RUTHFULLY YOURS

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/winners-and-losers-in-the-war-on-poverty/

Progressives and liberals love William James’s idea of a “moral equivalent of war.” As Jonah Goldberg defines this concept, “The core idea, expressed in myriad different ways, is that normal democratic capitalism is insufficient. Society needs an organizing principle that causes the citizenry to drop their individual pursuits, petty ambitions, and disorganized lifestyles and unite around common purposes. Naturally, the State must provide leadership and coordination in this effort, just as it does in a war.” The redefining of social problems as battles in a “war” also expands the regulatory and intrusive power of the federal government, and justifies its appropriation of wealth in order to finance the programs that are de facto redistributions of property. The fundamental purpose of the Constitution, limiting the government in order to allow problems to be solved at the closest possible level to the people, is gutted by a false analogy.

Up until Obamacare, no greater example of costly failure of this idea has been Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” a congeries of various federal programs legislated 50 years ago. Johnson’s grandiose utopian aim for his “unconditional war on poverty” was the “total victory of prosperity over poverty.” Recently the House Budget Committee issued a report surveying this effort, and its conclusions are stark: after spending $15 trillion, the war on poverty has led to an expensive stalemate at best. But it has been a winner for the party of big government.

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/theodore-feder/gunter-grass-and-the-waffen-ss/

On April 7, 2012, Gunter Grass, German novelist and Nobel Laureate, published a poem, titled “What Must Be Said” (“Was gesagt werden muss”) in which he chastised the nuclear power Israel for threatening Iran and endangering world peace. It garnered worldwide attention.

The poem states in part,

Why is it only now I say in old age, with my last drop of ink, that Israel’s nuclear power endangers an already fragile world peace? Because what by tomorrow might be too late, must be spoken now, and because we—as Germans already burdened enough—could become enablers of a crime.

He allowed himself to do this, he says, in spite of being a German and at the risk of being labeled an anti-Semite, which he averred he most assuredly was not. What better proof of his objectivity than that he, a good German of the left, was impelled by his conscience to sound the alarm, regardless of the consequences to him personally, though his poem was met with considerable approval in Germany and elsewhere?

Of course, he could have decried other threats to international harmony, posed for instance, by the nuclear power of North Korea, by the instability in a nuclear-armed Pakistan, by the events in the Sudan, Rwanda, and Somalia, by the regime of Bashar al Assad, by the Taliban, Al Qaeda and the world-wide jihadist movement, or he could have focused on the threats to annihilate Israel that have emanated from Iran itself. There, its past president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was wont to describe Israel as an illegitimate entity “that should be wiped off the map,” as a “germ of corruption that will be wiped off” and as “an insult to all humanity.”

Ahmadinejad’s successor, Hassan Rouhani, reputed to be more moderate, stated on the occasion of the Al-Quds Day celebrations in Tehran that “Israel is a wound on the body of the world of Islam that must be destroyed.” Grass would appear to prefer that the Jews of Israel proceed compliantly to their deaths, as they did under the careful ministrations of the SS during World War II, which brings us to a not-unrelated subject.

It happens that after 60 years of concealment and silence, Gunter Grass admitted in August 2006 that during the war he had been a member of the Waffen SS. He made this admission in an autobiography released that same month titled Peeling the Onion (Beim Heuter der Zwiebel). Asked about this in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Grass replied,

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-cancels-tomahawk-missile-spends-400k-on-camel-sculpture-in-pakistan/#.UznXcXWq51A.twitter

Obama is tossing out the A-10, the Hellfire and the Tomahawk missile. In the future, we won’t win wars with hard power. We’ll do it with soft power camel sculptures.

The State Department wants to plunk down $400,000 in taxpayer money for a camel sculpture at the new U.S. Embassy being built in Islamabad, Pakistan, according to a report Monday.

“Camel Contemplating Needle,” created by American artist John Baldessari, depicts a 500-pound white camel made of fiberglass staring at the eye of an oversized needle, Buzzfeedfirst reported.

Officials explained the decision to purchase the sculpture in a four-page document justifying a “sole source” procurement.

“This artist’s product is uniquely qualified,” the document states. “Public art which will be presented in the new embassy should reflect the values of a predominantly Islamist country.”

State Department press spokeswoman Christine Foushee told Buzzfeed that the proposed purchase comes from the department’s “Office of Art in Embassies.”

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-310314.html

By any standard, the Palestinian problem involves the strangest criteria in modern history.

To begin with, refugees are defined as individuals who have been forced to leave their land of origin. A new definition of refugee status, though, was invented exclusively for Palestinian Arabs, who count as refugees their descendants to the nth generation.

All the world’s refugees are the responsibility of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, except for the Palestinians, who have their own refugee agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine.Among all the population exchanges of the 20th century – Greeks for Turks after World War I, Hindus for Moslems after the separation of India and Pakistan after World War II, Serbs for Croats after the breakup of Yugoslavia during the 1980s – the Palestinians alone remain frozen in time, a living fossil of long-decided conflicts.

Some 700,000 Jews were expelled from Muslim countries where they had lived in many cases more than a thousand years before the advent of Islam, and most of them were absorbed into the new State of Israel with a territory the size of New Jersey; 700,000 or so Arabs left Israel’s Jewish sector during the 1948 War of Independence, most at the behest of their leaders, but few were absorbed by the vast Muslim lands surrounding Israel.

Instead, the so-called refugees were gathered in camps (now for the most part towns with a living standard much higher than that of the adjacent Arab countries thanks to foreign aid) and kept as a human battering ram against Israel, whose existence the Muslim countries cannot easily accept.

Some 10 million Germans who had lived for generations in what is now Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic were driven out at the end of World War II (more than half a million died in the great displacement).

Imagine that Germany had kept these 10 million people in camps for 70 years and that their descendants now numbered 40 million – and that Germany demanded on pain of war restitution of everything from the Sudetenland to Kaliningrad (the former Konigsberg). That is a fair analogy to the Palestinian position.

It is a scam, a hoax, a put-on, a Grand Guignol theatrical with 5 million extras. Because polite opinion bows to the sensibilities of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims, it is treated in all seriousness.

As a matter of full disclosure, I want to put my personal view on record: The mainstream view amounts to a repulsive and depraved exercise in hypocrisy that merits the harshest punishment that a just God might devise.

In this looking-glass world of hypocrisy and hoax, though, the most noteworthy deception is the physical existence of the Palestinians themselves: in Judea and Samaria (sometimes called the occupied West Bank), there are perhaps half the number of Arabs as the Palestinian Authority’s census has counted, or the international community acknowledges. As Jerusalem Post reporter Caroline Glick reports in her new book, Israeli researchers have demonstrated that

Obama’s Foreign Policy Failures Lead to Disaster at UN

Anne Bayefsky is director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. Follow her @AnneBayefsky.
President Obama’s hemorrhaging foreign policy is creating an increasingly embarrassing mess at the United Nations. A four-week session of the U.N.’s top human rights body, the Human Rights Council, ended in Geneva on March 28, 2014, with a series of humiliating defeats for the president’s calling card of indiscriminate engagement.

Joining, and legitimizing, a U.N. Human Rights Council with no human rights conditions for membership was one of President Obama’s first foreign policy moves. Hence, the United States was elected to the council in 2009, re-elected in 2013, and currently sits alongside such human rights luminaries as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia.

This session took place against the backdrop of Russia’s aggressive takeover of parts of a sovereign country, in gross violation of the human rights of Ukrainians. And yet the Council itself couldn’t manage a peep. A U.S.-backed resolution at the U.N. General Assembly adopted on March 27, 2014, criticized Russia, but failed to take what would have been the truly isolating step of removing Russia from the Council.

Brooklyn13@Embarqmail.com

Many Islamic leaders have repeatedly stated loud and clear that Islam will dominate the world. To achieve this goal, where Muslims migrate, frequently their leaders foster isolation from the native population. In these enclaves they look to establish and enforce Shania instead of the law of the land. Believe it, Because it is happening here in the US as well as the entire world. .

To understand what can and is happening here in the US we are well advised to look at what has happened in countries such as France and England.

According to French journalist and historian, Alexandre Adler, there are many French suburbs that have become Muslim controlled no-go zones. He states “The violence in these areas can’t be explained away only as social problems.” He also stated, “that it’s due to the Muslim doctrine that wherever Muslims spread it is Islam land.”

There are at least 750 such no-go zones throughout France. These are violent areas where police, firemen and ambulances refuse to enter unless they have absolutely no other option. These zones are under Islamic control and non-Muslims are advised not to enter.

In England, Islamic law has been enforceable nationwide. There are no-go Zones, Muslim enclaves in the London boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest and Bradford. In Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden, the governments have allowed unassimilated Muslim immigrants to carve out Sharia zones where government law is no longer enforced, even for violent crimes such as murder.

Here in the US look at what is happening in Dearborn, MI with a population that is 45% Muslim. It can be considered a no-go zone. It is an area (http://www.clarionproject.org//news/american-muslims-stone-christians-dearborn-michigan) ; where police did not protect Christians carrying pro Jesus signs. The Muslim crowd threw rocks, bottles and eggs at the Christians. Repeatedly, the Christians asked for protection from Wayne County Sheriff’s Department (WCSD) officers who were present. Repeatedly they were denied protection.

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2014/03/hollywood-sharia-compliant.html

Hollywood has rarely produced a trustworthy depiction of historical events. My own philosophy of historical fiction is that historic events should serve as background to the conflicts, aspirations, ambitions, betrayals and destiny of the principal characters in the story.

Further, the plot in which these characters move – or, even better, when these characters move the plot itself – should not conflict with the historic events, but be in sync with those events. The principal conflicts should be between the characters, not between the story and history. I obeyed this rule while writing the Sparrowhawk series, and also my period detective novels.

Hollywood does not adhere to such rules. I don’t think it has even formulated them.

Thus we have such examples as the 1936 Charge of the Light Brigade, in which the sequence of events of the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean War was reversed (the war, 1853-1856; the mutiny, 1857). Otherwise it would have required Errol Flynn to survive the Charge and travel to India to rescue Olivia de Havilland from Surat Khan’s filthy clutches. History was tweaked, but not by much, to accommodate the plot. The lavish 1968 Tony Richardson version, however, was a plotless anti-war statement, complete with animated period political cartoons and caricatured Victorian figures. And, because it was an anti-war statement, it was gorier than its predecessor.

There are innumerable films and TV series grounded in history. I could write a book about the subject. I might do that, some day. What looms largest in my mind, however, and at the moment, is David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962). At the age of 17, when I first saw it shortly after its release, I was literally smitten by it. It got me to read up on World War One. Although I entertained doubts about its accuracy, it was a grand scale film, one of the last. My positive appraisal of it gradually diminished over the years, the more I learned about how and why the Allied campaign in the Middle East was conducted.