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Douglas Hassall :The Australian Monuments Men……. (Very interesting History ) *****

Entirely overlooked by the Hollywood scriptwriters whose recent movie hailed the military unit that saved great works of art from Europe’s rubble in the dying days of the World War II, Tom Dunbabin and John McDonnell deserve not merely to to be remembered but celebrated.
Aeneas John Lindsay McDonnell (1904–64) was born in Toowoomba and educated at Cranbrook School in Sydney, where he developed his early interest in art. In 1928 he joined in the partnership which ran the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. He had a particular interest in French art and architecture, spoke fluent French and travelled widely. He later became private secretary to the Governor of Queensland. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the Red Cross in April 1940, serving in Africa and the Middle East until 1943. In May 1944, he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force and was commissioned as a lieutenant and then seconded to special duty with the British forces.

Owing to his expertise in art and his fluency in French, he was then assigned to the Civil Affairs Division of the Allied Armies as an Australian representative to the SHAEF Mission to France in early 1945. “At SHAEF Headquarters in London, McDonnell was tasked with creating the MFAA (Commission on Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives) Handbook for France alongside Monuments Officers Walter Hancock and Bancel LaFarge.” The MFAA was established by a directive of President Roosevelt:

to protect cultural artifacts and monuments from war damage [and] then afterwards, [to] repatriate cultural treasures stolen by the Nazis to their rightful owners when and where possible. [It] was comprised of about 350 to 400 men and women who were trained as museum directors, curators, art historians and educators. From 1943 till the cessation of hostilities, officers of MFAA saved and protected countless cultural artifacts, monuments and churches across Western Europe.

The MFAA’s work has been described in L.H. Nicholas’s The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (1994) and by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter in The Monuments Men (2010). McDonnell’s service as a Monuments Officer took him throughout the American and British Zones in Occupied Europe. In May 1945 he was with Lieutenant Commander Charles Kuhn, Deputy Adviser to the MFAA, during the ten-day inspection of Nazi art repositories in Germany. At Altaussee, McDonnell examined the Ghent Altarpiece by Van Eyck and the Bruges Madonna by Michelangelo. He also saw the very large collection of looted French art stored by the Nazis at the Schloss Neuschwanstein. He headed the first conference of the Archivists of the British Zone held at Bunde in 1946.

mcdonnellMcDonnell (left) was appointed an Officer of the Legion of Honour by the French government and was awarded the Australian Service Medal, the British War Medal (with the Mentioned in Despatches Oakleaf), and the France and Germany Star. His decorations set is now in the collection of the Australian War Memorial.

After his discharge in January, 1947, with the honorary rank of lieutenant-colonel, McDonnell was appointed to be the London adviser to the Felton Bequest for the benefit of the National Gallery of Victoria, in which capacity he served until his untimely death in 1964. He worked closely with Sir Kenneth Clark and other art historians in London and on the Continent, on the Bequest’s campaign to augment the collections of the NGV. Among the major works the NGV acquired through the Felton Bequest during McDonnell’s time as its London adviser were paintings by Poussin, Rembrandt and Gainsborough, as well as the collection of Albrecht Durer prints amassed by Sir Thomas Barlow of Manchester.

McDonnell was one of the two Australians who served with the Allied “Monuments Men” in Europe from 1943 to 1947. The other was Thomas James Dunbabin (1911–55) a classical scholar and archaeologist who served with SOE on Crete (alongside Patrick Leigh Fermor) from 1942 to 1945, after which he worked in Athens as the Director of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the Allied Forces in Greece. Later, he returned to Oxford University, becoming Reader in Classical Archaeology and All Souls Bursar in 1950. His best-known published work is The Western Greeks: The History of Sicily and South Italy from the Foundation of the Greek Colonies to 480 BC (1948). Dunbabin died of pancreatic cancer at the age of only forty-four on March 31, 1955.

dunbabinDunbabin (right) was born in Tasmania, the son of the celebrated Australian journalist Thomas Dunbabin. He was educated at Sydney Church of England Grammar School and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. As Derby Scholar in 1933, he travelled extensively in Sicily and southern Italy and by 1936 was already the youthful Director of the British School at Athens.

The French-Obama-Arab-UN Attack in the Offing and the Way Out: Anne Bayefsky

President Obama has gone rogue and only one man can protect American democracy in the next few days: the President-elect.

On January 15, 2017, with only five days left after 2,917 days in office, President Barack Obama is planning once again to feed Israel to the international wolves. The move is intended to tie the hands of President Donald Trump and is a direct repudiation of the will of the American electorate who rejected Obama’s calamitous foreign policy and a repeat performance by his secretary of state.

On Sunday, France is scheduled to hold an international conference to unleash an international mob on Israel. The meeting is taking place with Obama’s direct connivance. Seventy-states have been lined up to impose their preferences on the Middle East’s only democracy. Israelis are still dying in Israeli streets after seventy years of unending Arab terror – and the folks sitting in Paris munching on croissants know best how to protect Israeli national security.

The bare-faced power-grab by France and its Arab allies – with the blessing of President Obama – raises unavoidable questions: Who will attend? If they attend, how senior a representative will be sent by the main players on the Security Council: the U.S., Russia, and the United Kingdom? Will attendees sign on to an outcome document imperiling Israel that is already circulating? Will the Middle East Quartet – composed of the U.S., the EU, Russia and the UN – approve of the outcome document? Will a UN Security Council subsequently approve of the outcome document before January 20, 2017?

The French meeting follows on President Obama helping to ram through a UN Security Council resolution on December 23, 2016 that was clearly intended to unleash a legal and economic pogrom against the Jewish state. It didn’t take long for Palestinian terrorists to get the message: sidelining a negotiated solution between the parties by strong-arming an Israeli villain at the UN was a greenlight for the enforcers in Gaza City and Ramallah.

President Obama’s collusion on round-two jettisons decades of bipartisan policy prioritizing a negotiated path to Arab-Israeli peace, and flies in the face of overwhelming bipartisan opposition in Congress reconfirmed by the House just last week. Since the point of this flurry of international activity by UN-firsters is to scuttle and deny President Trump’s foreign policy remit, would-be participants in the French mugging of the Jewish state need to know – now – what they should expect five days later on January 20, 2017.

How Putin Unmasked Erdogan’s Tough Guy Show by Burak Bekdil

There was only leader who knew in which language to talk to Erdogan: Vladimir Putin. In November 2015, two Turkish F-16 jets shot down a Russian Su-24. Ankara said that as part of the new rules of engagement, any foreign plane violating Turkish airspace would be shot down. Putin immediately downgraded diplomatic relations, announced scores of punishing economic sanctions but, more importantly, he promised that the price Turkey would have to pay would not be limited to the economy and trade.

Erdogan panicked. He sent envoy after envoy to normalize ties with Russia. Moscow demanded an apology, which in mid-2016 Erdogan offered to Putin. Since then, Erdogan has been behaving like a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, led by Russia and China.

Erdogan’s balancing act has been successful because his Western counterparts were too naïve in deciphering him and his real political motives. He keeps fighting until the end, so long as he does not perceive or face any imminent major political or economic threat to his rule.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, until a few years ago, could astonish. Now the pattern of his primary political strategy boringly repeats itself.

The pattern started in 2009 with Erdogan’s shocking tirade against then Israeli President Shimon Peres. “When it comes to killing,” Erdogan told Peres at the Davos meeting, “You know very well how to kill.” In the following years, that romantic neighbourhood-bully behaviour against major powers added to his popularity at home — in addition to the anti-Zionist rhetoric and Jew-bashing that boosted his popularity both at home and on the Arab Street.

The target “tyrant” did not have to be non-Muslim. “Dictator Sisi” — his reference to Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and the “Tyrant, murderer of Damascus” — his reference to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are still common currency.

Sydney M. Williams Thought of the Day “Aleppo”

There is, perhaps, no better metaphor to describe the failure of the West in terms of a Middle East foreign policy than the tragedy that is Aleppo, its consequence for the people of Syria, and the refuge crisis it unleashed on Jordan, Turkey and Europe. It opened the door for Russia, emboldened Iran and further divided and already divided Middle East between Sunnis led by Saudi Arabia and Shiites by Iran.

The bombing ceased in mid-December, but atrocities continued as Bashar al-Assad’s forces swept through former rebel strongholds in the eastern part of Aleppo. The battle for the city began a month before President Obama proclaimed on August 20, 2012: “…that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” Thirteen hundred tons of chemicals were subsequently removed, but not before Syrian helicopters launched at least two attacks using Chlorine gas, a chemical first used as a weapon by the German army in the First World War during the Second Battle of Ypres. We allowed that “red line” to become a sea of blood.

Syria’s civil war masked the arrival of ISIS. Distinguishing between rebels who wanted out from the oppression of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorial control and ISIS fighters whose aim is a despotic caliphate is difficult. That confusion aids ISIS. The year 2011 gave rise to the “Arab Spring.” Democratic-leaning forces (or, rather, different totalitarian forces) toppled the heads of Libya, Yemen, Tunisia and Egypt that spring. In March of that year, peaceful protests began in Syria. President al-Assad responded by imprisoning thousands and killing hundreds of demonstrators. Nevertheless, by July military defectors had formed the Free Syrian Army, whose aim was to overthrow the Syrian government. Civil war had come to Syria.

Aleppo is an ancient city, located in northwest Syria near the Turkish border. Before the First World War, it was the capital of Aleppo Province, which then bordered the Mediterranean. Prior to the current civil war, it was Syria’s largest city, with 2.3 million people (more than 10% of Syria’s pre-war population), and it was the country’s commercial hub. It is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, dating back thousands of years. Excavations at Tell as-Sawda show the area was occupied 3000 years before the birth of Christ. The city was a strategic trading center between Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the Mediterranean, which lies 75 miles to the west. The Province was the western terminus of the Silk Road, which passed through central Asia and Mesopotamia, on its way to the Mediterranean. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, trade was diverted to the sea and Aleppo began a long decline in terms of its commercial significance.

A Muslim Murder Spree in Canada’s Capital Muslim migration carries a heavy price. Daniel Greenfield

Canada’s capital is a small sleepy city of less than a million. Its average annual murder rate is only 10. That’s a weekend in Chicago. But last year something strange happened to Ottawa’s murder rate.

It shot up to 24 homicides.

The last two murders were of Somali Muslim sisters Asma and Nasiba. Their murderer was their brother, Musab A-Noor. Despite the obvious history of Muslim honor killings of women, often carried out by brothers against their sisters, Musab was found “unfit” to stand trial. A director at the Somali Centre for Family Services insisted that Somali settlers in the city need more mental health funding.

Something certainly seems to be needed.

There were an estimated 66,000 Muslim settlers in the Ottawa – Gatineau metropolitan area. Despite forming some 5 percent of the population, they are startlingly overrepresented in Ottawa’s murders.

2016 in Ottawa ended with a Muslim murder in December and it began with a Muslim murder in January. Mohamed Najdi was killed by five other Muslim men. Mohamed had probably been shot in connection with the 2015 shooting of yet another Muslim man by an accused killer named Mohammad.

And we mustn’t confuse Mohamed with Mohammad.

The other Mohammad, a Kuwaiti immigrant, had been a suspect in multiple shootings the previous year and had spent two years in prison for sexual assault.

At January’s end, Marwan Arab, Ottawa’s second homicide victim, was shot, along with his cousin. Both men were members of the Algonquin Muslim Students Association. One of the Arab cousins allegedly had links to a terror suspect. The shooting led to more arrests of Muslims for plotting another attack.

In March, Christina Voelzing became Ottawa’s sixth murder victim. The 24-year-old Algonquin college student was murdered by her ex-boyfriend Behnam Yaali. Yaali, a drug smuggler, was represented by a lawyer who also specializes in refugee law.

Twenty-four hours after almost being allowed to walk free after pleading guilty to robbery, Idris Abdulgani was arrested for murdering Lonnie Leafloor, a 56-yearold former truck driver, by stabbing him in the back of the neck.

And that was Ottawa’s seventh murder.

The Islamization of Britain in 2016 “The realistic future for Britain is Islamic.” by Soeren Kern

Sharia courts administering Islamic justice in Britain are run by clerics who believe some offenders should have their hands chopped off, according to Muslim scholar Elham Manea. She described the prevailing attitude as “totalitarian” and as more backward than some parts of Pakistan.

Teaching children fundamental British values is an act of “cultural supremacism,” according to the National Union of Teachers, which wants to replace the concept with one that includes “international rights.”

More than 100,000 British Muslims sympathize with suicide bombers and people who commit other terrorist acts, according to a 615-page survey. Only one in three British Muslims (34%) would contact the police if they believed that somebody close to them had become involved with radical Islam. In addition, 23% of British Muslims said Islamic Sharia law should replace British law in areas with large Muslim populations.

Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London has become “like a jihadi training camp,” according to testimony from a former inmate. The government was accused of burying a report on prison extremism. The report warned that staff have been reluctant to tackle Islamist behavior for fear of being labelled “racist.”

Residents in Manchester received leaflets in their mailboxes, from a Muslim group called “Public Purity,” calling for a public ban on dogs.

Voter fraud has been deliberately overlooked in Muslim communities because of “political correctness,” according to a government report.

Police in Telford — dubbed the child sex capital of Britain — were accused of covering up allegations that hundreds of children in the town were sexually exploited by Pakistani sex gangs.

The Muslim population of Britain surpassed 3.5 million in 2016 to become around 5.5% of the overall population of 64 million, according to figures extrapolated from a recent study on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe. In real terms, Britain has the third-largest Muslim population in the European Union, after France, then Germany.

The growth of Britain’s Muslim population can be attributed to immigration, high birth rates and conversions to Islam.

Islam and Islam-related issues, omnipresent in Britain during 2016, can be categorized into five broad themes: 1) Islamic extremism and the security implications of British jihadists in Syria and Iraq; 2) the continuing spread of Islamic Sharia law in Britain; 3) the sexual exploitation of British children by Muslim gangs; 4) Muslim integration into British society; and 5) the failures of British multiculturalism.

A Call on All Christians to Defend Their Birthplace and the Homeland of the Jewish People by Petra Heldt

We need ensure that the Old City of Jerusalem, the heart of Judaism for more than 3,000 years and the seat of Christianity for 2,000 years, will not be allowed to be Islamic as part of what would soon be an Islamic country, and very likely a terrorist one. In such a state, all polls show that the next vote will be to install Hamas.

Based on the Hamas Charter that denies Israel’s right to exist, the vote could complete eliminating Jewish — and Christian — history and replacing it with Islam.

What drives Western politicians to be servants aiding the destruction of Judeo-Christian culture in the Middle East and Europe? Why does the Paris peace conference prepare for the destruction of the Jewish State while Christians are murdered in Muslim countries in historically unparalleled numbers?

Christians will not be silent when all these places will be voted to go to those who will destroy them — as they destroyed Palmyra, Antioch, Nisibis, Niniveh, and in late 2014, Iraq’s oldest Christian monastery, St. Elijah, leveled by the Islamic State.

The streets of Paris must hear the protests against the attempted rewriting of history at the peace conference and any subsequent Security Council vote. Such protestors are like “a man who would built up the wall and stand in front of God in the gap on behalf of the Land” (Ezekiel 22:30) — so that the only bastion of democracy, the very defender of Christianity, the last keeper of Judeo-Christian heritage in the Middle East and Europe will continue to prosper.

Christians’ collective consciousness must stop the planned peace conference in Paris on January 15-17, and prevent the presumably intended UN Security Council (UNSC) vote on a Palestinian State as a 22nd Muslim state, in the midst of the one Jewish State. We need to ensure that there will be no capitulation to the Islamization of the Middle East and Europe. We need to ensure that the Old City of Jerusalem, the heart of Judaism for more than 3,000 years and the seat of Christianity for 2,000 years, will not be allowed to be Islamic as part of what would soon be an Islamic state, and very likely a terrorist one. In such a state, all polls show, the next vote will be to install the terrorist group Hamas. That would mean the eventual destruction of all Judeo-Christian heritage, as we have been seeing throughout the Middle East.

Peter Smith The Dar al-Islam Demographic

The face of failure, according to officialdom, is a Muslim immigrant with a bona fide visa blowing people up. This is a blinkered perception, as it is not explosive Islamists who represent the greatest threat, but the West’s mute acceptance of a culture and mores antithetical to our own.
Said Turkey’s President Erdogan after the New Year Islamic terrorist attack in Istanbul, “They are trying to trying to create terror, to demoralise our people and destabilise our country…we will retain our cool-headedness…and we will never give ground to such dirty games.” After each Islamist terrorist atrocity, in whatever country, we are told by an array of political leaders and men and women in the street that “we” won’t be cowed. The terrorists will win, we are told, if they succeed in their aim of getting us to change our behaviour. What a lot of old rope this all is.

Why does anyone believe the terrorists are so dim-witted that they think their attacks will seriously disrupt the normal business of everyday life? During the Blitz in Britain people got on with their lives. They did keep calm and carry on. Was this heroic? I don’t think so. Exactly what else could people do? It would quickly wear you out if you started running around in a panic, and claustrophobia and hunger would wreak havoc if you remained locked indoors under the bed. And my point is exactly what?

My point is that Islamic terrorist attacks have no ulterior motive. The motive is that they want to kill infidels, as instructed by their scripture. (That is, those parts of it that Western apologists seem not to want to read.) That is it, full stop, end of story. Their end game is to take over. But this, they recognise, will not be accomplished by terrorist attacks. Such attacks, tragic though they are for the victims and their families, are trivial in the scheme of things. They are needle pricks on an elephant.

Hold on, I might be wrong. I am wrong. There is an ulterior motive to terrorist attacks; though I seriously doubt that it is appreciated by suicide bombers and their ilk. Terrorist attacks are a classic diversionary tactic.

Donald Trump talks about “extreme vetting”. What is the purpose of such vetting? When I have heard it being discussed, its purpose, apparently, is to ensure that terrorists are not let in through the front door. Politicians, security services, police forces, and immigration officials are singularly focussed on this objective. The face of failure is a Muslim immigrant, with a bona fide visa, blowing people up. This blinkers our perception of the existential threat which has nothing to do with Islamic nut jobs blowing people up. Al-Hijra (immigration) and fecundity are the real interconnected weapons of mass (cultural) destruction.

Muslims stream into the West and multiply, without the slightest inclination among 99%-plus of them to deliver death with a bomb, gun, knife or truck. In fact, many are fleeing Islamic death dealers. You have to admire the sheer chutzpah and wizardry of it. ‘More Muslims than infidels are killed by Muslim extremists’ is the conventional narrative and therefore must flee in vast numbers to Dar al-Harb (effectively the West), where they erect mosques and don hijabs to embrace the very same creed out of which supremacism, intolerance, hate and terrorism inevitably spew forth.

And all the while this happens, feeble-minded apologists tell us how peaceful and moderate are most Muslims. Sure they are, but they will still be out flag-waving as and when each Western city and country succumbs to the Muslim majority and becomes part of the house of Islam (Dar al-Islam).

Daryl McCann Jerusalem Bound?

The last time Arabs ruled eastern Jerusalem and the Old City all but one of the Jewish Quarter’s 35 synagogues was demolished, a fact John Kerry prefers not to mention. Trump’s pledge to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv would end the prospect of history repeating itself.
As a candidate in the 2016 election season Donald Trump often talked of moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It was easy enough to dismiss. After all, both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had made the same promise before winning the White House.

This time around might be different. For a start, David Friedman sounds like a very different kind of U.S. ambassador to Israel. Here’s Friedman responding to Trump endorsing him for the post: “I intend to work tirelessly to strengthen the unbreakable bond between our two countries and advance the cause of peace within the region, and look forward to doing this from the U.S. embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.”

Should the United States relocate its embassy to Jerusalem? A lot of opinion in Australia is against it, although Tony Abbott saw merit in the idea. Australia joining a move by President Trump to shift its embassy to Jerusalem could “demonstrate its unswerving support for Israel, as the Middle East’s only liberal, pluralist democracy”. Members of the Turnbull government rebuffed “talkative” Abbott’s latest idea. Shifting the embassy would exacerbate an already problematic situation, especially with regards to the “two-state solution”. Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce referred to Abbott’s comments as “not helpful”, while Foreign Minister Julie Bishop gave her former leader short shrift: “The Australian government does not have any plans to move the Australian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.”

Greg Barton, professor in global Islamic studies at Deakin University, made this case for retaining the status quo:

“The future of Israel for Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis and for people living on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank depends upon trust and negotiation…If we went ahead and moved our embassy, following suit after the Americans to Jerusalem, we would be closing off doors of opportunity to play that mediating role.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s, not surprisingly, took an even harder line, and warned that changing the US embassy would unleash a “crisis we will not be able to come out from” for “the peace process in the Middle East and even peace in the world”. Departing Secretary of State John Kerry appeared to be reading from the same script, characterising the planned embassy change as dangerous: “You’d have an explosion, an explosion in the region, not just in the West Bank, and perhaps in Israel itself, but throughout the region.”

But so many explosions are already taking place in the Middle East and none have anything to do with the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Syria’s civil war alone has resulted resulting in as many as 470,000 deaths. Perhaps this outgoing secretary of state might have found better things to do than trying to foist on Mahmoud Abbas a Palestinian mini-state (the West Bank and East Jerusalem) instead of his real goal, a fully-fledged Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

The Palestinian Authority has played John Kerry for a fool. The latest version of Mahmoud Abbas’ polemic naturally enough features UN Resolution 2334 and its call for East Jerusalem – including the Jewish Quarter in the Old City – to be the capital of an independent Palestinian state. According to Abbas, at any rate, it would now be “hypocritical” of the US government to move its embassy before all Israeli-Palestinian territorial disputes, not least any final agreement on Jerusalem, are resolved. John Kerry – again – is on the same page as Mahmoud Abbas: “If all of a sudden Jerusalem is declared to be the location of our embassy, that has issues of sovereignty, issues of law that would deem to be affected by that move…”

Theresa May Says Britain Will Make Definitive Break With EU Brexit strategy isn’t ‘muddled,’ British prime minister says By Jenny Gross

LONDON—U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May said Britain would make a definitive break with the European Union while still seeking to negotiate the best possible access to the bloc’s common market.

“Often people talk in terms as if somehow we are leaving the EU, but we still want to kind of keep bits of membership of the EU,” Mrs. May said in an interview with Sky News. “We are leaving. We are coming out,” she said, adding that London still “wants the best possible deal” in terms of trade.

Mrs. May reiterated earlier comments that the U.K. would have control over its borders once outside the EU. She declined to say whether she would prioritize curbing immigration over market access.
EU leaders say the U.K. must allow free movement of people from across the EU if it wants access to the tariff-free single market. Many British lawmakers say membership in the single market is crucial for Britain’s economy.

Mrs. May has faced renewed pressure over the past week from critics who have questioned whether the British government has clear aims in Brexit negotiations, which are due to start by the end of March.

Ivan Rogers, the U.K.’s top diplomat in Brussels, on Tuesday resigned unexpectedly and wrote in a letter to staff that he hoped colleagues would continue to challenge “muddled thinking.”

“Our thinking on this isn’t muddled at all,” Mrs. May said in Sunday’s interview. “We will be outside the European Union but we will get the best possible deal for the U.K. in terms of our trading relationship with the European Union.” CONTINUE AT SITE