RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2013/12/28/hitlers-firestorm-and-the-christmastime-salvation-of-st-pauls/

Just four days after Christmas 1940, Hitler turned London into earthly hell. December 29 was London’s longest night, the night Hitler tried to burn London down and incinerate the majestic St. Paul’s Cathedral.

At sunrise the dome of St. Paul’s stood, though surrounded by a smoldering warscape of total destruction. The salvation of St. Paul’s Cathedral from the inferno uplifted British spirits and is a Christmas story worth retelling seventy-three years later.

By December 1940, nearly all the democracies of Europe had fallen to the Nazi menace. Germany itself started the process in 1933 when an enlightened democracy suffered the sudden concentration of power into an ideologically driven central state. Mania followed. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, France, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands all fell to Hitler.

By Christmastime 1940, Britain stood alone against the evil which had consumed Europe.

Hitler aimed to break England’s will. He wanted England to be content with Nazi control of continental Europe.

On December 29, 1940, fire was his weapon of choice.

The Luftwaffe’s air war over England had raged for months. Londoners had grown accustomed to the wail of air raid sirens and nights sleeping underground in tube stations. The Blitz first focused on military targets, then strategic targets, and then conventional bombings which affected civilian areas.

But on the night of December 29, Hitler attempted to terrorize and eradicate the civilian population of London with a gruesome deliberateness he would also employ against continental Jews.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/12/demolished_homes_israel_sovereignty_and_distorted_context.html You cannot get a good education if your instructor is telling you only half the story. The following was found in an English composition classroom at a university where I teach. Hundreds of “eviction” notices were slid under Rutgers dorm and apartment doors the night of October 6. The notices [had] a municipal code […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/12/the_temple_mount_dismounted.html

In June 1967, Israeli paratroopers entered Jerusalem’s Old City after Israel’s miraculous victory in the Six-Day War. The Old City had been under Jordanian control for nineteen years, an era of wanton destruction of synagogues and of ethnic cleansing of all Jews from the Old City. The paratroopers made their prayerful way to the Temple Mount, the holiest piece of ground in all Judaism, site of the First and Second Great Temples and, by tradition, the ark itself. Three paratroopers climbed to the top of the Dome of The Rock (built atop the former Second Temple) and unfurled the Israeli flag for the first time. Four hours later, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan ordered the flag taken down. Then, in one of the most incomprehensible acts in Jewish history, Dayan handed over the entire Temple Mount to the Muslims, to be administered by the Waqf, the Jordanian Muslim religious trust. And thus it remains.

Dayan told his critics that he committed this act of ignominy to protect against the building of a Third Temple, which pious Jews indeed pray for. Of course, the likelihood of either the Messiah or the Third Temple arising would seem to be microscopically tiny at this time, a fact that doesn’t stop Muslim clerics from expressing their suspicion that “the Israeli occupation and its executive arms are making increasing efforts…to hasten the building of the alleged third Temple in place of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque….” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 4, 2011)

Meanwhile, and not surprisingly, in the Muslim grand scheme to erase Jews from all of Jerusalem, since 1967 things have steadily gotten worse at the Mount. Jews are allowed only limited access to the Mount, and are strictly forbidden to pray there. If a Jew is seen so much as moving his lips while there, he runs the risk of being attacked, pelted with rocks and other missiles, and will very likely be arrested — by the Israeli police. In spite of constant Israeli assistance, however, just last week the Jordanian Information Minister demanded the removal of the police station and its surveillance cameras.

Dear Dr. MacEoin (maceoin@btinternet.com )

I received from both a friend and Jerusalem Posts, a copy of your recent letter (pasted to the foot of this letter) to St. James Church and in particular, Rev.’s Meader, Winkett and Valentine.

I expect you have already received tremendously favorable comments for your eloquently powerful letter damning them for their having “constructed a mendacious (anti-Israel) wall on its premises in order to make an ignominious political point”.

Metaphorically speaking you have employed both a surgeon’s scalpel and a sledgehammer to cut away and shatter the illusory façade these church leaders have erected for themselves to hide the truth that their real motives for erecting this wall are antisemitic which motives mark not just them, but their church.

Redemption for St. James Church and Rev.’s Meader, Winkett and Valentine can only come if they open their eyes to the ugly sin of their antisemitism that flies in the face of the best of what Christian teaching offers.

That redemption can only be complete if in seeing the antisemitic ugliness within them, they embrace the word and spirit of the best of Christian principles that their antisemitism denies and with that, admit their sin, renounce their antisemitism and tear down the mendacious anti-Israel/antisemitic wall they have built for all to see.

Denis M. MacEoin (born 1949, Belfast, Northern Ireland) has been editor of Middle East Quarterly since June 2009. A former lecturer in Islamic studies, his academic specialisations are Shi‘ism, Shaykhism, Bábism, and the Bahá’í Faith, on all of which he has written extensively. MacEoin is also a novelist, writing under the pen names Daniel Easterman and Jonathan Aycliffe
Dear Revs. Meader, Winkett and Valentine,

The last time I was in your beautiful church was for a memorial service for my dear friend Patricia Parkin, a leading literary editor and my own editor for a great many years. Thbe service was a thing of great beauty, with some wonderful music, as one might expect from your church. My attention was drawn by the magnificent Grinling Gibbons carvings on the font and reredos. Having recently read David Esterly’s lyrical account of his restoration of Gibbon’s carvings, my appreciation of the quality of your specimens has much increased. You are very welcome to visit my parish church, St. George’s in Jesmond, which is widely thought to be the most beautiful church in the North of England.

The welcomes you extend to LGBT people, the homeless, refugees, and innovative approaches to the liturgy and beyond (as in your Zen group) have always interested. My own background is in Persian, Arabic and Islamic Studies (especially Shi’ite Islam), on all of which I have written extensively. The bulk of my academic work has centered on the Baha’i religion and its precursors. I am very conscious of the plight of the Baha’is still living in Iran, where they have been and are being persecuted with great severity. I don’t know if you include them in your prayers, but perhaps I can ask you to.

Compassion for those who suffer is necessarily an automatic response of Christians, given the emphasis Christ placed on love for one’s fellow man.

For myself, my earliest encounter with true suffering came through a teacher at my drama school in Belfast, Helen Lewis (née Katz). I had heard that she had been imprisoned in a concentration camp, but it wasn’t till one day when she rolled her sleeve up and I saw numbers tattooed on her arm that her plight came home to me. She had spent a long time in Theresianstadt (Terezin), where she saved her life because she was a professional ballet dancer: the Nazis used Terezin as a Potemkin village with dancers, musicians, actors, painters and writers to impress the Red Cross and others with their kindly treatment of inmates (while thousands died behind the scenes). Helen’s husband died in Auschwitz.

http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303849604579278722657163880-lMyQjAxMTAzMDIwODEyNDgyWj
A Controversial New Movement Wants to Cooperate More Closely With the Jewish State

As Christmas neared, an 85-foot-high tree presided over the little square in front of the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth. Kindergarten children with Santa Claus hats entered the church and listened to their teacher explain in Arabic the Greek inscriptions on the walls, while a group of Russian pilgrims knelt on their knees and whispered in prayer. In Nazareth’s old city, merchants sold the usual array of Christmas wares.

This year, however, the familiar rhythms of Christmas season in the Holy Land have been disturbed by a new development: the rise of an independent voice for Israel’s Christian community, which is increasingly trying to assert its separate identity. For decades, Arab Christians were considered part of Israel’s sizable Palestinian minority, which comprises both Muslims and Christians and makes up about a fifth of the country’s citizens, according to the Israeli government.

But now, an informal grass-roots movement, prompted in part by the persecution of Christians elsewhere in the region since the Arab Spring, wants to cooperate more closely with Israeli Jewish society—which could mean a historic change in attitude toward the Jewish state. “Israel is my country, and I want to defend it,” says Henry Zaher, an 18-year-old Christian from the village of Reineh who was visiting Nazareth. “The Jewish state is good for us.”

A Deadly Mix in Benghazi
By David D. Kirkpatrick

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/benghazi/?emc=edit_na_20131228#/?chapt=0

It was Sept. 9, 2012. Gathered on folding chairs in a banquet hall by the Mediterranean, the Libyans warned of rising threats against Americans from extremists in Benghazi. One militia leader, with a long beard and mismatched military fatigues, mentioned time in exile in Afghanistan. An American guard discreetly touched his gun.

“Since Benghazi isn’t safe, it is better for you to leave now,” Mohamed al-Gharabi, the leader of the Rafallah al-Sehati Brigade, later recalled telling the Americans. “I specifically told the Americans myself that we hoped that they would leave Benghazi as soon as possible.”

Yet as the militiamen snacked on Twinkie-style cakes with their American guests, they also gushed about their gratitude for President Obama’s support in their uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. They emphasized that they wanted to build a partnership with the United States, especially in the form of more investment. They specifically asked for Benghazi outlets of McDonald’s and KFC.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4110/palestinians-is-abbas-being-asked-to-sign-his PLO President Mahmoud Abbas undoubtedly knows that the minute he signs a peace deal with Israel, the Palestinian terrorist organizations will assassinate him. The mismanagement by Europe, the UN and Abbas’s own weakness have prepared the ground for a takeover by radical elements, and it will occur in the foreseeable future. If elections were […]

My friend Daniel Greenfield included some of Ben Hecht’s broadcasts in his weekly roundup today. Who was Ben Hecht born in 1884- died in 1964?

For starters, he was called the Shakespeare of his time. He started as a newspaper reporter, writing columns for the Chicago Daily News. At the urging of Herman Mankiewicz he relocated to Hollywood where he became a screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, and novelist. He worked on over seventy films, wrote over thirty books and was the recipient of the first Oscar for Original Screenplay for the movie “Underworld.” Among his hits were “Scarface”, “The Front Page”, “Mutiny on the Bounty”, “Notorious”, “Spellbound” and “Some Like it Hot.” Six of his movies were nominated for Oscars and two won.

That was his paying day job. In 1943, plagued with concern and fear for the plight of European Jewry, and offended by government indifference, he organized a rally in Madison Square Garden with the help of Billy Rose, Ernst Lubitsch, Kurt Weill and Moss Hart. The production named “We Will Never Die” drew over 40,000 people to Madison Square Garden. Although the pageant made a national tour, Hecht was disappointed in its outcome. Weill is quoted as saying “The pageant has accomplished nothing. Actually, all we have done is make a lot of Jews cry, which is not a unique accomplishment.”

Hecht turned to active militant Zionism. He wrote “Perfidy” a plea to save the Jews and began his collaboration with Peter Bergson to help create independence for Jews in Palestine. When the war ended he wrote the screenplay for the Bergson Group’s production of” A Flag is Born” which opened on September 5, 1946 in New York, starring Marlon Brando and Paul Muni. Hecht became the most effective spokesman for the Irgun. After the bombing of the military headquarters in the King David Hotel, Hecht said ” Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts. ”

His work was blacklisted in Great Britain.

When Israel was established, the Bergson group was disbanded and Hecht turned his effort to raising funds. The speaker of honor at the first dinner in 1948 was Menachem Begin who also deliverd a eulogy at Hecht’s funeral in 1964.

The first flagship of Israel’s nascent Navy was the S.S. Ben Hecht.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
UNION POLITICS

This story is about a labor leader I once met whom I did understood. This fellow was named Herr Eichhorn and he’d become dictator in a town in Germany named Dusseldorf.

There’d been an uprising and the Bolsheviks captured the town. Eichhorn had been a street car conductor and now he found himself in the Burgomeister’s Palace as a dictator of whatever province Dusseldorf was in. He was running the works.

I met him at the palace to talk. He was a very fine street car conductor who sat there beaming and happy at his desk. I asked him what he’d done since he’d become a dictator.

“Well the first thing O did is two days after I was dictator, I doubled the salaries of all the street car employees,” he said.

“That’s fine, what else did you do?”

“I doubled the salaries of all the street cleaners. In fact I’ve doubled all the salaries in Dusseldorf.”

“Where do you get all the money to pay all these double wages?” I asked.

He said, “I get it out of the treasury of Dusseldorf.”

So I thought for a moment and I asked him, “What’ll happen when you run out of the money in the Treasury of Dusseldorf? How are you going to pay these double wages?”

He grinned. “I’m not worried about that, by the time that happens I won’t be dictator.”

(The Ben Hecht Show Dec 4, 1958)