RUTHFULLY YOURS

Tomorrow evening Jews will gather with friends and family to celebrate Passover. We will recount the hardships of slavery in Egypt and the harsh oppression by the Pharaoh. We will rejoice in the rescue by Moses who demanded freedom for our people. We will recite the ten plagues that were unleashed on the Egyptians when the Pharaohs refused to free the Jews .The Pharaoh finally relented but when the Jews were leaving he sent an army to capture them and return them to enslavement. We will cheer when we retell how the waters of the Red Sea miraculously parted giving the Jews an escape, and the waters returned drowning the pursuing army.

Then, we will have a moment of silent prayer in memory of the martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto who courageously rebelled on Passover in April of 1943 and held off the well-armed Nazis for over a month.

Finally, we will recount another miracle- the return of the Jews to Israel in 1948 when the seas again parted- this time for the steel hulls of vessels bringing besieged and beleaguered and traumatized survivors of the Genocide of World War 2 to safety and succor in the Jewish state of Israel.

Then we will eat, drink and be merry.

But, the story of Passover continues with great consequences:

The book of Exodus says that after crossing the Red Sea, Moses led the Jews into the Sinai, where they spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness. After travelling through the desert for nearly three months, they camped before Mount Sinai and it was there that God made a covenant with Moses and revealed the Ten Commandments on two stone tablets that codified the mandate to create a just and humane society and govern the lives of Jews and all decent people and nations. There are actually 613 commandments which cover every aspect of life-even hygiene and diet, but the Decalogue- the Ten Commandments are the most famous.

Think about that. At a time and place of local mores that sanctioned and celebrated murder and pillage and tyranny, these laws set forth principles of morality which have lasted for millennia.

Until 2005 The Ten Commandments were prominently displayed in courts, schools, churches and public grounds. In 2005 rulings on the presentation of religious symbols and sacred text on Texas public property, the US Supreme Court justified displays like the Ten Commandments but with the caveat that such displays must be clearly secular and not cross the line into proselytizing.

However, in a ruling on the display of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky courthouses, the justices ruled 5 to 4 that public officials were not motivated by a secular purpose in ordering the courthouse display but sought to advance religion in violation of the separation of church and state.

The debate continues with the ACLU pitted against all public displays of the Ten Commandments and determined citizens of all religions who fight to uphold their rights to display them. There are prominent jurists and scholars who continue to argue on that subject. In spite of these controversies, The Ten Commandments continue to inspire all the world’s religions and all decent societies- religious as well as secular.

Here, in this great nation we live in freedom from intimidation, oppression and harassment because those founding fathers who sought to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” were religious Christians who were informed and guided by the Bible and the Ten Commandments which were revealed more than 3,000 years ago to Moses and the Jewish people on their way to their homeland in Israel.

Next month, Obama will be in Japan for the G-7 Summit. There are rumors that he will visit Hiroshima and formally apologize for the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on that city and Nagasaki in August 1945. Maybe that’s why John Kerry didn’t apologize during a recent visit to the Hiroshima memorial, but merely set the stage for Obama by lamenting the suffering and calling for a “world free from nuclear weapons.”

The debate over whether or not Truman should have authorized dropping the bombs is an old one. And any objective evaluation of the decision shows that it was correct, for it shortened the war and saved millions of Japanese and American lives. More interesting than rehashing what should be a settled debate is the ideological prejudices and moral incoherence of those who continue to want the U.S. to express regret for swiftly ending a war it didn’t start and paid for with nearly 112,000 lives.

First is the idea, serially displayed by Obama since the beginning of his presidency, that the U.S. has been a bad international actor and so must atone for its sins. As the leftist tale goes, America’s corporate greed, imperialist depredations, and racist nationalism sowed the seeds of all the world’s disorder and ills. Whether poverty in Africa, violence in the Middle East, or global warming, the default response is “When all else fails, blame the Americans.”

Just watch Oliver Stone’s 10-part “documentary” on the Cold War, “The Untold History of the United States,” or read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. This is the “Yankees done us wrong” school of factually challenged historiography that has spread into popular culture, high school curricula, and whole departments in most universities. With Obama it has now reached the presidency, where its malign effects have been obvious in his foreign policy disasters caused by feckless “disengagement” and “leading from behind” predicated on reversing America’s malign interventionism.

The dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains the only wartime use of nuclear weapons in history.

No one knows exactly how many Japanese citizens were killed by the two American bombs. A macabre guess is around 140,000. The atomic attacks finally shocked Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese militarists into surrendering.

John Kerry recently visited Hiroshima. He became the first secretary of state to do so — purportedly as a precursor to a planned visit next month by President Obama, who is rumored to be considering an apology to Japan for America’s dropping of the bombs 71 years ago.

The horrific bombings are inexplicable without examining the context in which they occurred.

In 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill insisted on the unconditional surrender of Axis aggressors. The bomb was originally envisioned as a way to force the Axis leader, Nazi Germany, to cease fighting. But the Third Reich had already collapsed by July 1945 when the bomb was ready for use, leaving Imperial Japan as the sole surviving Axis target.

Japan had just demonstrated with its nihilistic defense of Okinawa — where more than 12,000 Americans died and more than 50,000 were wounded, along with perhaps 200,000 Japanese military and civilian casualties — that it could make the Americans pay so high a price for victory that they might negotiate an armistice rather than demand surrender.

Tens of thousands of Americans had already died in taking the Pacific islands as a way to get close enough to bomb Japan. On March 9-10, 1945, B-29 bombers dropped an estimated 1,665 tons of napalm on Tokyo, causing at least as many deaths as later at Hiroshima.

On Monday April 18, 2016, China officially broke ground on its first naval base in Djibouti, Africa, a country which has also been the home of the United States (U.S.) African intelligence-gathering base for the past 15 years. The Chinese base will be encroaching upon a major U.S. military installation with 4,000 troops and has the largest drone installation base outside of Afghanistan.

Djibouti may be a proving ground for China’s foreign policy as the nation looks to further expand its influence in Africa. China has participated in anti-piracy missions off the coast of Somalia since 2008 and increased those missions in 2010. Chinese President Jinping donated $100 million to the African Union (AU) and said it was to help build a standby force as well as an emergency response and quick response force.

American Ambassador to Djibouti Tom Kelly warns that Djibouti is the forefront of U.S. national security policy in Africa and raised concerns of Chinese military efforts to intercept American intelligence.

The U.S. also has to deal with Djibouti president Ismali Omar Guelleh, viewed by many locals as a dictator, who curtails free speech and human rights, makes arbitrary arrests, and uses torture on opposition. Guelleh may be increasing his ties to China following the Chinese purchase of the Port de Djibouti for $185 million. Chinese investment has also establish a $4 billion dollar railway project from Djibouti to Ethiopia; and is expected to Djibouti $20 million per year for the Djibouti naval base over the next decade.