Displaying posts published in

2011

MARKS AND SPENCER VILIFIED AND BOYCOTTED FOR ITS JEWISH IDENTITY

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/
“Marks & Spencer Stands For Misery & Suffering; Marks & Spencer Stands For Murder & Slaughter” (video)

“Don’t ask the price – it’s a penny.” Thus did Michael Marks (1859-1907), an immigrant to Leeds from Slonim in the Tsarist Empire, where his father was an impoverished tailor,advertise the goods on display at his clothing stall in the Yorkshire city. As is well-known, Marks & Spencer had its origins in the business partnership that the enterprising Leeds stallholder made in 1894 with the non-Jewish Thomas Spencer, who retired in 1903. By the time Marks died, the firm already had 60 clothing stores in various parts of Britain, and was well on its way to becoming one of the staples of the British High Street, known for offering goods of high quality and reliability at a reasonable price. Its flagship store in London’s Oxford Street opened in 1938

Following Michael Marks’s death the firm was run by his son, Simon (1888-1964, who was knighted in 1944 and raised to the peerage as the first Baron Marks of Broughton in 1961), and by his son-in-law Israel Sieff (1889-1972, who became a life peer, Baron Sieff, in 1966), the son of a Lithuanian-born Manchester textile manufacturer and husband of Simon’s sister Rebecca (1890-1966). Marks and Spencer, an enlightened employer which enjoyed excellent staff relations, arguably reached its peak under the leadership of the Sieffs’ son, Sir Marcus Sieff, Baron Sieff of Brimpton (1913-2001; knighted in 1971 and given a life peerage in 1980). Its fortunes declined after the Marks and Sieff families requished control, although it remains, of course, a legendary giant of British retailing.

Simon Marks and Israel Sieff , who knew Chaim Weizmann when he was a scientist in Manchester, were prominent supporters of the Zionist movement and investors in the infrastructure of the Yishuv. Simon Marks was President of the Joint Palestine Appeal and Honorary Vice-President of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain. Israel Sieff was during the 1930s President of the Zionist Federation, and subsequently its Vice-Chairman for many years. His many other positions relating to Jewry and to Israel included the longterm presidency of the Anglo-Israel Chamber of Commerce. Lady Sieff, Simon’s sister, was one of the founders of WIZO, the Women’s International Zionist Movement, and a lifelong champion of Zionism and Israel. Baron Sieff of Brimpton was also an active Zionist. For example, he was President of the Anglo-Israel Chamber of Commerce, Hon. President of the Joint Israel Appeal, and Chancellor of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot. The well-known Zionist Harry Sacher (1881-1971) who helped to win over the Manchester Guardian to the Zionist cause, and who played a not inconsiderable part in the talks leading to the Balfour Declaration, was married to Simon’s sister Miriam (1892-1975), who was equally devoted to efforts for the Jewish Homeland and shared Harry’s involvement with the Weizmann Institute.

Needless to say, the attachment of the Marks and Sieff families to the Zionist cause did not go unnoticed by Israel’s enemies. In 1973 Israel Sieff’s brother Joseph Edward “Teddy” Sieff (1906–1982), who chaired the firm from 1967-72 and also served as Hon. Vice-President of the Zionist Federation, survived a bungled assassination attempt in the bathroom of his London home by no less a personage than the notorious Carlos the Jackal, firing a gun on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

WEAPONS CACHE FOUND IN ZUCOTTI PARK AFTER EVICTION OF OWS SQUATTERS

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/11/23/weapons-cache-found-during-zuccotti-park-clean-up-sources/?test=latestnews#ixzz1ed8IoKEy A number of weapons were discovered in New York’s Zuccotti Park after Occupy Wall Street protesters were evicted by the Police Department last week, law enforcement sources tell FoxNews.com. Gardeners employed by the park owners, Brookfield Properties, to clean up the mess made by occupiers during their two-month stay discovered various knives, […]

MICHEL GURFINKIEL: SUPPORT ISRAEL UNCONDITIONALLY

Support Israel “unconditionally” [Google translation] By Michel Gurfinkiel

http://www.dreuz.info/2011/11/soutenir-% C2% AB-unconditionally-% C2% BB-israel /

Most Jews in France unconditionally support Israel. It is a fact. It is also a kind of ontological necessity, which can neither be surprised nor indignant. For three reasons.

First, the particular historical experience of this community. French Jews today are, for half of them survivors of the Holocaust, or direct descendants, one or two generations of survivors. And the other half of the Jews expelled from Islamic countries, or, upon a generation or two again, their direct descendants.

The two tragedies, it should be emphasized, are interrelated. The Holocaust, where it took place, struck indiscriminately Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Ideologies which it has fed, or who made it possible, directly influenced or reactivated ones in the East led to ethnic cleansing or community. In both cases, the Jews were crushed as Jews. In both cases, they were betrayed: by governments in which they had placed their faith and trust in the companies they thought they were full members.

How, then, French Jews would they not attached to the world’s only Jewish state, founded and inhabited by other Holocaust survivors and others expelled from the country of Islam?

ANDREW McCARTHY: ROMNEY’S IRAN GAFFE

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/283999 Ahmadinejad is not a law-enforcement problem. For a guy who generally seems solid on national security, Mitt Romney flashed some disturbing weakness at last night’s foreign-policy debate among the Republican presidential hopefuls. When it comes to Iran, the most immediate threat to the United States and its interests, the Romney strategy is — wait for […]

ROMNEY VS. GINGRICH ON JIHAD AND SHARIA: ANDREW BOSTOM

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2011/11/23/romney-versus-gingrich-on-jihad-and-sharia-a-yawning-if-unappreciated-gap/ Romney Versus Gingrich on Jihad and Sharia: A Yawning, if Unappreciated Gap Early and volatile, the Republican Presidential nomination race—at least for now—appears to be settling into a contest between consistent frontrunner Mitt Romney, and the latest surging, “non-Romney alternative”, former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich. Unfortunately the CNN/Heritage Foundation/American Enterprise televised debate [1] of […]

DAVID P. GOLDMAN: THE UNITED NATIONS….THE DEVIL’S JURY

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2607/united-nations-devil-jury In Stephen Vincent Benét’s story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” Satan called a jury of the damned composed of turncoats, traitors, and Blackbeard the Pirate, “with the stench of hell still upon them.” At the United Nations Human Rights Council, accusations against the Dutch political leader Geert Wilders will be heard by Chinese and […]

YISRAEL MEDAD: SHAMEFUL IN MANCHESTER

http://www.thejc.com/blogs/advis3r/shameful-in-manchester-0
There are more Jews living in Judea and Samaria than in the whole of the British Isles and yet the “Guardians” of British Jewry do not consider that a representative of the Jews of Judea and Samaria has any right to be heard at their big tent fest in Manchester next week. Maybe I should not be surprised since the good people of Manchester tried to hound out Efrat’s Chief Rabbi Rabbi Shlomo Riskin Shlita when he tried to speak there a few years back.
Yisrael Medad has written the following blog [http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2011/11/wineman-not-wise-man.html] which I reproduce with his written approval.
If you do not know, my presence at the Manchester Big Tent is prohibited as a speaker/presenter. The flap has flopped and I am out. There will be many people there as presenters, workshop facilitators, panelists and greeters.
I was personally “disinvited” although I am not sure that I ever was officially invited. I think my name was proposed at the organizing meeting last Thursday for I was told that opposition was strongly expressed by Board of Deputies head, Vivian Wineman, in that the feeling shared around the table, it would seem, was that I had insulted the gentlemen and ladies thereof.
Wineman, however, is truly the odd Jew in this situation.

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE FUTURE OF EGYPT

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ In the wake of the latest instability everyone has an opinion on the future of Egypt. But the future of Egypt is the past, not the distant past of its pre-Arab culture, but a repetition of the last century. In a region that has never escaped from the past, history is not a road, […]

: LIESL SCHILLINGER: A REVIEW OF “HEDY’S FOLLY” BY RICHARD RHODES…THE REMARKABLE BIOGRAPHY OF HEDY LAMARR

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/11/20/hedy-lamarr-biography-hedy-s-folly-by-richard-rhodes-review.html
How the world’s most beautiful woman helped invent GPS, Wi-Fi, and a homing torpedo.

Actresses often long to turn director, but how many of them yearn to turn inventor? Given the success that the screen siren Hedy Lamarr achieved in that realm—revealed in Richard Rhodes’s fascinating biography, Hedy’s Folly—it’s a pity more of them don’t consider it.

In 1940, while acting alongside Jimmy Stewart and Judy Garland in the MGM musical Ziegfeld Girl, the 26-year-old Lamarr spent her free time devising a radio-controlled submarine missile-guidance system to help the U.S. Navy in World War II. What moved her to do this? “She didn’t drink and she didn’t like to party, so she took up inventing,” Rhodes explains. Of course, there was more to it than that. The torpedo was not the starlet’s only invention: she also came up with an antiaircraft shell with a proximity fuse, and a fizzing cube that could turn a plain glass of water into soda.

How did a woman who couldn’t spell (by some accounts) make such signif-icant contributions to science? Born Hedwig Kiesler into a refined Viennese Jewish family in 1914, she dropped out of high school to act on stage and screen. In 1931, when she was 16, the director Max Reinhardt cast her in the play The Weaker Sex and called her “the most beautiful woman in the world”—an epithet that stuck. Two years later, she attained notoriety for her memorable (if fleeting) nude scenes in a Czech art film called Ecstasy. The film horrified her parents but thrilled munitions mogul Fritz Mandl.

THE AMERICAN HOLIDAY OF THANKSGIVING AND THE BIBLICAL FESTIVAL OF SUKKOT….HAPPY HOLIDAY TO ALL FROM RSK

THE AMERICAN HOLIDAY OF THANKSGIVING certainly has its roots in the Jewish tradition of giving thanks to God, and many historians believe that the early “Pilgrims” (members of a larger “Puritan” group) derived the idea directly from the Biblical festival of Sukkot (i.e., “Tabernacles”). According to scholars, before coming to the New World, the Pilgrims lived for a decade among the Sephardic Jews in Holland, since Holland was considered a safe haven from religious persecution at the time. Since the Pilgrims were devout Calvinists and Puritans, their religious idealism led them to regard themselves as “New Israel,” and it is likely that they learned that Sukkot commemorated Israel’s deliverance from their religious persecution in ancient Egypt at that time. [This connection with being the “New Israel” explains the popular biblical names of the Pilgrims/Puritans such as Abigail, Ebenezer, Ezekiel, Ezra, Miriam, etc.]

After they emigrated to the “Promised Land” of America, it is not surprising that the pilgrims may have chosen the festival of Sukkot as the paradigm for their own celebration. The highly religious pilgrims regarded their perilous journey to the new world as a form of “Exodus” and therefore sought the appropriate Biblical holiday to commemorate their safe arrival in a land full of new promise…

After their lengthy pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the ancient Israelites lived for a week in temporary huts while giving thanks for a plentiful harvest. Likewise, during their first winter in Massachusetts, the pilgrims dwelled in makeshift huts, wigwams that the Wampanoag Indians helped them build.

While Sukkot remains a seven-day observance, the first Thanksgiving celebration continued for three days, a time frame more similar to the Jewish harvest festival than today’s Thanksgiving dinner, which often begins in late afternoon and ends several hours later. However, with its pumpkin pies and cranberry garlands, Thanksgiving mirrors many of Sukkot’s customs and culinary themes.

Here’s a slideshow that addresses the relationship between Sukkot and Thanksgiving.