RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dear E-Pals: I love Jewish holidays. I love gathering with my four children and six grand children and eating traditional foods, laughing, retelling anecdotes about my late husband, my parents and their own childhoods. I also love the idea that something which began with the Patriarchs Abraham and Sarah in Hebron continues in an unbroken chain despite all the millennia of efforts to destroy my people.

Seventy nine years ago the Nuremberg Laws were established in Germany, heralding the Holocaust which killed one in every three Jews in the world. The answer to that catastrophe is Israel.

I think my friend and e-pal and one of my favorite journalist David Hornik sums it up today:

“The statistics for 2013 are in, and they confirm that Israel’s amazing demographic trajectory continues. The population now stands at 8.25 million, up by well over a hundred thousand from the previous year, double what it was thirty years ago. And during the Jewish year that began last September, just about 25,000 immigrants came to the country—the highest total in five years. Meanwhile Israel’s birthrate remains by far the highest among Western countries.
Is there an overarching explanation for all this success—awesome economic achievements, dramatically outsize military power, attracting immigrants, an evident love for life despite the difficult environment?
There is—and it’s this: the Jewish people’s return to their land after two millennia, the revival of their language and culture, the concentration of so much talent, the memory of catastrophe and the unfathomable will to survive release huge energies. Israel will stay on this trajectory of success, which all the region’s dark hatred can’t stop.”

I wish you all a sweet and happy holiday. In the Bronx, whose importance cannot be understated,since it is the only borough preceded by the word “the”- we always abbreviated our message and wished one and all “A Happy and a Healthy”….May we have peace and happiness in America, this most wonderful nation.

Sincerely,

rsk

America is silently acquiescing to President Obama’s extraordinarily expensive and flawed plan to fight Ebola in West Africa. On Tuesday, Obama announced he is committing $763 million dollars and 3,000 military personnel to taming the outbreak that so far has killed 2,400 people.

Though help is urgently needed there, the plan does too little to protect Americans.

Obama said nothing about temporarily banning commercial air travel between the U.S. and West Africa, in order to help prevent Ebola from coming here. Some 220,000 residents of West African countries have visas that permit them to enter the United States. As the disease increases exponentially, the likelihood also increases that a person carrying Ebola, perhaps unknowingly, travels to the United States before symptom’s appear. Northeastern University professor Allesandra Vespignanini and his research team have developed a computerized risk assessment based on travel patterns, and pegs the risk at no more than 15%.

Regardless of the small figure, the frightening truth is that most hospitals in the U.S. are unprepared for a patient unknowingly infected with Ebola. Hospitals that cannot stop the spread of MRSA, C. diff and VRE won’t be able to contain Ebola. Some seventy-five thousand patients die each year in U.S. hospitals from infections spread patient-to-patient, according to the CDC. The same lax hygiene that allows those deaths to occur would allow Ebola to race through hospitals as well.

On August 1, the CDC issued guidelines to U.S. hospitals on how to dispose of bodily fluids, soiled bed linens, and other contamination from an Ebola-infected patient. But one misstep could cost healthcare workers or other patients their lives.

The World Health Organization and West African political leaders have pleaded against a travel ban, saying it will cripple the economies of these stricken countries. But our president also has an obligation to protect us.

Here is where our President’s plan fails most. Less than one month ago, the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security released a shocking report showing that the stockpiles of medications, protective clothing, and other supplies needed to protect Americans in the event of a man-made or naturally caused disease outbreak were expired or near-expired, damaged, missing, or inappropriate. Where’s the attention to protecting Americans? The Inspector General flunked Homeland Security on all measures: planning, storage, and replenishment of the medical supplies that would be needed in a national emergency.

Since the deadly terror attacks of 1993 at the CIA and the World Trade Center, there have been a series of terror attacks attempted inside the United States by radical Islamists.

On September 11, 2001 our nation suffered the worst terror attacks ever carried out within the borders of our country.

Every one of these attacks had something in common: The perpetrators were all aliens who had managed to gain entry into the United States and managed to hide in plain sight, or in the jargon of the 9/11 Commission, they embedded themselves in our country as they went about their deadly preparations.

Our borders and our immigration laws are our first line of defense and last line of defense against international terrorists who seek to attack America and Americans. Yet this essential fact is blithely ignored by the president, members of his administration, members of Congress who seek to implement a variant of “comprehensive immigration reform” and local and state politicians who proudly proclaim that they have created “sanctuaries” for aliens who have run our borders or violated the terms of their admission into the United States and have violated those critical immigration laws.

On Friday, September 19th, I was a guest on “America’s Forum” on Newsmax TV hosted by former Congressional Representative JD Hayworth. NewsMax posted a video of my segment with a synopsis of our discussion. The title of this article was: “Michael Cutler: Sanctuary Cities Are Safe Havens for Terrorists.”

The starting point for my interview was an important news report that contained a video clip of an interview that Rep. Jason Chaffetz participated in with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly. The title of the report was: “BREAKING: Four Terrorists Captured on US Border on September 10 – Day Before 9-11.”

The video clip of the Chaffetz interview on Kelly’s program also contained a brief video of an exchange between Congressman Chaffetz and Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security at a hearing conducted earlier that day. The exchange was infuriating. At first Johnson stated that he was not aware of terrorists running our borders. Rep. Chaffetz then confronted Secretary Johnson, saying that there was information that four terrorists had been apprehended attempting to run our borders at two locations along the U.S./Mexican border. Johnson became extremely uncomfortable and started rubbing his face and all but twitching in his seat. He then claimed that he had heard about it but that they were trying to confirm the information. Next Chaffetz asked Johnson about what level of “operational control” DHS has over the U.S./Mexican border. Johnson said he did not know, whereupon Chaffetz stated that he had information that at present there is 6% operation control.

Every ideology needs to believe in its inevitability. Religions get their inevitability from prophecies; secular ideologies get theirs from the modernist fallacy.

The modernist fallacy says that history is moving on an inevitable track toward their ideology. Resistance is futile, you will be liberalized. Marxism predicted the inevitable breakdown of capitalism. Obama keeps talking about being “on the right side of history” as if history, like a university history curriculum, has a right side and a wrong side. All everyone has to do is grab a sign and march “Forward!” to the future.

The bad economics and sociology around which the left builds its Socialist sand castles assume that technological progress will mean improved control. Capitalism with its mass production convinced budding Socialists that the entire world could be run like a giant factory under technocrats who would use industrial techniques to control the economic production of mankind in line with their ideals.

The USSR and moribund European economies broke that theory into a million little pieces.

The dot com revolution with its databases and subtle tools for manipulating individuals on a collective basis led to a Facebook Socialism that crowdsources its culture wars and “nudges” everyone into better habits, lower body masses and conveniently available death panels.

The iSocialist, like his industrial predecessor, assumes that technology gives superintelligent leftists better tools for controlling everything. The planned economy failed in the twentieth because the tools of propaganda posters, quotas and gulags were too crude. This time he is certain that it will work.

Intelligence is to leftists what divine right was to the crowned kings of Europe. They frantically brand themselves as smart because in a technocracy, superiority comes from intelligence. Their vision is the right one because they are the smart ones. Their shiny future is backed by what they call “science.”

The umpteenth case of child sex abuse in Britain perpetrated by Muslims, the Rotherham abuse case, has understandably left the self-proclaimed “progressives” and multiculturalists in disarray. The Leftist media outlets are on the defensive but still trying to maintain their ground.

Their best weapons are to distract public attention by diverting it to whatever has not been committed by Muslims, and the use of double standards, of which the most shocking example is the differential treatment of Muslims versus the Catholic Church.

The same people, assorted Leftists and secularists, who immediately jumped to the conclusion that all Catholic clergymen are either directly involved in paedophile abuse or in its cover-up are now bending over backwards to deny any connection between the Muslim grooming and sex-slavery gangs and Islam.

An article in The Guardian by Slovenian Marxist psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek, included by Foreign Policy in its 2012 list of Top 100 Global Thinkers (no less), seems to condemn but in fact displays this behaviour. Deceitfully entitled “Rotherham child sex abuse: it is our duty to ask difficult questions,” it covers just about everything but Rotherham – and generally Muslim — child sex abuse.

The word “Muslim” appears twice, “Islam” once, “Islamophobic” once, “Catholic” three times (the same number as “priests” and “racism”), plus assorted uses of “Christian” and “Christianity”.

It doesn’t talk about Islam at all, except to briefly mention women’s second place within it, but immediately prevents the reader from dwelling on the subject too much: “Without blaming Islam as such (which is in itself no more misogynistic than Christianity)…”

The most ironic part of the piece is where Žižek blames his comrades for doing the same thing as he does:

The left exhibited the worst of political correctness, mostly via generalisations: perpetrators were vaguely designated as “Asians”, claims were made that it was not about ethnicity and religion but about the domination of men over women, plus who are we – with our church paedophilia and Jimmy Savile – to adopt a high moral ground against a victimised minority.

The double standard in this kind of coverage and comment is so gigantic that it’s better described as a total reversal of the truth.

Boston’s WCVB.com reported Monday that “the federal government is targeting Boston and two other American cities to shut down what they are calling the U.S.-Jihad pipeline to ISIS in an attempt to stop Americans from joining the terrorist organization.” Boston apparently made this elite list because Ahmad Abousamra, “an American college graduate from Boston, who has been on the run from the FBI for years, is suspected of joining ISIS and leveraging his computer skills to spread the Iraqi terror group’s propaganda on social media.” And so now Boston is reaping what it has sown for so many years.

The Islamic State has been linked to the Islamic Society of Boston. The Tsarnaev brothers, the Boston Marathon jihad mass murderers, went to mosque at the Islamic Society of Boston. So did other convicted jihad terrorists, Tarek Mehanna and Aafia Siddiqui. During all this, the FBI conducted “outreach” to the Islamic Society of Boston but never investigated it. Now they’re reaping the fruits of their politically correct willful ignorance.

Former Boston Mayor Thomas Menino really, really wanted the Islamic Society of Boston to be well situated in the city. He gave the ISB an astonishing sweetheart deal on the land for the mosque. Menino, according to a 2008 Boston Phoenix exposé, “in a fit of multicultural ecumenicalism, approved the sale of city-owned land to the mosque for the bargain basement — and still controversial — price of $175,000, plus the promise of in-kind services, including upkeep of nearby parks. The predictable uproar that arose in the wake of not only selling land well below market rates, but also selling it to a religious institution in contravention of the supposed separation of church and state, was supposed to be muffled by making the complex available for community use. But oops — that never happened. The promised community facilities for non-congregant use still have not been built.”

Not only that, but although it was “originally intended to minister to an urban congregation of African-American Muslims, the mosque project was turned over by the city, with no fanfare and little notice, to the control of suburban-based Muslims of largely Saudi Arabian heritage: the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), which more recently became the Muslim American Society of Boston (MAS-Boston). Perhaps the city believed, incorrectly, that one Muslim community could easily step in for another. In fact, the two groups are quite different.”

The Muslim American Society is the principal name under which the Muslim Brotherhood operates in the United States. According to a captured internal Muslim Brotherhood document, the Brotherhood’s “work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

For some reason, or for obvious reasons, this time of year, our High Holy Days, leads us to remembering, and these remembrances are often salted with pain and broken hearts. In this week’s portion of Deuteronomy it summons us “Ask your father, and he will tell you.”

That phrase alone touches deeply, and does indeed bring back memories of my father.

Years ago I sat down to write a short, swift book of memoirs, not about the Holocaust, but what it was like to arrive in Montreal after the Holocaust.

I named the book “Escape From Mount Moriah” and it still does quite well as literature and then along came a Canadian moviemaker. She asked for permission to turn the book’s first short story, “My Father, Joe” into a short film. I said okay and about eight years later the movie was done.

I was not totally thrilled with the movie. But obviously she knew what she was doing because the 10-minute film won about a dozen film festival awards around the world and was even honored at CANNES, which is like Europe’s Academy Awards.

So why “My Father, Joe?” Why Joe?

With your indulgence, I am reprinting it here as it appears in the book of memoirs, since I cannot do it better the second time as I did it the first time.

“My Father, Joe”

From the book of memoirs, “Escape from Mount Moriah”

Now we had it good. Six million never made it out. We…we escaped France when the Nazis and their gendarmes were beginning their roundups in our district in Toulouse. We walked the Pyrenees…hid in Spain…rested in Portugal…and found refuge in Montreal, Canada — much later we moved to America.

‘When black flags emerge from the east . . .”

— Quote from a hadith (reported saying of Mohammad)

Khorasan is a historic region of central and southern Asia.

But when an al-Qaeda splinter group embraced “Khorasan” as its name, it wasn’t thinking about geography. Rather, it was seeking the identity of Salafi-extremist purity. It would be a black-flag-bearing army descending from the metaphorical mountains of despair and advancing toward a war for holy justice. For these jihadists, the name “Khorasan” holds mystical significance as nomenclature for God’s army: that which cannot be defeated.

Khorasan sees itself as a movement of divinely inspired, valiant warriors, unafraid and certain of ordained victory.

In reality, of course, Khorasan is a terrorist group that wants to blow up innocent civilians at 35,000 feet. And although it lacks the raw, reflexive brutality of the Islamic State, Khorasan possesses no moral consideration for innocent people. Instead, for Khorasan, as for all violent Salafis — from al-Shabaab to Boko Haram — existential purpose is defined by theological totalitarianism.

Khorasan poses a special threat to America and the West. That is why the U.S. military attacked Khorasan alongside its opening sorties against Islamic State positions in Syria.

Why is it such a threat?

First, while Khorasan is very small (a good estimate is 50 to 80 operatives), it’s an al-Qaeda special-forces unit. Led by Muhsin al-Fadhli — a strategically minded zealot experienced in both terrorist network facilitation and direct action — and manned by skilled and proven terrorists from many different al-Qaeda affiliates, Khorasan has the capacity and intent to conduct major attacks.

By any objective measure, things have been going great for women for a long time.

Last Friday, the White House announced its “It’s On Us” initiative aimed at combating sexual assaults on college campuses. I’m all in favor of combating sexual assault, but the first priority in combating a problem is understanding it.

That’s not the White House’s first priority. Roughly six weeks before Election Day, its chief concern is to translate an exciting social-media campaign into a get-out-the-vote operation.

Accurate statistics are of limited use in that regard because rape and sexual assault have been declining for decades. So the Obama administration and its allied activist groups trot out the claim that there is a rape epidemic victimizing 1 in 5 women on college campuses. This conveniently horrifying number is a classic example of being too terrible to check. If it were true, it would mean that rape would be more prevalent on elite campuses than in many of the most impoverished and crime-ridden communities.

It comes from tendentious Department of Justice surveys that count “attempted forced kissing” and other potentially caddish acts that even the DOJ admits “are not criminal.”

According to one Department of Justice survey, more than half the respondents said they didn’t report the assault because they didn’t think “the incident was serious enough to report.” More than a third said they weren’t clear on whether the incident was a crime or even if harm was intended. But President Obama uses these surveys to justify using the terms “rape” and “sexual assault” interchangeably.

And yet those who question the alleged rape epidemic are the ones who don’t take rape seriously? I would think conflating a boorish attempt at an undesired kiss with forcible rape is an example of not taking rape seriously.

The “It’s On Us” PR stunt is not an exception; it is par for the course. To listen to pretty much anyone in the Democratic party these days, you’d think these are dark days for women. But by any objective measure, things have been going great for women for a long time, under Republicans and Democrats alike.

Women earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 63 percent of master’s degrees, and 53 percent of doctorates. They constitute the majority of the U.S. workforce and the majority of managers. Single women without kids earn 8 percent more than single men without children in most cities. Women make up almost half of medical-school applicants and nearly 80 percent of veterinary-school enrollees.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, falls this year on Wednesday, September 24. The year that just ended—5774 on the Jewish calendar—was not an easy one.

There was the war against Hamas in July and August, which Israel won overwhelmingly while losing 64 soldiers and seven civilians. In June there was Hamas’s kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenage boys. (The murderers have now met their just fate.) And Israel’s overall security environment in the Middle East seems more and more precarious. Among other things, jihadis are battling the Syrian army just across Israel’s Golan Heights border; Jordan’s moderate regime could be in danger; Islamic State has set up its “caliphate” of atrocity in Iraq and Syria; while Iran keeps being allowed to progress along the nuclear path by Western powers playing feckless diplomatic games. (Another update: Israel has shot down a Syrian plane over the Golan.)

Where, then, does a “bright future” come into all this? Looking ahead to 5775, Israel has a track record of overcoming security challenges, and in other ways keeps thriving.
1. Surviving the Obama administration.

The first five and a half years of Obama have, no doubt, been rough for Israel. There’s no one who seems to get the president’s goat like Israel’s thrice-elected prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Obama has given Netanyahu a churlish and unprecedented snub at the White House, publicly vilified him as a peace-wrecker, and lashed out at him viciously on the phone during the latest Gaza war.

Israel is very worried that the administration’s ceaseless courting of Iran belies any seriousness about stopping its nuke program. Against Israel’s warnings and advice, Obama backed Mohamed Morsi’s (fortunately short-lived) Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt. After the 2012 Gaza war, the administration together with Morsi pushed Israel into a deal that allowed Hamas to rearm and set the stage for this year’s war.

And yet, with all that and more, the U.S.-Israeli alliance is today stronger than ever. On September 19 the Senate passed a bill declaring Israel a “major strategic partner” and boosting U.S. trade, energy, R&D, and military ties with Israel. Even Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, whose anti-Israeli track record alarmed many after he was nominated, is said to have an excellent working relationship with Israeli defense minister Moshe Yaalon.

As the Middle East descends into worse and worse turmoil and terror, Israel’s democratic stability, military preeminence in the region, and topnotch intelligence capabilities have to look better and better. Even the Obama administration isn’t totally blind to the reality.