RUTHFULLY YOURS

During a rally held on March 23, 2014 in Gaza to mark the tenth anniversary of the assassination of Hamas’s founding “spiritual guide,” Sheik Ahmad Yassin, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya admonished the gathered crowds to, “establish the balance of terror. Out of the ruins, we shall rock Tel Aviv.” The Muslim masses responded with chants of “Strike, strike Tel Aviv.” Echoing the ancient sentiments of Islam’s prophet and prototype jihadist, Muhammad*, extolled as the ultimate “Jihad Model” by “moderate” head of the International Union of Islamic Scholars, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Haniya added the jihadist matrydrom mantra**,

“we are a people that yearn for death, just as our enemies yearn for life. We yearn for martyrdom for the same goal for which our leaders died”

More ominously, Haniya’s speech alluded to Hamas’ now well-established massive network of underground infiltration tunnels:

From below ground and above ground, you, the Occupiers, will be dismissed.
You have no place in the land of Palestine.

Currently, as Israel’s Operation Protective Edge continues, necessitated by Hamas’ latest round of unprovoked missile barrages targeting civilian population centers, the Israeli counter-attack is appropriately focused on an aggressive campaign against the tunnels. Monday, 7/21/14, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) thwarted a jihad terror assault after two groups of Hamas terrorists (about ten in number) infiltrated from Gaza to Israel through a tunnel, ostensibly on their way to conduct a mass casualty attack at Kibbutz Erez and/or Kibbutz Nir Am. Earlier, IDF forces halted several other attempted attacks by Hamas near Kibbutz Sufa and Kibbutz Nirim which also utilized attack tunnels. Dozens of tunnels in Gaza, adjacent to Israel’s border, have been uncovered, and destroyed. Reaching lengths of up to 2.4 kilometers (1.5 miles), some of these tunnels penetrate deep into Israeli territory.

Hamas Prime Minister Haniya’s explicit March 23, 2014 reference to jihad terrorism waged “from below ground,” unmasked what Israeli President Shimon Peres observed with regard to the recently thwarted attack on Kibbutz Sufa: a planned campaign by Hamas to inflict wholesale, deliberate slaughter of Israeli non-combatants.

Notwithstanding over a quarter century of morally bereft wishful ignorance, and deliberate obfuscation, the enduring motivations for Hamas’ genocidal wishes—and accompanying actions—vis-à-vis Jews, were laid out unambiguously in its August 18, 1988 covenant. Moreover, within 6-months of the publication of Hamas’ foundational covenant, the late historian David Littman waged a unique, heroic personal campaign—in public, at the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC), beginning January, 1989 (see “Human Rights and Human Wrongs,” World Union for Progressive Judaism, Geneva, 1989, N° 6, p. 3, statement by David G. Littman, E/CN.4/1989/SR.2)—to elucidate key aspects of the jihad terror organization’s genocidal ideology.

Terrorism needs its poison spewed to as wide a viewing audience as possible.

This still begs the question: how can people of principle and truth respond so lamentably towards those who wave their automatic weapons and fire deadly missiles through the orb of the blue sky, bringing down passenger planes or indiscriminately attempting to destroy cities?

The New York Times, or the Guardian in London, have long been propaganda organs for terrorist organizations, wittingly or unwittingly. The result is the same. The victim suffers and the victimizer is feted. In the July 20th edition of the conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard, Noah Pollak writes:

“Something important is missing from the New York Times coverage of the war in Gaza: where are the photographs of terrorist attacks on Israel, and pictures of Hamas gunmen, tunnels, weaponry, and the use of human shields?

“It appears the Times is silently but happily complying with a Hamas demand that the only pictures from Gaza are of civilians and never of the terrorists. The most influential news organization in the world is thus manufacturing an utterly false portrait of the battle – precisely the portrait that Hamas finds most helpful: the blatantly false image of embattled, victimized Gaza civilians under attack by a cruel Israeli military.”

Indeed, there are no images of Israelis under rocket attack, no images of grieving Israeli families and damaged Israeli buildings, no images of heavily armed Hamas gunmen or rocket attacks on Israel, no images of the RPG’s and machine guns recovered from attempted Hamas tunnel infiltrations into Israeli villages. So far, some 80 tunnels have been located running from Gaza into Israeli territory.

Practically all the cement and concrete that Israel unknowingly allowed into Gaza, in the expectation that it was being used to build schools, hospitals and homes, was diverted by Hamas solely for the construction of sophisticated tunnels through which terrorists could infiltrate into Israel or hide their vast arsenal of Iranian supplied deadly missiles. A report about Hamas tunnel attacks on Israeli civilians, bizarrely contained not a single picture related to those attacks though many appear throughout the internet and in other publications.

John Kerry and Barack Obama appear focused on the suffering of “civilians” in Gaza as the IDF continues to find more killer tunnels that were built by those Hamas busy beavers…and I put quotes around “civilians” because if the information comes from Hamas or the UN they’re about as reputable as your long lost uncle in Zimbabwe.

Remember, the UN was shocked, shocked to find Hamas rockets stashed in Gaza’s UN schools. Shocked, I tell you.

For pity’s sake Kerry deplores Israel’s “disproportionate” response. Israel can’t seem to make him happy.

Obama quickly took action to console himself and his secretary of state.

He shipped $47 million over to Gaza. Half of that automatically goes straight into the pockets of the Hamas leadership so that those thugs can spend more time in their villas on the Riviera. (You expect them to actually live among their own people?) The other half goes to buying materials for more tunnels in time for the next war.

Meanwhile there is this war, and this war is being waged to cry pity for the Palestinian Arab cause. This war is less about gaining territory and more about gaining sympathy. This is a war made for television. Watch the theatrics on CNN and the BBC and see how your emotions are being played.

The images of Arab sorrow (seldom Jewish grief) are orchestrated to light the fuse of anti-Semitism throughout the world. It’s working.

It is working among the usual suspects.

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2014/07/western-death-wishes.html It is quite obvious that Islam inculcates a death wish among Muslims, even in the “pacific” numbers of the “silent majority” of them. Wishing death on non-Muslims of every variety and stripe, even at the price of a Muslim’s own life, is the fundamental fabric of the creed, which lends itself to a life-stifling, […]

There is no change in U.S policy toward Israel that will win any true allies in the Middle East, despite what Arab leaders claim. They often assert that if only we would solve the Palestinian-Israeli problem first, relations would improve. This is a tactic. These leaders employ it simply to divert Western officials from making demands on them, instead of on Israel. The reality is that most Arabs view the U.S., its European allies and Israel with ineradicable contempt.

Remember the commentaries after 9/11 that “we should have been expecting something like this”? Some even implied that America was, in part, responsible for the attacks because of our one-sided policy toward the Muslim world, and in particular, “our support for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.”

Remember also, though, the news reports about the cheering and dancing in Palestinian Arab neighborhoods on 9/11? Perhaps these celebrations resembled the high-fives and other macabre gestures of glee made by some Palestinian Arabs following the recent kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teenagers in Gush Etzion, near the ancient Judean city of Hebron.

Guilt-riddled apologies for America’s alliance with Israel can only be explained by ignorance, by disingenuous attempts to curry favor with Arabs, or for some, by a darker motivation.

Given the pervasive Orwellian double standard applied to Israel by Western media and the often sanctimonious comments by U.S. and European politicians that Israel should be fearful of being internationally isolated, a reality check might be in order.

First, there is no change in U.S. policy toward Israel that will win any true allies in the Muslim world, no matter what its leaders claim. They often assert that only if we would solve the Palestinian-Israeli problem first, relations would improve. This is a tactic. These leaders employ it simply to divert Western officials from making demands on them instead of on Israel. The reality is that most Arabs view the U.S., its European allies, and Israel with ineradicable contempt.

No Arab state has recognized the legitimacy of a Jewish — or often even a pluralistic — state in Palestine. Egypt and Iraq have been persecuting their Christians, only because the Jews were all forced out already; and many Muslim countries cannot even abide each other, as seen every day in the Shia-Sunni conflict, still under way after centuries.

This struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is not about land. If it were, there would have been a two-state solution long ago. Former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would have said yes to the Camp David Plan offered by President Clinton and former Israeli Prime Minister Barak. The current strife between the Hamas terrorist movement and Israel is just another stage in the permanent state of Arab hostility towards the existence of a Jewish state in the region.

Nearly eight years ago, I wrote The Third World Cometh…and Soon. The third world has now arrived, and America – as you and I know it – is all but gone.

The Obama-engineered “humanitarian” border crisis is the latest shameful example of just how far the government that is supposed to protect its own citizens will go, in order to further the total destruction of a once great nation. Once again the politically correct have pulled out a well-worn page from their playbook to implore that it is “for the children”- children who are “undocumented”. Many of these so-called “undocumented children” are disease ridden with scabies, lice and worse. In addition, it has been reported that a number of them are teenagers who are members of criminal gangs such as MS13 or members of jihadist terrorist groups.

In fact, former US Border Patrol Deputy Chief Ronald Coburn has stated that 1 in 5 illegal aliens crossing our border has a criminal record:

“One in ten of every adult male crosser[s] in this day and age more than likely already has a violent criminal record here in the United States, has been removed, and is returning. Another one in ten, making it one in five, is bringing with him or her their violent criminal tendencies and records from their own countries of which we don’t know yet” Coburn said.

The Obama administration and their open borders sycophants in the mainstream press want us to believe that these Central American “children” are refugees, when in reality the majority are 14 to 17 years of age and were sent by their parents who paid coyotes to bring them. Despite this suddenly being “news”, the so-called “crisis” actually began at least a year ago when the influx at the border increased five-fold.

Obama created this “crisis” by signaling to those living in Central America that the US government would allow those who crossed the border to remain, when he unilaterally enacted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012 – and remain they have. With the aid of the administration, illegal aliens are being dumped into facilities in towns across the country without notification to those towns’ respective state governments. To add insult to injury, the liar-in-chief wants to spend $3.7 billion in taxpayer money to fund this operation, of which less than ten percent would go to customs and border protection. Thus far at least, the measure has not passed congress.

While Obama has been instrumental with his endorsement of this de facto amnesty, along with his encouragement of illegal aliens to come en masse, he is by no means alone in this destruction of our nation’s very foundation. In addition to the Obama-Reid-Pelosi axis, there have been plenty of so-called “conservatives” who have aided and abetted this agenda. George W. Bush was very pro open borders as is his brother Jeb. Add to that the usual establishment RINOs such as John McCain, Lindsey Graham and others – not to mention the US Chamber of Commerce, who have furthered the cause of national self-annihilation, and you have a veritable smorgasbord of globalists who would like nothing better than to erase the last vestiges of national and state sovereignty, and the common culture that was once the glue that did make us one people.

The nation’s No. 2 court on Tuesday slapped down the Obama administration in a 2-1 decision that could kill the president’s signature health-care law.

A less-prestigious federal appeals court issued a contradictory opinion the same day, but if the Supreme Court upholds the DC Circuit’s ruling, it will force Congress back to the drawing board to design a health law that is genuinely affordable, not just falsely titled “Affordable Care Act.”

The ruling in Halbig v. Burwell bars the federal government from handing out taxpayer-funded subsidies to people who buy ObamaCare plans in nearly two-thirds of the states – New Jersey and 35 others that refused to set up their own insurance exchanges.

Those subsidies took the sting out of being forced to buy pricey ObamaCare plans. If the ruling sticks, buyers in those states will have to pay full price, on average a whopping four times the subsidized price they paid this year.

Quadrupling the price would trigger a mass exodus out of the plans, causing what the insurance industry calls a “death spiral.”

Sadly, many of the people who’ll be forced to flee the exchanges had cheaper health coverage pre-ObamaCare – but the president’s law outlawed plans that didn’t contain all the bells and whistles he deemed necessary.

The DC Circuit ruling also chastised the Obama administration for rewriting the law to suit its own ends.

Judge Thomas Griffith, writing for the majority, declared: “The Constitution assigns the legislative power to Congress, and to Congress alone.” No more governing by fiat, Mr. President.

I argued in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy that the illusion’s signature feature is a fantasy: By holding free elections, a people is choosing freedom: joining modernity, adopting pluralism and tolerance, rejecting revolutionary violence and totalitarianism.

Today, we are yet again being inundated with tales of Palestinian woe after Hamas’s familiar barbarism has provoked an Israeli military response. It thus bears remembering that the Palestinian people chose Hamas. What ever happened to all those Democracy Project paeans to self-determination? Hamas is Palestinian self-determination. Hamas was not forced on Palestinians. Hamas did not militarily conquer Gaza. No, Hamas swept parliamentary elections freely held in the Palestinian territories in 2006 – thrashing its rival, Fatah, which is only marginally less committed to the destruction of Israel.

Hamas did not suddenly become a terrorist organization after it was elected. Hamas was elected because it was a jihadist organization. It was elected because, by its own declaration, Hamas connects Palestinians to something they find attractive: the global Islamic-supremacist movement. Palestinians widely reject Israel’s right to exist. They regard not just Gaza, Judea and Samaria but all of Israel as “occupied Palestine.” Even those Palestinians who purport to accept the “two-state solution” see it as a way-station on the march to a one-state solution in which the Jewish state eventually ceases to be. Palestinians chose Hamas precisely because Hamas was seen as more dedicated than Fatah to the achievement of that goal—not to mention, more brutally competent.

At the time of its election, Hamas was well known to be the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian terrorist wing. It has been formally designated as a terrorist organization by the United States since the mid-nineties. Indeed, shortly before Palestinians endorsed Hamas at the ballot box, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted several Hamas operatives in the Holy Land Foundation case, a multi-million dollar terrorism financing conspiracy orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood in which several of the Brotherhood’s American affiliates—CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, the North American Islamic Trust, among others—were proved to be complicit in the promotion of Hamas and thus designated as unindicted co-conspirators.

The Wall Street Journal gets close to the heart of the matter in its fine editorial this morning about Hamas’s “civilian death strategy”:

The people of Gaza overwhelmingly elected Hamas, a terrorist outfit dedicated to the destruction of Israel, as their designated representatives. Almost instantly Hamas began stockpiling weapons and using them against a more powerful foe with a solid track record of retaliation.

What did Gazans think was going to happen? Surely they must have understood on election night that their lives would now be suspended in a state of utter chaos. Life expectancy would be miserably low; children would be without a future. Staying alive would be a challenge, if staying alive even mattered anymore.

Does the United Nations ever read its own press releases? This week’s case in point being the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, known as UNRWA, which provides entitlement programs in Hamas-ruled Gaza — where Israel is now fighting to rid the enclave of terrorist tunnels and rockets.

For the second time in less than a week, UNRWA has discovered rockets hidden in vacant UNRWA schools in Gaza. UNRWA has disclosed these discoveries in press releases condemning “the group or groups” responsible for placing the rockets on its premises. But that is apparently no bar to UNRWA condemning Israel for shelling an UNRWA school.

Thus do we see the following lineup of UNRWA press releases:

July 17: “UNRWA STRONGLY CONDEMNS PLACEMENT OF ROCKETS IN SCHOOL”

July 22: “UNRWA STRONGLY CONDEMNS SHELLING OF A SCHOOL IN GAZA SHELTERING CIVILIANS AND CALLS FOR AN INVESTIGATION”

July 22: “UNRWA CONDEMNS PLACEMENT OF ROCKETS, FOR A SECOND TIME, IN ONE OF ITS SCHOOLS”

There are now questions about whether UNRWA, in turning over the first round of hidden rockets to local authorities, effectively turned them right back over to the terrorists of Hamas.

One might well wonder whether the real problem here is rockets being stored in UNRWA schools, or UNRWA running schools in what might better be described as terrorist rocket-storage facilities.

We had decided to spend a year with our children in Israel. We won’t let Hamas stop us.

In two weeks, we’re taking our four kids to Israel for a year — that is, unless El Al decides to stop flying into Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport.

Amidst the current conflagration in the Holy Land, friends and family have (cautiously, nervously) asked us if we still intend to go forward with our move. Our answer has been an anxious, fearful, gut-wrenching, but still resounding and joyful “YES!”

Our saga began this spring when we, parents and children, decided to spend the coming year in the Holy Land, where Michael would develop new business for his law firm among Israeli technology companies (while working remotely for his American clients), where Debra would study Hebrew and Jewish texts, and where our family as a whole would enjoy a year of religious, cultural, and linguistic exploration.

We would enroll our children in Israeli schools, where they would study every subject from math to Bible to history in Hebrew while also studying the Hebrew language intensively on the side, in addition to the usual suite of athletic and artistic extracurricular activities.

We would spend quality time with our many relatives and friends living throughout the country, and we hoped to travel to its four corners, from spelunking in the caves of Rosh HaNikra on the northern coast, to skiing the slopes of Mount Hermon on the Syrian border, to snorkeling among the reefs off Eilat in the south.

But, for a proudly Zionist, Orthodox Jewish family like ours, spending a year in Israel would always amount to far more than the sum of its parts, an all-encompassing religious, historical, and cultural experience that never relents. Michael and Debra were both privileged to spend extended periods living in the Jewish state as young adults, reveling in the cycle of holidays and enduring the mundane details of quotidian life, and we desperately wanted our children to share that experience.

And then thousands of rockets began raining down indiscriminately on civilian population centers in Israel — including the Tel Aviv suburb we’re moving to — ultimately prompting a State Department travel advisory and a temporary FAA ban on flights into Ben Gurion.