RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nysun.com/foreign/how-a-terror-attack-against-our-marines-30-years/88466/

This was one of the most shameful episodes of the Reagan administration. Furthermore, it was subsequently learned that the wounded were to be air-lifted to Israel’s highly advanced and state of the arts trauma hospitals, but Weinberger nixed that and the wounded had to endure a three hour flight to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, prolonging their pain and suffering and possibly altering their prognosis….rsk

When suicide bombers strike, the shadowy men who dispatch their charges then step back to gauge the response. Thirty years ago Wednesday, after one of the costliest acts of terror ever committed against America, Washington sent out the worst possible message to terrorists around the world. They were watching and listening.

Early on Sunday morning, October 23, 1983, when our Marines were still asleep in their cots at the Beirut International Airport, a truck driven by an Iranian, Ismail Ascari, and filled with explosives crashed into their barracks. The blast was so huge that witnesses said the four-story building actually lifted into the air before it came crashing down.

The blast killed 220 Marines, more than any day since Iwo Jima — 18 sailors, three soldiers and six civilians. Almost simultaneously, a second suicide truck bomber blew up a nine story building on the other side of the airport killing 58 French paratroopers.

The Americans and French were in Beirut as part of an international peacekeeping force sent to quell the violence from the Lebanese Civil War. Once a beautiful and tranquil country, Lebanon descended into a living hell after the P.L.O. arrived, having been kicked out of Jordan by King Hussein in 1970. This tipped the fragile balance between Arab Christians and Muslims. Soon they were fighting each other as well as the Israelis, who entered in 1982 to stop PLO terror raids.

“Which brings us to the point about the Tea Party. It — or “they,” in that it’s not really a party — may have lost the latest engagement in the battle of the budget and the debt. But in our view they have opened up an inspiring vista. We’ve been beating this drum for a while. The heroes of the Tea Party these days are not the kind of troublemakers and yahoos of the kind the Left lampoons on the right.On the contrary, the feature of the Tea Party heroes is that they are exceptionally well-educated. Senator Cruz is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School. He clerked for the Chief Justice of the United States. Senator Lee, the son of a solicitor general of America, was a star at Brigham Young University and clerked on the Third Circuit for a future Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito. Rand Paul is a physician who learned economics at the knee of his father, who goes home at night and reads the principles of political economy that guided the Founders.”

Editorial of The New York Sun | October 21, 2013

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/taking-sides-in-the-gop/88463/

In respect of the power struggle inside the Republican Party, on which side is the Sun? Is it on the side of Senator Cruz or on the side of Senator McCain? Is it on the side of Karl Rove or on the side of Sarah Palin? Is it on the side of Governor Christie or of Senator Paul? We wouldn’t want to suggest that there are great throngs hanging on this question. But for the record, in the rift that is rending the Republican Party, the Sun is on the side of George Washington.

We speak of him as the personification of the constitutional founders. Few of our political loyalties are personal. Our base is the Constitution, at the drafting of which Washington presided. The more we study it, the more we savor the great cases that have been brought down from the high court, the more it seems that this is the ground on which to stand. In the political posturing, constitutional principles are what for what we look, references to it are for what we listen.

Constitutional thinking can be detected but rarely in the Democratic Party palaver. The Democrats are carrying on their crusade with scant reference to or reverence for the Constitution. When they do reference it, they too often do so in a glancing way, a point we marked when, in the midst of the budget crisis, President Obama blandly asserted that of “all the responsibilities the Constitution endows to Congress” there are two that “should be fairly simple.” They are “pass a budget, and pay America’s bills.”

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4028/world-council-of-churches Who needs the WCC any more? Would the world, let alone Middle East Christians, be better off without it? The World Council of Churches (WCC) in Geneva claims to represent and serve 345 churches worldwide. What has it done to help the persecuted churches in Iraq, Syria and Egypt? Or the flood of Syrian […]

http://mosaicmagazine.com/supplemental/2013/10/before-pastor-hagee/

The following comments are a historical footnote to Robert Nicholson’s splendid essay, “Evangelicals and Israel.” Addressing himself to American Jews, he rebukes them for being distrustful of the millions of evangelical Christians who have been staunch supporters of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. But he also rebukes the growing minority of evangelicals who have recently withdrawn that support and are now actively hostile to Israel and Jews.

Two years ago, I was provoked to write The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England from Cromwell to Churchill, in a similarly critical mode, reproaching the present-day English (not English Jews) for betraying their own evangelical tradition, which was so respectful of the Jewish religion and people and so enthusiastic in favor of a Jewish state, and for succumbing to an anti-Israel fervor very nearly indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.

Evangelicalism was at its height in England in the early 19th century, with Lord Ashley (later the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury) its most prominent and vigorous champion. “An Evangelical of the Evangelicals,” he described himself. It was evangelicalism that prompted both his zeal as a social reformer (of factories, education, and child-labor practices) and as a “missionary,” as he saw it, to and from the Jews. “Who will be the Cyrus of Modern Times,” he inquired in his diary in 1826, “the second Chosen to restore the God’s people?” (Cyrus, king of ancient Persia, permitted the exiled Jews to return from Babylonia to the land of Israel.)

Ashley was all of twenty-five and a newly elected member of Parliament when he took upon himself that role. A decade later, he helped organize the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews (the Jews’ Society, as it was known), one of whose aims, and soon its principal aim, was “encouraging the physical restoration of the Jewish people to Eretz Israel—the Land of Israel.” Two years later, he persuaded Lord Palmerston, then the foreign secretary, to appoint a British vice-consul to Jerusalem. “What a wonderful event it is!” he exulted. “The ancient city of the people of God is about to resume a place among the nations.”

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/10/21/zombie-republicans Needed: A light bulb strategy to pour light into our caves. Staggering, without direction, not quite dead and in search of brains, the Republican Party is giving a really good performance as the Zombie Party. According to the media’s current narrative, it has to rid itself of the Tea Party’s influence or die. That […]

Here is a vow. I will not give a plug nickel to any candidate that wants to “reach across the aisle and work with democrats.” That is a frequent mantra of the legislators that want to put their hands in my wallet. Why would anyone want to reach out to those who have slandered and libeled Republicans with accusations of racism, metaphorical “rape”, indifference or hostility to the poor, women, trees, animals and the whole planet?

I want legislators who adhere to true conservative/liberal policies on social, economic and defense issues, not clones of Dick Durbin such as John McCain, and not mindless parrots who spread the lies of climate change which hamper business and economy while doing nothing for humanity or our planet.

And here is a reminder to the weak and dispirited Republicans. Forget Karl Rove. Remember this. The path to the presidency of Ronald Reagan was paved by Senator Barry Morris Goldwater- a man whom I disliked for his overt hostility to Israel. Nonetheless Goldwater, an early incarnation of the Tea Party rejected the legacy of the New Deal and inspired a conservative revolt.He emphasized states’ rights and opposed interference by the federal government in state affairs. While Goldwater was called extreme and alien, his voting records prove otherwise . He lost big to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and dragged a few Republicans down with his loss. In 1971 he fought to stop funding of the United Nations. He said…”I suggested on the floor of the Senate today that we stop all funds for the United Nations. Now, what that’ll do to the United Nations, I don’t know. I have a hunch it would cause them to fold up, which would make me very happy at this particular point. I think if this happens, they can well move their headquarters to Peking or Moscow and get ’em out of this country.”

He lost big to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and took quite a few Republicans down in the process. However, he enrgized the conservative movement which culminated with the election of Ronald Reagan.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/richard-l-cravatts/moral-incoherence-in-the-call-for-academic-boycotts-against-israeli-scholars/print/ This month, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the most largest and most significant organization of academic faculty members in the United States, with over 47,000 members dedicated an entire issue of their online Journal of Academic Freedom to examine the feasibility and appropriateness of an academic boycott of Israel. Given the AAUP’s […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/liberalisms-war-on-women/print/ As Bob Filner, San Diego’s former progressive mayor, pleads guilty to charges stemming from his attacks on women, his essay, “Why I am Pro-Choice” still decorates the website of Planned Parenthood. A year ago, Filner had appeared at a Planned Parenthood rally while running for mayor of California’s second largest city to accuse his […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/requiem-for-a-bloody-phony-peace?f=puball

“Oslo has failed, it’s finished, it’s dead,” concluded Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Danny Danon (Likud) while speaking from Israel online to a Washington, DC, audience at the law offices of Jones Day.

Danon spoke as part of the Oct. 3, 2013, Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) panel “20 Years since Oslo: Time to Reassess Paradigms” offering an expert, sober anniversary postmortem of the failed Arab-Israeli Oslo peace process begun on Sept. 13, 1993, and its lessons for the future.

Although “it is very hard to tell people the truth,” Danon saw no “viable partner for peace” among Palestinian leaders. Further “land for peace” Israeli territorial concessions to the Palestinians were thus pointless. Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria/West Bank, for example, would simply “copy and paste” the aggression faced by Israel from Hamas since its 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip onto territory even closer to Israel’s population centers.

In discussing Israel’s Oslo negotiating partner, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), former Israeli ambassador Yoram Ettinger in person at Jones Day stated that “leopards do not change spots,” but rather “they change tactics.”

Muslim Arabs like Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas have an understanding of the entire region including Israel as a “waqf…divinely ordained to be a Muslim area.” For such Muslims “it has never been the size, but the existence of Israel” ruled by the “infidel Jew” that is a source of conflict. This intransigence manifested itself in a “constant and steady stream of incitement” of hatred and terrorism against Israel from Palestinian media, EMET founder and President Sarah Stern noted.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/361725/print Even for the most cultivated people, the 19th-century humorist Josh Billings quipped, “it ain’t ignorance causes so much trouble; it’s folks knowing so much that ain’t so.” Ideally, Plato’s promise that the process of learning would teach us how little we know would apply universally, thus encouraging not only humility but caution, too. Yet […]