RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/

UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ADOPTS 9 RESOLUTIONS IN 1 DAY CONDEMNING ISRAEL, 9 TIMES MORE THAN ANY OTHER STATE

http://www.un.org/press/en/2014/gaspd576.doc.htm

Fourth Committee, Concluding Work, Sends Raft of Resolutions to General Assembly on Information, Israeli Practices Committee, Middle East Refugee Relief Agency

Concluding its work for the session, the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) today approved 12 draft resolutions and three draft decisions, on special political missions, information, Middle East and organization of work, bringing to 28 the total number of draft texts it forwarded to the General Assembly for adoption.

Among those approved today was Draft B on United Nations public information policies and activities. Prior to action on the text, the Committee Secretary presented an oral statement anticipating that the activities to be undertaken — particularly in the area of achieving parity of information products in all six official languages — in the biennium 2016-2017 in line with the Department’s biennial programme plan for that period, would entail nearly $14 million in additional resources for the period.

As operative paragraph 22 was brought to a recorded vote, several speakers expressed surprise, considering that the text had been agreed by consensus and in good faith during the Committee on Information session, held earlier in the year. Some regretted that the Secretariat had come out with a request for additional funding, when the text had been explicit that no new costs would be incurred.

The Committee decided to retain the paragraph in the resolution by a vote of 116 in favour to none against, with 48 abstentions, and then approved the wide-ranging draft as a whole without a vote. It also approved Draft A, on information in the service of humanity, and a related draft decision on increasing membership of the Committee on Information, both without a vote.

In Scathing Letter to Obama, Former FBI Assistant Director Slams Holder as “Chief Among Antagonists” in Ferguson
As the Senate prepares to hold confirmation hearings for new Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch and as outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder continues to allocate Department of Justice resources to the situation in Ferguson, former FBI Assistant Director and Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund President Ron Hosko has sent a scathing letter to President Obama detailing the damage done to the relationship between law enforcement and DOJ over the past six years.

“The hyper-politicization of justice issues has made it immeasurably more difficult for police officers to simply do their jobs. The growing divide between the police and the people – perhaps best characterized by protesters in Ferguson, Mo., who angrily chanted, “It’s not black or white. It’s blue!” – only benefits members of a political class seeking to vilify law enforcement for other societal failures. This puts our communities at greater risk, especially the most vulnerable among us,” Hosko wrote in the letter exclusively obtained by Townhall. “Your attorney general, Eric Holder, is chief among the antagonists. During his tenure as the head of the Department of Justice, Mr. Holder claims to have investigated twice as many police and police departments as any of his predecessors. Of course, this includes his ill-timed decision to launch a full investigation into the Ferguson Police Department at the height of racial tensions in that community, throwing gasoline on a fire that was already burning. Many officers were disgusted by such a transparent political maneuver at a time when presidential and attorney general leadership could have calmed a truly chaotic situation.”

In Ferguson law enforcement officials are bracing for violence and riots ahead of a Grand Jury decision about whether to prosecute Police Officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown. Wilson says he shot Brown in self-defense after Brown went for his gun during a struggle in the police car. According to an official autopsy, Brown was shot at close range and had gun powder residue on his hand, indicating the struggle in the car did in fact happen and that Brown reached for Wilson’s gun.

Executive amnesty would kill an already fragile American economy, according to former Immigration and Naturalization Service officer Michael Cutler, who discussed on Newsmax TV’s “America’s Forum” Friday how American jobs would be lost should President Barack Obama resort to such action.

“We’re worried about jobs. Why don’t we talk about the need to liberate jobs? When you realize that we’re admitting more authorized foreign workers into the U.S. every month than the number of new jobs being created.”

“If we enact any kind of massive amnesty program, the money wired out of the U.S. would skyrocket as it is between $125 billion and $200 billion being wired from our economy to other countries,” Cutler said.

“India globally gets the greatest amount of remittance of the high tech workers. We have American kids going to schools, getting the degrees and getting every qualification they need and being passed over by people from other countries who work for a lot less money. Americans are being laid off by Silicon Valley.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Silicon Valley and politicians who argue that the U.S. needs to substantially increase the number of H-1B visas may not be considering the impact that would have on the American workforce.

“Silicon Valley last month laid off 18,000 American high tech workers,” Cutler said. “Does it sound like we have a shortage?

“When politicians say that we need to bring in foreign workers because the schools in the U.S. don’t turn out the engineers and programmers and so forth, then in the next sentence what do they tell us? Foreign students going to those schools should be having their green cards stapled onto the diplomas. The immigration laws used to be the primary responsibility of the labor department. That’s how we built the middle class. This is about protecting American jobs and American lives and it’s time the politicians went back to the fundamental idea of protecting America and Americans.”

The most important component of immigration enforcement is in the interior, something Cutler said the United States is severely lacking.

“You need to have enough agents from within the interior enforcing our laws not only to arrest illegal aliens, but to conduct the fraud investigations and to make sure there’s integrity to the system,” he explained. “This is like playing baseball right now without having anybody take the outfield. Right now there are seven million immigration agents, half are dong customs work. New York City has 40,000 police officers. What do you think will happen to New York’s crime rate if we had 3,000 cops instead of 40,000? We really need to have thousands of more agents, more immigration judges, and more immigration lawyers. We admit more than a million lawful immigrants every year. How many more do you want to admit?”

America is a country of 50 Border States, he argued, and the way to adequately measure how secure the borders are is to look at the price and availability of heroin and cocaine.

The Free Speech Movement seems to have evolved into its opposite, a censorship by others or of oneself, disguised as political correctness.

Bazian is in the forefront of the movement to prevent Bill Maher from speaking on campus. Bazian himself however, seems to like being unrestrained when he wants to speak.

Apparently to Bazian, Jewish money promotes undue influence, but Saudi money has no Wahhabi fundamentalist strings attached. Maybe Bazian should ask whether there is something in Islam that causes so many of its adherents to cast non-Muslims as “the other.”

The organized Muslim groups have not exactly embraced Freedom of Speech or Assembly as primary values.

Each year, the University of California hosts a lecture in honor of Mario Savio. On December 2, 1964, Mario Savio stood on the steps of Berkeley’s Sproul Hall and launched into an unrehearsed speech, often considered one of the best 100 of the century. The speech would make him the voice of what became known as the Free Speech Movement.

Throughout Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement [FSM] represented a strong part of Berkeley’s historic and cultural identity.

The FSM, however, seems to have evolved into its opposite, a censorship by others or of oneself, disguised as political correctness. It is an ideology that makes sensitivity to the feelings of the “previously excluded” trump basic rights.

The tension between what the FSM was and what it became has now come to a head in the most recent of Berkeley’s conflicts over the role of free speech. The conflict arose from the invitation to television personality Bill Maher to give the address for this December’s graduation.

“In the meantime, I have a one free piece of advice that might help stem the current wave of terrorism: Israel should inform the Fatah and Hamas leadership that Israeli hospitals don’t have room to treat their loved ones as we have absurdly been doing for so long. We won’t have room until we know that we don’t need the hospital beds for victims of terror.Former Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, whose daughter was treated last month and granddaughter last year, will have to find an alternative to the top-notch Tel Aviv medical center, and I don’t mean Jerusalem’s Augusta Victoria Hospital where his mother-in-law reportedly received treatment in June; Abbas’s wife, Amina, should not be welcomed for future treatment following the June operation on her knee; and the sister of senior Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk should find a hospital to treat her cancer that did not come under Hamas rocket fire a mere three months before she was admitted – and all this while their supporters around the globe call for a boycott of Israel.Purveyors of terrorism should not benefit from medical tourism. Even in the strange world of November 2014.” (Amen…rsk)

The writer is editor of The International Jerusalem Post.

Few juxtapositions are as jarring as Israel’s Remembrance Day immediately preceding Independence Day, back-to-back, in the springtime. But I found a same-day combination this week hard to handle. November 11, the date when the world remembers – or should remember – its dead from the First World War on, is known as Singles Day in China. It has become a day dedicated to discount online shopping.

As 2014 marks the centennial of the outbreak of “The Great War” – the war to end all wars – there were special ceremonies in several continents.

But since this is 2014, when the digital age meets the consumption obsession, Singles Day was also celebrated with a shopping frenzy.

Originally a form of counter celebration to the two-someness of Valentine’s Day, the Chinese online retail firm Alibaba adopted the date for incredible deals five years ago, and revenue from global consumers this year reportedly reached some $9 billion.

It is one of those anomalies that China is still Communist enough to severely restrict international Internet access for its own population but capitalist enough to want to benefit from the worldwide affinity for buying sprees.

Growing up in Britain, I was used to marking the moment of the armistice at 11 o’clock on the 11th of the 11th on what is colloquially known as Poppy Day. Nothing, however, prepared me for the power and poignancy of living in a country where we take memorial days personally.

When the sirens sound for silence – one minute in the evening, two minutes in the morning – Israel comes to a halt. Every year I light a candle and stand still, silently recalling the names and faces of friends and comrades, and worse – the children of friends, colleagues and neighbors.

I’m acutely aware that this year more than 70 names have been added to the list of the country’s dead in war and terror. This year, too, almost everyone in the country will have to deal with the instinct to rush for shelter when the siren is heard: The rockets, Iron Dome protection system notwithstanding, have left their mark, a scar on the collective psyche.

A perfect storm is brewing for Israel.

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. – Winston Churchill, in first speech to the House of Commons as prime minister, May 13, 1940

A military defeat of Israel would mean the physical extinction of a large part of its population and the political elimination of the Jewish state… Nor does this reflect a historical trauma…To lose a single war is to lose everything…
– Yigal Allon, then foreign minister, in Foreign Affairs, October 1976

This is not an article for those of weak stomach. It is not for those who wish to be reassured that, in the end, things will be “okay.” It offers no glimmer of optimism, nor any comforting prospect of some happy ending.

Indeed, if the Jews are to preserve their political sovereignty, all it bodes for the foreseeable future is one of Churchillian “blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

A perfect storm brewing

A perfect storm is brewing for Israel. On virtually every front, ominous clouds are gathering, and should the menacing maelstroms they portend hit together, it is far from certain that the Jewish state will survive the destructiveness of their combined impact.

Since I began writing this Into the Fray series in mid- 2011, I have warned repeatedly of the perils of the government’s policy of counterproductive compromises and concessions. I cautioned that this “cavalcade of capitulation” will elicit nothing from our adversaries other than demands for more – and more far-reaching – concessions, as indeed it has.

BRISBANE, Australia (AP) – Vladimir Putin is underlining his presence at a major summit of world leaders in Australia by stationing warships in waters off the country’s northeastern coast, prompting the Australian prime minister to angrily accuse Russia of trying to reclaim the “lost glories” of the Soviet Union.
The diplomatic drama, which has been simmering since a Malaysia Airlines plane was shot down over an area of Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed separatists in July, threatened to overshadow Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s goal of keeping this weekend’s G-20 summit focused on economic growth.
But Abbott, who had previously said he would physically confront the Russian president over the Flight 17 disaster that killed 298 people, including 38 Australian citizens and residents, did little to dampen tensions with his latest critique of Putin’s Russia.
In recent days, four Russian warships have entered international waters off the northeast Australian coast to coincide with Putin’s visit to Australia for the summit that brings together the leaders of the world’s 20 biggest industrialized and developing economies. Australia, in turn, sent three warships of its own to monitor them.
The Russian embassy said on Friday that Russia’s Pacific fleet was testing its range, and could be used as security for Putin.
Abbott was not impressed.
“Russia is being much more assertive now than it has been for a very long time,” he said at a press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, also in Australia for the summit. “Interestingly, Russia’s economy is declining even as Russia’s assertiveness is increasing.”
The prime minister, who met with Putin earlier this week on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Beijing, aired details of his conversation with the Russian leader.
“One of the points that I tried to make to President Putin is that Russia would be so much more attractive if it was aspiring to be a superpower for peace and freedom and prosperity … instead of trying to recreate the lost glories of tsarism or the old Soviet Union.”

Super-Amnesty Will Turn Every City into Detroit

After another bloody weekend in Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel branded the shootings unacceptable and the city’s top cop demanded more gun control laws. Chicago’s murder rate has actually dropped since concealed carry became legal. Emanuel’s lawsuits over his illegal gun control laws have left the already struggling city deep in the hole and forced to cover the NRA’s million dollars in legal bills.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KGwTDQG-uNA/VGWBpXtkqCI/AAAAAAAAOjg/Be9nLNHIz-o/s1600/DETROIT-articleLarge.jpgConcealed carry paid off over that bloody weekend when a vet carrying a gun returned fire stopping a massacre before it happened. The original shooter ended up in the hospital, but nobody ended up in the morgue, which kept the death toll for the weekend down to fourteen.

Fourteen isn’t pretty, but it’s better than twenty or thirty.

Chicago’s murder rate in 1992 was double what it is today. The death rate was at 33.7 out of 100,000 which meant that you had a pretty good chance of being shot in Chicago. Today it’s down to 15 out of 100,000, which is small comfort to those ending up in the morgue, but it gives everyone else much better odds of surviving to see what ingenious ways the next corrupt mayoral administration will use to rip off the city.

Back in 1992, the cops also blamed guns for the murder rate. But it wasn’t the guns that were killing people. It was the gangs. Now the murder rate is down, but the number of shootings is up. To Chicago’s police boss, that’s a problem, as if it makes a difference to the deceased whether he’s shot, stabbed or dropped in the water wearing cement overshoes. But fighting guns is easier than fighting crime.

The gun obsession is one of the few things that cops and leftists have in common. It’s the last politically acceptable form of prohibitionism in a society that enthusiastically legalizes drugs, even if possessing crack cocaine is statistically much more likely to lead you to kill a man, than possessing a gun will.

Every shooting spree bypasses the obvious problem with calls for more gun laws and something for the youth to do over the weekend that doesn’t involve shooting up the local housing project. This weekend, Rahm Emanuel took on the problem of funding more teen centers while Chicago’s top cop blustered about more gun laws. And then having successfully talked around the issue, they all went home.

The left loves root causes more than it loves red shirts and black bandanas, a fashion choice that it shares with some of the gangs responsible for most of the shootings.

To say that my question “Is this book pro-Hezbullah?” wasn’t well received on Tuesday night at SOAS is an understatement.

I was at the book launch of The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication written by Lina Khatib, Dina Matar and Atef Alshaer.After I had asked my question Dina Matar said “I knew you were going
to ask that” and Lina Khatib waved the book at me and said “Why don’tyou read it?”

The book explains how Hizbullah has been successful in staying relevant since its 1982 inception by adapting itself to changing situations and communicating these adaptations through various means
such as poetry and social media.

Hizbullah are poets? Who knew.

One can imagine: “To kill a Jew, or not to kill a Jew. That is the question.”

So, according to the authors, Hizbullah’s 1980s narrative was one of“victimisation” to attract Lebanon’s marginalised Shia Muslims.

During the 1990s it was one of “resistance” against Israel and connection with “Palestine”.

From 2000 onwards it was focused on “defence” after Israel had left south Lebanon with Hizbullah disseminating the narrative that the Lebanese army is not strong enough to defend Lebanon from Israel.

Now Hizbullah is back to a “victimisation” theme after being implicated in the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq
Hariri and others by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and also due to its fighting alongside Bashar Assad in Syria.

Dina Matar said that although Hasan Nasrallah has lost some credibility because of Syria he is still popular, and people in th

If military advisers don’t plan to win it, Congress shouldn’t authorize it.

It probably won’t be, but the first item on the lame-duck congressional agenda should be the military action in which we are now engaged against the Islamic State, or ISIS. Congress has no more serious responsibility than to examine the policy and goals behind any action that puts American lives at risk. Thursday’s appearance of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey before the House Armed Services Committee should be only the beginning.

Not that Congress does that all or even most of the time our military is engaged in conflict. Over our hundreds of years of history, Congress has declared war only 11 times. Without declarations of war, we’ve nevertheless fought major wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (twice) and engaged in smaller military actions dozens of times. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress twice passed “authorizations for the use of military force” first against al Qaeda and then for the Iraq invasion, but in neither case actually declared war.

Congress passed the 1973 War Powers Act by overriding President Nixon’s veto. Nixon’s successors have generally followed it without admitting to its constitutionality. President Obama, in accordance with the War Powers Act, notified Congress when he ordered the commencement of the air campaign against the Islamic State.

We’re already hearing members of Congress, beginning predictably with Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, say the ISIS war is illegal because it has exceeded the 90-day limit imposed by the War Powers Act, ignoring the probable unconstitutionality of that congressional action.