RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is a society that rejects religious zealotry. Most Kurds are Sunni Muslim and one can hear the five-times-a-day Muslim call to prayer, but it is muted and ignored by most.

Like Israel, Kurdistan is more democratic than any of its neighbors. Like Israel, Kurdistan is surrounded by enemies that wish it did not exist. Like Israel, Kurdistan looks West. And like Israel, Kurdistan has maintained an internal equilibrium though all the world betrays it.

Iraqi Kurdistan is full of surprises. Probably, the most unexpected discovery is how normal life is in its capital city, Erbil. Despite a late summer scare by Islamic State [IS] military gains north of Mosul and the threat of suicide bomber attacks, the social discipline of Kurdistan’s citizens is admirable. There is a relaxed state of tension. It is “business as usual.”

There is also a sense of optimism, pervasive and infectious. Entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well. While there was an exodus of foreign businessmen after the initial territorial gains by the IS, foreign investors are filtering back. The Kurdistan Regional Government [KRG] has already drawn up plans for large-scale projects to improve the infrastructure. Heavy-duty construction vehicles are everywhere. The most visible project is the beltway being built around the city.

This column is from Israel’s black-belt leftist newpaper which I call Al-Ha’aretz….rsk
Feminists, Islamists and university administrators have all taken extreme measures to protect their ‘right’ not to be offended. Unfortunately, censorship for this cause is widely accepted in modern democracies.

Nobody should be surprised that the dictatorial ruler of North Korea would want to censor a film that offended him, or even that he would feel entitled to break the law by threatening reprisals against the offenders. His actions emulate those of hard-left feminists, radical Muslims, university administrators, and others who seek to prevent the publication or distribution of material they deem offensive.

I recall an incident several years ago when radical feminists fired bullets through the windows of a Harvard Square bookstore to protest its sale of Playboy Magazine. I also recall being physically threatened by a group called “Dykes on Bikes” – a feminist motorcycle gang – for providing legal representation of alleged pornographers.
Then there is radical Islamic censorship that has become far more deadly. When some radical Muslims were offended by Theo Van Gogh’s film “Submission,” which exposed Islam’s demeaning views toward women, Van Gogh was murdered in cold blood and his co-producer’s life threatened by a Fatwa. Salman Rushdie had to go into hiding when a Fatwa was issued against him and his book, “The Satanic Verses.” The Yale University Press, fearful of threats of violence, censored the actual cartoons depicting Mohammed from a book about that subject, following violent reaction to the publication of the cartoons in Scandinavia.

Contrary to the two-state solution, which splits Israel between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Israeli scholar Mordechai Nisan proposes that the land west of the Jordan River should be granted to Israel alone.

“It became conventional and universally acceptable that there should be a Palestinian state next to Israel, west of the Jordan River,” Nisan, retired lecturer in Middle East Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told John Bachman and Miranda Khan on “America’s Forum” on Newsmax TV.
“This was a theme that was embedded in the Oslo Accords from 1993 and central to various rounds of negotiations, which took place in the last 20 years between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” he explained.

“But a Palestinian state hasn’t surfaced and the reasons for that are many,” he said.

There is “a grave incompatibility between what Israel needs for its own well being and national military integrity, its right to settlements in the land of Israel, and what the Palestinians demand, which is a Palestinian state emptied of any Jews and a Palestinian state, which is not ready to recognize Israel as a Jewish state at all,” he contends.

“Therefore, it’s not surprising that after 20 years, no agreement has been reached,” he added.

RIP Joseph Sargent, Director of the Greatest Jewish Action Movie

Taking of Pelham One Two Three director died at 89

Yesterday brought the news that Joseph Sargent, the director of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, died at 89. This is particularly sad because Sargent–the journeyman director with nearly 90 credits–made perhaps the greatest Jewish action movie.

Pelham, for those of you who somehow haven’t seen it, is about the hijacking of a New York City subway in the early 1970s. It’s insanely memorable–David Shire’s thumping, horn-driven score, Owen Roizman’s gorgeous and dirty cinematography, and a cast that’s a who’s who of great character actors, including Jerry Stiller, Robert Shaw and Martin Balsam.

But let’s not forget that Pelham is also, as David Edelstein put it, “a New York Jewish comedy writer’s take on the modern metropolis going meshuggener.” It’s an action movie with the soul of a Catskills timeshare.

This story was originally published on December 16, 2010.
Brooklyn’s hip Mile End deli modernizes the traditional meal once again

Mile End opened in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, at the beginning of 2008, a deli specializing in Montreal Jewish cuisine: smoked meat instead of pastrami; poutine instead of cheese fries; those flat, sweet things they serve up there instead of what New Yorkers call bagels. Foodies loved the sandwiches. Hipsters loved the Brownstone Brooklyn setting, the Stumptown coffee, and the brunch, which is just exotic enough to be adventurous and just familiar enough to be, well, brunch.

Then, Mile End began to offer an ambitious dinner menu that took your Eastern European Jewish grandmother’s evergreens and ran them through up-to-the-minute, fat-happy trends: shmaltzed radishes, veal cholent, kasha varnishkes with confit gizzards. What was this cool Canadian place doing serving traditional food? “To me, this is what deli is,” Montreal-born Noah Bermanoff, the place’s founder and co-owner, said earlier this week. “I’m not trying super-hard to be Montreal. I’m trying super-hard to serve food as I know it.”

By Ruth King http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/twas-the-night-before-christmas-when-all-through-the-house

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through House

Not a Democrat was stirring, not even a mouse;
The RINOS left with a harrumph and a grouse

Hagan, Pryor and Landrieu were home tucked in their beds
The others just tossed with polls in their heads.

I woke up with a START from a terrible DREAM
When heard a clatter and saw a silver stream.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,

Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

I peered through the window and put on my glasses
It was a miniature sleigh with eight tiny jackasses

With a spry old driver, so lively and chipper
I knew in a flash twas the ghost of the Gipper
“Yon Feinstein, yon Schumer yon Durbin the jerk”
He scolded and shouted and gave them their work
“Sweep the tax hikes, the earmarks, and toss the pork.!!!”

A bundle of bags he had flung on his back,
And he laughed out loud while opening his pack.
With a smile and knowing and friendly look
He gave every democrat Dick Morris’s book.
Another election may we all live to fight

Merry Christmas to All and to all a good night!!

Happy Holidays to all of you!!!

In most parts of the world, it’s not easy to find a major issue on which 80% of the population agrees. An election victory in the United States is considered a “landslide” if the winner receives more than about 60% of the vote. (Such as Richard Nixon winning 65% of the vote against George McGovern in the 1972 presidential race.)

But among Palestinian Arabs in Judea-Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza, it turns out there is one issue on which there is more support than any other: randomly murdering Israeli Jews.

The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research last week asked a sample of 1,270 Palestinian Arab adults in the territories what they thought of the recent wave of attacks in which Palestinians stabbed Israelis or ran them over with their cars. Fully 80% responded that they support such attacks.

Note that the respondents weren’t talking about theoretical future attacks. They were commenting on recent attacks which they know all about. Here is what they are endorsing:

– Ramming a car into a crowd at a train station in Jerusalem. The fatalities included a three-month old infant.

– Stabbing an unarmed young woman standing at a bus stop in Gush Etzion.

– Axing and machine-gunning four rabbis at prayer in a Jerusalem synagogue.

Apparently, the Obama administration’s ostensible determination to foster “diversity” in the military is a one-way street. Army Chaplain Joseph Lawhorn was disciplined for mentioning his faith and the Bible as part of a November suicide prevention training seminar with the 5th Ranger Training Battalion. “You provided a two-sided handout that listed Army resources on one side and a biblical approach to handling depression on the other side,” wrote Col. David Fivecoat, commander of the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade at Ft. Benning, Georgia, in an official Letter of Concern. “This made it impossible for those in attendance to receive the resource information without also receiving the biblical information.”

Lawhorn received the letter following orders to appear in Col. Fivecoat’s office on Thanksgiving Day. The letter continued:

As the battalion chaplain, you are entrusted to care for the emotional wellbeing of all soldiers in the battalion. You, above all others, must be cognizant of the various beliefs held by diverse soldiers. During mandatory training briefings, it is imperative you are careful to avoid any perception you are advocating one system of beliefs over another.

The sequence of events leading to the action taken against Lawhorn should sound familiar. The session took place Nov. 20 at the University of North Georgia. Lawhorn handed out the two-sided document, recited some scripture, and explained how he used the Bible to cope with his own bout of depression. A single soldier was “offended” by Lawhorn’s presentation and reported him to the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers (MAAF). Writing on behalf the MAAF, former Army Captain Jason Torpy characterized Lawhorn’s presentation as “an abuse of power and a violation of regulations.” He further accused Lawhorn of engaging in “conscience protection” which he defined as “an insidious legal tool designed to allow military chaplains to use their power and authority to evangelize vulnerable military populations.”

Going by the standard liberals hold conservatives to, Al Sharpton clearly has blood on his hands.

Going by objective standards of reason and fairness, Al Sharpton is not to blame for the assassination of two New York City cops over the weekend. Nor are New York mayor Bill de Blasio, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder, President Obama, or any of the protesters and activists they supported, encouraged, and allied themselves with. Going by what we know, the only person to blame is the man police identified as the killer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley.

This is the standard I’ve upheld in this space for years, when one madman after another has killed and maimed in the name of one cause or another. It’s also been necessary to uphold this standard when madmen have killed for no political cause whatsoever, but politicians and journalists have been determined to claim otherwise.

The most glaring example of this was the horrible 2011 shooting spree in Tucson that claimed six lives and horribly wounded then-U.S. representative Gabrielle Giffords. The shooting occurred during a period of maximum liberal paranoia about the tea-party movement. And in a riot of groupthink, much of the elite media convinced itself — absent any evidence — that the killer, Jared Loughner, was inspired by, variously, Sarah Palin’s Facebook map of congressional races (there were targets over various districts where Palin wanted Democrats defeated), Minnesota representative Michele Bachmann’s overheated speeches, and other forms of what New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called “eliminationist rhetoric.”

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the Cold War that had existed between it and the U.S. since the end of World War Two came to an end, but there was ditritus, loose ends like Cuba and it has taken until now for an end to the diplomatic obstacles whose roots reach back to the Eisenhower administration. In 1960 it had approved a CIA plan to arm and train a group of Cuban refugees to overthrow the Castro regime.

The Cuban dictator, Flugencio Batista, fled Havana on January 1, 1959 and Fidel Castro and his rebels entered the capital a week later on January 8. One sees the world through the prism of one’s own life and, that event was six months prior to my graduating from the University of Miami.

Among my friends in college were young men who were the children of well-to-do Cubans, so I was more aware of what was occurring than most my age when Castro took over. In 1960 I was inducted into the army and it was big news when the Bay of Pigs invasion occurred on April 14, 1961. President Kennedy had moved ahead on the CIA plan, but it was a failure and it was followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The nation was literally on the edge of nuclear confrontation.

In the lead up to that the Second Infantry Division of which my unit was a part ceased its training mission and converted to one of battle readiness. In my case, however, I had already been discharged in April 1962. Kennedy declared a blockage of Cuba which had installed the Soviet missiles. Wisely, the Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev agreed to remove them.