RUTHFULLY YOURS

For three straight days starting on July 15, 2014, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) made thousands of phone calls to the residents of Shejaiya in northern Gaza. The locals were encouraged to evacuate their homes before IDF tanks rolled across the border. Tens of thousands of leaflets were dropped into the village. These leaflets suggested both a safe evacuation route and safe destinations to head for within Gaza City. The IDF sent similar messages daily via local television and radio. But that’s not all. The IDF also made dozens of phone calls to Shejaiya’s influential citizens, asking them to get out the word of the impending IDF incursion.

Thousands and thousands of warnings were given. The Israeli military authorities essentially told the enemy where the IDF troops would enter the village and when. And for three days, Hamas fighters, no dummies, took full advantage. They dug their own forces in deeper. They activated booby-traps. They hid IEDs. They got snipers into perfect positions. They brought in additional fighters. They pre-positioned weapons. They readied their terror tunnels.

Political correctness is a set of moral imperatives that prescribe how the members of certain “disadvantaged” groups in American society should be treated. It is based on a world view that divides humanity into oppressors and oppressed. This is an updated version of the old Marxist division of humanity into capitalists and workers. In the new version, the oppressors include, depending on the context, white people, males, Christians, Jews, Israel, the United States, the U.S. military, the police, the wealthy, large corporations, industrialists, polluters, gun owners, the Tea Party, the Catholic Church, and the Boy Scouts. The oppressed include blacks, women, sexual minorities, Hispanics, American Indians, Moslems, the handicapped, the poor, illegal immigrants, and even wildlife and “the land.”

CONTENTS
1. Cry freedom
2. Saudi student kicked off university bus for unveiling face
3. New Egyptian TV drama set to show Jews in non anti-Semitic light
4. Israelis and Saudis reveal secret talks
5. Egyptian historian: We must focus on our own interests, not on the Palestinian cause, and improve ties with Israel
6. Leading Jordanian author: Jihadi terror based on Jewish Talmud, not Islam
7. Iranian media: Mossad plotting terrorist attacks on Sunni mosques
8. Iran, Russia, who is telling the truth?
9. Whoops, Tehran forgot to shrink its enriched uranium stockpile
10. France opposes Iran nuclear deal without military site checks
11. Work accident
12. “And from behind the head – there was no brain”
13. Russia and Egypt hold first joint naval exercise
14. Egypt to destroy 10,000 more Palestinian homes in Gaza buffer zone expansion
15. “In defense of Tony Blair, peace envoy”

Netanyahu Asks Why UN Does not Condemn Rocket Attacks on Israel
Doesn’t Netanyahu understand that the UN opens its mouth if an Israeli home is rocketed and then warns the IDF not to “escalate tensions”?
By: Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/netanyahu-asks-why-un-does-not-condemn-rocket-attacks-on-israel/2015/06/07/

ISIS/Salafist Group Takes Credit for Ashkelon RocketISIS has been trying to make inroads into Gaza

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/isissalafist-group-takes-credit-for-ashkelon-rocket/2015/06/07/

Iron Dome Intercepts Rocket in South
9:54 PM: Confirmed: One Iron Dome interception. Report of rocket strike appears to be parts from the intercepted rocket that landed outside the city of Ashkelon. No rocket hit in Ashkelon. 9:49 Unconfirmed: 1 Iron Dome interception near Ashkelon. Second rocket hit. 9:43 PM Local reporting hearing 2 explosions. 1 possible landing site (also unconfirmed). […]

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/rocket-alerts-in-south-3/2015/06/06/

Sometimes, you really have to give the New York Times credit for the sheer amount of reportorial labor it undertakes. This is not one of those times.

A couple of Times reporters spent Friday morning basking in praise for their “nice scoop” — the less-than-remarkable public knowledge that Marco Rubio was written four traffic tickets over the course of two decades — but, as Brent Scher of the Washington Free Beacon pointed out, neither of the reporters in the byline — Alan Rappeport and Steve Eder — nor the researcher also credited by the Times for the piece — Kitty Bennett — ever accessed the traffic records in question. But somebody did: American Bridge, a left-wing activist group, had pulled the records just before the Times piece appeared, and the Times employed some cagey language, with the relevant sentence beginning: “According to a search of the Miami-Dade and Duval County court dockets. . . . ” A search? Yes. Whose search? A piece of the news that apparently is not fit to print.

That the New York Times’s political desk is thick with lazy partisans who take their cues — and in some cases, their research — from Democratic interest groups is not a secret, though the Times really ought to have, if not the honesty and the institutional self-respect, then at least the sense of self-preservation (these things do come to light) to disclose that it is being fed opposition research and choosing to publish it as though it were news. Senator Rubio’s having received a traffic citation approximately once every five years is no less newsworthy because the documentation was gathered by a Democratic activist group.

Is what they are doing legal and is it something our laws and traditions protect? The answer, in both France and America, is “Yes.” If what they are doing is legal, we should defend them.

When people — who seek to break not just our laws but our customs and tradition of free speech — attempt to kill those people, then the response can be only solidarity.

We are no more justified in making ourselves judge and jury of a victim or potential victim than the Islamists are justified in making themselves the self-appointed executioners.

Something happened in America last week that cannot be passed over. There are two parts to it. The first is what happened. The second is what happened in response.

On Tuesday, June 2, a 26-year old man, Usaama Rahim, was shot and killed by a Boston Police officer and FBI agent. Boston Police and federal law enforcement sources say that Rahim, who made a living as a security guard, was under surveillance. Officials believe that he was radicalized by ISIS and was planning to behead someone. One name that apparently came up in his conversations was that of blogger and activist Pamela Geller. However, Rahim subsequently appears to have decided to target what he called in one conversation the ‘boys in blue’ (the police). On the basis of Rahim’s conversations, the police and FBI anti-terror investigators decided it was time to move in. When they did so, Rahim threatened them with a military-style knife, and after refusing to give it up, was shot dead by a police officer and FBI agent.

In the early hours of June 6, at breakfast time, and on visitation day, the guards of Ghezelhesar Prison in Karaj, Iran forcefully, and without any prior notice, removed 22 prisoners from their cells to prepare them for execution by hanging.

Source: International Committee against Execution (ICAE)

In a not terribly long life, I have known well three transsexuals (as we used to say), and another three not so well. Not because I especially sought out their company, but just because I’ve spent a lot of my time around theatre and music and areas that attract those who feel “different”. Two of those three friends I didn’t know were transsexual until they were “outed”, one very publicly – although with hindsight certain curious aspects of both their physiognomy and behavior suddenly made a lot more sense.

But that’s the point: Even those far closer to them than I was weren’t aware – because back then the object of having a “sex change” (also as we used to say) was to change from being a man to being a woman. There were still only two teams and you were simply crossing over to bat for the other side. The trans-life had little in common with “gay pride” – because the object wasn’t to come out of the closet, but to blend into it so smoothly no one would know you hadn’t always been there. Before their outing, the two ladies in question were more lady-ier than thou: both used to show up once a month with a box of Tampax discreetly poking out from the top of their handbags – even though, as we all understood in retrospect, they had no need of it. But they had chosen to live as women, and so they wished to be as other women. And they were mortified when they were exposed.

David A. Deptula, a retired Air Force general, is dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter’s recent remarks on the efficacy of Iraq’s army reflect the fact that, despite years of training by thousands of U.S. and coalition forces, the army has not been able to halt Islamic State aggression. What makes anyone think that a few more months of similar training will yield success?

We must not, however, confuse Iraq’s objectives with critical U.S. national security interests. While the two may overlap, they are not the same. Each demands its own strategic, military and policy approach. From the U.S. perspective, the most important goal is not the maintenance of the Iraqi government but the destruction of the Islamic State.

Selective data trimming, adjusting, and stitching together is how global warming enthusiasts get the results they want.

A flurry of recent publication activity on the health impacts of carbon dioxide by the catastrophic climate change community is evidence that it has now moved beyond post-normal science. That was the philosophical answer to traditional science founded on rational hypotheses, reproducible experimentation, and impartial confirmation of results. Post-normal science was to be the answer to really difficult research problems; it would apply in cases where “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent,” according to its advocates Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1991. These same attributes accurately describe the status of climate research. Loosening the traditional standards of acceptable proof to include some postulating and science conclusions based on consensus and opinion would expand the universe of available answers desperately desired by governing bureaucrats and environmental activists.