RUTHFULLY YOURS

There are so many persons of the year worthy of respect, admiration and support. In Israel the persons of the year are the Jewish residents of Hebron the biblical first capital of the Jewish people. In spite of hardship, danger, hostility from neighbors, a vile Western media, one sided “negotiations” and Israeli leftists…they remain and they persist. They continue that miraculous link between Abraham and Sarah that has made our survival as a people possible in spite of every effort to extinguish our faith. When David Wilder, the spokesmen for the Jewish community in Hebron speaks of his city, he does not cite the incoveniences and difficulties of daily life. He calls it a privilege to live there.

hebron-day-trip-10David Wilder at home in Hebron

http://www.romirowsky.com/14217/tested-by-zion Although it has been sixty-five years since the establishment of the state of Israel and twenty years since the Oslo peace process, the question of Israel’s isolation within versus its centrality to the region still remains a core issue. U.S. support for a Palestinian state—despite the Palestinians’ support for terrorism—has placed American policy regarding […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/frontpages-2013-man-of-the-year-ted-cruz/print/

Harry Reid called him a “laughingstock” and Grover Norqust’s men accused him of being a “terrorist.” The head of the Chamber Commerce suggested that he learn to sit down and be quiet. Nigeria demanded that he apologize and Chris Matthews accused him of wanting to kill Obama’s baby.

At September’s end, Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine gloated, “Someone tell Ted Cruz the ObamaCare War is Over.”

“Cruz can say, ‘Everyone in America knows Obamacare is destroying the economy,’ and quite plausibly believe it. News to the contrary has never penetrated his mental bunker,” Chait wrote suggesting that Cruz and his allies would end up like the Japanese soldiers on lost islands fighting for a lost cause.

Fast forward a few months and it’s ObamaCare that looks like the lost cause.

A Rasmussen poll places Cruz as the third most influential world leader after Obama and the Pope. Texas Republicans favor him for the top job and he took first place in the Value Voter Summit straw poll. Cruz ties Hillary Clinton in Colorado and beats her among independents.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/the-new-york-times-benghazi-revisionism/print/

To help put Hillary Clinton in the White House, the once-great New York Times has published a dubious report swallowing the Obama administration’s lies about the Sept. 11, 2012 Islamist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

In an act of journalistic malfeasance, the agenda-setting newspaper of record concluded over the weekend that the once-obscure “Innocence of Muslims” YouTube video sparked the armed assault that left four Americans dead at the height of last year’s presidential election cycle. The newspaper also concluded that al-Qaeda wasn’t involved, ignoring the mountain of evidence suggesting al-Qaeda was involved.

Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

Evidently the Old Gray Lady didn’t look too hard for the truth.

From the outset the Obama administration said that what happened in Benghazi was a spontaneous riot identical to what had taken place in Cairo, Egypt, a short time before.

The administration claimed that the Benghazi violence was a spontaneous protest that somehow got out of hand. The official line was that a demonstration outside the U.S. mission in Benghazi grew increasingly violent and that protesters unconnected to terrorist groups eventually stormed the facility.

Not long after the attack National Security Adviser Susan Rice told Fox’s Chris Wallace that,

the best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack. That what happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo as a consequence of the video. People gathered outside the embassy and then it grew very violent and those with extremist ties joined the fray and came with heavy weapons, which unfortunately are quite common in post-revolutionary Libya and that then spun out of control.

Weeks later the Obama administration changed its tune, admitting as more and more evidence accumulated that terrorist groups were involved in planning and carrying out the attack.

After Rice’s TV appearance, the State Department said that there were no protests whatsoever outside the consulate before the attack. The tale that Rice told of “mobs” and “protests” spiraling out of control was an utter fabrication. It was a bald-faced lie told with a straight face to the American people on national TV.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/asian-trade-treaty-will-destroy-america?f=puball

In the same way Obamacare was foisted on America by creating a 2,000-page law that Democrats in Congress never even bothered to read, a new treaty about trade with Asia is going through the same process and poses as great, if not greater, threat to our economy, our judiciary, and our sovereignty.

Secrecy and outright deception is the hallmark of the Obama administration and a proposed Asian trade treaty must be stopped.

It is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and, writing on The Economic Collapse blog, Michael Snyder, notes that “This treaty has 29 chapters, but only 5 of them have to do with trade. Most Americans don’t realize this, but this treaty will fundamentally change our laws regarding internet freedom, health care, the trading of derivatives, copyright issues, food safety, environmental standards, civil liberties, and so much more.”

Snyder warns that “It contains a whole host of things that Obama would be unable to get through Congress on his own. But he is hoping to spring this on Congress at the last minute and get them to agree to this ‘free trade agreement’ before they realize all of the things contained in it.” This is a definition of governing by deception. It evokes the way Obamacare was put before a Congress that had not read it…and which passed by a straight party-line vote by Democrats.

The secrecy surrounding these treaty negotiations,” said Synder, “have really been unprecedented.” In fact, if Wikileaks had not secured access to the TPP draft there would be next to nothing known about it. It posted a 95 page, 30,000 word document that is a horror. Writing about it on his blog, Kurt Nimmo noted that is provisions for implementing “a transnational ‘enforcement regime designed to supplant national laws and sovereignty with a globalist construct. The TPP is by far the largest and most oppressive economic treaty devised so far.”

Indiscriminate charges of racism do more harm than good, as Martin Luther King well knew.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/367176/print

Would America be better off if the Outrage Industry went on a diet for New Year’s?

We just spent much of December quacking and arguing way too much about the views of Phil Robertson, one of the stars of the Duck Dynasty reality-TV series. Most of the attention focused on Robertson’s harsh, mean-spirited comments about gays and on the subsequent, short-lived decision of the cable network A&E to suspend him. But people saved plenty of ire for his comments, offered in an interview with GQ magazine, that when he grew up in Louisiana in the 1950s he never saw “the mistreatment of any black person” and that African Americans in that era didn’t have complaints about white people.

That’s an invitation to call Phil naïve, blind, or a liar. But such descriptions weren’t enough for Jesse Jackson, who said: “These statements uttered by Robertson are more offensive than the bus driver in Montgomery, Alabama, more than 59 years ago. At least the bus driver, who ordered Rosa Parks to surrender her seat to a white person, was following state law. Robertson’s statements were uttered freely and openly without cover of the law, within a context of what he seemed to believe was ‘white privilege.’” He wasn’t the only prominent liberal to go way over the top. MSNBC’s Michael Eric Dyson said Robertson and Duck Dynasty were “part of a majority-white supremacist culture.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/367179/print he year 2013 marks the centenary of the reported founding of the Canaanite Temple in Newark, N.J. That was the very earliest form of an indigenous African-American Islam, one completely distinct from normative Islam, the 1,400-year-old religion from Arabia founded by Mohammed. From this movement came Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan. The […]

The cultural critic on why ignoring the biological differences between men and women risks undermining Western civilization.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303997604579240022857012920

‘What you’re seeing is how a civilization commits suicide,” says Camille Paglia. This self-described “notorious Amazon feminist” isn’t telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that’s just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation.

When Ms. Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the publishing of “Sexual Personae,” she immediately established herself as a feminist who was the scourge of the movement’s establishment, a heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled “Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, ” and it’s easy to see why. “If civilization had been left in female hands,” she wrote, “we would still be living in grass huts.”

The fact that the acclaimed book—the first of six; her latest, “Glittering Images,” is a survey of Western art—was rejected by seven publishers and five agents before being printed by Yale University Press only added to Ms. Paglia’s sense of herself as a provocateur in a class with Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. But unlike those radio jocks, Ms. Paglia has scholarly chops: Her dissertation adviser at Yale was Harold Bloom, and she is as likely to discuss Freud, Oscar Wilde or early Native American art as to talk about Miley Cyrus.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303799404579284731933788614

In Havana a small white clique rules a majority black nation.

Did Barack Obama bow to Raúl Castro when the two shook hands at a memorial for Nelson Mandela in South Africa earlier this month? It sure looked that way in a South African Broadcasting Corporation photo.

On the other hand Castro is a diminutive dictator. That may explain what seemed to be presidential stooping to the level of the tropical totalitarian. Let’s hope so. After all, the Cuban military dictatorship, run by a white junta, held and tortured the black political prisoner Eusebio Peñalver for 28 years—one year more than Mandela endured.

The world barely noticed when Peñalver died in exile in 2005. If he had enjoyed the kind of international support Mandela had, things might have turned out differently for him and for Cuba’s predominantly black population. Government statistics in Cuba are unreliable but according to a 2009 report in the Inter Press Service News Agency, “most Cuban academics estimate that between 60% and 70% of the population is black or ‘mulatto.'”

Cuba was thrilled with the Obama encounter. A Dec. 19 commentary under Fidel’s byline, published by the state media, congratulated Raúl for “his firmness and dignity” when the two met.

http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/iran-un-authority-on-violent-extremism/

The United Nations has yet to agree on a definition of terrorism. That makes it especially problematic for the UN to actually do much about terrorist groups, or UN member states that happen to sponsor them. But when it comes to homing in on “violent extremism,” the UN is on the case, led this month by — of course — Iran. With a nod from the U.S.

Earlier this month, Iran introduced a resolution in the General Assembly on “A world against violence and violent extremism.” Coming from a country that the U.S. State Department has called the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, this was one of many resolutions the UN ought to file in a titanic trash bin labeled “Orwell Out-Takes.” Instead, the General Assembly on Dec. 18 approved it by consensus. That tells us the U.S., erstwhile leader of the free world, did not even call for a vote. Thus did Iran’s PressTV trumpet Iran’s success in persuading the UN, “overwhelmingly… to adopt a resolution based on President Hassan Rouhani’s proposals for a World Against Violent Extremism (WAVE).”

To be fair, while not actually making any attempt to vote against the resolution, the U.S. delegate did make a statement (scroll down to page 5). The UN’s notes on the meeting record that the U.S. delegate protested “the clear resurgence in recent years of Iran’s State-sponsored terrorism” and said Iran “must halt” this behavior. But that formulation out of the way, the U.S. delegate went on to say that Iran’s President Rouhani had outlined “peaceful aims” at the UN in September, and that the U.S. hoped that “his vision would soon be reflected in practical steps.”