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HISTORY

From Islam’s Shahada To Communism’s Credo: Shared Totalitarian “Religious” Visions Andrew Bostom

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2019/06/from-islams-shahada-to-communisms-credo-shared-totalitarian-religious-visions/

A century ago, in April, 1918, the Burlington Vermont Daily News, captured, unintentionally, the quintessential, shared ideological roots of Neo-Marxist Bernie Sanders’ Red [Communism]- Green [Islam] Alliance, foreshadowing the ugly consequences of this nexus:

 “[M]any of the Protestant churches in Germany are no more than empty shells. This lack of horizon, spiritually speaking, has led to the growth of socialism to a marked degree in Germany. Karl Marx was its founder and its slogan is ‘There is no God, and Karl Marx is his prophet.’”

Even earlier, five years before the October, 1917 Bolshevik Revolution would begin to impose Communist totalitarianism on Russia, Henry C. Vedder, observed in his 1912 study of Socialism, that the Marxist Social Labor Federation of Britain had adopted Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” [Capital] as their infallible authority, “an article of faith from which they will permit no dissent, on pain of excommunication.”  Vedder, a Professor of Church History at the Upland, Pennsylvania Crozer Theological Seminary, added that this British Marxist organization rejected the orthodoxy of its own votaries unless they too professed as their credo, “There is no God, and Karl Marx is his prophet.”— mirroring the Islamic declaration of faith (p.730), or “shahada”—“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.”

Late doyen of Islamic studies, Bernard Lewis, had erroneously attributed the origins of this Communist profession of faith to an unnamed mid-20th century “humorist” in his 1954 essay, “Communism and Islam”. Despite that rather egregious error—attributing the established, obligatory creed of humorless Marxists, some four decades after the fact, to a witty quip by some anonymous comic—Lewis did keenly point out how this statement highlighted “real affinity” between Islamic and Communist totalitarianism, a theme his essay developed quite well, and at some length.

A Century of Disorder By:Srdja Trifkovic |

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/a-century-of-disorder/

A hundred years ago, on June 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed in the illustrious Hall of Mirrors, the same spot where the German Empire was proclaimed in January 1871. It was the most ambitious gathering of its kind in history. Leaders and diplomats of 27 nations convened to establish a new order and make the world “safe for democracy,” as President Woodrow Wilson had summarized America’s war aims in his message to Congress two years earlier.

Far from reestablishing a solid new order after over four years of carnage and destruction, the Treaty was deeply flawed from the outset. It produced an unstable system which lacked legitimacyin the eyes of the vanquished states, especially Germany. This hindered their prospects of eventual integration into the new order, or even their willingness to try doing so in good faith. Perhaps it could not have been otherwise:

The war had been of such magnitude – affecting so many lives directly, creating both domestic and international divisions, and engendering insatiable expectations of the peace – that the peacemakers were all but impotent to deal sensibly with its consequences. This was not a settlement in which the peacemakers carelessly let the opportunity for consensus–building slip through their fingers: the basic problem of Versailles was that no such consensus could possibly be found.

“Versailles” contained the seeds of another, even more destructive war a generation later. On the centennial of the convening of the conference I wrote an article for the print edition of Chronicles(“A Century of Disorder,” January 2019) dealing with the Treaty’s shortcomings and their consequences. Today’s anniversary calls for a rewrite and more detailed treatment of some key themes. The subject is relevant in our own time: since the end of the Cold War, the bipartisan “foreign policy community” in Washington has been trying to create and uphold an international system based on America’s self-proclaimed authority to impose the universal regime of “benevolent global hegemony.”

The Fog of Youth: The Cornell Student Takeover, 50 Years On written by Tony Fels

https://quillette.com/2019/06/25/the-fog-of-youth-the-cornell-student-takeover-50-years-on/

On April 20, 1969, an era of student rebellions that had rocked American campuses at Berkeley, Columbia, San Francisco State, and Harvard reached a culmination of sorts with the triumphant exit of armed black students from Cornell’s Willard Straight student union building after a two-day occupation. The students had just won sweeping concessions from the university’s administration, including a pledge to urge faculty governing bodies to nullify reprimands of several members of the Afro-American Society (AAS) for previous campus disruptions on behalf of starting up a black studies program, judicial actions that had prompted the takeover. White student supporters cheered the outcome. And when the faculty, at an emergency meeting attended by 1,200 professors, initially balked at the administration’s request to overturn the reprimands, the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) led a body that grew to six thousand students in a three-day possession of the university’s Barton gymnasium. Amid threats of violence by and against the student activists, the faculty, in a series of tumultuous meetings, voted to reverse themselves, allowing the crisis to end. Student protestors claimed victory for a blow successfully dealt to what they held to be a racist institution.

This positive interpretation of the meaning of the Cornell events has surprisingly remained mostly in place among the left-leaning participants (all within the SDS orbit) with whom I have kept in touch over the past 50 years. Most other former New Leftists whom I have spoken with or who have written about the crisis see it roughly the same way. One might have thought that decades of personal maturation would have produced profound doubts about the wisdom of such extreme actions taken when we were still in, or just past, our teenage years.

The continuity in interpretation by former SDSers is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that the nation at large took a distinctly critical view of the same events right from the start. Most Americans immediately recoiled at the sight of the widely reproduced image, captured in a Pulitzer prize-winning photograph, of the bandolier-wearing student leading the Willard Straight Hall activists, rifles at their side, out of the building. Headlines describing Cornell’s “capitulation” and “disgrace” typified national news coverage. Among 4,000 letters written to Cornell’s top administrators after the crisis, under five percent viewed the administrators’ actions favorably, and the student rebellion no doubt helped reinforce the country’s shift toward conservative dominance that had begun the previous November with the election of Richard Nixon. Yet through this immediate aftermath and on into the future, most of the aging participants have shown little evidence of rethinking.

Nazis Killed Her Father. Then She Fell in Love With One. By Katrin Bennhold

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/business/reimann

Their billionaire descendants, who control Krispy Kreme, Stumptown and other brands, are grappling with the exposure of an unspeakable secret. Emilie Landecker, circa 1961. Her Jewish father, Alfred, was killed by the Nazis. When her children asked about the family’s roots, she would admonish them to stop talking about “that old stuff.”

1. Such appalling events

Emilie Landecker was 19 when she went to work for Benckiser, a German company that made industrial cleaning products and also took pride in cleansing its staff of non-Aryan elements.

It was 1941. Ms. Landecker was half Jewish and terrified of deportation. Her new boss, Albert Reimann Jr., was an early disciple of Adolf Hitler and described himself as an “unconditional follower” of Nazi race theory.

Somehow, inexplicably, they fell in love.

The story of Ms. Landecker, whose Jewish father was murdered by the Nazis, and Mr. Reimann, whose fervent Nazism and abuse of forced laborers did not stop his family from attaining colossal wealth after the war, is a tale of death and devotion and human contradictions. It is also a tale of modern-day corporate atonement.

Decades after World War II, Benckiser evolved into one of the largest consumer goods conglomerates on the planet. Known today as JAB Holding Company and still controlled by the Reimann family, it is worth more than $20 billion and owns Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Peet’s Coffee, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Pret A Manger, Keurig and other breakfast brands.

The relationship between Mr. Reimann and Ms. Landecker was for many years a secret. He was married, but had no children with his wife. He and Ms. Landecker had three, and he adopted them in the 1960s; today, two of them own a combined stake in JAB of about 45 percent. For decades, they say, they did not know about their father’s Nazism and the abuses that took place at the company they inherited: The female forced laborers who had to stand at attention outside their barracks naked. A prisoner of war who was kicked out of a bomb shelter and died.

Norman Borlaugh: The man who helped feed the world By Tim Harford

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47643456?utm_source=pocket-newtab

In the early 1900s, newlyweds Cathy and Cappy Jones left Connecticut in the US to start a new life as farmers in north-west Mexico’s Yaqui Valley, a little-known dry and dusty place, a few hundred kilometres south of the Arizona border.

When Cappy died in 1931, Cathy decided to stay on. By then she had a new neighbour: the Yaqui Valley Experiment Station, a grand agricultural research centre with impressive stone pillars, and cleverly designed irrigation canals.

For a while, the centre raised cattle, sheep and pigs, and grew oranges, figs and grapefruit.

But by 1945, the fields were overgrown, the fences fallen and the windows shattered. The station was infested with rats.

So when Cathy heard strange rumours about a young American man setting up camp in this dilapidated place – despite the lack of electricity, sanitation, or running water – she drove over to investigate.

There she found the Rockefeller Foundation’s Norman E Borlaug, who was trying to breed wheat which could resist stem rust, a disease that ruined many crops.

EDWARD CLINE: ORIANA FALLACI REMEMBERED

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

An essential history lesson from the great Oriana Fallaci that should be required study in all schools. If enough people actually understood what Islam means in practice, there would be no tolerance for it and it would, finally, be relegated to the dustbin of history along with evils like Nazism. Read it all:

“LESSON OF HISTORY
In 635 AD, that is, three years after the death of Mohammed, the army of the Holy Crescent invaded Christian Syria and Christian Palestine.

In 638 they took Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. 

In 640, seizing Persia, Armenia and Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), they invaded Christian Egypt and conquered the Christian Maghreb, that is, modern Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
In 668 they first attacked Constantinople and besieged it for five years.

In 711 they crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and landed on the highly Catholic Iberian Peninsula, crushing Portugal and Spain, where, despite the resistance of the heroic warriors of Pelayo, Sid Campeador and others, they remained as much as eight centuries.

And the one who believes in “peaceful coexistence that marked the relationship between conquerors and conquered” let him re-read stories about burned abbeys and monasteries, desecrated churches, raped nuns, Christian and Jewish women who were locked in their harems.

Let him remember about those crucified in Cordoba, hanged in Granada, beheaded in Toledo and Barcelona, Seville and Zamora. (The decapitation in Seville was ordered by Mutamid: he used these severed heads of Jews and Christians to decorate his palace. In Zamora, heads were cut at the order of Almanzur, the vizier who is known as the “patron of philosophers and the greatest leader of Islamic Spain”! 

Saying the name of Jesus meant instant execution. Crucifixion, of course, or decapitation, or hanging, or impalement. The same followed those who dared to ring the bell. The same for wearing green, which belonged exclusively to Islam. When a Muslim passed by, every Jew and Christian was obliged to step aside and worship. And woe to that Jew or Christian who dared to respond to an insult from a Muslim. As for that widely advertised detail, that the unfaithful dogs were not obliged to convert to Islam and they were not even pushed towards it, do you know why they were not pushed? 

“Omar Amin” von Leers and the Islamization of Nazism by Andrew Bostom

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24000

Exclusive: How a Nazi disciple of the Mufti of Jerusalem converted to Islam and embraced the millenium-old Muslim ideology of destroying the West by Jihad.

Johannes “Omar Amin” von Leers (d. 1965), was a Nazi disciple of Hajj Amin el-Husseiniwho converted to Islam, found a haven in Egypt, and embraced a 1300 year-old ideology to destroy the Judeo-Christian West—Islamic jihad.

Sixty-four years ago, June 8, 1955, while still in exile in Argentina, Leers wrote a letter to W.E.B. DuBois, extolling Islam and African Muslim soldiers under WWI-era German colonial governance, as follows:  

“[The] German administration was openly in favor of Islam. No African became a color sergeant in the Askari Army [i.e., African soldiers fighting under German colonial leadership] who was not a steadfast Moslem. And also in Cameroon the Germans never forgot to give power and dignities to the Moslem Amirs of the North. The Germans were convinced Islam makes good soldiers and reliable men—and that a Moslem does not drink alcohol and therefore can be used for positions of confidence. An uncle of mine who was for a long time [an] officer in the Askari Army told me, when I was a boy, ‘You must know that Islam is the best religion for soldiers. By disgrace of history, we Germans have not go it [Islam] and now cannot change the situation. ..[I]n Africa, a negro converted religion often becomes the ape of the European, imitating him in his worst aspects—but Islam makes him a noble African with a feeling of his own dignity. As an officer I like better a noble African on my side in the battle, than an ape of mine.”

As I noted in my 2013 analysis of the first fully annotated English translation of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s 1937 fatwa on the Jews—which re-affirms canonical Islam’s Jew-hating motifs used to foment murderous violence against them by Muhammad himself, since the advent of Islam, and till now—this seminal proclamation of incitement by the “Godfather” of the Palestinian Muslim movement, was pure Islamic dogma, devoid of any themes from the writings of Nazi racial theorists epitomized by von Leers’ 1936, “History on a Racial Basis”.

My Father’s D-Day Memories By Karin McQuillan

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/05/my-fathers-d-day-memories/

D-Day is more than a remembrance of America’s great victory in the Battle of Normandy. It is a celebration of the Greatest Generation and the lessons they have to teach us.

Like Jews repeating the story of the Passover every year for 3,000 years, we must recall the story of this generation’s great deeds, or we will lose some idea of who we are, why we are here, and what we are capable of achieving. Indeed, if we don’t remember what our fathers knew, we will lose our country.

My beloved father, who passed away two years ago at 98-years-old, was a typical member of the greatest generation. Phil Schultz was eternally optimistic, fearless, hard-working, a responsible family man and provider, and patriotic to his core. He achieved the American Dream, not through selfishness or callousness but rather through family loyalty, taking care of those closest to him, and believing in himself. It was the same ability to pull together and have confidence in victory that gave our country the stamina to win World War II, and later let my Dad realize his personal dream of being a professional cameraman.

If only the Millennials and Generation Z could share in his life experiences and wisdom for just a moment, their world would be transformed.

The Lessons and Legacy of D-Day By Perry Gershon

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/the_lessons_and_legacy_of_dday.html

This week, we will celebrate the daring, courage and sacrifice of 73,000 young Americans who hit the beaches of Normandy, Omaha and Utah — on June 6, 1944, 75 years ago.  Those who lived to come home are now in their 90s.  While we have this extraordinary generation till among us, this is the year, month, and day to reach out and thank them.  It is also a moment to think about what the day means for us.

The assault, named “Operation Overlord,” was epic – enormous in size, significance, and tragic cost.  On the beaches of Normandy France, in a moment of profound resolve, faith, military commitment, and patriotism, which boils down to love of country, town, family, and freedom – these boys from across America risked all for us. 

Had they not done so, the freedoms and prosperity we take as a birthright daily would not be ours; if by some stretch America had survived and endured at all, we would be an island in an ocean of unthinkable darkness. 

These boys knew that the fight was all or nothing, win or freedom perishes, prevail against the evil that had taken Europe, or allow something to stand that could not.  So they gave it their all. 

That invasion – which the Nazis thought they could halt on the beach – is what made freeing Europe possible.  But it did not come without enormous human cost – both in those lost on that day and in the memories and horrors experienced, which lasted a lifetime for those who were there.

D-Day By the Numbers, By the Men By Stephen Green J

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/d-day-by-the-numbers-by-the-men/

I want you to imagine picking up every resident of a medium-sized city, everything they’ll need to eat and drink and rest for a few days, any vehicles they might need, gasoline of course, plus lots of guns and ammo — did I mention this was a hunting trip? — and then moving them all in a few short hours a distance of anywhere from 30 to 125 miles or so.

Now imagine you have to move all those people and all that stuff partly by air, but mostly across heavy seas in foul weather.

Under enemy fire.

I should also mention that if you messed up any of the big details, a lot of your people are going to die, and then you’re going to have to figure out how to move them all back without getting too many more of them killed.

And all that is just the beginning. Because once you’ve done all that, those men on that “hunting trip” are going to have to take and widen a beachhead big enough and secure enough that you can rebuild (or build from scratch!) the ports and roads necessary to bring another million men over… plus all additional the stuff all those additional men will need.

That, in a logistical nutshell, was what the Allies had to accomplish 75 years ago on D-Day.

Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight Eisenhower said that “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” The planning which went into Operation Overlord boggles the mind.