RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/sound-the-trumpet-the-united-states-and-human-rights-promotion-interview-with-lawrence-j-haas

In the introduction to his remarkable book Sound The Trumpet-The United States and Human Rights Promotion, Lawrence J. Haas avers that the United States has been the world’s leading promoter of human rights over the course of modern history, by example and by determination to pressure repressive regimes and engage with and inspire their dissidents.

While giving requisite credit to other religions and cultures, Haas states that the concept and practice of these essential freedoms is generally a Western and Judeo/Christian phenomenon which evolved from the Protestant Reformation, the Founding Principles of the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism. However, in this book, Haas, a senior fellow for United States foreign policy at The American Foreign Policy Council and former Communications Director for Vice President Albert Gore, concentrates on the period since World War 11, and discusses the contradictions between the desire to promote human rights in every corner of the world and the inherent collision with national interest, the sovereignty of other nations, unwillingness to commit military force and the possible aftermath that replaces one thug with another, that confounded every administration.

The first chapter “America the Essential” is a paean to America. As Haas eloquently states, America is special in “…that we have values to cherish and a system to emulate, that we are a tool of Providence with a mission to fulfill, that we can inspire others around the world and change the course of history, and that our system of government is simply better than the alternatives.”

These are strong and welcome and inspiring words in the present cultural climate when the media, politicians and academics so often deride our values, our mission, our goals and our religious beliefs. How often do we hear from the left the word “imperialist” coupled with the claim that we trample on people’s cultural legacies when we seek to impose freedoms they neither crave nor need. How often have we heard purveyors of “real-politick” and isolationism scoff at popular uprisings and the notion that a principled and muscular stance on human rights imperils our trade, our supply of energy, our alliances and our national security? Haas gives the lie to both in chapter after chapter by demonstrating how successive Presidents have used the “bully pulpit,” and economic sanctions as well as foreign aid to persuade tyrants and encourage their opposition. One need only revisit the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union which is meticulously detailed to be convinced.

A powerful polemicist in defense of Jews, Israel By ARNOLD AGES

From Chicago Jewish Star Vol. 22 (Aug. 17-30, 2012), p. 9

I must confess to have experienced an initial disquiet upon approaching Edward Alexander’s collection of very literate reviews, essays and think pieces, some of the latter based on books and articles which he has analyzed.

This is a genre which, in past encounters with several examples, has inevitably left me somewhat disappointed because of the lack of internal unity in the themes explored.

Alexander’s book, The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal (Transaction Publishers, 2012, 248 pp., $34.95), however, is a welcome exception because he has, in each exquisitely polished entry, identified what Rabelais used to call la substantifique moelle (“the essential marrow”) of the issue.

The marrow here is the disgraceful assault on Jews and the State of Israel coming from both gentiles and Jews in the last decade.

In the 10 full-length book reviews and the 17 essays and think pieces (derived in part from his Gargantuan reading habits) Alexander proceeds first, in an orderly fashion, to document the anti-Semitic rot which courses through the thinking of some of the luminaries of English literature, before moving to the more current war against Jews and Israel, a war aided and abetted by misguided members of the Jewish tribe.

Some of those tribal members who live in Israel are also the special target of the author’s critical volleys.

“The other country, right or wrong” is the way Alexander characterizes the attitudes of some of the more repugnant representatives of the Israeli left.

Alexander is a powerful polemicist who possesses a biting sense of humor, which he deploys in an essay about how deceased Jewish grandmothers are being converted to radical anti-Israel positions by extreme Jewish leftists today and made to parrot anti-Zionist and anti-Israel tropes. (And we thought that only the Mormons were engaged, mutatis mutandi, in this kind of mischief!)

17 08 2012 Joel Fishman Makor Rishon

The Dangerous Link between Delegitimization and Sedition: When we think about the campaign of delegitimization against Israel, the international efforts of the Palestinians and their allies to isolate and harm Israel come to mind. We may also recall the Durban debacle of 2011, the boycott of Israeli products, and the refusal of some performers to appear before audiences in Israel. In reality, boundaries are unimportant, because a basic type of delegitimization takes place unrelentingly in far off lands and within Israel’s domestic discourse.

I am referring to the ongoing campaign to discredit the idea of the Jewish state and particularly its prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu. Most recently, a group of agitators, prominent intellectuals, and fashionable authors have accused the Prime Minister of being a dictator, a megalomaniac, and war criminal. Moreover, they have claimed that the existing form of government is not a real democracy. According to them, the Prime Minister, the government, and the Jewish State lack legitimacy and virtue. They no longer deserve to hold office and even to exist.

This aggressive and confrontational form of delegitimization exceeds the bounds of civil discourse. In social-science terms, these adversaries reject the basic paradigm of the State of Israel, its social and political fabric, its legal organization and in its most basic sense, its constitution.

We constantly receive these messages in our social environment, in the media, and in the marketplace of ideas. They have become so pervasive that the public nearly does not pay attention to them, and this is dangerous. Words are used like weapons, and the violence of words can easily mutate into physical violence, as it has during the past two years. We should be mindful of the ease with which such ideas and slogans can be internalized.

At present the timing of a major assault on the Prime Minister and the Israeli system of democracy is related both to Israel’s current security situation and to the recent visit of the Republican frontrunner in the American elections. Mitt Romney’s visit to Jerusalem may have been much more successful than reported in the press and, to the surprise of many, his message about the relationship between a nation’s culture and accomplishments received a surprisingly sympathetic resonance worldwide.

Originally posted at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/12053#.UC2w01RFF0Q,
HATE IS OKAY BUT IT IS THEIR FEAR OF THE SMARTEST, FUNNIEST, SAVVIEST WOMAN THAT IS ALMOST FUN TO OBSERVE. GO LORI!!!! RSK

Remember “Zionism is racism?” That was the high tide in the battle to turn the word Zionism from a mantle of national pride in Israel as the Jewish Homeland, to one that carries the toxic undercurrent of ultra-nationalism and oppression of the “other.”

The UN resolution equating Israel’s existence with evil was rescinded in 1991, but the fallout continues. Haters of Israel to this day employ variations of the term Zionism – ZioNazi, Zionist Occupying Government – as synonyms for what they most want people to associate with Jews and the Jewish State, thereby subtly winning adherents to their cause.

The battle against Zionism continues today, only now it’s being fought inside the gates of the world’s biggest Jewish charity. It’s not as if the Jewish establishment actually opposes Zionism. But Israel’s detractors have been so successful that, to put it bluntly: the term Zionism doesn’t poll well. And if Zionism doesn’t poll well, and your goal is to raise money to support Jews and the Jewish Homeland, you’re left with quite a conundrum, indeed, a veritable hornet’s nest.

One former high-ranking leader of global Jewish philanthropy has claimed that the largest Jewish charity in the world succumbed to the polling/fundraising dilemma by rejecting the use of the term Zionism – because that term is “too controversial” – at a recent high level meeting. When this reporter tried to investigate the truth, she unwittingly became, like the title of a popular book, the Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

My news article about the Jewish Federations of North America alleged decision to avoid the use of the word Zionism in a major planning document unleashed a firestorm response by JFNA leadership so relentless, one-sided and shrill that their behavior, rather than the underlying original story, must now be laid bare.

Here are the facts.

On July 27, 2012, my article ran in The Jewish Press.

In writing the story, I did what reporters are supposed to do. First I researched and then interviewed the person making the claim. I then reached out to JFNA people who were at that meeting, and/or who are major players within the JFNA world. I reached out to them for hours, across several states , time zones and levels of leadership, in attempts to include in my story the JFNA response. I was explicit about who I was and what I was making contact about.

I contacted New York City UJA-Federation Chair John Ruskay, his press contact person Jane E. Rubinstein; president of the Jewish Federation of Cleveland Steve Hoffman; JFNA’s senior vice president for Global Planning, Joanne Moore; JFNA Vice President for Public Policy and Director of the Washington, D.C. JFNA office, William Daroff; and JFNA spokesman Joe Berkofsky. I was stonewalled at every turn: I got literally nothing of substance back.

After receiving repeated deadline extensions from my editor in Israel – as a daily reporter I am expected to submit a news story every day – I then engaged in a final, harried hour-long Direct Message Tweet exchange in which I implored Daroff to help me find someone from JFNA to comment on my story. I told him who I had already contacted, and explained, “I’d hate to run the story without your input.” Ultimately, after receiving an autoreply from the only person he finally suggested I contact whom I hadn’t yet, Joe Berkofsky, I sent my last message to Daroff: “Joe is out of the office until Aug. 6th. I’ll have to file it without a comment from any Federations folks. Too bad.” I got nothing back from that message either.

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4277

Everybody’s piling on Joe Biden, and it’s not quite fair. Of course, a presidential campaign, like life, is unfair. We have John F. Kennedy’s word on that. Maybe we should give ol’ Joe a break. He’s our only source of campaign humor, if not exactly the sharpest wit.

Even The Washington Post, now in full-battle dress to protect Democratic interests, thinks it’s OK to pick on ol’ Joe. Writes Post blogger Alexandra Petri: “He inspires the sort of discomfort one feels upon introducing one’s fiancé to Grandpa after he has had a Scotch too many.”

One’s fiancé should just grin and bear it. But one never knows, as Fats Waller famously asked, do one? A lot of Joe’s malapropisms, blurts and boners – the remarks the press, eager to display a foreign language skill, inevitably calls “gaffes” – are just the sort of thing that endears Joe to a lot of other grandpas. The vice president, after all, is constitutionally harmless, like a wart in an embarrassing place on the body politic.

It’s certainly true, though, that Joe has overdrawn the unlimited checking account Barack Obama gave him on inauguration day. The president’s dilemma, and it is a true dilemma, is what to do about the second banana. He knows he couldn’t trust Joe at the funeral of the president of Volta, upper or lower, and foreign funerals are the default preserve of veeps. But he can’t indulge himself by bouncing Joe off the ticket, either.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0812/glick081712.php3?printer_friendly

JewishWorldReview.com | In 1949, the Communist takeover of China rattled the US foreign policy establishment to its core. China’s fall to Communism was correctly perceived as a massive strategic defeat for the US. The triumphant Mao Tse Tung placed China firmly in the Soviet camp and implemented foreign policies antithetical to US interests.

For the American foreign policy establishment, China’s fall forced a reconsideration of basic axioms of US foreign policy. Until China went red, the view resonant among foreign policy specialists was that it was possible for the US to peacefully coexist and even be strategic allies with Communists.

With Mao’s embrace of Stalin this position was discredited. The US’s subsequent recognition that it was impossible for America to reach an accommodation with Communists served as the intellectual architecture of many of the strategies the US adopted for fighting the Cold War in the years that followed.

Today the main aspect of America’s response to China’s Communist revolution remembered is the vindictive political hunt for scapegoats. Foreign Service officers and journalists who had advised the US government to support Mao and the Communists against Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists were attacked as traitors.

But while the “Red Scare” is what is most remembered about that period, the most significant consequence of the rise of Communist China was the impact it had on the US’s understanding of the nature of Communist forces. Even Theodore White, perhaps the most prominent journalist who championed Mao and the Communists, later acknowledged that he had been duped by the Communist propaganda machine into believing that Mao and his comrades were interested in an alliance with the US.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2426

It is the last Friday of Ramadan, when Islamists across the globe will participate in al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day marches against Israel. The annual tradition was established in 1979 by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader of the newly-formed Islamic Republic of Iran.

Though ostensibly a show of solidarity with the Palestinians, it was actually created as a mass expression of anti-Zionism — something that could unite otherwise heterogeneous groups under a consensual banner.

“For many years, I have been notifying the Muslims of the danger posed by the usurper Israel,” Khomeini declared. ”… I ask all the Muslims of the world and the Muslim governments to join together to sever the hand of this usurper and its supporters … I ask God Almighty for the victory of the Muslims over the infidels.”

This was not an indication of the ayatollah’s sympathy with the Palestinian cause. Khomeini cared as little for the Palestinians as a national entity as he did for Iran as one. In fact, on his flight back to Iran after 14 years of exile, he was asked by reporter Peter Jennings how he felt about it. “I feel nothing,” Khomeini said, indicating that it was the Islamic caliphate he cared about, not some country from which he happened to hail.

He also exhibited contempt for PLO chief Yasser Arafat, by not allowing him to act as an intermediary during the American Embassy takeover by radical Muslim students, among them a 23-year-old named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Trying to show U.S. President Jimmy Carter that he had clout with the mullahs in the Islamic republic, Arafat offered to “intervene” to negotiate the release of the hostages. Carter was hopeful; Khomeini laughed in both their faces.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/314094

The neoconservative Wall Street Journal’s monotonously Islamophilic celebration of the “Arab Spring” has become as comically predictable as the open-borders enthusiasm that colors its coverage of illegal immigration. A fine example is the paper’s profile of the general chosen by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s new president, to lead the armed forces.

The Journal is still stuck on the democracy-project dogma that free elections herald the birth of liberty, even as the Brotherhood tightens the noose in a nation whose population, by lopsided margins, keeps approving Muslim Brotherhood initiatives, electing Islamic supremacists, and telling pollsters that it would like to see Islam’s repressive sharia law strictly enforced. Thus, Journal’s story about General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi runs under a headline assuring readers that Morsi has picked a defense minister with longstanding “U.S. Ties.”

The profile elaborates that Sissi has been working with the American military for three decades and even took a basic training course at Fort Benning, Ga., in 1981. He is, we are further told, well known to, and liked by, senior Obama-administration officials. The implication is clear: Sure, there are now some Islamists running the government, but don’t be concerned, because the Egyptian armed forces are still really in charge and they remain staunchly pro-American. As the report states, “U.S. officials expressed confidence that Gen. Sissi will maintain close ties with the U.S., which provides Egypt with $1.3 billion a year in military aid, and uphold Egypt’s peace deal with Israel.”

Happy ending, right? Depends on whether you keep reading. It is not until 15 paragraphs down, by which point most readers have already moved on, that we get to the most significant part of the report, which deals with the “ties” that actually matter — not to the U.S. military but to the Muslim Brotherhood:

Mr. Sissi’s appointment may also represent an ideal compromise between the secular-minded military old guard and Mr. Morsi’s Brotherhood. People with knowledge of the Egyptian military said Gen. Sissi has a broad reputation within military circles as a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer, a rare trait in a military culture inured against Islamism. “Sissi is known inside the military for being a Muslim Brother in the closet,” said Zeinab Abul Magd, a professor at the American University in Cairo and an expert on Egypt’s military.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-biggest-d-c-spy-scandal-you-havent-heard-about-part-two/

In Part One [1], I explored the court documents in the case of Ghulam Nabi Fai, the executive director of the Kashmiri American Center (KAC) who admitted in a 26-page Statement of Facts [2] at the time of his plea deal [3] last December that he was an influence agent working for the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. He penetrated the halls of Congress and successive administrations over a 20-year period to help shape U.S. foreign policy in Pakistan’s favor.

As noted in the affidavit [4] by FBI Special Agent Sarah Webb Linden that was the basis for the criminal charges filed in federal court against Fai, he was in constant communication with his ISI handlers, exchanging more than 4,000 emails between June 2008 and his arrest in July 2011. According to the FBI, the ISI spent more than $4 million funding Fai’s operation, funneling money to straw donors in the Pakistani-American community. The operation was coordinated by Zaheer Ahmad, a U.S. citizen living in Pakistan who was charged along with Fai in the case.

As I noted in Part One, while the establishment media reported on Fai’s arrest, the story virtually disappeared from all of the leading news outlets. But while the U.S. media was ignoring the scandal entirely, the matter was the subject of considerable media scrutiny in Indian and Pakistani media.

One curious episode that received no attention from the U.S. media was the strange death of Fai’s conspirator, Zaheer Ahmad.

Several months after Fai’s arrest, an extensive investigative piece [5] (the only one ever published on the topic) by ProPublica noted Ahmad’s ties to Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. Mahmood had met with Osama bin Laden [6] and Ayman al-Zawahiri prior to 9/11, wanting to help al-Qaeda obtain nuclear weapons. Ahmad told the ProPublica researchers:

In a phone conversation, Ahmad said he was free and working at Shifa. “Until this case is finished, I can’t discuss this,” Ahmad told a ProPublica reporter. “And it could be dangerous for you, too.”

Two days after the ProPublica exposé appeared, a bombshell report [7] from the Hindustan Times placed Ahmad (Fai’s conspirator) at the meeting with Mahmood, Bin Laden, and Zawahiri just weeks prior to the 9/11 attacks.

Two days after that Hindustan Times article appeared tying him to the meeting with al-Qaeda leaders, Ahmad, who was living in Pakistan, dropped dead [8] from a “cerebral hemorrhage”.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ Think of a hybrid, whether it’s one of those ubiquitous bailout-backed vehicles that you see happy families driving around town in bailout-backed commercials or magnificent beasts such as the Liger, the Wolphin or the humble Mule. Hybrids are impressive at times, but they don’t have much of a future. Our system is an ungainly […]