RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s a “media intifada,” notes Gary Weiss, an old colleague and one of the world’s top business investigative reporters. He is referring of course to the ongoing war in Gaza, where journalists working for American news outlets have, he says, “become part of the Hamas war machine.”
As more than a month has passed since Israel began its Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, it’s high time to dig through the carnage that many of my colleagues from major U.S. media outlets are leaving behind—especially the New York Times.
On August 11th, the normally Israel-averse Foreign Press Association in Israel conceded what those closely following the war coverage already knew: That Hamas has been intimidating foreign reporters. In a harsh statement, it condemned the terrorist group for “the blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods employed by the Hamas authorities and their representatives against visiting international journalists in Gaza over the past month.”

This is hardly surprising, as who can expect a terrorist group to treat reporters nicely—except perhaps many reporters themselves? But what is surprising is that New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren undermined her own newspaper—quickly denouncing the FPA’s statement. She said in a tweet that she wasn’t aware of any such harassed reporters, even though she concedes she spent only one week in Gaza herself during the height of the conflict. In an email to the FPA, she said that the FPA’s statement could be “dangerous” to the “credibility” of the foreign press who are covering the conflict. “Every reporter I’ve met who was in Gaza during war says this Israeli/now FPA narrative of Hamas harassment is nonsense,” she tweeted. [Boldface type hers.]

I agree that there’s a lot of nonsense being disseminated about Israel’s war with Hamas, and about the media role in the conflict. And I agree that there is a danger—if people believe that the media, including the New York Times, provides a fair picture of the war in Gaza. (I would argue it is not.)

Since late July, I’ve conducted an in-depth look at the credibility of the media coverage, plus interviews with military experts and some journalists covering the war. Among other things, I’ve discovered that the Times’ most important reporter in Gaza for the past few years has used the late Yasser Arafat as his profile photo on Facebook, and, in a second photo, praised the former Palestinian leader. This suggests that the Times may have less to worry about in terms of Hamas intimidation than others in the press corps. Indeed, this Times reporter’s parallel pieces for Qatar’s Al Jazeera since the war began can only be pleasing to the terrorists.

“An overheard conversation between top Nazis Goering and von Ribbentrop set off the chain of events revealing to the public the existence of the Hitler-Stalin Pact’s “secret protocol,” which included evidence of Soviet war crimes committed in tandem with the Nazis. The Allies suppressed the document at the Nuremberg trials. ”

—Today is the 75th anniverary of the non-aggression pact between the Hitler and Stalin, the latter becoming (after Hitler attacked Stalin on June 22, 1941) the member of the “Big Three” known as “Uncle Joe.” In the commemorative essays discussing the twin dictators’ earlier alliance of August 23, 1939, which would be followed by Hitler and Stalin’s conquest of Poland the following month, the pact’s secret protocol that divided the nations of central and Eastern Europe between them is also mentioned. I have yet to see, however, any discussion of how that secret protocol became known to the public.

That disturbing story of near-suppression takes us past the war to the trials of the Nazi high command in Nuremberg — widely hailed the model of international justice. But what a morally rotten exercise it was, as war criminals (Soviets) sat in judgment of war criminals (Nazis) while war crimes (British and US) were occurring all around (Operation Keelhaul, the little known British-US-enabled “repatriation” from the West of millions of Soviet-claimed persons to death/the Gulag, was in full swing).

There, in a Nuremberg prison yard, a German defense lawyer by chance overheard top Nazis (von RIbbentrop and Goering) discussing the contents of the still-secret protocol, which offered evidence of Stalin’s guilt in committing “conspiracy to wage aggressive war,” one of the key charges against the German high command. With Stalin trying to blot out his alliance with Hitler from the record — with full support of his British and American allies — how did the secret protocol ever come to the world’s attention?

Here is what happened at Nuremberg, as discussed in Chapter 2 of American Betrayal, pp. 54-58.

State Dept. whoppers: Beheading wasn’t directed at the US; Islamic State isn’t ‘Islamic’

Under questioning by reporters at a news briefing about the savage beheading of American photojournalist James Foley by savages calling themselves the Islamic State, the hapless Harf maintained with a straight face that not only was the crime not directed against the United States, it wasn’t done in the name of religion either, according to CNS.

No matter what the guys who actually did the killing might think.

“I think ISIL wants to make this about the United States and our actions. And I think what the President was trying to say was that this is not about the United States and what we do,” Harf said, apparently even believing it. “This is about countries in the region coming together to fight a shared threat, and this is not about us.”

As someone once said, let this be clear.

Some Islamist animal with a knife slit the throat of an American citizen, explicity because he’s an American citizen. Then distributed a video of the barbarity called, “A message to America.” And that video concluded with a warning to the president of the United States about another hostage, Steve Joel Sotloff, that said, “The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision.”

But John Kerry’s State Department is outraged that anyone could take that to mean this was directed in any way at “the United States and what we do.”

And religion?

Most people might think a group that calls itself the Islamic State might have more than a passing belief that it operates in the name of some religion or other. Not to point fingers or anything — just to pull a religion of the air, you understand – most people might think that group was operating in the name of Islam

Whey may be the way to go. Image via Shutterstock.com.

Bodybuilders ingest buckets of whey protein powder to bulk up their
muscle mass. But researchers from Israel have found a new blood-smart
reason to eat like a “hulk” before meals.

A new study by Israeli and Swedish researchers has found that a plain
whey protein drink one half hour before breakfast could help
diabetics, or those on the verge of diabetes, prevent blood-sugar
spikes and better manage the disease.

Researchers Prof. Daniela Jakubowicz and Dr. Julio Wainstein at
Wolfson Medical Center in Holon; Prof. Oren Froy of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem; and Prof. Bo Ahrén of Lund University and
their colleagues studied a group of people who consumed whey protein
before eating a high-glucose meal.

What exactly is a garmento?Is it a cringe-making label or a badge of honor? Does the stereotypical garmento embody traditional Jewish values? Or does he (or far less often she) defy or deny them?
Why did so many Jews go into the rag trade anyway? And Sam, really, why did you make the pants so long?

Steven Fischler of Teaneck and his business partner, Joel Sucher of Hartsdale, N.Y., examine these questions — well, at least some of them — and similar ones in a documentary, “Dressing America: Tales From the Garment Center.” Created in 2009, it will be broadcast a number of times on Channel 13 and on WLIW, beginning on September 2, to mark Fashion Week in New York City.
“The film looks at two things,” Mr. Fischler said. “It talks about the Jewish immigrant roots of today’s garment industry. Some of the Jewish immigrants who came over didn’t have a lot of money, but they had the skills — certainly sewing and clothes-making was something that Jews did in Europe. They brought their skills to this country, and they helped create the billion-dollar fashion industry that we have today.”

Much of that history is shown through old photographs and film snippets, and excerpts from both English- and Yiddish-language movies.
“The other aspect is a little bit of a slice of life,” he said. “There are some recurrent characters, who have been in the industry for a long time, and reflect the golden age of the garment industry, before everything got outsourced — when people didn’t have 90-page contracts but cut deals on a handshake.
“Of course,” he added, “the garment center was much smaller then; much more of a small town than it is today.”

The garment center wasn’t all Jewish, he added; like many of the New York City neighborhoods where its workers lived, it also was Italian. “But it had a very large and strong Jewish aspect,” and much of the documentary focuses on it.
Not only did some Jews come to New York with sewing skills — as they came to Paterson — they also brought an entrepreneurial orientation and a quick-witted willingness to take chances.
“The garment center in New York City really is women’s wear,” Mr. Fischler said. “Men’s wear is mainly in the Midwest, particularly in Chicago, with big companies like Hart Schaffner and Marx.” That’s because men’s styles change slowly — the lapel might wax and wane — so it is far easier and safer to produce large numbers of basic items, and to charge more for them. “But women’s fashion changes every year, and it affects the nature of the business. Women’s fashion companies were much smaller and more highly specialized, and it was a more difficult business.
“If you picked the right dress, you made a lot of money. If you picked the wrong one — if, say, you went for a long skirt in a year when the style was short — you were going to go bankrupt.” Bankruptcy is never pleasant, but it looms less for someone who already has left home, crossed a continent using his wits and then steamed across an ocean in stomach-turning steerage, started a new life from scratch, and learned that it is almost always possible to start all over yet again.

Israel’s recent defensive war against Hamas and other Islamist factions in Gaza has generated a wave of criticism against Israel, which, in truth, is simply old-fashioned and persistent, anti-Semitism disguised as political argument. A means to determine the difference was actually created more than a decade ago by Israeli political leader

Natan Sharansky, who dubbed his method, the “3D Test.”
A co-founder of the Soviet refusenik movement in the mid-1970s – mostly Soviet Jews denied permission to emigrate to escape the USSR’s institutionalized anti-Semitism – Sharansky was no stranger to anti-Semitic persecution himself. He spent nine years in a Soviet gulag before he was released thanks to the efforts of President Ronald Reagan.

Thus attuned to blatant anti-Semitism, Sharansky observed that, with the existence of modern-day Israel, hostility against Jews was masked and projected onto the Jewish state. He called it the “new anti-Semitism” and created his “3D” conceptual tool to differentiate prejudice against the Jewish people from valid disapproval of Israeli policies and actions.

The 3Ds are demonization, delegitimization, and double standards. The tool has been accepted by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency and the U.S. Department of State. Applied against past and current events, all three elements, or “Ds,” clearly show anti-Semitism in play on the world stage.

The Dole: New data on federal public assistance programs show we’ve reached an ignominious milestone: More than 100 million Americans are getting some form of “means-tested” welfare assistance.

The Census Bureau found 51 million on food stamps at the end of 2012 and 83 million on Medicaid, with tens of millions of households getting both. Another 4 million were on unemployment insurance.

The percentage of American households on welfare has reached 35%. If we include other forms of government assistance such as Medicare and Social Security, almost half of all households are getting a check or other form of government assistance. The tipping point is getting closer and closer.

So much is shocking and dismaying about these numbers. How is it that the number of recipients and the price tag for many of these programs kept skyrocketing though the recession officially ended in 2009? Normally, you’d expect welfare caseloads to fall in a recovery as the unemployment rate dips, but this time welfare participation keeps expanding.

Perhaps this is because this administration and many Democrats in Congress, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, have told Americans that welfare benefits are a stimulus to the economy (sic). Apparently, the left believes that if every family were on food stamps, the economy would return to its glory days.

The feds have also created outreach programs — including radio and TV ads in multiple languages — to encourage people to sign up for the dole because, as one ad put it, this “helps the local community.”

The new statistics also highlight how limited work requirements are for welfare benefits. In 1996 when a Republican Congress and President Bill Clinton enacted landmark welfare reform laws, the old-fashioned cash welfare assistance (AFDC) was replaced with a time-limited assistance program (TANF) that required work for benefits.

The Stalin-Hitler Pact Turns 75

In June, Western democratic leaders invited Vladimir Putin to the 70th anniversary of D-Day memorial in France, but there’s no good reason he should have been be there. Putin is an autocrat, not a democrat. He laments the demise of the Soviet Union, a dictatorship that played no role in the D-Day operation. And since Putin is now conducting an incremental invasion of Ukraine, a different memorial would be more suitable. As it happens, this one is long overdue and remains shrouded in ignorance.

Seventy-five years ago, on August 23, 1939, the USSR and Nazi Germany became allies through the Stalin-Hitler Pact. Joachim von Ribbentrop signed for Hitler and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed on behalf of Stalin. Molotov said that Hitlerism was “a matter of taste,” and that it was “not only senseless, but criminal” to wage war on Hitler “camouflaged as a fight for democracy.” Though often described as a “non-aggression pact,” the reverse was true.

The month after the Pact, Stalin and Hitler both invaded Poland, starting World War II. The Pact also gave Stalin control of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which he retained after the war, along with other conquests such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary and what became the German Democrat Republic, the regime that made emigration an exciting experience.

While the pact was in effect, Soviet and Nazi intelligence agencies worked together and American Communists did everything in their power to keep the United States from coming to Britain’s aid. During the Pact, the Soviets murdered 22,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest. That came at the direct order of Stalin, as Russia now acknowledges. Less well known is the reality that Stalin also handed over German Jewish Communists to Hitler’s Gestapo. At the Nuremberg trials after the war, Joachim von Ribbentrop was convicted for signing the Pact while Molotov, who signed for Stalin, sat in the accuser’s chair. So Stalin and his gang got away with it.

A Nazi-Soviet Pact memorial would be a great opportunity for Putin to express his admiration for Stalin. Maybe he could provide some enlightenment on what happened to the Jews Stalin handed over to Hitler. And as a former KGB man, maybe he could bring out more details of Soviet-Nazi intelligence cooperation during the Pact. This could be a shining moment for Putin, but the memorial would also do others some good.

American educators, for example, could familiarize themselves with these events and gauge the depths of their ignorance and denial. Some might even decide to make the Stalin-Hitler Pact into a college course. That would tell students something they don’t know. American politicians would also benefit.

It’s a good bet that most of them, regardless of party, know little if anything about the Stalin-Hitler Pact. A 75th anniversary memorial would help educate them, and would be particularly relevant for Barack Obama, President of the United States. He could use the memorial to expand on one of his mentors.

That would be Frank Marshall Davis, an orthodox Stalinist of exceptional ferocity, with an absolutely sulfuric hatred of the United States. Davis joined the Communist Party USA after the Pact was signed, at the same time others were leaving the ranks, never to return. The Pact memorial would be an opportunity for Obama to provide a full profile of the man his handlers disguised simply as “Frank” in Dreams From My Father. If Frank Marshall Davis ever believed, said, or did anything with which Obama disagreed, a Stalin-Hitler Pact memorial would be the ideal time to set the record straight. After all, the Obama administration is the most transparent in history, with not a smidgeon of corruption. And of course, it would be another photo op he could use to raise funds. He could even bring along his travelling studio audience.

Former First Lady and current presidential candidate Hillary Clinton could also benefit. One of her mentors is Robert Treuhaft, a Stalinist lawyer who joined the Communist Party USA after the Stalin-Hitler Pact and served faithfully in the USSR’s alibi armory. Hillary Clinton, who interned for Treuhaft, could use a Pact memorial to clarify Treuhaft’s career, and explain why he left the Communist Party in 1958, as he claimed. And she could go on record if she ever disagreed with anything her Stalinist mentor believed, said or did.

That could prove enlightening, but as with Benghazi she might just say “what does it matter?” Actually, it matters quite a bit, especially for someone who wants to be president, and the one who already is.

Daniel Tregerman, a four-year-old boy, was killed by a terrorist rocket from Gaza launched from near a UNRWA school.

“Daniel was disciplined and was always quick to get to shelter. Once the alarm sounded, he always knew what to do and where to go. Always.”

“When everyone would come to the shelter, Daniel would say, ‘Now we are all safe.’”
Hamas Rocket Fired Near UNRWA School Kills 4-Year-Old Boy

15 SECONDS

An Israeli father was moderately injured by shrapnel Thursday morning, moments after he helped a group of young children — including his son, whose birthday it was — to scramble to safety when a rocket slammed into the Eshkol region community kindergarten

Jan Berman, 35, and his wife Leora had brought their three-year-old son to the kindergarten for his birthday celebration that morning, when a siren sounded, warning of an incoming projectile from Gaza.

The Eshkol region is so close to the Palestinian enclave that the rocket warning system allows just 15 seconds to run for cover.

With many children still gathered outside the kindergarten, Berman and the kindergarten teacher dashed to herd them inside the building that was reinforced against rocket attacks. As the last of the kids made it into the building, a rocket struck. Although Berman was inside, shrapnel blasted through a window, injuring him in the arm.

“As the Last of the Kids Made it Into the Building, a Rocket Struck”

“13 Year Old Boy” Killed by Israel Turns Out to be Adult PLO Terrorist

It’s hard to engage in interfaith dialogue when your head has been cut off.

In times of evil, prophets who see it in what Ronald Knox called a “clear light” are not necessarily heeded, though they are desperately needed. Such a man was Hilaire Belloc, as Monsignor Knox described him at Belloc’s funeral Mass in 1953. “By derivation,” Knox explained, a prophet “is one who speaks out.”

Belloc, the first truly revisionist historian, made it his life’s work to speak out. He warned of the rise of Islam throughout the early years of the 20th century and then between the two world wars, when such prophecy seemed absurd. In 2006 another great prophet, Pope Benedict XVI — James Schall, S.J., calls him “the clearest and most incisive mind in the public order in the world today” — spoke at Regensburg and addressed in a clear light, the light of reason and reasonableness, the problem of Islam.

Reading Belloc’s many references to the rise of Islam, one is struck by his amazement at what he calls its “permanence and endurance.” He pointed (as did Pope Benedict later) to the force of the creed of Muhammad: “The most powerful denial of the Incarnation, the denial which came armed and victorious, was gathering in the desert and coming upon us without our dreaming of the danger: Islam.” As the Western world struggles to comprehend the upheaval in the Middle East, and secular liberal democracies not only fail to understand the power of the threat but talk of “dialogue” with a “religion of peace,” Belloc’s clear light can help us understand the newfound strength of this hostile force after 1,400 years.

Islam’s success, in Belloc’s view, derives precisely from its being fundamentally a Christian heresy. As a denial of the Incarnation, it is the one heresy that has endured and flourished. In more-philosophical terms, Pope Benedict has made essentially the same observation. “Mohammed’s burning appeal was an appeal to simplicity and the relaxation of the intelligence,” Belloc remarked in 1929.

“There is something starkly simple about Islam, its constant effort since its beginning to submit the whole world to Allah,” Father Schall wrote, summing up Benedict’s message at Regensburg “We tend to think this is fanatical or outlandish. But to many Muslim minds, it is perfectly logical and indeed a basis of action. What the Pope was concerned about was the basis of this claim.”