RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/blog/hey-parents-meet-neo-soviet-nyu-princeton-professor-steven-cohen/

Not surprising: following the passage of the Magnitsky Act — which penalizes Russians who were involved with the brutal torture and murder of a human rights attorney — supporters of Vladimir Putin’s KGB dictatorship criticized Americans for supporting American values in Russia.

But would you be surprised to learn that one of those minions is not just an American citizen, but a professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton?

Professor Steven F. Cohen — husband of Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of ultra-liberal The Nation – has been speaking up for the interests of Putin and Russia’s KGB. Writing at The Nation itself, he called the Magnitsky Act a “sanctimonious [1] blacklist without due process” supported by a “feckless foreign policy elite”. (Do note: the Act was adopted by both houses of Congress in landslide votes with virtually no opposition.) Cohen claimed that Russia is far more democratic that the U.S. because “the Russian media were filled with heated controversy over the adoption ban,” while there was no such controversy over Magnitsky. (Putin’s response to the Act was to ban American adoptions of Russian children [2].) Cohen called American journalists “cheerleaders for a new cold war.”

This is not new behavior for him — Cohen has been bashing the U.S. media for reporting on Putin’s neo-Soviet crackdown for years now [3].

Politics truly makes odd bedfellows: Cohen and his wife’s publication are aligned with the likes of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan on this issue — two of Putin’s strongest supporters in the U.S. But Cohen’s take was truly neo-Soviet: he trashed the Clinton administration for giving birth to the new cold war, and he stated that Obama has “surrounded himself with Russia advisers, including Hillary Clinton, wedded to the twenty-year-long approach” that calls for cold war.

Cohen then directly wrote for the Kremlin itself, on its Voice of Russia website where he maintains a blog [4] and is also routinely the subject of the Kremlin’s “journalism [5].” Any American parent thinking of sending their children to Princeton or NYU ought to find this worrisome: NYU itself got into the act, publishing his article [6] on its website.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/338950 A couple of network cameras and tripods sat outside the offices of the National Labor Relations Board here on Friday afternoon in the midst of a snowstorm. The NLRB doesn’t usually merit such attention, but it was pushed into the spotlight after Friday’s unanimous decision by a D.C. Court of Appeals panel declaring three […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324461604578191513459319542.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Opinion

The riots and deaths in Egypt signal another grim turn in a story once filled with hope.

THE SO CALLED “ARAB SPRING” DID NOT FOOL ANYONE FAMILIAR WITH THE HISTORY OF THE MOSLEM BROTHERHOOD AND JIHAD….THAT EARLY BLIND ENTHUSIASM WAS INDULGED BY FANTASISTS RATHER THAN POLITICAL THINKERS…..MEMRI, DAVID GOLDMAN, ROBERT SPENCER, ANDREW BOSTOM, IBN WARAQ, ANDY McCARTHY WERE AMONG THOSE WITH EYES WIDE OPEN….RSK

The Arab Spring has reached its second anniversary, but in the swath of countries upended by continuing populist revolts, it is getting hard to find a safe place to throw a party.

Egypt on Friday began a long weekend of violence as dozens of people were killed and hundreds injured in demonstrations—many of them directed at government buildings—in Cairo, Suez, Alexandria and elsewhere. A court decision in Port Said on Saturday sparked a riot that left at least 27 dead. Cairo’s Tahrir Square has been a scene of frequent protests by Egyptians unhappy with the consolidation of power by President Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. On Friday, tens of thousands descended on the square less intent on celebrating the anniversary of their revolution against the autocratic Hosni Mubarak than on raging against what replaced him. The protest descended into a chaotic street battle between demonstrators and police.

Frustration and violence in post-Arab Spring Egypt is nothing new: Last month protesters gathered at the presidential palace after Mr. Morsi granted himself broad powers beyond the reach of judicial oversight. Islamist supporters of the president detained about 50 demonstrators (including four minors), bound their hands and beat them in an apparent effort to extract confessions of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Morsi’s fragile government. Such tactics haven’t been seen in Egypt since the days of . . . well, Hosni Mubarak.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323596204578244140722159814.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond If Chávez believes the nation’s oil billions belong to the people, why not give it to them directly? In the 12 months ahead of the October 2012 Venezuelan presidential election, government spending increased 40% from a year earlier in real terms, according to Francisco Monaldi, a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School who […]

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2013/01/whos-afraid-of-bradford-bruising.html

Bradford,Yorkshire, traditionally one of the great woollen centres in England, became home to a large number of German Jews in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. These immigrants contributed to Bradford’s growth and prosperity, and played a not insignificant part in the civic and cultural life of Bradford.

Textile merchant and philanthropist Sir Jacob Behrens (1806-89), for example, knighted in 1882, was a long-serving president of the local Chamber of Commerce, and was instrumental in the establishment of the commercial department of the Foreign Office. Merchant Charles Semon (1814-77) was similarly involved in local civic life, and also philanthropic on a grand scale. A Bradford hospital and a nurses’ training institution, and model lodging houses and a day nursery founded on his initiative, benefited in particular from his largesse. Like Behrens, he served as mayor of Bradford.

Even more outstanding as a philanthropist was yet another textle merchant from Germany, Jacob Moser (1839-1922), who, some years after Bradford’s acquisition of city status, served as lord mayor. At a time when old age pensions did not yet exist he donated £10,000 (about £1million in today’s money) in order that elderly inhabitants of Bradford irrespective of creed would have a weekly income. His wife also played a prominent tole in local affairs. Moser was a Reform Jew who nevertheless aided the local Orthodox congregation, and it’s interesting to note that he gave what was, before the First World War, the most generous contribution by a single individual to the Zionist Organisation (in order to build the Herzlia Gymnasium in Jaffa).

Another notable Jew with Bradford connections was the artist and art school administrator Sir William Rothenstein, who was born there in 1872, the son of an immigrant woollen merchant, and died in 1945 after a distinguished career. His paintings include Jews mourning in a synagogue (which can be seen here).

Today, the Jewish presence in Bradford has been all but eclipsed, and the town to which those and other nineteenth-century immigrants flocked and in which they so eagerly integrated is home to a large Muslim community of mainly Pakistani origin who comprise about one quarter of the population.

It is against that backdrop that the outrageous remarks of Liberal Democrat MP David Ward, who represents the Bradford East, must be viewed.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2580/holocaust_memorial_day_abuse There is a new form of demented bigotry being paraded by some of Israel’s most venomous detractors. We can call it Holocaust Day abuse. It consists of insulting the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide by politicising the day set aside to honour their memory. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, while most of us remembered the […]

http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/jim-webb-women-cant-fight/

JAMES WEBB IS A COMBAT VETERAN OF VIETNAM, AUTHOR OF THE NOVEL MADE INTO A MOVIE “RULES OF ENGAGMENT”….RSK
“Your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable—it is to win wars,” Douglas MacArthur told the 1962 West Point class. In this story, a Naval Academy graduate, a combat veteran of Vietnam, says the country’s fighting mission is being corrupted, with grave consequences to the national defense. One of the main problems, he says, is women. By James Webb

From the November 1979 Washingtonian

We would go months without bathing, except when we could stand naked among each other next to a village well or in a stream or in the muddy water of a bomb crater. It was nothing to begin walking at midnight, laden with packs and weapons and ammunition and supplies, seventy pounds or more of gear, and still be walking when the sun broke over mud-slick paddies that had sucked our boots all night. We carried our own gear and when we took casualties we carried the weapons of those who had been hit.

When we stopped moving we started digging, furiously throwing out the heavy soil until we had made chest-deep fighting holes. When we needed to make a call of nature we squatted off a trail or straddled a slit trench that had been dug between fighting holes, always by necessity in public view. We slept in makeshift hooches made out of ponchos, or simply wrapped up in a poncho, sometimes so exhausted that we did not feel the rain fall on our own faces. Most of us caught hookworm, dysentery, malaria, or yaws, and some of us had all of them.

We became vicious and aggressive and debased, and reveled in it, because combat is all of those things and we were surviving. I once woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of one of my machinegunners stabbing an already-dead enemy soldier, emptying his fear and frustrations into the corpse’s chest. I watched another of my men, a wholesome Midwest boy, yank the trousers off a dead woman while under fire, just to see if he really remembered what it looked like.

We killed and bled and suffered and died in a way that Washington society, which seems to view service in the combat arms as something akin to a commute to the Pentagon, will never comprehend. And our mission, once all the rhetoric was stripped away, was organized mayhem, with emphasis on both words. For it is organization and leadership, as well as the interdependence sometimes called camaraderie, that sustain a person through such a scarring experience as fighting a war.
This is the only country in the world where women are being pushed toward the battlefield. The United States also has one of the most alarming rates of male-to-female violence in the world: Rapes increased 230 percent from 1967 to 1977 and the much-publicized wife-beating problem cuts across socioeconomic lines.

http://www.investigativeproject.org/3897/additional-morsi-muslim-brotherhood-anti-semitic
Note: This is the first of two stories to examine the New York Times’ coverage of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The New York Times’ January 14 report on the Middle East Media Research Institute’s (MEMRI) videos of Egyptian Mohamed Morsi’s 2010 anti-Semitic statements inexplicably omitted the larger story of the Muslim Brotherhood’s decades-long intrinsic anti-Semitism.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism has uncovered comments going back to 2004 showing a pattern of pure anti-Semitic comments made by Morsi and other Muslim Brotherhood leaders.
MEMRI has routinely covered these sorts of bigoted and hate-filled statements from throughout the Islamic world that most media outlets such as the Times have refused to cover since the late 1990s.
Morsi’s comments reflect the Muslim Brotherhood’s intrinsic anti-Semitism that is easily obtainable dating back to its founding in 1928.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-dershowitz/israeli-elections-and-pal_b_2541709.html

“Resuming negotiations would send a powerful message to Obama that Israel does indeed know its own best interests. The only way to know for sure is to begin negotiations, with no preconditions and with open minds and open hearts.”

The American politician Tip O’Neill once famously observed “that all politics is local.” Had O’Neill been an Israeli, he might have added: “but local politics often has international consequences.” The as yet uncertain results of the Israeli election have considerable implications internationally. They suggest a movement toward the center and away from the extremes. This, in turn, makes it more likely that the Israeli government might have more flexibility in dealing with the Palestinian Authority and in moving toward a two-state solution. There is also some suggestion that the Palestinian Authority may be prepared to soften its refusal to sit down with the Israelis until after a total settlement freeze is agreed upon.

In September I spoke to President Abbas and suggested to him a formula for restarting negotiations: He would agree to sit down and begin negotiations without Israel having frozen settlements, with the understanding that only after he began good faith negotiations, would Israel initiate a settlement freeze. The plan also contemplated a quick and rough division of the West Bank into three areas: those that would almost certainly remain part of Israel; those that would almost certainly become part of a Palestinian state; and those that are reasonably in dispute. As to the first, there would be no limitation on building; but as to the second and third, a freeze would remain in effect until final borders were agreed upon, so long as the negotiations continued in good faith.Abbas agreed to this formulation, after conferring with Saeb Erekat. He even signed a paper that set out this plan.

We both agreed that it was unlikely that negotiations would resume until after the Israeli election. And I said that I would reraise the issue at that time. So I am.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/12789#.UQXCYrb6Zz8 On Friday, January 25, 2013, Sunni protesters were “blocking an international road linking Iraq with Syria.” In plain English, that means the Sunni protesters were peacefully blocking Iranian arms shipments to Iran’s murderer-puppet Assad, this with the full knowledge of Iran’s other puppet, Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki. The Iranian-controlled Shiite-puppet Iraqi Army opened gunfire […]