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Churchill’s Lesson for Our Time:Daryl McCann

By on May 14th, 2022

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/05/churchills-lesson-for-our-time/

“Churchill’s lesson is not about how to wage war—though he knew something about that as well—but how to avoid wars. The armed forces of Ukraine have bloodied the nose of the Russians and knocked Putin’s “special military operation” off balance, while thousands of Ukrainians have been killed and millions have fled the country. Putin is undoubtedly a monster but not an irrational monster, which is all the more reason why the implications of Churchill’s lesson should have been grasped by Obama and Biden. Better, by far, there had never been a Russo-Ukrainian war even if that war results in an unlikely Ukraine victory or, at least, stalemate. Hopefully, America and the West in general will take to heart Churchill’s lesson in time to stymie Xi Jinping’s designs for Taiwan.   ”

Winston Churchill has a reputation in some quarters as a warmonger, and yet nobody was as courageous and prescient in trying to avert the Second World War. His line of argument, which brought him social and political ostracism in the years immediately preceding Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, might be summarised as follows: appeasing a vainglorious demagogue was folly. In the preface to The Gathering Storm, the first part of his six-volume history of the war, he defined his theme as follows: “How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness and good nature allowed the wicked to re-arm.” On November 16, 1945, in a speech to the Belgian Senate, Churchill implored the West to “profit at least by this terrible lesson. In vain did I attempt to teach it before the war.” It could be argued that Churchill’s lesson did leave its mark, if only for the duration of the Cold War. However, Xi Jinping’s militarisation of the South China Sea and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, commencing on February 24, suggest we need to learn it all over again.

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American military cemeteries come alive in memory of Jewish soldiers How Operation Benjamin connects people with their forgotten past and Jewish identity Samuel H. Solomon

By on May 8th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/american-military-cemeteries-come-alive-in-memory-of-jewish-soldiers/

Benjamin Garadetsky fought with courage and died on August 23,1944 in service of the 2nd Armored Division in Europe. Benjamin was just one example of the over 550,000 Jews who fought to defeat Nazism during World War II. From his birthplace in Zhitomir, Russia to the shores of Ellis Island, to the streets of the Bronx, to the battlefields of Europe, Benjamin Garadetsky lived as Jew. He died a Jewish-American hero and was laid to rest at Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer, France, along with 9,386 other heroes of the war.

And here our story begins.

For various unintended reasons—along with an estimated 500 other soldiers—Benjamin was buried under a Latin Cross and not the Star of David. One of the two main reasons for these errors was related to paperwork during the multiple reburials of these soldiers. But the more ironic reason was Jewish soldier’s reluctance to wear dog-tags with the identifying “H” for Hebrew, as they feared certain death in the hands of the Nazis, thus they enlisted as Christians. These historical errors are being painstakingly researched and corrected by a small team that has taken it upon themselves to welcome these war heroes into the bosom of the Jewish people once more.

Rabbi J.J. Schacter, Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, discovered these historical errors back in 2014 while visiting Normandy. Months later, he mentioned the missing Stars of David to a friend and military historian, Shalom Lamm. Together, they decided to take action, and their first experiment with the process was in connection to the headstone of Benjamin Garadetsky. From this experience, Operation Benjamin (www.operationbenjamin.org) was born.

Changing a soldier’s burial marker is a very difficult process, as it should be. The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) administers the Normandy American Cemetery along with 25 other cemeteries located in 17 foreign countries. These beautifully arranged and maintained cemeteries are a symbol of America’s role in defeating Nazism. They are very special and, I dare say, holy places. The ABMC is tasked with the maintenance of the integrity and beauty of these cemeteries. As such, they dictate the process by which a gravestone is changed.

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Harvard, Slavery and Judaism What the story of Judah Monis tells us about America and the children of Israel. By Ira Stoll

By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-slavery-and-judaism-slaveholder-judah-monis-hebrew-professor-founders-11651172214?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Mr. Stoll is managing editor of Education Next, based at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The first Jew at Harvard was a slaveholder. That’s the bombshell, so far as I can tell, buried in the appendix of the new report “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery,” released by the university this week.

The report’s “list of human beings enslaved by prominent Harvard affiliates” includes the “enslaved persons” Cuffy and Cicely, owned by Judah Monis. Monis lived from 1683 to 1764 and was an instructor in Hebrew at Harvard College from 1722 to 1760. In researching this article, I discovered a third possible slave, “my Negro child Moreah,” mentioned in Monis’s 1760 will.

I first encountered Monis’s name more than a decade ago while working on a biography of the American revolutionary leader Samuel Adams. Part of the required curriculum for Harvard students from 1735 to 1755 was the study of Hebrew grammar from a textbook written by Monis. That might seem like an obscure detail, but it’s of historical significance because Harvard students in that era included Samuel Adams, his cousin and the future President John Adams, and their fellow signers of the Declaration of Independence John Hancock, Robert Treat Paine, William Williams, and William Ellery.

Monis had converted to Christianity from Judaism one month before joining the Harvard faculty. In a 2018 article for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Jon D. Levenson writes that the conversion had been a condition of hiring. The baptism took place in Harvard Yard. “Although doubts about Monis’s sincerity in converting have long been raised, I am certain that he was absolutely sincere in his desire for a Harvard professorship,” Mr. Levenson writes.

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There’s a B-17 Parked on My Desk It reminds me of what America was. Don Feder

By on April 28th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/theres-b-17-parked-my-desk-don-feder-0/

A scale model of a B-17 Flying Fortress — very detailed, with gun turrets and all — sits on my desk. It reminds me of the country we once had and what we’ve lost.

The B-17 was the most widely used strategic bomber in World War II. The Army Air Corps deployed the long-range, heavy bomber to drop 640,000 tons of bombs over Germany and Axis-occupied territory.

As much as any weapon, the B-17 won the war. By 1944, German industry was smashed. Its cities were rubble. It softened up German defenses for D-Day and the liberation of Europe.

The brave men of the Army Air Corps paid a terrible price – 18,400 aircraft were lost and 51,000 died in the skies over Europe. For comparison, that’s more than twice the number of Marines who died in WW II.

The B-17 represented a nation that knew how to defend itself and take the battle to the enemy. It was an America that was determined and unapologetic.

It was the America of the Greatest Generation that survived the Depression, won World War II and went on to create post-war prosperity that was the wonder of the world. GDP soared from $200 billion in 1940 to $500 billion in 1960.

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‘Common Sense’ Indeed by Lawrence Kadish

By on April 21st, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18465/common-sense-indeed

Founding father Thomas Paine knew a crisis when he saw one.

When America’s Revolutionary War was sputtering he wrote a powerful essay that spoke directly to the men being asked to shoulder their muskets against the British Empire and the most powerful army in the world, giving them the spirit to sustain the fight.

In his Common Sense pamphlet, “American Crisis No.1, 1776,” he shared, “These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

With these inspiring words Thomas Paine dismissed the Loyalists, Tories, and traitors who were against the patriots and would throw aside the demand for independence and freedom. He would scathingly ask, “And what is a Tory? GOOD GOD! what is he? I should not be afraid to go with a hundred Whigs [Patriots] against a thousand Tories, were they to attempt to get into arms. Every Tory is a coward, for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.”

What would Paine make of today’s American “Tories” – those against American patriotism, no longer patriots loyal to America; these might be the Americans whose enormous wealth has so altered their perception of self that they may not even view themselves as citizens of our threatened democracy? Rather, their self-concept may be that of a sovereign entity answerable only to themselves and their stockholders.

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The Middle East: An American Vision Review of Behind the Silken Curtain by Amir Taheri

By on April 20th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18437/middle-east-american-vision

“If my experiences in the days and weeks devoted to this problem have taught me any one thing, it is that everywhere the need is felt for an American foreign policy — a foreign policy so firmly embedded on principle that it will hold equally for United States troops in China or the atom bomb, or Palestine.” — Bartley Crum.

[Crum’s] account … clearly shows that President Truman, who always… sided with the forces of freedom and progress, was often opposed by his own State Department that practiced a value-free diplomacy in the name of preserving the status quo.

“We can throw our lot in with the forces… who prop up feudalistic regimes in the Arab states in the hope that these will serve as a cordon sanitaire against Soviet; who believe they can successfully continue the same processes of exploitation in the future which have proved successful in the past. Or we can throw our lot in with the progressive forces in the Middle East. We can recognize that there is a slow rising of the peoples, and that we must place ourselves on the side of this inevitable development toward literacy, health, and a decent way of life.” — Bartley Crum.

He was against a status quo that subjected the nations of the region to despotism and poverty. He also realized that Arab despots and their hangers-on used the issue of Palestine as a means of diverting attention from their own misdeeds, wasting Arab energies on xenophobia and religious bigotry. The irony in all this was that Great Britain… sided with the Arab despots, and did all it could to discourage and weaken the very forces of reform and change that Crum saw as the natural allies of Western democracies.

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Growing Up Under Mao :Book Review by Wolfgang Kasper

By on April 19th, 2022

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/04/growing-up-under-mao/

When the Cultural Revolution raged in China in the 1960s, I was not very interested. Periodic violent repression and maltreatment of non-conformists was what communist regimes did. My attitude changed in the late 1970s when I met some Chinese academics who visited Australia. They told harrowing tales of their personal suffering in the Cultural Revolution. This was much more brutal than the suppression of uprisings in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Poland (1956, 1980) and Czechoslovakia (1968). The Great Leap Forward (1959 to 1961, when an estimated 20 to 45 million were starved) and the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1977, when around 1.5 million were murdered) were orders of magnitude above the periodic ructions in Eastern Europe. In 1981, on a lecture tour around China, I met people then in their seventies and eighties who had recently been restored to leading positions. They were resolutely determined that these atrocities “must never be allowed to happen again”. Clearly, the Mao-era convulsions sprang not only from Marxist totalitarianism but also had roots in China’s history.

Summary accounts of these events of course circulated in the West. But where were the detailed personal stories that added colour and substance? Had Chinese authors written “literary digestions” of the events? In recent years, fewer and fewer mention the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, as the generations that lived through the terror are thinning and new worries have taken over. Are these horrors, and the lessons from them, slipping into oblivion?

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Why Sun Yat-Sen Was An American Thinker By Laura Lam

By on April 12th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/why_sun_yatsen_was_an_american_thinker.html

In modern Chinese history, Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) holds a unique place. He led the revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911; devoted his life to championing an independent and democratic China; and was a revolutionary leader and a man of vision. Sun remains the only political leader honored by both mainland China and Taiwan. What’s fascinating about Sun, but little known in America, is that his birthplace, formal education, medical training, religious faith, and political values made him a true American.

Sun’s elder brother concealed the fact that Yat-sen was an American. His family would claim that he was born in China because a Chinese identity was crucial to his mission for China’s future but contemporaneous records show that he was an American citizen by birth. The National Archives at San Francisco verified on April 29, 1904, that Sun had US citizenship. The American Institute in Taiwan also confirms that Sun Yat-sen was born in Hawaii.

When Sun was 4 years old, his parents took him back with them to China. Then at age 12, he sailed on a British steamship back to Hawaii, to live with his elder brother. Sun received his secondary education at the ʻIolani School under the supervision of the Church of Hawai’i.

At 18, Sun wanted to convert to Christianity. He was baptized in Hong Kong by Rev. C. R. Hager, an American missionary. He began studying Western medicine at the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese. At 22, he joined a group of revolutionary thinkers called the Four Bandits. They founded the Furen Literary Society, which emphasized discipline, purifying the character, and learning from the West. In 1892 Sun graduated with a medical doctorate degree from the University of Hong Kong, a globally respected educational establishment in the British territory.

In 1894, Sun wrote a petition to the Qing Viceroy of Zhili, Li Hongzhang, presenting his ideas for modernizing China but was refused an audience. That same year, he founded a nationalist party in Hawaii, the Revive China Society. It would later be renamed the Kuomintang.

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Points that Putin Apologists Miss by Amir Taheri

By on April 10th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18415/putin-apologists

The second charge related to NATO’s alleged rush to included Ukraine, or what [Professor John] Mearsheimer calls “reckless expansion”, provoked Putin is equally absurd.

For almost two decades, Russia made no objection to NATO enlargement that included former members of the Warsaw Pact. Under Putin, Russia even concluded a deal for cooperation with NATO on issues of mutual security with the Helsinki Accords as historic reference. In 2002, Putin met NATO Secretary-General George (Lord) Robinson and quipped that “maybe it is time NATO invited Russia to become a member.”

In NATO’s 2008 Bucharest summit, both Georgia and Ukraine expressed the desire to apply for membership but were quietly told not to submit formal applications. The undeclared reason was the persistence of irredentist problems both had with Russia. Putin interpreted that as a rebuff to Kiev and Tbilisi by NATO and invaded Georgia, snatching South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

What would Putin do if China invaded Russia to regain control of territory that was once Chinese?

If we accept that what once belonged to one state can never belong to another, Crimea must be handed over to Turkey as successor to the Ottoman caliphate….

Who do you think is to blame for the war in Ukraine?

For the Blame-America-International the answer is simple: the culprit is the United States.

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The Ethnic Cleansing of the Pandits of Kashmir By Janet Levy

By on April 8th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/the_ethnic_cleansing_of_the_pandits_of_kashmir.html

In Vivek Agnihotri’s recent film, The Kashmir Files, frenzied crowds of Muslims chant Raliv, galiv, chaliv! (Convert, leave, or die!) as Hindu Pandit families cower in their homes. Bands of Islamic militants gun down security personnel and walk into Pandit homes to loot, rape, and murder. Wearing Indian army uniforms, they walk into Pandit villages and refugee camps, trick the residents by saying they must move to a safer location, then line them up and shoot them.

The film is set in Kashmir in the early 1990s. By then, the Pandits had long been reduced to a minority—about 140,000, or three percent of the population—in the beautiful Kashmir valley, their homeland since at least the fourth century BCE. Since the late 1980s, Islamic militancy, in the guise of a freedom (Azadi), movement gained momentum. As Pakistan-backed militants unleashed a campaign of mass murder, rape, and gory atrocities such as sawing a woman alive, nearly 100,000 Pandits were forced to flee. Agnihotri composes some of the shocking events of that exodus into a unified story that has left audiences in India gasping—and angry that a compromised media never gave this ethnic cleansing due coverage.

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