RUTHFULLY YOURS

Michael Brenner (not Lenni Brenner the Trotskyite and not to be confused with another Michael Brenner who writes also on Israel) writes about the new Jewish Nation State legislation in his “Jabotinsky and the Jewish State law”, November 27, 2014. One of my rules of thumb as a half-century old adherent to Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism is that when opponents of right-wing nationalist Zionism and Likud leaders begin to quote Jabotinsky, that’s when one need pay careful and close attention.

Brenner notes that in Jabotinsky’s thinking “all [? YM] a Jewish state meant for him was a territory in which Jews enjoyed a sufficient degree of sovereignty in their internal and external affairs and in which they constituted a majority.”

That, of course, is a facile, if not a shallow, reading of the man’s Zionism.

Books in English have been published disputing Brenner’s bias such as “Every individual, a king : the social and political thought of Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky” by Hebrew University’s Raphaella Bilski Ben-Hur and “The Political and Social Philosophy of Ze’ev Jabotinsky: Selected Writings”, as well as a pamphlet that was issued by the Israel Democracy Institute, “Ze’ev Jabotinsky on Democracy, Equality, and Individual Rights” and many other articles including one on the formation of a ‘new Jew’ personality. Of course, the many Hebrew-language sources that dispute Brenner’s assertion are too numerous to even begin to list.

Beyond this prejudicial build-up, Brenner seeks to surprise and quotes from Jabotinsky’s 1940 book, The Jewish War Front, wherein he proposes that “both Jews and Arabs share equal collective autonomous rights as well”. So much so, that “In every Cabinet where the Prime Minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab, and vice-versa.”

Of course, that it may be a surprise to many is only a proof that one of the greatest Zionist thinkers of the 20th century was not only ignored and ostracized in his day but posthumously suppressed and banished from our political dialogue.

Brenner sees in the move to legislate a Jewish Nation-State Law “not only an unnecessary provocation to Israel’s Arab citizens” but an act that “also ignores the vision of its founders”. And that is why he quotes from Jabotinsky.

One always need be careful when dealing with quotations from Jabotinsky. Excerpts must be faithful to the fundamental conceptualization of the author’s thinking so that the quotation cannot be used for a purpose which is contrary to the author’s outlook.

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. health officials on Tuesday released a draft of long-awaited federal guidelines on circumcision, saying medical evidence supports having the procedure done and health insurers should pay for it.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines stop short of telling parent to get their newborn sons circumcised. That is a personal decision that may involve religious or cultural preferences, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin.

But “the scientific evidence is clear that the benefits outweigh the risks,” added Mermin, who oversees the agency’s programs on HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

These are the first federal guidelines on circumcision, a brief medical procedure that involves cutting away the foreskin around the tip of the penis. Germs can grow underneath the foreskin, and CDC officials say the procedure can lower a male’s risk of sexually-transmitted diseases, penile cancer and even urinary tract infections.

The CDC started working on the guidelines about seven years ago, when a cluster of influential studies in Africa indicated circumcision might help stop spread of the AIDS virus.

“The benefits of male circumcision have become more and more clear over the last 10 years,” said Dr. Aaron Tobian, a Johns Hopkins University researcher involved in one of the African studies.

But the guidelines are important, because the rates of newborn male circumcision have been dropping, he added.

The guidelines are being published in the federal register Tuesday. For the next 45 days, the CDC will receive public comment before finalizing them next year.

Novorossiya!

In April, in a four-hour call-in show televised across Russia, Vladimir Putin assigned the name New Russia—Novorossiya—to the lands in Southeastern Ukraine he claimed were and are historically part of Russia. The term Novorossiya had been used only once before in history, during the three decades from the late 18th to the early 19th centuries, to describe the territories north of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov that Catherine the Great had wrested from the Ottoman Turks. What’s more, Putin said, the lands of his Novorossiya—Kharkov, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolaev, and Odessa—had never been part of Ukraine. The contention is nonsensical. There had never been an officially designated piece of territory called Ukraine before the Leninist regime in Moscow created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The USSR came into being in 1922 with four constituent sub-states, the Ukrainian SSR being one of them.

So Putin’s “New Russia” is, to put it mildly, historically dubious, a work of convenient fiction—and a cover for his assault on Ukraine, featuring the annexation of Crimea and the proxy war in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Yet Putin has done the world a favor by bringing the word Novorossiya back into circulation. Novorossiya is the perfect word to describe the messianic, autocratic, and increasingly dangerous regime Putin has been engineering over the past three years, following his return to the presidency of Russia after a four-year gap in which his aide Dmitry Medvedev warmed the chair.

The annexation of Crimea and Russia’s military proxy intervention in Ukraine should be considered an epiphenomenon of Russian politics. Putin has been changing his regime from a “softer,” largely nonideological, corrupt “electoral authoritarianism” to a highly personalistic, far more repressive, and ideologically inspired dictatorship. The annexation of Crimea was a portent of “a new Russian revolution from above,” according to the popular website Gazeta.ru.

“The huge iceberg Russia, frozen by the Putin regime, cracked after the events in Crimea; it has split from the European world, and sailed off into the unknown,” wrote the Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books. “No one knows what will happen to the country now, into which seas or swamps it will drift.” The website Slon.ru declared: “Russia is no longer Europe…but another, peculiar civilization.”

Alexander Dugin, one of the organizers of Russia’s National Bolshevik Party, and perhaps Russia’s most prominent advocate of what might be called national-imperial totalitarian socialism, was thrilled by the annexation of Crimea; he sees it as the onset of a “real evolution,” the “end of liberalism and the beginning of patriotism,” and as “Putin’s challenge to the unipolar world, dominated by all the components of the world [that are] evil.”

Why did Putin open this Pandora’s box?

In 1893, the German labor leader August Bebel breezily dismissed anti-Semitism as the “socialism of fools.” From then to the present day, the Western left has been disturbingly complacent about Judeophobia. Communists and socialists of various stripes have persistently underestimated the impact, distinctiveness, and longevity of anti-Semitism. Even today, significant strains of the American and even the Israeli left are far less exercised about global anti-Semitism than the supposed transgressions of the Jewish state. A review of the hard left’s various answers to the “Jewish Question” makes clear that equivocation on anti-Semitism and antipathy toward Israel are enduring, complementary elements in Marxism’s wrongheaded materialist interpretation of world affairs.

Few Marxists have attempted to address Judeophobes’ fundamentally demonic view of the world or the mythical power of anti-Semitic archetypes of “the Jew,” such as Judas, Satan, and the Antichrist. Similarly, few have tried to decipher the phantasmagoric conspiracy theories at the heart of so many anti-Semitic beliefs. This failure contributed to how the Western left viewed the rising anti-Semitism of the Nazis in the 1930s. Very few socialists, anarchists, or Communists (apart from isolated mavericks such as Wilhelm Reich) showed much grasp of the psychology of fascism, let alone addressed seriously the Manichean worldview of anti-Semites before the Holocaust.

Let us begin with the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the SPD deliberately played down anti-Semitism and generally avoided any direct attacks on it. The SPD’s paralysis went beyond the fear of challenging the popular prejudices of German workers inside the Third Reich. It was a fundamental failure of the imagination. Both German socialists and Communists grossly underestimated the integrative power of irrational thinking and the centrality of racial anti-Semitism in Nazi ideology. They didn’t see the great qualitative difference between traditional Jew-hatred and Nazi anti-Semitism, which they reduced to a mere political instrument of “reactionary” forces to bring down the Weimar Republic. After 1933, they still regarded Jew-hatred primarily as a tool for consolidating Hitler’s dictatorship.

For the German left, the essence of Nazism was not the destruction of the Jews but the crushing of the working class. They saw Kristallnacht as little more than a trial balloon for more repressive measures against German society as a whole—not as a massive offensive against the Jews. Many left-wing German intellectuals in exile believed that Jews suffered no more than others, and they argued that overemphasizing anti-Semitism would only weaken the anti-Nazi campaign. Writing from postwar Germany in the summer of 1945, Klaus Mann (son of Thomas Mann), who had served as a staff sergeant in the 5th U.S. Army, was still treating the fate of the Jews as a secondary issue; he dismissed the Jews as a “dreary” subject, and the Holocaust as neither special nor significant.

Sarrazin wrote that Islamic immigrants threaten Germany’s freedom and prosperity because they are unwilling to integrate and rely overwhelmingly on welfare benefits. The book hit a nerve with the German public. It sold over two million copies and became one of the most widely read books ever published in Germany.

Ziemmour’s book argues that France is being destroyed by immigrants who refuse to assimilate; by political correctness that stifles all debate and by supranational organizations such as the EU, which are undermining the French nation state and the French economy. Its sales are breaking all records.

Four years ago, Thilo Sarrazin, a renowned German central banker, who was also a long-time member of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), shocked the German establishment when he published a book in which he argued that Islamic immigration is undermining German society. In the book, Deutschland schafft sich ab [Germany Abolishes Itself], Sarrazin wrote that Islamic immigrants threaten Germany’s freedom and prosperity because they are unwilling to integrate and rely overwhelmingly on welfare benefits.

Although Sarrazin’s party, as well as the governing Christian-Democrats of Chancellor Angela Merkel, distanced themselves from the author — and Islamic organizations tried to take him to court on charges of racial incitement — the book hit a nerve with the German public. It sold over two million copies and became one of the most widely read books ever published in Germany.

Last October, Éric Zemmour, a French journalist, also published a book, which can be considered the French equivalent of Sarrazin’s book. In Le Suicide français [The French Suicide], Zemmour argues that the policies of the French political elite are destroying the country. His arguments resemble Sarrazin’s and the book has had the same impact. Its sales are breaking all the records. So far, in less than two months, over half a million copies have been sold, in spite of the fact that French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has declared that the book “does not deserve to be read.”

Three unknown assailants invaded the home of a Jewish couple in the Paris suburb of Créteil on Monday, raped the 19-year-old woman, and robbed the home, saying it was “because you are Jewish,” local French media reported on Tuesday.

“The Jewish community is in shock over this,” a journalist who covered the story told The Algemeiner. Noting the concern about the case, he said, “When I posted the story on my social networks – they went crazy from reshares.”

The two were at her 21-year-old boyfriend’s parent’s home in the heavily-Jewish suburb, when the three masked attackers broke in, after the couple answered the door.

“They came to rob everything, especially the cash,” according to the Francophone JSS News Service. “According to the victim’s testimony to the police ‘they demanded more money and pointed out that we are Jews,’” the journalist said.

“So, since they had little cash on them or in the house, the thieves demanded a credit card and the PIN code in order to make a withdrawal at a nearby ATM. One robber went to withdraw the money, while the second robber immobilized the young man, and the third raped the woman,” the source said.

An hour after the beginning of the attack, the thieves fled with cash, jewelry and other items.

Police investigators managed to track down and arrest two of the suspected assailants, but the third member of the gang is still at large, according to French media.

Police said the attackers wielded a sawed-off rifle and pistol, and used tape to tie up the couple, and tape over their mouths.

No information was provided as to the identities of the suspects, the source told The Algemeiner.

On Saturday night, two Jewish men were also attacked in the vicinity, according to the Le Parisien newspaper.

Small business government loans subsidized Rolex dealerships, country clubs, spas

A federal program expanded by President Obama to help small businesses on Main Street recover from the financial crisis has backed loans to Rolex and Lamborghini dealerships, plastic surgery clinics, Napa Valley wineries, country clubs, and other industries servicing recession-proof clientele, government records show.

In all, the U.S. Small Business Administration has guaranteed since 2007 about 35,000 loans totaling $67 billion to businesses that primarily service an affluent lifestyle, according to government data compiled by American Transparency’s OpenTheBooks.com, an online portal aggregating 1.3 billion lines of federal, state and local spending records.

The loan guarantees to luxury industries — each $1 million or more in size — amount to about 20 percent of the total handed out by SBA during that period, the agency said.

Mr. Obama increased SBA’s funding by $730 million on the heels of the recession, packaging it as part of the 2009 stimulus bill, so it could guarantee more loans to small businesses to help alleviate the so-called credit crunch at the time.

The White House heralded the effort and subsequent actions — such as increasing the SBA’s maximum loan amounts from $2 million to $5 million — as “a crucial step in supporting economic recovery and job creation.”

As a result, the number of million-dollar loans the SBA backed spiked 37 percent from 2007 to 2013, according to Open the Books. Last year, the SBA dispensed $14.8 billion in seven-figure loans guaranteed by the administration, whereas in 2007 the amount was $9.3 billion.

Much of the money was guided to recession-proof industries, not the Main Street, mom-and-pop shops which form “the backbone of the American economy,” or that “lead the way to the industries of the future,” as was trumpeted by the White House at the time as reason for the additional funding.