RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Ten years after withdrawing from Gaza, the territory we left behind has become a safe haven for terrorists”​Speech as delivered by Israel’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Ron Prosor, on the Situation in the Middle East:

“Mr. President,

First, I would like to congratulate New Zealand for its able stewardship of the Security Council this month. I thank Foreign Minister McCully, for being here today to preside over this session.

I also want to thank, the UN Special Coordinator and Special Representative of the Secretary General, Mr. Nikolay Mladenov, for his briefing today and his ongoing efforts to help ease the situation in this volatile region.

Ten years ago, this month, Israel disengaged from the Gaza Strip- and, I would like to remind you, that we also dismantled four settlements in the West Bank in order to show that there is a political horizon. We removed thousands of Israeli families from their homes, uprooted entire communities, and withdrew every unit of the Israeli Defense Forces. Not a single Israeli civilian or soldier remained in Gaza.

We in Israel have always been told- including in this prestigious chamber- the obstacles to peace are the settlements, and the Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria. If only Israel would pull back, if only Israel would leave the Palestinians to run their own affairs- there would be peace. If Israel would only listen to the international community, the border between Israel and the Palestinians would be like the border between the Netherlands and Belgium.

“Schumer is not a Shomer” were the words emblazoned on dozens of placards that were held by some of the 12,000 people who flooded Times Square last week to protest the “Death to America/Death to Israel” deal that Barack Obama and his cronies made on July 14th with––to this day, to this hour––a palpably belligerent, anti-Western, anti-Semitic Iran.

Schumer, will you guard Israel or not?
The placards––and the demonstration in front of the senator’s New York City office the next day––were to implore him to stop evading the subject with mealy-mouthed language (“I’ll go through the agreement with a fine-tooth comb”) and to reject the deal outright, vote against it in Congress, and convince at least 13 of his colleagues on the left to vote against the horrific deal. Congress is now reviewing the deal and will vote on September 17, in less than 50 days.

In short, to block the Iran deal, 67 Senators need to vote against it. 59 Senators are already committed to doing just that. 14 are undecided. And Sen. Schumer is one of them.

New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn) said, “We have listened to Senator Schumer for years and how he takes every opportunity to explain the origin of his name Schumer and what it means for him to be a proud “Shomer”––which in Hebrew means protector. Now is the time to live up to your claim and put your words into action.”

The real question is why, when it comes to the most extreme, anti-Western nation-destroyer of them all — a country committed to the annihilation of a UN member state — Her Majesty’s government would not only permit it to have any nuclear project, but would trust the word of a regime with stated genocidal intent when it says that it is not pursuing genocidal weaponry?

Two very interesting things happened in Britain over the last two weeks. What makes them more interesting is that they are wholly contradictory.

Abroad, Britain’s foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, put his nation’s name to the P5+1 agreement with Iran, lifting sanctions against the Islamic Republic, unfreezing its assets, lifting arms controls on the regime and much, much more, all in exchange for having potential oversight — with permission requested weeks in advance of any inspection — of the country’s nuclear sites. Britain’s signature on this deal appears to have been an accepted and acceptable outcome with no significant opposition from any senior political figure of either main political party, and very little objection in the national press.

A few days later, Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, gave his best speech to date on the threat of Islamic extremism at home and abroad. In that speech, the Prime Minister defined the challenge that Islamic extremism poses to Britain’s way of life and cohesion as a society. He outlined the problem better than perhaps any other Western leader to date:

“What we are fighting, in Islamist extremism, is an ideology. It is an extreme doctrine. And like any extreme doctrine, it is subversive. At its furthest end, it seeks to destroy nation-states to invent its own barbaric realm. And it often backs violence to achieve this aim… mostly violence against fellow Muslims — who don’t subscribe to its sick worldview. But you don’t have to support violence to subscribe to certain intolerant ideas which create a climate in which extremists can flourish. Ideas which are hostile to basic liberal values such as democracy, freedom and sexual equality. Ideas which actively promote discrimination, sectarianism and segregation.”

A cousin of mine has finished his freshman year in college; like most freshmen, he now knows absolutely everything. He took it upon himself, this week, to announce (to my brother, who is a very patient man) that Iran’s Islamist dictators were “a predictable consequence of American imperialism,” which manifested itself through “the CIA’s international pro-fascist crimes.”

That’s nonsense, of course, but it’s widely believed nonsense — and not just among college kids who’ve read the first chapter of a Noam Chomsky book. There are serious men who are under the impression that the CIA led a coup to replace an upstanding, democratic reformer named Mohammed Mossadegh with a fascist Shah named Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and that Pahlavi’s crimes were so atrocious that Iran was driven into the arms of the mullahs. None of that is true. And with Congress getting ready to vote on the Iran deal, everyone could use a little historical perspective.

Just for the record….Steve King is an outstanding legislator and gets a -4 from the Arab American Association for his staunch defense and support of Israel…..rsk
Islamic jihad has declared war on the United States and all of Western civilization. ISIS has announced its intention to dominate the world and fly its black flag from the White House in continuation of a 1,400-year-old war against us “infidels.”

In the first 100 years after the death of Mohammed (a.d. 632)`, Islamic jihad conquered most of the known world except Western Europe. Christian forces blocked the first century of Islamic conquest at the very bloody Battle of Tours on October 10, 732. Islamic jihad continued to threaten the very existence of Christianity throughout the next millennium. October 7, 1571, marked the destruction of Islamic jihad’s massive fleet by the Holy League fleet in the Aegean Sea.

More than a century later, Islamic jihad, having conquered the Middle East and most of Eastern Europe, had surrounded and besieged the crown jewel of Western Christendom, Vienna. If Vienna fell to Islam, all of Western Europe would be likely to follow. After a two-month siege of Vienna, relief forces from Poland and Germany arrived.

The battle for relief of Vienna began on September 11, 1683, and ended with the rout of the Islamic forces the following day. On September 11, 1697, Prince Eugene caught and routed a large Islamic army and delivered a decisive blow at the Battle of Zenta.

Her “short-termism” fear will lead to long-term stagnation.

The worst sectors of the worst recovery since World War II are business investment in new plants and equipment and new business start-ups. These are the biggest job-creators, and their slump is a key reason for the sub-par labor recovery, with low participation rates and high numbers of involuntary part-time workers.

So if investment is the problem, what does Hillary Clinton go out and do? She proposes jacking up the tax on investment. It’s almost inconceivably stupid.

In her latest economic speech, Clinton proposes doubling the capital-gains tax rate on the profit made from asset sales (stocks, bonds, real estate) held a day less than one year up to two years. Right now, if you take a capital gain a day more than one year, you are taxed at a 20 percent rate. Actually, it’s 23.8 percent when you include the health-care surtax. So under Clinton’s brilliant new play, you’d be taxed at 43.4 percent — the top individual cap-gains rate of 39.6 percent plus the 3.8 percent Obamacare surtax.

That means, instead of keeping 80 cents on the additional dollar of profit, you’d only keep 56.6 cents — a 30-percentage-point reduction in the take-home-pay reward for taking an extra dollar’s investment risk.

By lying and withholding information about the agreement, he gives aid and comfort to America’s enemy.

The president “must certainly be punishable for giving false information to the Senate.”

One can imagine hearing such counsel from a contemporary United States senator on the receiving end of President Obama’s “full disclosure” of the nuclear deal with Iran. But the admonition actually came from James Iredell, a champion of the Constitution’s ratification, who was later appointed to the Supreme Court by President George Washington.

Iredell was addressing the obligations the new Constitution imposed on the president in the arena of international affairs. Notwithstanding the chief executive’s broad powers to “regulate all intercourse with foreign powers,” it would be the president’s “duty to impart to the Senate every material intelligence he receives.” Indeed, among the most egregious offenses a president could commit would be fraudulently inducing senators “to enter into measures injurious to their country, and which they would not have consented to had the true state of things been disclosed to them.”

The politically convenient illusion that a coherent United States of Europe might be nudged into being paved the way for the financially convenient delusion that a single currency would see the Euro Zone stable, secure and surging ahead. The turmoil in Greece puts pay to that notion
Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the EU Commission, may be widely referred to as “the master of lies”, but when he spoke to a group of students in Belgium in early May he was not at his best. The Eurozone, he claimed, was an “area of solidarity and prosperity”. There are no reports of laughter but in Hades Tacitus could be heard repeating that old jibe of his, “ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant”: They make a desert and call it peace.

A desert it is, at least in the currency union’s south. About the only abundance is in miserable statistics. To take just a few, Greece’s GDP fell by roughly a quarter between 2008 and 2014. In Spain, youth unemployment stood at slightly under 50 per cent this March, some 10 per cent worse than in Italy, a country with an economy that has barely grown since the turn of the century. There has been a wave of emigration from Europe’s south in which the best and the brightest are over-represented. Talk of a lost generation is not hyperbole.

Why did so many embark on leaky boats, rather than present themselves as ordinary economic migrants? Because they have no marketable skills, little education and no jobs waiting for them upon arrival. What many do boast is a troubling insularity borne of loyalty to fundamentalist Islam.
Many, perhaps most, of the difficulties and malaise currently being experienced by the West, including Australia, stem in large measure from two factors: the unprecedented increase in population in the Third World, and the replacement of secular, universalistic ideologies, especially Marxism, by religious fundamentalism. Neither underlying trend has been widely discussed here, and the aim of this article is to examine these factors on the context of Australia’s policy towards immigration and political extremism.

The statistics of population increase throughout the Third World in recent decades are simply staggering. Although everyone is aware that there has been a worldwide population explosion, and that this has occurred primarily in the under­developed world, in all likelihood few know just how astronomical this increase has been. Here is a table of the populations of various randomly selected Third World countries in 1950 and today (numbers in millions):

Yes, they are hemp-clad loons, ignore history’s lessons and remain resolutely impervious to both empirical evidence and logic, but the sincerity they invest in their misconceptions is somewhat admirable. The same cannot be said of Bill Shorten, that consummate opportunist, and his party.
Give credit where credit is due: the Australian Labor Party is not without its traditionalist element. For instance, in the lead up to the ALP 47th National Conference (July 24-26), Senator Joe Bullock has taken a sensible, non-ideological position on Israel: Australia’s immediate recognition of an Arab Palestinian state cannot be conducive to peace since it advances the cause not of Arab Palestinians but of Hamas, a Salafi jihadist (okay, terrorist) organisation that is currently in league with al-Qaeda-in-the-Sinai.

Amongst the Greens, on the other hand, apparatchik after apparatchik appears to be a foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Zionist