RUTHFULLY YOURS

Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl.

—Che Guevara, Motorcycle Diaries

President Obama’s recent move to cozy up to Communist Cuba is a crucially important moment not just diplomatically, but as a moral one in regards to human rights, dignity and justice. As we witness a Radical-in-Chief throwing an economic lifeline to a barbaric tyranny, it is our duty and obligation to shine a light on the dark tragedy of the Cuban Gulag — and to reflect on the unspeakable suffering that Cubans have endured under Castro’s fascistic regime.

Until July 26, 2008, Fidel Castro had ruled Cuba with an iron grip for nearly five decades. On that July date in 2008, he stood to the side because of health problems and made his brother, Raul, de facto ruler. Raul officially replaced his brother as dictator on February 24, 2008; the regime has remained just as totalitarian as before and can, for obvious reasons, continue to be regarded and labelled as “Fidel Castro’s” regime.

Having seized power on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro followed the tradition of Vladimir Lenin and immediately turned his country into a slave camp. Ever since, Cuba has distinguished itself as one of the most monstrous human-rights abusers in the world.

In December 2011, former House Speaker and presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich made the following observation regarding the Palestinians;

Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community…

That comment set off a firestorm of debate and criticism but is in actuality, grounded in historical fact. As noted historian Benny Morris pointed out in his acclaimed book, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War, at the turn of the 20th century, most Arabs residing in the Land of Israel or “Palestine” considered themselves to be subjects of the Ottoman Empire. There were some Palestinian Arabs with vague nationalistic tendencies but even this minority considered itself to be part of Greater Syria. There simply was no reference to an independent Palestine for a distinct group of people calling themselves “Palestinians.”

Morris also perceptively notes that the residents of Palestinian villages routinely failed to come to the assistance of nearby villages that were under attack by Jewish forces thus reinforcing the view that Arab villagers felt little loyalty to all but clan and village. The notion of a “Palestinian people” was an alien concept to the common Palestinian villager who was not bound by any sense of duty to assist a neighboring village.

The song “ I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is about an overseas soldier during WWII, writing a letter to his family. He tells the family that he will be coming home, and to prepare the holiday for him with “presents on the tree” but ends on a melancholy note, with the soldier saying “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.” It was composed by Walter Kent a Jewish American composer who also wrote wrote the music for the wartime classic ” The White Cliffs of Dover”.

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by scholar of Islam Louis Lionheart and joined by author and lecturer Dr. Edward L. Dalcour.

Dr. Dalcour came on the show to discuss To Kill a Kafir, explaining Islam’s true teachings on “freedom” of religion. The discussion occurred within the context of Sharia Law: Draconian Legal System, in which Dr. Dalcour unveiled the nightmare spawned by Islamic “theocracy.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/to-kill-a-kafir-on-the-glazov-gang/

Meet Jack Taylor, the Hollywood dentist turned SEAL who was captured behind enemy lines.

Seventy years ago, Jack Taylor, arguably America’s first Navy SEAL, spent Christmas being tortured and beaten in a small, dank cell in a Gestapo prison. “I broke down. It was the only time during all of my captivity,” he says.

Taylor was a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Maritime Unit, the group that pioneered the technology and tactics that were the origins of today’s U.S. Navy SEALs. It was an extraordinary and eclectic group of men that also included an archeologist who could have been the model for Indiana Jones and Sterling Hayden, one of Hollywood’s leading stars.

One man close to the organization described the ideal OSS operative as “a Ph.D. who could win a bar fight.” Jack Taylor personified that ideal.

As one of the OSS’s most experienced operatives, this first SEAL planned and executed a parachute mission deep into the Third Reich in the fall of 1944. After Taylor and his team were captured far behind German lines in Austria, he found himself with other high-level prisoners in Gestapo headquarters in Vienna.

The stories of Taylor and the other OSS frogmen are captured for the first time in my new book, First SEALs: The Untold Story of the Forging of America’s Most Elite Unit.

For the first time in 1,400 years, there will be no Christmas celebrations in Nineveh province, home to Iraq’s largest remaining Christian community and largest non-Muslim minority, and a site of great biblical significance. This northern province, whose area is over three times larger than that of Lebanon, is now part of the Islamic State’s caliphate, and its Christians and churches are no longer tolerated.

What has become of Nineveh’s Christians? What will be their fate?

These should be pressing concerns for America, especially its 247 million Christians. Yet the mainstream media rarely cover this story — a New York Times reporter in a recent e-mail says it’s of “limited interest,” explaining that “most of our readers have only vague notions of who they are anyway and why their issues are relevant to the United States.” A better explanation would be that the Times and other establishment elites are reluctant to focus on the goals, rather than just the tactics, of Islamist extremist ideology. A main goal is total Islamization — and it is on the verge of being realized in Iraq.

Iraq’s Christians, who in recent years have clustered in their ancestral Nineveh homeland to escape persecution in Baghdad and Basra, are important culturally and politically. With authentic roots in the earliest years of the faith, they constitute one of the largest remaining native Christian communities in Christianity’s cradle. It was these communities that first structured the sacred liturgy, developed religious music (leading to Gregorian chant), brought to the West monasticism for men and women, and otherwise provided great treasures of Christian patrimony.

Stanley Weintraub, Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Penn State University, has authored a number of books about celebrating Christmas while at war. His latest, about a war he served in, is A Christmas Far from Home: An Epic Tale of Courage and Survival during the Korean War. He talks about the book, war, and writing history with National Review Online. – KJL

Kathryn Jean Lopez: What turned your attention to Korea for your latest book?

Stanley Weintraub: I was a young Army officer in wartime Korea for 17 months, over two Christmases.

Lopez: How is A Christmas Far from Home “a narrative of two fantasies”?

Weintraub: MacArthur’s fantasy, fed by poor intelligence and personal hubris, was that he could unify all of Korea by Christmas without Red Chinese intervention. He fed the unrealistic hopes of his troops that they would be on the way home by Christmas 1950.

Lopez: Why is the Korean War considered “the Forgotten War”?

Weintraub: The Korean War, only five years after the close of World War II, was almost a continuation of that war. Further, memories of it were overwhelmed by the catastrophe of Vietnam.

‘What’s merry about all this, you ask?”

Thus began a Christmas Eve message from General Anthony McAuliffe to his troops besieged at the Belgium town of Bastogne. Adolf Hitler had launched a desperate counteroffensive against the allies in the West in December 1944. As described in the book No Silent Night: The Christmas Battle for Bastogne, the town became a linchpin of the Battle of the Bulge.

Hitler hoped to split the Allied armies and retake the crucial harbor at Antwerp. His attack through the Ardennes forest, accompanied by a withering artillery barrage, caught the Allies by surprise and met with initial success.

But he needed Bastogne, a crossroads that General Dwight Eisenhower quickly decided must be held.

The American general rushed the 101st Airborne (the “Screaming Eagles”) to the town, together with other units. Seventy years ago, the heroes of Bastogne, or, as they were fondly dubbed, “the battered bastards of Bastogne,” spent Christmas breaking the advance of the German army in one of the most storied fights in American history.

It is Bastogne that gives us some of the great statements of American military defiance. When the Germans demanded surrender of his forces, Generl McAuliffe shot back with his famous rejoinder, “NUTS!” A soldier’s quip captured the spirit of the American defenders: “They’ve got us surrounded, the poor bastards.”

At 2:45 p.m [1]., Saturday, December 20, 2014, Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley [2] approached two people on a street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. After requesting that they follow him on Instagram, he told them, “Watch what I’m going to do.” Within 2 minutes, at 2:47 p.m [1]., Brinsley reached the passenger window of a marked police car, and fired a lethal barrage at the heads of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu. Fleeing into a nearby subway station, pursued by police officers, Ismaaiyl Brinsley stopped, and shot himself, fatally [1], in the head.

Immediate post-mortem accounts riveted, appropriately [3], on Brinsley’s history of mental illness, personal failure, and paroxysms of violent anger—he even wounded his Baltimore area girlfriend, just before departing by bus for New York City, that fateful Saturday morning. However, by Saturday, Brinsley had focused his vengeful rage [3] on the recent deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. According to the now rigidly enforced narrative, Brinsley executed Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in cold blood due, solely, to his warped perception of their “shared culpability” in the tragic deaths of Garner and Brown.

““The whole narrative of widespread police brutality is a big fat lie.”

Advice to the perplexed: if approached by a police officer, do not pull out a revolver and point it at him [1]. It doesn’t matter if you are white, black, pink, or purple: such behavior is not conducive to your longevity. And that, frankly, is the way things should be.

As I have noted here on several [2] occasions [3], the militarization of the police in the U.S. is a minatory development that should be scrutinized and reversed. American police should not be swaggering about town in armored vehicles and accoutered like a Navy SEAL en route to bin Laden’s Pakastani retreat. In America, the default posture of the police should be like something out of Mayberry, province of sheriff Andy Taylor, protector of the peace on The Andy Griffith Show. Deep down, of course, it is not Andy but the townspeople of Mayberry who are responsible for maintaining order. “Andy,” as I wrote in one of the above linked columns,

is simply a sort of boundary marker. He represents what Walter Bagehot might have called the impressive side of the social contract. He has a sidearm. He rarely wears it. It’s usually at home, unloaded, hidden on top of a china cabinet. He barely wears a uniform. That’s to say, his uniform is homey, not scary.

Why? Because he wished people to trust and respect him and not fear him [4]; he was an authority, not an authoritarian figure. His sidekick, the lovable but bumbling Barney Fife, likes the paraphernalia of police garb. Andy lets him wear a revolver, but it has to be unloaded. He’s allowed to carry one round of ammunition in his shirt pocket.