RUTHFULLY YOURS

COP-21, the 21st Conference of the Parties (to the Global Climate Treaty) is convening in Paris (November 30 to December 11, 2015) to try to impose global restrictions on the emission of the greenhouse (GH) gas carbon dioxide. The usual cast of characters will show up — delegates from nearly 200 nations, who have made a lifetime career out of the climate business, plus some 15,000 hangers-on. We think they will fail to reach an effective international agreement — for a variety of reasons: Important developing countries have other priorities; scandals are brewing and may flare up; and the climate itself is not cooperating. But the media will portray Paris as a huge success, trying to burnish the environmental-climate legacy of President Barack Obama.

Paris will be a big “nothing-burger”

Do you remember Anne Gorsuch, who may have coined this pungent term? She was the first female administrator of EPA, and rather different from both Lisa Jackson and Gina McCarthy. Gorsuch served for a couple of years in the Reagan administration, during which time she managed to cut the EPA budget and slim down the agency. She proved that a determined administrator can do something to rein in the regulatory excesses of the EPA. [Actually, one of the most effective ways of achieving that goal might be to expand the EPA office in Alaska, and then transfer most of the Washington activists to that office.]

Supporters of overthrowing Syrian dictator Bashar Assad are truly rare among that country’s Christian minority, yet Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding (ACMCU) found one. Hartford Seminary Professor Najib George Awad’sSeptember 28 presentation (audio) before six people in ACMCU’s boardroom continued a longstanding, surreal ACMCU pattern of never locating Christians with any fears of Islam.

With ACMCU professor and fellow Syrian Christian expatriate Yvonne Haddad moderating, Awad drew upon his previous writing to recast minority in Syria’s context away from a numerical concept. Referencing French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Awad discussed “minoratization as a verb,” a process in which oppressive circumstances create for disfavored groups a status “qualitative in nature…something people transform into.” During decades of Syria’s Assad family dictatorship in particular, regime opponents endured “radical and merciless minoritization,” even though they were Syria’s “dominant majority” across ethnic and sectarian divisions. “In the Arab world today, secularism, democracy and liberalism are the real minority,” he wrote in 2014, including in Syria the “majority of the Syrian public rebelling against the systematic suppression and criminality of the regime.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity during his speech to the 37th World Zionist Congress, to speak from his Zionist heart to the hearts of Zionists everywhere.

Netanyahu used the occasion to rally supporters of Israel and to call upon them to spread the truth about Zionism and Israel. He spoke during the midst of a wave of terror in Israel unlike any in recent time. The stabbing, shooting, car-ramming attacks on Israeli citizens just during the month of October alone has unnerved many. Once again the media and the outside world uses moral equivalency or worse to condemn Israel for the terror unleashed against its citizens.

Netanyahu’s rock steady speech enlisted all supporters of Israel in the battalion of truth tellers about Israel. The physical attacks are being endured solely by Israelis, but the fight against the vilification of the Jewish State is something in which everyone can and must participate.

The ammunition Netanyahu provided the troops he enlisted consists solely of truth. The truths that can and will deflate the myths perpetuated by so many against the Jewish State.

In all, Netanyahu summarized into Ten Big Lies being told about Israel, and he provided answers to all of them. The entire speech can be found here.

In 1929, 86 years ago, for the Holiday of Shavuot-Pentecost, Levin Kipnis wrote the early Hebrew song ‘Baskets on our shoulders,’ an Israeli children’s song that is sung to date.

Yedidya Admon wrote the tune to the song and many artists recorded it, among them the singer Yaffa Yarkoni.

The poet’s song version is as follows:

Baskets on our heads,
Our heads are decorated,
From all corners of the land we arrived,
We brought the first fruits.
From Yehuda-Judea, Yehuda, from Shomron-Samaria,
From the valley, from the Gallil-Galilee –
Clear the road for us,
Our first fruits with us,
Bang, bang the drum and bang the flute!
About Levin Kipnis

Levin Kipnis, who lived between 1894-1990, was an Israeli children’s story writer and a poet, who wrote mostly in Hebrew and also in Yiddish, and in 1978 became Israel’s Prize Laureate for children’s literature.

It’s hard to find any silver lining in a situation where Palestinians are perpetrating multiple stabbing attacks against Jews every day, and most of the “international community” is siding with the perpetrators. Yet this dismal situation may finally have produced something Israel desperately needs: An Israeli Arab political leader who represents his community’s sane majority. The 65 percent who are proud to be Israeli, the 55 percent who identify with the Israeli flag, the ones who genuinely want to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors.

For decades, Israeli Arab leadership at the national level has been an unmitigated disaster. The community’s current Knesset members, elected on a joint ticket called the Joint Arab List, span the gamut from the “moderate” Ayman Odeh to the “firebrand” Hanin Zoabi, to borrow the media’s favorite misnomers. The former merely refuses to condemn Palestinian terror, saying, “I cannot tell the nation how to struggle … I do not put red lines on the Arab Palestinian nation.” The latter may face criminal investigation for actively inciting it, having allegedly told a Hamas publication that the current terror needs more “national support,” because “If individual attacks continue without national support, they will be extinguished within the next several days, and therefore hundreds of thousands are needed to start a real intifada.” In between are MKs who spew a wide variety of anti-Israel libels; my personal favorite was Ahmed Tibi’s 2014 op-ed in The Hill claiming that Israeli Arabs are subject to Jim Crow treatment – signed, without a trace of irony, by his then-title of deputy speaker of the Knesset.

The Palestinian terror wave that began on October 1 struck again on Sunday evening with an attack at the bus station in Beersheva, my town. Monday, at the time of writing, has been quiet so far, but it’s certainly too soon to say whether the wave is subsiding.

It’s not too soon, though, to point out some things that already emerge from this latest onslaught. They are not new phenomena. They indicate, though, that even as Israel keeps making great strides in various fields that benefit humanity (water use and conservation is one of the most dramatic), and keeps upgrading its ties with important countries (lately, particularly, India), it remains a country that is subjected to special, malign treatment.

Authorities insist on describing predators only as “Asian”. In Banbury, Birmingham, Blackburn, Bristol, Burnley, Cambridge, Carlisle, Derby, Leeds, London, Manchester, Oldham, Oxford, Peterborough, Preston, Rochdale, Rotherham, Sheffield and Telford locals need no translation
A few weeks ago a Muslim sex gang was convicted at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, of raping a girl when she was under sixteen and arranging for another sixty men to do the same. The offences occurred in the quiet market town of Aylesbury. It is just the latest in a long series of trials for rape and sex attacks on under-age English girls by Muslim gangs in town after town right across the country including Banbury, Birmingham, Blackburn, Bristol, Burnley, Cambridge, Carlisle, Derby, Leeds, London, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Oldham, Oxford, Peterborough, Preston, Rochdale, Rotherham, Sheffield and Telford. The victims of these horrible sex crimes were usually vulnerable young girls without families to protect them. More trials are currently taking place in Newcastle and Manchester. The gangs were often traffickers who once they had gained control over a girl would pass her around as a sex-object so that as many of their fellow Muslims as possible could enjoy her.

What is striking is that whenever a group of Muslims commits a crime of this kind, the press and broadcasters go out of their way to avoid identifying the religion of the malefactors. They are even less willing to suggest any causal connection between these acts and the central practices of that religion, the connection that makes it both ethical and necessary to identify and stress the faith of the perpetrators.

Moral Abdication in the Middle East The West has developed a dangerous concern for ‘proportionality.’
In the current epidemic of Palestinian violence, scores of Arab youths are attacking, supposedly spontaneously, Israeli citizens with knives. Apparently, edged weapons have more Koranic authority, and, in the sense of media spectacle, they provide greater splashes of blood. Thus the attacker is regularly described as “unarmed” and a victim when he is “disproportionately” stopped by bullets.

The Obama State Department has condemned the use of “excessive” Israeli force in response to Palestinian terrorism. John Kirby, the hapless State Department spokesman, blamed “both” sides for terrorism, and the president himself called on attackers and their victims to “tamp down the violence.”

In short, the present U.S. government — which is subsidizing the Palestinians to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year — is incapable of distinguishing those who employ terrorist violence from the victims against whom the terrorism is directed. But why is the Obama administration — which can apparently distinguish those who send out drones from those who are blown up by them on the suspicion of employing terrorist violence — morally incapable of calling out Palestinian violence? After all, in the American case, we blow away suspects whom we think are likely terrorists; in the Israeli instance, they shoot or arrest those who have clearly just committed a terrorist act.

Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters today that Israel has a right to defend itself, but discouraged against “self-help” responses to random stabbing attacks from Palestinians.

Israeli authorities have encouraged citizens with gun permits to carry when they’re out and about, as they can possibly stop an attacker before police can get on the scene.

Israel Army Radio reported today that the internal security ministry phone service “collapsed” from citizens inundating the ministry with gun permit requests. They’ve doubled the number of workers at the ministry to field the requests.

Appearing at a press conference in Madrid with his Spanish counterpart, Kerry again used the recent spate of violence in Jerusalem to call for a two-state solution.

Anne in Petah Tikva is an Israeli likely none of us know or have ever heard of. But she has a story to tell about life in Israel these days. And her ultimate message is one that should resonate with every American.

Writing for Legal Insurrection, Anne reports that she, like many Israelis, is feeling “furious, angry, frightened and frustrated.” She railed against the government, the Arabs in the Knesset, and about the refusal to recognize that this is a war with Islam. She also talked about the struggle to balance one’s fears with the need to go about living a normal life, as she recalls life during the second Intifada.

She also wrote of shock and disgust at the ceaseless brainwashing of generation after generation of “Palestinians” to hate Jews.

I find it profoundly depressing, almost nauseating, to realize that with the indoctrination by the Palestinian education system. Their accommodating media pushes yet another generation of Palestinian children into vicious and unreasonable Jew-hatred, there is not a chance in hell of us ever reaching any kind of workable way for the two nations to live in an armed truce if not peace in our little country.