policy is a non-profit, non-partisan national security organization that specializes in identifying policies, actions, and resource needs that are vital to American security and then ensures that such issues are the subject of both focused, principled examination and effective action by recognized policy experts, appropriate officials, opinion leaders, and the general public.

For more information visit www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org.

http://www.investigativeproject.org/4158/princeton-professor-embraces-9-11-conspiracy He is one of the nation’s most visible academics, making frequent television appearances and speaking throughout the country as part of Tavis Smiley’s speaker’s bureau. Princeton University Professor Cornel West also straddles a line in which he does not espouse conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks, but he openly encourages those who do. The […]

The US offered a $5 million bounty for American-born jihadi Omar Hammami, who was reportedly killed by al-Shabab Sept. 12.

A 29-year-old native Alabaman, a YouTube rapper on the FBI jihadi list, said he didn’t expect to come home “unless it’s in a body bag.”

MOGADISHU, Somalia — A rapping jihadi from Alabama who became one of Somalia’s top al-Qaida-linked rebels was killed Thursday in an ambush ordered by the rebels’ leader, the extremists said.

Omar Hammami, a native of Daphne, Ala., who was known as Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, or “the American,” died in southern Somalia following several months on the run after a falling-out with al-Shabab’s top leader, the rebels said.

Related: Will $5M bring down tweeting, rapping US jihadi?

Reports of Hammami’s death have cropped up every few months in Somalia, only for him to resurface a short while later. But a United States terrorism expert who closely follows the inner workings of the al-Shabab rebels says he thinks that the current reports of the death are accurate.

The rebels did not immediately present proof of Hammami’s death.