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2016

Chanukah guide for the perplexed, 2016 Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger see note please

This year Chanukah starts on December 24 in the evening and ends on the evening of January 1, 2017 . No one ever explains it better than retired ambassador Yoram Ettinger…rsk

1. Chanukah and Jewish immortality. In 1899, Mark Twain wrote: “Jews constitute but one percent of the human race…, [but] their contributions to literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine and abstruse learning are away out of proportion to the weakness of their numbers. They have made a marvelous fight in all the ages, and had done it with their hands tied behind them…. The Egyptians, Babylonians and Persians rose and then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greeks and Romans followed, made vast noise and they are gone…. The Jew saw them all, beat them all and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies…. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

2. The Chanukah Menorah (a nine-branched-candelabra) commemorates the legacy of the Maccabees, which has been a pillar of fire for the Jewish people, highlighting the prerequisites of spiritual and physical liberty, in defiance of formidable odds: faith, optimism, patriotism, memory and adherence to value and principle-driven culture. The Maccabees have become a universal role-model of national and religious liberation struggle against all odds, the victory of long-term, principle-driven faith over short-term, convenience-driven cynicism and opportunism; the victory of tenacious optimism over pessimism and political-correctness.

3. Israel’s Founding Father, David Ben Gurion: “The struggle of the Maccabees was one of the most dramatic clashes of civilizations in human history…. The Maccabees overcame one of the most magnificent spiritual, political and military challenges in Jewish history due to the spirit of the people, rather than the failed spirit of the establishment ….” (Uniqueness and Destiny, pp 20-22, Ben Gurion, IDF Publishing, 1953)

4. The US connection:

* On December 2, 1993, in Billings, Montana, white supremacists tossed a brick through a window of a Jewish home that displayed the Chanukah Menorah. On the following morning, the Billings Gazette – reflecting sentiments of local churches and civic leaders – printed a full-page Menorah, which was pasted on the windows of over 10,000 non-Jewish residents in a show of solidarity. Some Billings’ residents displayed their Not in Our Town spirit, displaying Chanukah Menorahs on Billings’ main street. The Billings’ Chanukah gesture has been commemorated annually. A Chanukah candle-lighting was recently held at the State Capitol in Helena, MT.

*A bust of Judah the Maccabee is displayed at West Point Military Academy, along with those of Joshua, David, Alexander the Great, Hector, Julius Caesar, King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon – “the Nine Worthies.”

*John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, Thomas Paine and the organizers of the Boston Tea Party were referred to as “the modern day Maccabees.”

* According to the Diary of Michael and Louisa Hart, George Washington was introduced to Chanukah in December 1777 at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. He was challenging the much superior British military. A Jewish solider lit a Chanukah candle, explaining its significance: a conviction-driven, tactical victory against immense odds. Washington replied: “I rejoice in the Maccabees’ success, though it is long past…It pleases me to think that miracles still happen.” On June 19, 1778, Washington implemented the battle tactics of Judah the Maccabee, defeating the British troops.

Former CIA Interrogator Looks inside the Jihadist Mind : Andrew Harrod

“You may not be in a religious war with me, but I’m in a religious war with you,” recalled former CIA interrogator James Mitchell the views of al-Qaeda (AQ) mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM). Interviewed on December 6 at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) before an audience of about 70, Mitchell provided chilling, essential insight into the jihadist worldview currently threatening the globe.

AEI Resident Fellow Marc A. Thiessen introduced Mitchell as someone who “has spent thousands of hours with Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and other senior al-Qaeda operatives” and “looked directly into the face of evil.” Mitchell concurred that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, considered the leading technical genius behind AQ’s devastating September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was “devil and diva,” whom Mitchell and other interrogators called “muq” after the Arabic word for brain, muqtar. Comparing him to a Star Wars “Jedi master” recruiting jihadist “Jedi warriors,” Mitchell found him “immensely charming. He reminded me of Yoda,” yet “that is often how evil looks.”

Mitchell recalled that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad “thought he was a Sufi” and “likes to sit there and talk…to tell you about his religion,” yet he appeared to Mitchell as no mere blusterer. Mitchell compared his AEI audience to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, stating “I haven’t seen this much raw brain power in one place since the last time I sat in his cell with just him.” He “is probably the brightest person I have ever seen in my life, and I have seen some pretty bright people.”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammad’s evil genius came to life in Mitchell’s recounting of his description of his 2002 murder of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter and jihadist hostage in Pakistan. He remembered that he “had sharp knives. The toughest part was getting through the neck bone.” For him, this killing showed God’s “glory, shows how much his influence is. It’s almost like an act of worship to him.”

While “not attacking all of Islam,” Mitchell saw in Khalid Sheikh Mohammad how “these Islamists, who want to destroy our way of life, have a set of beliefs that make them incredibly dangerous.” For Islamists, “how we’re supposed to live was established 1,400 years ago in the Koran and in the perfect words and deeds” of Islam’s prophet Muhammad. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad considered Islam a “religion of peace. The world will be at peace when sharia law is imposed on the whole world.”

Speaking of jihadists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, Mitchell emphasized the “depth of their belief. I don’t think most Americans understand that they, no kidding, believe what they believe.” Jihadists “really do believe they’re going to end up with 72 spiritual beings that become virgins every time you have sex with them.” “It sounds ridiculous to me,” but “they really do believe they’re going to be treated like rock stars up there.”

Mitchell’s interrogations of another captured AQ jihadist, Abu Zubaydah, revealed that “Al Qaeda dreams of bringing down America with catastrophic attacks, but that’s not particularly practical.” For him, the “real way to bring down America was with low-tech, ‘lone-wolf’ attacks because the target is not our military capabilities. It’s not our buildings. It’s not our roads. It’s the minds of the Americans.” “We don’t have to defeat you. We only have to persist long enough for you to defeat yourself.”

Similarly, Mitchell noted that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad “got fascinated by the Beltway sniper” who killed numerous individuals outside of Washington, DC, in 2002; He “would spend hours to me talking about that” and its “economy of scale.” Accordingly, he fantasized about multiple “single martyrs, shahids, who would go into the American culture and pull off low-tech attacks…with enough of those low-tech attacks, like happened with the Beltway shooter, it would cripple America.” Thus he “bought a gas station in Pakistan so he could figure out how to build a bomb that they could slide down into the gas tanks at gas stations.”

Trump Should Quickly Rescind Obama’s Drilling Ban By Andrew C. McCarthy

In his enviro-extremism, President Obama is attempting to tie President-elect Trump’s hands by blocking vast swaths of the Arctic Ocean and stretches of the Atlantic from oil and natural-gas drilling. The gambit, announced by the administration on Tuesday, is part of an eleventh-hour wave by which Obama is flooding the regulatory zone: Promulgating so many rules – of the unpopular, hard-left variety that Democrats dare not unveil before Election Days – that he hopes the Trump administration will find it too cumbersome to undo all of them.

The incoming president should not let his predecessor get away with it. Obama’s lawyers apparently believe they’ve found a loophole that could make the anti-drilling ban stick. President Trump, however, will have the power to rescind it, and should do so promptly.

Obama will set an all-time record for pages added to the Federal Register this year. Actually, make that another all-time record, since he will (yet again) be breaking records he has set, and broken, repeatedly over the last eight years. In fact, the Competitive Enterprise Institute notes that on a single day in mid-November, Obama added an unprecedented 572 pages to the Federal Register.

Concededly, counting pages can be an imprecise or even misleading measure of presidential law-making. The Federal Register includes reams of documents besides rules and regulations. Plus, even rules that had the effect of rolling back rules would thicken the rule book. But let’s face it, Washington is rarely in the business of reining in its intrusions. The last eight years have been all about extending them – to the Arctic Ocean and beyond.

Trump will find it easy to cancel rules imposed in the late stages of the incumbent administration. Any rules that have not yet gone into effect can simply be suspended. And rules that have just gone into effect may be undone under the 1996 Congressional Review Act. The CRA empowers Congress, within 60 session-days of a rule’s implementation, to enact a resolution disapproving it. Such a resolution is not subject to Senate filibuster (i.e., it can be passed by a simple majority because the usual requirement of 60 votes to end debate does not apply).

For the most part, the CRA has been an illusory check on executive agencies run wild. A disapproval resolution, like any other congressional act, does not become law unless the president signs it (or unless the president’s veto is overridden). Obviously, a president is not going to sign a resolution that cancels rules promulgated by his own administration in furtherance of his agenda.

Still, the CRA has been successfully invoked once, in 2001. That example mirrors our current transitional circumstances: It happened at the start of the new Bush (43) administration, when Congress voted to revoke a rule implemented toward the end of the Clinton administration.

With Republicans in control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House, it will be possible to enact resolutions of disapproval, as long as it is done quickly. While the GOP margin in the Senate is thin, Republicans have been united in opposition, at least rhetorically, to Obama’s despotic style of governance. Now that they can easily do something about it, expect them to pass, and Trump to sign, resolutions that rescind brand new Obama rules.

The Saudis at the UN Human Rights Council by Giulio Meotti

While the medieval Saudi system of justice was flogging the gentle blogger Raif Badawi 50 out of the stipulated 1000 lashes, a delegation of UN bureaucrats landed in Jeddah to promote an international conference on religious freedom.

The Saudis use these international seats to advance their oppressive agenda, and to press the Western democracies to punish criticism of Islam.

Through the shameful trial of Geert Wilders, Dutch authorities sent a message of surrender to the Saudis and other rogue Islamic regimes that punish dissent.

Did the Dutch prosecute Wilders on behalf of the Saudis, who threatened to impose sanctions on the Netherlands?

The UN and the Western democracies are putting the defense of human rights and freedom in the hands of one the world’s worst violators of religious and intellectual freedom.

Sharia courts are already fully operating in the Netherlands. They know something about “human rights”: stoning, flogging and chopping off heads.

Who will rescue our right to speak?

“My husband has been languishing in a Saudi prison since June 17th, 2012. Our children live with me in the city of Sherbrooke, Québec in Canada. They have not seen their father for five years now… On January 9, 2015, Raif received the first 50 lashes… Will members of the United Nations Human Rights Council join the European Parliament and ask for Raif’s release?”

Unfortunately, the UN members did not respond to this appeal by Ensaf Haidar, the fearless wife of the most famous blogger of the Arab world, the gentle Raif Badawi, imprisoned and flogged by the Saudis for his secular ideas. A few days after Ensaf’s appeal, the United Nations welcomed Badawi’s executioners, the Saudis, at the UN Human Rights Council. The Saudi representative, Abdulaziz Alwasil, will be decisive on three major issues at the UN Palace of Nations in Geneva: women, religious freedom and the system of justice.

What a great achievement for Saudi Arabia: The country flogs poets and bloggers, and its sheikhs have no other concern than filling their sumptuous palaces with wives and concubines, and then stoning them to death if they become “adulterous”. Saudi Arabia is where a Shiite cleric was publicly beheaded and where a Christian cannot wear a tunic or a cross.

The British government supported the Saudi bid to be re-elected at the Human Rights Council (British Prime Minister Theresa May was urged in vain to oppose the Saudi election to the Geneva body). The Obama Administration did the same: Samantha Powers, the U.S. ambassador at the UN, called the Saudi bid at the UN a “procedural position”.

Europe’s Compassionate Hatred of Israel by Bat Ye’or

The Jerusalem Declaration of UNESCO seeks to Islamize, with the help of many governments in Europe and other Christian countries, the ancient history of the people of Israel.

But what does this declaration mean for Europe and Christianity? Wasn’t Christianity born out of Israel? Wasn’t Jesus a Judean Jew, as were the apostles and evangelists? Or was it Islam that Jesus was preaching, in Arabic and in the mosques?

Where are the great Catholic or Protestant voices to protest against this Islamization of Christianity? This passivity, this indifference makes you think that Europe will soon look more like Lebanon.

European countries recognize terrorism everywhere except in Israel, where they themselves are allies of these terrorists whom they call “freedom fighters” or “militants”, against “occupation”.

This alliance has ruined Europe — because the enemies of Israel are also enemies of Christianity and of Europe. How can you ally yourself with those who want to destroy you, without in fact dying yourself?

The same obsessive hatred Hitler had for Israel, which led to the ruin of Europe, has persisted today in the European Union against the Jewish State. The great irony is that in trying to destroy Israel, Europe has destroyed itself.

Today we are witnessing the coming of the worldwide caliphate. This expression means that the Muslim view of history is currently prevailing in international institutions. We see it with the Jerusalem Declaration of UNESCO, this palace of revisionism. The Jerusalem Declaration seeks to Islamize, with the help of many governments in Europe and other Christian countries, the ancient history of the people of Israel.

The Venice Declaration of 1980, issued by the European Community, which tried to force Israel to survive in an indefensible territory, already prescribed its disappearance and replacement with a people that had never even manifested itself before 1969 — and all with the assistance of the Soviet Union and especially France. The Islamization of Jerusalem and the delegitimization of the State of Israel were already set out in the Venice Declaration, which to this date the European Union has continued to view as valid.

The Venice Declaration of 1980 was a gift from the European Community to the Arab League, aimed at reestablishing good economic relations with Arab countries, which had been angered by the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979, a peace Europe had not been able to prevent. Jewish holy sites and the survival of the Jewish State were sacrificed by the European Community in exchange for petrodollars.

Since that time, the European Union has expressed remorse for the Holocaust and love and compassion for Israel, but has continued to support, fund and encourage a population whose mission is the destruction of Israel, as proclaimed in its doctrine, and with which Europe is quite familiar. European countries zealously spend billions to promote a worldwide Palestinian campaign of hatred against the State of Israel. They recognize terrorism everywhere except in Israel, where they themselves are allies of these terrorists, whom they call “freedom fighters” or “militants”, against “occupation”. The so-called “Jewish occupation” of Judea and Samaria refers to land that was conquered by war and occupied by Jordan from 1949 to 1967, and from where Palestinian Jews were killed, or dispossessed and expelled.

Peter Smith A Fog of Generalised Imbecility

Many of what pass these days for mature adults believe the views of sixteen-year-olds are worth taking into account, and why wouldn’t they? Their own views are baseless invocations of ideas blowing in the wind, therefore no more valid than those of callow youths.
Ever have annoying experiences? Well, of course we all do. I have more these days because I get annoyed by MSM commentators, even by the dwindling number of conservatives. No-one can tell me that the quality of commentary has improved in the past thirty to forty years. I don’t know why precisely. Perhaps it is the fault of post-modern education which, so I understand, encourages barely-formed minds to have views instead of concentrating on absorbing building blocks for rational thinking.

I am glad to say that when I was sixteen I had no views at all. My recollection is that having views was not encouraged. Every mature adult knew that the views of a sixteen-year-old were worthless. Now views have supplanted building blocks. They are, if you like, anchorless views. Accordingly, the new breed of mature adults thinks that the views of sixteen-year-olds are worth taking into account. Why wouldn’t they? Their own views are baseless invocations of ideas blowing in the wind and therefore no more valid than those of callow youths.

The manifestation of this trend towards generalised imbecility is what I call foggy thinking. I was in quite a few ‘pea-soupers’ when growing up in England. You simply couldn’t see a metre in front or behind you. I can only assume that pea soup has crept into commentators’ cranial cavities.

The number of deaths from guns dwarfs deaths from terrorist attacks in the US we are regularly told by left-wing commentators. Juan Williams on Fox News is the latest I have heard spouting this guff during a discussion of the Islamic massacre in Berlin. Quite honestly, what are we supposed to take from this kind of comment?

Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) spoofed it brilliantly in Quadrant a little time ago. I recall he suggested that Britain in WWII might have been better served concentrating on reducing heart attacks than on countering the blitz, which took far fewer lives.

A related topic that generally has me weeping in frustration is the thought, often propagated by conservative commentators, that it is extremely difficult to identify the few among Muslim migrants who might do us physical harm. The implication is that if ‘extreme vetting’ worked it would be fine to allow Western societies to be inundated by ‘peace-loving’ Muslims. No, it wouldn’t, dummies!

The Devil is a novice. His biggest trick is to convince us that he doesn’t exist. In the face of survey after survey showing religious and social intolerance among Muslim communities most everywhere and in the face of supposedly democratic Muslim countries like Indonesia and Pakistan wanting to punish and execute their citizens for insulting Islam, apparently the vast majority of Muslims are fine and dandy. And this narrative gains strength after each horrific Islamic terrorist massacre. What a trick!

Here we have subscribers to a supremacist, intolerant and violent creed being given a pass because only a relative few (tens of thousands, or is it more?) of their number out of 1.6 billion are monstrous literalists. Well, these monsters could not and do not emerge from a vacuum. They are a product of their creed; a vile excretion from the mass of subscribers.

Black Klansmen, fascist follicles By Roger Franklin

In the Age and Sydney Morning Herald today, remaining readers of those publications will have preconceptions further confirmed that Donald Trump is a Hitlerian svengali whose election has invited the brown-shirted “far right” to goose-step through the corridors of power. The report, picked up from the Washington Post, begins by noting that “a small but determined” band of neo-Nazis in Michigan has stopped flaunting swastikas in an effort to go “more mainstream”. This in turn prompts a journalistic round-up of the Left’s handy and standard boogeymen — the Klan, David Duke, backwoods militias and, if you can believe it, people who wear their hair “in an undercut style once popular among the Hitler Youth”.

Nazi haircuts! What more proof could anyone demand?

Need it be said that the story is piffle, that it is part of an emerging narrative intent on framing the next four years as a period that will see the politically correct tirelessly encouraged to denounce tax cuts and any easing of the regulatory straitjacket as the moral equivalents of invading Poland? You would need to be supremely dim to give such a slur any credence, which explains why Fairfax editors published it.

Trouble is, the jackbooted legions whose hatred is said be soiling America’s fruited plain are an uncooperative lot, as Fairfax US correspondent Paul McGeough will have to admit if he ever gets around to correcting a pre-election report that appeared beneath his byline on November 3. The multi-Walkley winner informed his readers:

“Vote Trump” was spray-painted on the ruins of Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Greenville, 160 kilometres north-west of Jackson, overnight on Tuesday. Local fire chief Ruben Brown said the church was badly damaged but no injuries have been reported.

Coinciding with the Ku Klux Klan’s endorsement of Donald Trump in a campaign that has become overtly racist, the attack kindles fears of a return to the 1960s civil rights unrest, when southern black churches were often torched or bombed by white supremacists.

It’s a minor quibble that McGeough preferred to generalise about “white supremacists”, rather than identify the church-burners of long ago for the segregationist Southern Democrats they really were. So let that omission pass and focus instead on the real problem with his bid to tie Trump to the Klan: it wasn’t white men in pointy hoods who burnt that Mississippi church. According to the state police, it was a black congregant — that’s his mugshot atop this post — who set the fire, presumably in hope of prompting some pro-Clinton votes and publicity.

Mississippi Department of Public Safety spokesman Warren Strain says Andrew McClinton of Leland, Mississippi, who is African-American, is charged with first-degree arson of a place of worship.

It would be nice to think McGeough’s editors will publish a retraction, that they are keen to set the record straight. And while they’re at it, they might take a close look at another of his dispatches which alleged a wave of attacks by racists celebrating Trump’s victory. Yes, there have been many reports of Trump-inspired racist assaults — and it seems, as even the Washington Post concedes, more than a few were false-flag hoaxes.

Israel Lobbied Trump to Help Derail U.N. Resolution Development pits an incoming administration directly against the sitting president; resolution’s sponsor, Egypt, postpones vote after Sisi and Trump spoke By Jay Solomon, Rory Jones and Farnaz Fassihi

Israeli government officials requested that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump intervene in deliberations at the United Nations focused on passing a new resolution on the Arab-Israel conflict, thrusting him into the center of one of the world’s most intractable conflicts even before taking office, according to Israeli officials briefed on the discussions.

Top Israeli officials had come to believe that the Obama administration wasn’t going to block a U.N. resolution that seeks to define Israeli construction in disputed territories as “illegal” when the measure came up for a scheduled vote by the Security Council on Thursday, according to the officials.

Instead, they turned to the incoming president, who has staked out positions more favorable to conservative Israelis and at odds with Palestinians.

Mr. Trump responded Thursday morning by issuing a Twitter message calling for U.S. opposition to the U.N. resolution. He also held a phone conversation with Egypt’s President Abel Fatah al-Sisi, whose government had drafted the U.N. resolution. Cairo proceeded on Thursday to call for a delay on the vote.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s transition team said Mr. Sisi initiated the call. Transition officials didn’t respond to questions about Israeli government contacts.

Obama administration officials declined to comment on how it would have voted on the U.N. resolution. State Department spokesman John Kirby confirmed that Secretary of State John Kerry talked with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday morning.

Palestinians and their allies favor a resolution such as the one that was under consideration, and may yet push for another vote on the measure. But the unusual developments Thursday, pitting an incoming administration directly against the sitting president, accentuates the uneasiness in the U.S. political transition, particularly on such a key foreign-policy issue.

In Mr. Obama’s final year in office, the White House has considered ways to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, and in recent months has considered supporting a U.N. resolution, according to White House officials.

Mr. Trump is expected to significantly shift U.S. policy on Israel, condoning the construction of settlements in disputed areas and proposing the move of the American embassy to Jerusalem.

Egyptian officials said that the phone call between Messrs. Sisi and Trump was the start of a new, U.S.-led approach in the Middle East.

“They have agreed to lay the groundwork for the new administration to drive the establishment of a true peace between the Arabs and the Israelis,” an Egyptian official said. “Moreover, President-elect Trump strongly supports the Egyptian leaders efforts to seek a satisfactory resolution to the issues across the Middle East.”

In his Twitter message about the U.N. resolution, Mr. Trump held to one longstanding tenet of U.S. policy—that any agreement must be decided by Israelis and Palestinians. CONTINUE AT SITE

Patriot’s Day – A Review By Marilyn Penn

A well-deserved tribute to Patriot’s Day, the docudrama about the terrorism at the Boston Marathon, is that despite its Hallmark message of love triumphing over hate, it remains a riveting, compelling movie on many levels. It’s a tense whodunit, and an even more excrutiating “how-and-when-to-do -it” as the decision of whether to release the surveillance photos of the two suspects will help or hinder attempts to find them It illustrates the power plays between various levels of local government and federal investigators and enforcers It doesn’t shy away from explicitly showing the horrific injuries sustained by survivors nor the depths of grief at the loss of life It focuses on the dedication of medical workers and the willingness of ordinary, untrained people to rush towards helping victims as opposed to running away in fear. Perhaps, even more bravely, it restores the role of heroes to the men in blue and other first responders – a role too quickly forgotten after 9/11 This is a movie that should be seen by all Americans who too hastily jumped onto the bandwagon of Black Lives Matter and various politicians to condemn our policemen en masse for the actions of a tiny fraction of their colleagues

Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg have successfully collaborated on other disaster films but this one strikes most closely to home, dealing with an activity in which people of all ages could participate – as athletes, as recreational runners, as spirited observers of a thrilling contest or just patriotic fans of their own city. This last category figures prominently in the final uplifting slogan of Boston Strong as we see the Red Sox trade their team jerseys in their post-marathon game for ones featuring the single word BOSTON. Sadly, this movie is all too timely as various other attacks by Muslim jihadists continue to recur throughout our country and the world – most recently in Berlin The ideology behind jihad is skimmed over lightly in this film with more emphasis given to the notion that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older more charismatic brother, dominated both his wife and younger brother Dzhokar into complying with his personal agenda – one which the younger brother might not have pursued independently. In a climactic scene in which the two brothers are fleeing Boston and driving to New York with two more bombs in the car, Dzhokar is seen resisting one aspect of his brother’s plan – an action that provokes Tamerlan, an amateur boxer, into a physical confrontation in which he beats and threatens to kill his brother if he doesn’t do exactly as instructed This scene (which had no witnesses) dramatizes as fact the subsequent legal strategy of Dzhokar’s defense team in trying to avoid the death penalty for their client. It stands out as one of the few instances in which there is no hard evidence for the audience to gauge whether the events we are watching ever took place In the courtroom, jurors would hear the prosecution’s rejection of that theory, which they ultimately preferred when they sentenced Dzhokar to death But, since most of the film uses surveillance film from many sources, we tend to accept the “truth” of what we are shown, forgetting that this is a feature film and not even a documentary It was an odd choice on the part of the filmmakers to not hedge the presentation of this slant as something suggested by a friend or family member (hearsay) instead of showing it as a re-enactment which appears to be true.

Is Communism Cool? Ask a Millennial The U.S.S.R. broke up 25 years ago—ancient history for some. By Andrew Clark see note please

These statistics are appalling but correct….The expensive Chardonnay crowd is now flocking to a Potemkin Cuba and gushing about it….They really need to spend a week in jail in Venezuela…..but of course they are idiots and ignorant and I would venture a bet that they never read Robert Conquest….or even heard of him. rsk

Millennials are one of history’s luckiest generations. We were fortunate to be born around the end of the Cold War a quarter century ago, when the tyrannical Communism embodied in the Soviet Union came tumbling down, also knocking socialism down a few pegs along the way. We have grown up in a world where, for the most part, economic and personal freedom are the rule rather than exception.

And apparently we hate it. How else does one explain why so many millennials seem to long to live in government-run economies, or worse?

A Gallup poll in June 2015 found that almost 70% of U.S. millennials would be willing to vote for a socialist presidential candidate. Even more shocking, a poll conducted before this year’s presidential election by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that barely half of millennials believe “Communism was or is a problem.”

The same poll found that a quarter of millennials hold favorable opinions of Vladimir Lenin, while 18% think favorably of Mao Zedong. More than 10% even have positive feelings about Joseph Stalin. Never mind that these men were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions and the impoverishment of hundreds of millions.

These polling numbers are frightening—especially when the Communist-ruled and socialist nations in the world today, from North Korea and Cuba to Venezuela, show so clearly how such systems invariably lead to repression and declining standards of living for their populations.

Part of the problem is that many millennials see these ideologies as represented by Scandinavian countries, an ignorant view fed them by candidate Bernie Sanders, among others. As Harvard and Stanford visiting professor Daniel Schatz (a Swede) wrote in Forbes in February, “Sweden began to reverse its economic model during the 1990s” through privatization and deregulation. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen was even more unequivocal in a speech earlier this year: “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Scandinavian economies are in some ways freer than those in the U.S. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom gives these countries high marks for limited regulatory burdens and for corporate tax rates lower than in the U.S. In many ways it’s easier to start a successful business and take part in economic life in a Scandinavian country than it is in America.