RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/world-war-i-continues-to-have-relevance-100-years-later-a-941523.html

It has now been 100 years since the outbreak of World War I, but the European catastrophe remains relevant today. As the Continent looks back this year, old wounds could once again be rubbed raw.

Joachim Gauck, the 11th president of the Federal Republic of Germany, executes his duties in a palace built for the Hohenzollern dynasty. But almost all memories of Prussian glory have been eliminated from Bellevue Palace in Berlin, where there is no pomp and there are no uniforms and few flags. The second door on the left in the entrance hall leads into a parlor where Gauck receives visitors.

In the so-called official room, there are busts of poet Heinrich von Kleist and Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, the first German president after Kaiser Wilhelm II fled the country into exile, on a shelf behind the desk. There are two paintings on the wall: an Italian landscape by a German painter, and a view of Dresden by Canaletto, the Italian painter.

Gauck likes the symbolism. Nations and their people often view both the world and the past from different perspectives. The president says that he doesn’t find this disconcerting, because he is aware of the reasons. In 2014, the year of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, the eyes of the world will be focused on Germany’s head of state. It will be the biggest historical event to date in the 21st century.

And Gauck represents the losers.

More than 60 million soldiers from five continents participated in that orgy of violence. Almost one in six men died, and millions returned home with injuries or missing body parts — noses, jaws, arms. Countries like France, Belgium and the United Kingdom are planning international memorial events, wreath-laying ceremonies, concerts and exhibits, as are faraway nations like New Zealand and Australia, which formed their identities during the war.

Poles, citizens of the Baltic countries, Czechs and Slovaks will also commemorate the years between 1914 and 1918, because they emerged as sovereign nations from the murderous conflict between the Entente and the Central Powers.

Unthinkable in Germany

In the coming months, World War I will become a mega issue in the public culture of commemoration. The international book market will present about 150 titles in Germany alone, and twice as many in France — probably a world record for a historic subject. The story of a generation that has long passed on will be retold. New questions will be asked and new debates will unfold. British Prime Minister David Cameron is even making funds available to enable all children attending Britain’s government-run schools to visit the battlefields of the Western Front.

A response of this nature would be unthinkable in pacifist Germany.

But Western Europeans paid a higher death toll in World War I than in any other war in their history, which is why they call it “The Great War” or “La Grande Guerre.” Twice as many Britons, three times as many Belgians and four times as many Frenchmen died on the Maas and the Somme than in all of World War II. That’s one of the reasons, says Gauck in his office in the Hohenzollern palace, why he could imagine “a German commemoration of World War I as merely a sign of respect for the suffering of those we were fighting at the time.”

The “Great War” was not only particularly bloody, but it also ushered in a new era of warfare, involving tanks, aircraft and even chemical weapons. Its outcome would shape the course of history for years to come, even for an entire century in some regions.

In the coming weeks, SPIEGEL will describe the consequences of World War I that continue to affect us today: the emergence of the United States as the world’s policeman, France’s unique view of Germany, the ethnic hostilities in the Balkans and the arbitrary drawing of borders in the Middle East, consequences that continue to burden and impede the peaceful coexistence of nations to this day.

Several summit meetings are scheduled for the 2014 political calendar, some with and some without Gauck. Queen Elizabeth II will receive the leaders of Commonwealth countries in Glasgow Cathedral. Australia, New Zealand, Poland and Slovenia are also planning meetings of the presidents or prime ministers of all or selected countries involved in World War I.

‘A Different Nation Today’

August 3 is at the top of Gauck’s list. On that day, he and French President François Hollande will commemorate the war dead at Hartmannswillerkopf, a peak in the Alsace region that was bitterly contested by the Germans and the French in the war. The German president is also among the more than 50 heads of state of all countries involved in World War I who will attend a ceremony at the fortress of Liège hosted by Belgium’s King Philippe. Gauck, a former citizen of East Germany, sees himself as “the German who represents a different nation today, and who remembers the various horrors that are associated with the German state.”

The 73-year-old president hopes that the series of commemorative events will remind Europeans how far European integration has come since 1945. Gauck notes that the “absolute focus on national interests” à la 1914/1918 did not led to happy times for any of the wartime enemies.

But he knows that the memory of the horrors of a war doesn’t just reconcile former enemies but can also tear open wounds that had become scarred over. In this respect, the centenary of World War I comes at an unfavorable time. Many European countries are seeing a surge of nationalist movements and of anti-German sentiment prior to elections to the European Parliament in May 2014.

In a recent poll, 88 percent of Spanish, 82 percent of Italian and 56 percent of French respondents said that Germany has too much influence in the European Union. Some even likened today’s Germany to the realm of the blustering Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Last August, a British journalist emerged from a conversation with the press attaché at the German Embassy in London with the impression that Berlin, in the interest of promoting reconciliation, wanted to take part in commemorative ceremony in neighboring countries. This led to an outcry in the British press, which claimed that the Germans were trying to prevent the British from celebrating their victory in World War I.

I don’t celebrate death of anyone. Sharon will meet his Creator and answer to massacres and destruction committed by him. He was a criminal.

— Linda Sarsour (@lsarsour) January 11, 2014

Editor’s Note: This is Part V of an ongoing series by Robert Spencer highlighting human rights hypocrisy and fraudulent peace activists. For Part I, see “The Hypocrisy of the ‘Islamophobia’ Scam,” for Part II, see “The Hypocrisy of the Fatwa Against Terrorism,” for Part III “The Hypocrisy of the Feminist Response to Islam’s Oppression of Women,” for Part IV see last week’s “The Hypocrisy of the Western Christian Response to Muslim Persecution of Christians.”

Leftists and Islamic supremacists took to Twitter on Saturday morning to take their last shots at Ariel Sharon.

New York-based Linda Sarsour tweeted piously: “I don’t celebrate death of anyone. Sharon will meet his Creator and answer to massacres and destruction committed by him. He was a criminal.” Sarsour is a rabidly antisemitic Islamic supremacist who has said that “nothing is creepier than Zionism” and has equated it with “racism.” She is also a frequent visitor to the Obama White House, and has claimed that the jihad underwear bomber was a CIA agent – part of what she claims is a U.S. war against Islam.

Sarsour is a practiced exploiter of the “hate” smear against foes of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, and has never apologized for using the Islamic honor murder of Shaima Alawadi to spread lies about the prevalence of hate crimes against Muslims in America. Although she decries “hate,” she is venomously hateful herself – as is clear in this self-righteous, self-pitying, foul-mouthed, hate-filled and utterly off-putting performance at a “comedy show,” which reveals that the preening preachers of the “Islamophobia” myth are the real haters. Her lurid tweet envisioning Sharon being damned to hell by a vengeful Allah showed it yet again.

Sarsour wasn’t alone. Others focused on Sharon’s alleged “war crimes.” Hard-Left journalist Glenn Greenwald, hero of the Snowden scandal, pointed out helpfully:

THE MOST STAGGERING STATISTIC OF THE HOLOCAUST IS THAT ONE OF EVERY THREE JEWS IN THE WORLD WAS KILLED…..RSK

People who argue that Holocaust Memorial Day is past its sell-by date are wrong. There is still so much to learn from such unprecedented evil

Holocaust Memorial Day falls again on January 27. It is the ninth consecutive year that this (in many ways uniquely) evil event is being officially commemorated in Britain and the EU.

Predictably there are voices — including some Jewish — who say, haven’t we heard enough about the Holocaust? What more is there to learn?

I take the opposite view — that collectively the world has not studied it nearly enough, and has not properly learned its lessons. If it had, anti-Semitism wouldn’t once again be rife in so many countries, including European ones.

And if it had, I don’t think President Assad of Syria could have used chemical weapons to kill 1,429 civilians, including hundreds of children, in a suburb of his own capital last August, without punitive action being taken by the world in response.

The United States is on a steady skid downward. The latest milestone in America’s decline is especially demoralizing: The U.S. has slouched from among the world’s Top 10 freest economies. In fact, we’re No. 12 — down two spots from No. 10 last year.

This bad news emerges from the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, released this morning by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal.

“Now considered only a ‘mostly free’ economy, the U.S. has earned the dubious distinction of having recorded one of the longest sustained declines in economic freedom, second only to Argentina, of any country in the [20-year] history of the Index,” observe the report’s editors, Ambassador Terry Miller, Anthony B. Kim, and Kim Holmes, Ph.D., all Heritage Foundation scholars. “The U.S. is the only country to have recorded a loss of economic freedom each of the past seven years.” This sad, maddening interval began in 2007 with Republican George W. Bush’s reckless expenditures, brand-new regulations (including the unforgivable federal destruction of Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb), and the post-crisis nationalization of American enterprises. This folly continues with President Obama’s trillion-dollar annual deficits, his 24/7 red-tape factory, and the triumph of Obamacare, now blossoming in its entire splendor.

The former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. thinks that if the U.S. is unsuccessful in forcing Israel to give up land for nothing, Israel should do it all on its own.

Have you seen the cartoon of a man holding a gun to his own head, with the caption, “Stop or I’ll shoot!”?

If so, you know where this column is going. Recently retired Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren left his post after what must have seemed to him like four and a half very long years. Now that Oren is no longer representing what the media he must love incessantly refers to as the hawkish Binyamin Netanyahu, the newly former ambassador is no longer diplomatically bound to have his mouth buttoned shut. And with the new Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. firmly ensconced and actually comfortable with the positions of Israeli Prime Minister Netanayahu, Oren is once again speaking out of the side of his mouth connected to his inner Disengager. Oren told an audience at Georgetown University in February of 2009, that he was amongst a minority of Israelis and was an outlier at the foundation where he then hung his hat: “I am one of the last remaining unilateralists.” It was Oren’s belief in 2009, as it appears to remain so today, that in order for Israel to remain a Jewish state it would have to withdraw from the disputed territories popularly known as the West Bank.

What he said then was that in order for Israel to remain a Jewish State it had to maintain a Jewish majority and that in order for that to happen it would have to “redraw its borders and withdraw from its settlements in the West Bank.” (What Oren actually said was that Israel would have to withdraw its borders and withdraw from its settlements, but that only makes sense if what he meant to say was that the borders would have to be redrawn, not withdrawn.) This past Saturday, Jan. 11, the day former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon died, a eulogy for Sharon penned by Michael Oren appeared on the CNN website.

The eulogy is relatively short, only 802 words, but Oren managed to get in some beautiful oratory. It opens with: “Written on every page of Israel’s history, in ink and in blood, is the name Ariel Sharon.” Oren is a masterful writer, a lovely speaker and appears to be a very decent man. But. Oren also managed to weave in to his presentatio of Sharon’s legacy the message that the former ambassador is still clinging to his earlier view that in order to save itself, tiny Israel must constrict still further. Along the way Oren revealed that where he saw Sharon acting to protect Israel’s security, Oren saw those acts then and described those actions now as ones taken without considerations about peace. But when Sharon pulled out the Israelis he himself had placed in communities in Gaza, Oren described Sharon as “pivoting toward peace.”

It took a while, but the media seem to have finally noticed Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s unprecedented obstructionism.

The New York Times reported last week on Reid’s “brutish style” and “uncompromising control” over the amendments process in the Senate. Why are more people finally catching on to Reid’s flagrant disregard for Senate customs? In part because conservatives aren’t the only ones complaining.

Democrats such as Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — who wants to repeal Obamacare’s medical-device tax — and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — who has waged a highly publicized campaign to reform the way the military handles sexual-assault cases — have been denied votes on their proposed amendments to various bills. Gillibrand had hoped to attach her sexual-assault amendment to the defense-appropriations bill that passed in December, but no amendments were allowed. Klobuchar has called for “a more open amendment process” because she’d like a vote on repealing the medical-device tax.

Moderate Republicans who occasionally vote with Democrats and help broker bipartisan compromise are annoyed as well. Senator Lisa Murkowki of Alaska told the New York Times she was “kind of fed up” with Reid’s obstructionism. “He’s a leader. Why is he not leading this Senate? Why is he choosing to ignore the fact that he has a minority party that he needs to work with, that actually has some decent ideas? Why is he bringing down the institution of the Senate?”

Undercover agents were able to vote as dead people, but election officials are attacking the agents.

Liberals who oppose efforts to prevent voter fraud claim that there is no fraud — or at least not any that involves voting in person at the polls.

But New York City’s watchdog Department of Investigations has just provided the latest evidence of how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost undetectable. DOI undercover agents showed up at 63 polling places last fall and pretended to be voters who should have been turned away by election officials; the agents assumed the names of individuals who had died or moved out of town, or who were sitting in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to vote. Those who did vote cast only a write-in vote for a “John Test” so as to not affect the outcome of any contest. DOI published its findings two weeks ago in a searing 70-page report accusing the city’s Board of Elections of incompetence, waste, nepotism, and lax procedures.

The Board of Elections, which has a $750 million annual budget and a work force of 350 people, reacted in classic bureaucratic fashion, which prompted one city paper to deride it as “a 21st-century survivor of Boss Tweed–style politics.” The Board approved a resolution referring the DOI’s investigators for prosecution. It also asked the state’s attorney general to determine whether DOI had violated the civil rights of voters who had moved or are felons, and it sent a letter of complaint to Mayor Bill de Blasio. Normally, I wouldn’t think de Blasio would give the BOE the time of day, but New York’s new mayor has long been a close ally of former leaders of ACORN, the now-disgraced “community organizing” group that saw its employees convicted of voter-registration fraud all over the country during and after the 2008 election.

It is with deep melancholy that one reads about the ongoing suffering of Cubans under communism. January 1, 2014 marked the 55th anniversary of Cuba’s communist revolution. In fact, Cuba is “the only full-blown dictatorship in the Western hemisphere” and “no other country in Latin America is ruled by a regime that ‘represses virtually all forms of political dissent.'” In Freedom House’s annual index of political and civil liberties worldwide, Cuba is “consistently rated ‘Not Free.'”

The “Future of Freedom in Cuba” was a March 2013 Cato Institute event that highlighted the continuing repression in Cuba. Cuban dissidents Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo and Yoani Sanchez spoke. The 24-minute event can be heard here. If you cannot hear the entire program, begin at 35:07. In essence, Sanchez asserts that in order for true democratic transition, “Cubans must lose their fear” and “the great majority of Cubans must realize that the country belongs to them and changing [Cuba] is their struggle. As long as opportunism, wearing a mask of doublespeak and silence are the ways that Cubans survive under a repressive regime we cannot expect a great change in the country.”

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo asserts that because the regime has successfully repressed the population over the years, there are too many people who are not interested in politics and change. He fears the “great sense of apathy — of not belonging.” Thus, “the idea of emigration as an end in itself is a sad commentary but it is a realistic one.” Nonetheless, Lazo declares to the Cuban government that he “is not going to stay in another country nor will he fear the cowardly acts of repudiation against him by the Cuban regime” even though he is fully aware about the overwhelming number of “car accidents” against many who speak out against the repression.

Recently the University of Colorado noted that political affiliation and orientation would be a protected category in the university’s nondiscrimination policy. What prompted this action were reports from conservative faculty members that their viewpoints have been stifled.

While the proposal was approved, it is remarkable that this policy had to be introduced in the first place. What it suggests is that the faculty political outlook is homogeneous allowing little room for different points of view. Yet, to state the obvious, the essence of education is the exploration of different opinions.

Some faculty members contend that anti-bias policies is a waste of time. After all, the exclusionary position of most faculty members will not change because of university reform. In fact, if diversity of views is the goal that is more likely to come outside the Academy than inside the faculty.

Faculty members who share this left wing orthodoxy, in my experience, are accustomed to the present academic environment. Their self righteousness is mutually reinforcing. They are the virtuous ones and their position must not be challenged.

Hameed Ghuriafi is a senior writer at the Kuwaiti daily As Siyasa and a former editor of several publications in Lebanon, Cyprus and London.

As soon as Israel announced the death of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Arab and international web-based news agencies rushed to unveil the “bloody record” of the Israeli leader and how he came to be known allegedly as the “butcher of Sabra and Chatila” Palestinian camps in September 1982. While it is hard to dispute Sharon’s rough military history, many questions remain surrounding his involvement in the Sabra and Chatila massacres.

Notable Lebanese-American historians who have researched the tragic events that occurred at the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Chatila in 1982, flatly dismissed allegations of Ariel Sharon’s direct involvement in the killings. Dr. Franck Salameh, Professor of Near Eastern studies at Boston College, revealed in his article titled “Syrian Responsibility for The Sabra and Chatila Massacres”(http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11159/pub_detail.asp) that the troops who conducted the massacres were selected by a Kataeb (Lebanese Forces) military commander Elie Hobeika who had established secret contacts with the Syrian Baathist regime of Hafez al-Assad.

Hobeika’s henchmen were reportedly instructed to kill indiscriminately men, women, infants and elderly Palestinians and place the blame for the horrific massacres on late-President-elect Bashir Gemayel and then-Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon. It certainly was not a pure coincidence that the killings took place 48 hours after the Syrian-engineered assassination of Gemayel. Salameh’s startling revelation was eerily reminiscent of the allegations made in 1999 by Elie Hobeika’s former bodyguard, Robert Hatem.