RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-as-chauncey-gardner?f=puball

The Obama created invasion on the southern border, refusal to do anything about it and moving the illegals around the country against the wishes of nearly everyone as caused nearly unprecedented bewilderment.

The events of bordergate are causing Obama’s Democrat politician support and voter popularity to plummet. This is substantially increasing the chance for a big Republican congressional pick-up. If Republicans win a senate majority, both houses can strategically pass legislation supported by their base and independents. Obama will veto, using his pen of course. This can damage the Democrat brand for 2016. A combination of a big Republican 2016 turnout to vent anger at Obama and depressed black turnout gives the Republicans a very good chance of winning the presidency. Why is Obama pursuing this border fiasco?

I believe there are three possibilities. One that is probable, another that is interesting and a third hold on to your seat explanation. The probable reason is that in the end Obama turns out to be just a narcissistic light weight with far more self-confidence than intellect. That he has made it this far is due to the MSM that has traits. As Rush and Mark Levin have repeatedly stated, without the MSM being co-conspirators, Obama would never have been elected in the first place, or at the very least re-elected. The only benefit to his presidency in this light is for Jimmy Carter moving up from the bottom of the heap.

The interesting explanation is Machiavellian. Obama / Democrats are playing a long game by taking the heat now of seeding America with many more Latino voters (amnesty / citizenship for those in the shadows and increasing the numbers by the illegal invasion). The border debacle will substantially increase the chances of their losing the 2016 presidential election. But with the Mr. Magoo RINOs’ assistance, immigration reform will pass resulting in a large increase in Latino voters heavily favoring Democrats (who knew). Democrats will climb out of political purgatory starting in 2018, take the presidency in 2020, ignore the RINO favored portions of immigration reform and not lose another election for “fill-in-the-blank” years.

http://chqdaily.com/2014/07/15/mogahed-to-outline-egyptian-revolution-unrest/

Mogahed to outline Egyptian revolution, unrest

John FordonJuly 15, 2014/0 comments

When Dalia Mogahed took the Amphitheater stage twice last year, she remained calm and objective, bringing thoughtfulness, modesty and erudition to her display of a breadth of knowledge about Arab and American views of each other.

It’s a perspective refined by years of public opinion sampling and analysis for Gallup and other organizations.

This time, Mogahed said, things will be different.

“I’m still me,” Mogahed said, “but this time around, I’m going to be breathing fire.”

Public opinion expert Mogahed returns to the Amphitheater stage at 10:45 a.m. today to launch the portion of this week dedicated to an Egyptian case study of revolution.

Mogahed is passionate in her indictment of the military government, which overthrew the popularly elected Muslim Brotherhood-dominated regime of Mohamed Morsi, almost exactly at the time she was visiting Chautauqua in 2013.

“The current Egyptian government is trying to make us believe that the January 2011 revolution which overthrew President Hosni Mubarak never occurred,” Mogahed said. “This military government in Cairo has not dealt with any of the root causes of the 2011 revolution, and I think they hope that the United States will lose interest and accept the status quo.”

The dilemma facing the Obama administration over Egypt was spotlighted last month when Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking in Cairo, radiated optimism about Egypt’s future course just one day before President Barack Obama condemned Egypt’s military government when it enforced punitive prison terms against several independent journalists, including three from Al-Jazeera.

When a “Cease-Fire” is Not a Cease-Fire By David Bedein

In the current conflagration between Israel and Gaza, news agencies mistakenly report that a “cease fire” is being discussed with Hamas.

In the imagination of the media, such a “cease fire” might result in the kind of armistice that ended hostilities in World War I, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the eleventh month on Nov. 11 1918, paving the way to the Versailles peace treaty and the genesis of the League of Nations.

However, the three Arabic nuanced terms being discussed with Hamas as a resolution to the current situation have nothing to do with a “cease fire”:

Those terms are Hudna, Tahadia and Hudaybiyyah. All three terms imply continued war, after a respite.

Hudna: a tactical pause intended only for rearmament, a temporary respite in the war between Islamic forces and non-Islamic forces.

The authoritative Islamic Encyclopedia (London, 1922) defines hudna as a “temporary treaty” which can be approved or abrogated by Islamic religious leaders, depending on whether or not it serves the interests of Islam; a hudna cannot last for more than 10 years.

Tahadia: a temporary halt in hostile activity which can be violated at any time.

Hudaybiyyah: An understanding that there will be no fighting for 10 years named for the “treaty of Hudaybiyyah” in 628 AD.

The Islamic Encyclopedia mentions the Hudaybia treaty as an “ultimate hudna.”

The late PLO leader Yasser Arafat often referred to “a hudna” in his speeches when he defined and described the nature of the Oslo Accords.

Every year the kindergartens of Gaza graduate a new class of children dressed like terrorists and suicide bombers. There are child sized coffins decorated with the flags of Islamic terrorist groups and colorful balloons.

A teacher explained that, “In every year’s kindergarten graduation ceremonies we focus on the children to represent the role of struggling and resistance in the way of Allah.”

One child spoke of wanting to blow himself and kill the most Jews. The article boasted that the children were “hoping to be volunteers in the future.”

Some don’t wait that long.

Abdullah Quran was only twelve years old when he was found with a bomb in his bag, but the indoctrination of children begins much earlier. Children’s magazines and television shows encourage them to kill and die using everything from songs to costumed characters. On Pioneers of Tomorrow, the children are urged to grow up to kill Jews. “All of them?” a little girl isprompted. “Yes” is the reply.

Hamas does not just turn children into killers; it also uses them as human shields. Hamas has encouraged Gaza families to act as human shields. It was caught launching rockets near a school.

The Hamas Interior Minister had said that, “For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry… This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen.”

When a Hamas spokesman encouraged the use of human shields, he cited the case of NizarRiyyan, a Hamas leader who deliberately surrounded himself with his own children when he knew that an attack was coming and asked other family members if they would like to die as martyrs with him.

But Hamas, like the PLO and Islamic jihad, doesn’t just use its own children as cannon fodder.

It sets out to kill Jewish children.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2014/07/reflections-of-a-jewish-neoconservative/?utm_source=Mosaic+Newsletter&utm_campaign=455746cc7b-2014_7_17&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-455746cc7b-41165129
Norman Podhoretz – Reflections of a Jewish Neoconservative
July 14, 2014

As part of the advanced institute on “Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews,” Tikvah hosted the legendary editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz has been a partisan of the left, the right, and, most of all, the Jews. In an interview with Tikvah’s executive director Eric Cohen, Podhoretz discussed his life’s work and his ideological transformation. He reflects on his early education and the conflict between his low-brow immigrant Judaism and his high-brow training under Lionel Trilling. He discusses the early days of Commentary, when it was ambivalent about Zionism and part of the anti-communist left. He explains what turned Commentary away from the left, and what kind of foreign policy vision it offered the nascent neoconservative movement. And what about Podhoretz himself? Famously frank and wide-ranging, Podhoretz spends the last half of the event commenting on theology, the American Jewish scene, Radical Islam, classical music, and Shakespeare.

Filming took place on May 19, 2014.

On July 13, Bernard Abouaf, a French Jewish journalist, posted on his Facebook wall: “I just passed through one of the truest moments in my life.” A bit earlier, he had been an eyewitness to a pogrom attempt.

About one hundred Muslim thugs had gathered in front of the Don Isaac Abravanel synagogue in Central Paris, a few blocks away from Place de la Bastille (Bastille Circle), and threatened to storm it. Two to three hundred worshipers, who had gathered for a pro-Israel religious service, were locked inside. There were five police officers to protect them–and two dozen Jewish youths trained in martial arts who were members of the Jewish community sponsored Security Organization or of the more militant Jewish Defense League.

For Abouaf, whose family is of Tunisian Jewish descent, the whole scene looked like a reenactment of the storming and torching of the Great Synagogue in Tunis during the Six-Day War in 1967: a traumatic event that accelerated the flight of Tunisian Jews to France or to Israel.

“What I have seen today,” he remarked, “is Arab hatred against Jews. Pure hatred. Right in the middle of Paris. Don’t try to ‘explain’ or ‘understand’, it was hatred, period.” Irving Kristol famously said that a neoconservative was a liberal mugged by reality. Something similar was befalling Abouaf. This was the “truth” he was so eager to share.

The Don Isaac Abravanel synagogue was not stormed. Its bunker-like shape (it was built in 1962) and its strong, straight, iron gates were probably helpful. Even more effective were the young Jewish defenders, who did not shy away from confronting the Muslim rioters. Older Jewish men and women, some in their late forties or early fifties, fought back as well. “The whole thing looked like street guerilla,” one witness said. At least two of the synagogue’s defenders–including a young Chabad chassid–were severely wounded and rushed to a nearby hospital.

The prime minister (and former interior minister) of France Manuel Valls called Serge Benhaim, the synagogue chairman, on his cell phone to assure him that more police forces, including CRS (anti-riot units) would soon be dispatched. It took some time before his orders were implemented; once deployed, even the heavily equipped CRS had to engage into hard fighting and some of them were wounded. Eventually, the worshipers were not just evacuated from the synagogue but escorted away to safer streets or a Metro station: “I will not forget the fear in their eyes as they went out,” wrote Abouaf. This time, it was not just the Tunis pogrom he had in mind, but “scenes of the Holocaust itself.”

Similar incidents occurred all over Greater Paris and France at about the same time. The morning before–that is to say, on the Sabbath–a Molotov cocktail was thrown into a synagogue at Aulnay-sous-Bois, a Parisian suburb. At Asnieres, another suburb, the police said a Muslim mob of 300 gathered in front of the synagogue and shouted anti-Israel slogans for about half an hour. Smaller group of Muslim mobsters attempted to get into the Belleville synagogue, in northeastern Paris, and into the Tournelles synagogue, in the Marais district.

Genetic engineering can produce drought-resistant plants. But activists still don’t like it.

Last year was the driest on record in California, and 2014 could well set another record. Most of the state is experiencing “extreme” drought — the second-most severe category. Reservoir levels are dropping, the snowpack is almost nonexistent, and some communities have already imposed restrictions on water usage. But it is the state’s premier industry — farming — that will be affected most drastically. In an average year, farmers use 80 percent of the water consumed by people and businesses in California, according to the Department of Water Resources.

It seems logical, then, that conservation measures should be focused on agriculture, but not everyone has figured that out. From their perch in a parallel universe, the New York Times’s editorial board saw fit to weigh in last week: “California is in the third year of its worst drought in decades. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at how much water the state’s residents and businesses are using.” You wouldn’t know it, either, by looking at the years of rants that the Times has published in opposition to a proven technology that could go a long way toward reducing the usage of water and the impact of the drought.

The technology is genetic engineering, sometimes called genetic modification (GM), which enables plant breeders to make old crop plants do new things, including conserve water. Even with research and development hampered by resistance from activists and discouraged by government overregulation, genetically engineered crop varieties are emerging from the development pipeline in many parts of the world. Cumulatively, during the past two decades, more than 3.7 billion acres of them have been cultivated by more than 17 million farmers in 30 countries — without disrupting a single ecosystem or causing so much as a tummy ache. Worldwide, these new varieties have provided “very significant net economic benefits at the farm level amounting to $18.8 billion in 2012 and $116.6 billion for the 17-year period” from 1996 to 2012, according to an authoritative report published by Landes Bioscience earlier this year.

Genetically engineered herbicide-resistant plants make possible the use of no-till farming techniques, in which the soil is not plowed, meaning that there is less soil erosion, less runoff of agricultural chemicals, and lower fuel consumption and carbon emissions by mechanized farm equipment. From 1996 to 2010, the shift to genetically engineered crops reduced carbon emissions by 19.4 billion kilograms, the equivalent of removing 8.6 million cars from the road for a year.

The planting of genetically engineered crops has also obviated the need to cultivate vast additional amounts of arable land. Between 1996 and 2011, genetically engineered crops were responsible for the production of an additional 110 million tons of soybeans, 195 million tons of corn, 15.8 million tons of cotton lint, and 6.6 million tons of canola. If modern genetic-engineering technology had not been available, to maintain worldwide production levels farmers would have had to “find” and cultivate tens of millions of additional acres of arable land.

Alan Dershowitz has called it “the most anti-Semitic and anti-Israel country in Europe today.” HanneNabintuHerland, a religious scholar at the nation’s leading university, has criticized it for “refus[ing] to distance itself from Hamas as a terrorist organization.” Its government, as NR’s Jay Nordlinger has noted, was “the first outside the Islamic world to recognize Hamas.”

We’re talking, as you might have guessed, about Norway.

In the corridors of Norwegian power, Israel-hatred and sympathy for Islamic terrorists have long been the norm. In 2011, Norway’s ambassador to Israel distinguished between Anders Behring Breivik’s murder spree and Hamas atrocities in Israel: While the former, he said, was inspired by an ugly ideology and was utterly undeserved by its victims, the latter is a result of Israel’s own “occupation” — and thus, presumably, justified, or at least understandable.

Among the pillars of Norwegian civil society these days are Basim Ghozlan, a supporter of Hamas suicide bombings who runs Norway’s Islamic Federation, and Shoaib Sultan, who, though refusing to criticize Iran’s execution of gays and Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s description of the Holocaust as a “gift from Allah,” was accorded the high honor of arranging last year’s Constitution Day festivities in Oslo.

Nordlinger again: “Norway’s attitude toward Israel is approximately that of the Middle East Studies department of the University of Michigan.” Precisely.

All this Israel-hatred is, it should be emphasized, grounded in Norway’s left-wing establishment — the mainstream media, the academy, and the political elite. Last September’s elections, which brought a non-socialist coalition to power, shook that establishment to its roots. Not because of the senior partner in the coalition — the soft-socialist, go-along-to-get-along Conservative party — but because of the junior partner, the Progress party, a faction of free-market enthusiasts who are unabashedly pro-U.S. and pro-Israel.

Among the Progress party’s most fervent supporters of America and Israel is Kristian Norheim, a 38-year-old member of Parliament and the party’s foreign-policy spokesperson. On July 12, he posted on his Facebook page a cartoon from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, drawn by Randy Bish. It showed an armed Hamas terrorist holding up a small child, and was captioned “the Hamas missile defense shield.” Norheim’s posted comment on the cartoon: “Sad, but true.”

To anyone who deplores terrorism and is appalled by Hamas gangsters’ habit of hiding behind women and children — and of sequestering themselves in schools, hospitals, and mosques — the cartoon is nothing more or less than a morally admirable response to a morally despicable practice. But the Norwegian establishment reacted to Norheim’s posting with outrage. The cartoon, protested the Socialist Left party, was “tasteless,” an expression of “extreme views.” The Labor party’s Anniken Huitfeldt called it “one-sided . . . propaganda” that was “unworthy” and “stupid.” Rasmus Hansson of the Green party called Norheim “shameful” for posting the cartoon and Trine Skei Grande, head of the Liberal party, said that by giving it a thumbs-up he’d lowered the level of debate.

A mother is arrested for giving her daughter a cell phone and letting her play in the park.
This week, a woman was arrested for letting her nine-year-old daughter (armed with a cell phone) go to a playground unsupervised. Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids explained this wacky story over at Reason:

Here are the facts: Debra Harrell works at McDonald’s in North Augusta, South Carolina. For most of the summer, her daughter had stayed there with her, playing on a laptop that Harrell had scrounged up the money to purchase. (McDonald’s has free WiFi.) Sadly, the Harrell home was robbed and the laptop stolen, so the girl asked her mother if she could be dropped off at the park to play instead.

Harrell said yes. She gave her daughter a cell phone. The girl went to the park — a place so popular that at any given time there are about 40 kids frolicking — two days in a row. There were swings, a “splash pad,” and shade. On her third day at the park, an adult asked the girl where her mother was. At work, the daughter replied.

The shocked adult called the cops. Authorities declared the girl “abandoned” and proceeded to arrest the mother.

There are so many disturbing aspects to this story; it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s begin with the nitwit who called the police in the first place. I’m sure this snitch was puffed with pride when they called the police on this little girl’s working mother. A real citizen soldier, that one.

I spend a lot of time talking about the danger of big government and the nanny state and bureaucrats nosing around in people’s business, but this story brings into sharp relief an even more frightening phenomenon: 911-happy, hypersensitive, busybody do-gooders who take it upon themselves to decide what’s right and wrong for your child. And now, apparently, those “citizen informants” can cause real and lasting harm (not to mention a police record) to their neighbors.

Some might sympathize with the informant in this case — perhaps she was just concerned for this little girl’s safety. But let’s think about what was better for that little girl. Should Debra Harrell have made her daughter sit inside an air-conditioned fast-food restaurant with nothing to do all day but (to the horror of the first lady) eat fries and hamburgers? Or is her daughter better off spending the day outside in the fresh air getting exercise, meeting and playing with other kids, and learning a lesson or two about independence and decision making?

Israel’s Iron Dome system shows that the best defense is not always a good offense.

Between the fall of the Jewish Commonwealth to the Romans in the first century A.D. and the founding of Israel in 1948, Jews were remarkably easy to kill. Not anymore.

Today, thanks to an innovative missile-defense system called Iron Dome (in Hebrew Kipat Barzel), it’s harder than ever. Yet when it was first proposed, many Israeli defense experts (and one way or another most Israelis consider themselves defense experts) were reluctant to support the idea of a defensive response to rocket attacks from Gaza and Lebanon.

Throughout the history of warfare there has been conflict between those who believe in the strength of a defensive posture and those who put their faith in the attack. Aside from the proponents of the nuclear doctrine known as Mutual Assured Destruction, no one has ever seriously claimed that an exclusively offensive or defensive strategy is viable. Some military organizations have traditionally put more emphasis on defense and others on offense.

Israel, because of its small size, has always preferred to fight offensively. If there is going to be a war, let it happen on the other guy’s territory. This made sense in the 1950s and ’60s. In 1973, however, the IDF’s lightly fortified positions in the Golan Heights and on the east bank of the Suez Canal were overwhelmed in the initial Arab surprise attack.

This led to the delusion that the Bar Lev line in Sinai was somehow an Israeli version of France’s disastrous Maginot Line at the beginning of World War II. In fact, it was a set of positions built during the War of Attrition (1968–70) to protect Israeli soldiers from Egyptian artillery fire, and hadn’t been intended as a line of defense capable of repelling a full-blown attack. The costly success of the IDF’s offensive across the canal and the drive on Damascus in the north convinced Israel’s military leaders that their attack-centered doctrine was the correct one; it just needed better tanks.

In spite of this doctrine’s failure to work as planned during the Lebanon war that began in 1982, Israel’s leaders remained committed to an offensive-minded strategy. However, they knew that their enemies were beginning to equip themselves with long-range missiles. Indeed, Egypt had used a few early-model Scuds during the Yom Kippur War.

Thus, when the Reagan administration offered Israel the chance to take part in the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) missile-defense program in 1983, a small faction inside the IDF leaped at the chance.