RUTHFULLY YOURS

This is from December 2009 but Holocaust Memorial Day sirs memories of these events….rsk

Sheldon Roth is training and supervising psychoanalyst emeritus at the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East and was an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is currently retired and lives in Los Angeles.

I knew the murder of Adolf Hitler as a fact. I had read the script, been informed by my son Eli that he was going to “shoot Hitler in the face until his head exploded,” discussed the murder with the film’s director Quentin Tarantino, even watched filming in Berlin on the very stages where Nazi minister Josef Goebbels made his monstrous propaganda films.

What I scarcely expected were the overwhelming feelings that flooded me as I witnessed the scene in the film, “Inglourious Basterds.” I watched my son, as his character of “The Bear Jew,” machine gun the Fuhrer’s face to a bloody pulp. In that moment, I felt that my beloved boychik was carrying out wishes of mine from my Brownsville, Brooklyn childhood, wild longings from a lifetime of agonizing over the Holocaust. I felt a powerful mixture of rescue, revenge, redemption, relief and a strange grief. My son was sacrificing himself for all of us. He was doing what I could not. And I cried.

Many friends have told me of similar personal, powerful emotions in response to this film, emotions that were also joyously pleasurable. Yet, I have listened to many post-screening Q-and-As and heard the confused questions of those who are puzzled, distanced by the film because it is “fantasy.” It strikes me that what these questions fail to take into account is that there are two kinds of facts: historical facts and emotional ones. Emotional facts, or feelings, are a condensed, animal form of personal history; expanding them tells the story of one’s life. Feelings are just as much a reality as facts. Art, similarly, functions as a condensed statement about life. When art resonates with an audience, those emotions are real — they cannot be dismissed because the story is “historically inaccurate.” Quentin Tarantino understood it was more important to be emotionally accurate than to follow a story previously written by history. Art must resonate with a truthful emotion inside the viewer in order for it to survive, and, if not, it falls by the wayside, disregarded and dies a forgotten work. So, where do “Inglourious Basterds” and my reactions fit into this picture?

In 1950 as a young girl I visited Israel for the first time…a tiny Israel with porous borders, ringed by implacable enemies. This was only five years after one in every three Jews in the world were killed-among them all my relatives-every single one- leaving only my parents, my brother and some very distant relatives in America.

When our car broke down in Beersheba we heard the whir of airplanes above. They were in formation but small and looked as if they were held together with chewing gum and scotch tape. But, on the underside of the wings there was a Star of David, and my little brother began to jump up and down shouting “Jewish planes- Jewish Planes” and my father in true form stood at attention and saluted. He had been an army officer in Bolivia where we lived during the Holocaust.

Those little planes morphed into a state of the art Israel Defense Force able and ready to defend the Jewish people and offer us sanctuary from every harsh corner of the Diaspora.

And so, dear e-pals, the best answer and memorial to our martyred brethren is:Support Israel in every way proudly and defiantly. rsk

On Wednesday evening and Thursday, Israel marked Holocaust Remembrance Day—a somber and deeply authentic commemoration of the victims of the Nazi genocide. Ceremonies are held, places of entertainment are closed, and TV and radio almost solely offer Holocaust documentaries, discussions, and interviews with survivors.

This year’s commemoration was marred by an incident in Jerusalem on Wednesday evening in which a car hit two pedestrians. One of them, 25-year-old Shalom Yohai Sherki, was killed; the other, a 20-year-old woman, was seriously injured. Police now strongly suspect [1] that the driver of the car, a 37-year-old Palestinian Arab from the Jerusalem area, acted out of terrorist motives.

Among other things, they note that last fall saw a spate of car-ramming terror attacks [2] in the Jerusalem area.

If the incident was an attack, then it can be assumed to have been timed for Holocaust Remembrance Day—a ubiquitous phenomenon that, if you’re in Israel, you simply can’t miss.

The strange thing about Hillary Clinton’s lies is how many of them are petty and so easily exposed. Like the time she claimed to be named after Sir Edmund Hillary or claimed that Chelsea was jogging around the WTC during 9/11 or claimed that she landed at Kosovo under sniper fire.

This one may be the most baffling [1] of them all.

In Iowa on Wednesday, Clinton told a roundtable of small-business owners, “All my grandparents, you know, came over here, and you know my grandfather went to work in a lace mill in Scranton, Pennsylvania.”

Tens of thousands of Muslim migrants come from conflict zones to small towns and cities across America.
“This is a place of inspiring memories. Here less than a thousand men, inspired by the urge of freedom, defeated a superior force intrenched in this strategic position,” President Herbert Hoover said.

“This small band of patriots turned back a dangerous invasion.”

But no matter how often dangerous invasions are defeated, they come again.

The thousand men that Hoover spoke of gained their victory at the Battle of Kings Mountain. The Spartan Regiment that fought there when, as Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “All the Southern lands lay at the feet of the conquerors” and “There was not a single organized body of American troops left” gave their name to Spartanburg, South Carolina.

And now, Spartanburg faces a dangerous invasion with only a handful of patriots inspired by the urge of freedom to stand against it.

The invasion is a silent and secret one. The soldiers come as refugees funneled through ratlines [1] run by liberal churches and other pseudo-religious organizations. Tens of thousands of Muslim migrants [2] come from conflict zones to small towns and cities across the country just like Spartanburg each year.

Democrat dowager Hillary Clinton has had a rough few days since she launched her inevitable presidential campaign Sunday with a vapid, vacuous, class warfare-oriented video on YouTube that pushed all the right politically correct buttons.

Charles Krauthammer mocked [1] Mrs. Clinton and her ongoing tour of flyover country. She wants to get the big money out of politics, he said, but she is aiming to generate an unprecedented campaign war chest of $2.5 billion.

“She has been taking in money ever since she took the silverware from the White House when they left in 2001,” Krauthammer said. “I mean, it really is a stretch. I just find this rather amusing. This is her Marie Antoinette cake tour.”

“The problem with her is the inauthenticity has reached a point where nothing you see is believable,” the conservative columnist said. “Even if she were sincere about anything you wouldn’t be able to tell it.”

The disastrous campaign rollout ought to embolden other potential Democratic challengers such as former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and former Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.). It sends a message that no matter how ruthless and determined Mrs. Clinton may be, she’ll never be ready for prime time.

Time and again reports have surfaced from various sources along the U.S./Mexican border that is supposed to separate the United States from Mexico. On April 14, 2015 Judicial Watch posted a chilling report, “ISIS Camp a Few Miles from Texas, Mexican Authorities Confirm” [1] that was, purportedly based on information provided to Judicial Watch by a “Mexican Army field grade officer” and a Mexican Federal Police Inspector.

This is the report as posted by Judicial Watch:

ISIS is operating a camp just a few miles from El Paso, Texas, according to Judicial Watch sources that include a Mexican Army field grade officer and a Mexican Federal Police Inspector.

The exact location where the terrorist group has established its base is around eight miles from the U.S. border in an area known as “Anapra” situated just west of Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Another ISIS cell to the west of Ciudad Juárez, in Puerto Palomas, targets the New Mexico towns of Columbus and Deming for easy access to the United States, the same knowledgeable sources confirm.

The “state sponsors of terrorism list” is mandated under Section 6(j) of the Export Administration Act of 1979, as amended, under which the Secretary of State makes a determination when a country “has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism.” As explained in a report on “Cuba and the State Sponsors [1] of Terrorism List,” [1] prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) in 2005, “certain trade benefits, most foreign aid, support in the international financial institutions, and other benefits are restricted or denied to countries named as state sponsors of international terrorism.”

Cuba was placed on the list of state sponsors of terrorism during the first term of the Reagan administration in 1982 because of Cuba’s “efforts to promote armed revolution by organizations that used terrorism.” It has remained on the list ever since – until now.

Today is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust remembrance day. It’s a day to honor the Jews who fought their murderers and those who were unable to, and to note the dishonor of those who, while in no danger themselves, failed to act to protect their people.

It’s not enough to have a big emotional catharsis on Yom Hashoah, to cry about the children, mothers, fathers, poets, Torah sages and others who were murdered because of their Jewish blood.

It’s not enough for well-meaning Jewish organizations to put on plays and presentations to bring a sense of the Holocaust to safe and well-fed Jews who otherwise would have little understanding of it.

It’s not enough to present programs about lost shtetl life, Yiddish culture, Jewish food and hazzanut (I guarantee that NPR will broadcast segments full of pathos that will tear out the hearts of their listeners — before they cut to the news program in which they will misrepresent the efforts of today’s Jewish state to keep bloody history from repeating itself).

Saudi Arabia is building a 1000-kilometre wall to protect itself from the Islamic State — a bricks-and-mortar exercise in irony, as it is the Saudis who nurtured, financed and encouraged the same firebrands and zealots they are now frantic to exclude
Until 1975 Lebanon was one of the few prosperous places in the eastern Mediterranean. Its various ethnic and religious groups lived side by side in tolerance if not harmony. Then came the civil war, which lasted until 1990, and the country has been in decline, sometimes chaos, ever since.

The central contention of Robert G. Rabil’s Salafism in Lebanon is that Salafism (or Islamic fundamentalism) has “now emerged as a prominent ideological and political driver of the Sunni community” in Tripoli and surrounding rural districts of northern Lebanon. The power of today’s Sunni political and religious leaders “lies not only in their ability to mobilise their community and face off Hezbollah but also the identity, political authority and religious crisis engulfing Sunnism in Lebanon”. Critically, traditional Lebanese sectarianism, the civil war, the Palestinian camps, Syrian interventionism, a local version of Khomeinism (Hezbollah) and the Syrian Civil War have all contributed to the rise and rise of Salafism in Lebanon, and yet in themselves they do not constitute a sufficient explanation for the growth of Islamic revivalism.