RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

As we consider the news, it is worth a reminder that bias, arrogance and hypocrisy are natural adjuncts of the media. Too often, in recent times, they have become rent-seekers, compromising integrity for collusion with those they are supposed to cover. Politicians have many of the same attributes, but for them it is primarily about power. Control of the federal bureaucracy wields enormous influence and, as we have seen, can be self-sustaining across succeeding Administrations. In 2016, the Presidential elections was not about finding the angel hidden among heathens, but deciding which candidate was the least Beelzebub-like, in terms of character and values. But also, which espoused policies most like one’s own. No matter whether one is conservative or liberal, we should all be able to agree that freedom, progress and well-being hinge on economic growth. Elections determine which policies allow for the greatest growth that does the most good for the most people, in terms of providing opportunity, encouraging self-reliance and lifting people from poverty, while doing the least harm in terms of safety and the environment. Admittedly, that is a judgement call and people can and will disagree. Nevertheless, Mr. Trump was my choice in November 2016. Nothing I have heard or read since causes me to re-think that decision.

Apart from primaries in a number of states, the conviction of Paul Manafort and the guilty plea by Michael Cohen, real news, as is typical in August, was sparse – a lot of chaff but little wheat. (The midterm elections will begin in earnest after Labor Day.) Europe continues to struggle over Brexit, Greece, Poland, Turkey and illegal immigration, all of which manifest the coercive and undemocratic tendencies of Brussels-quartered bureaucrats. China continues to chase its Belt and Road Initiative, while bullying its neighbors. Terrorism and war in the Middle East are unending. The domestic economy is strong. The bull market in stocks persisted. A trade deal between the U.S. and Mexico was announced. Wildfires in California burned tens of thousands of acres, destroying hundreds of homes. The Angel of Death appeared and bore away some good people, including the heroic John McCain. And Mr. Trump remained a lightning rod – a willing one – for harried Democrats who struggle to find a coherent message, apart from disparaging Mr. Trump with hate-filled messages. It is ironic that the party that bears the name “democrat” refuses to accept the outcome of a democratic election almost two years ago. They claim Mr. Trump is a fascist, yet he has curtailed regulations, reduced taxes and dismantled a federal bureaucracy that had been built stronger by Mr. Obama. Abnegation of power is not the way of tyrants. As well, the Left accuses the President of obstructing free speech, while newspapers, TV, cable news shows, and social media are afire in opposition, and their comrades on college campuses shut out conservative speakers. While real news was light, the air was thick with irony and hypocrisy.

https://www.jewishlinknj.com/features/25956-what-did-they-know-when-did-they-know-how-did-they-interpret-the-information-2

Part II

Initial Reaction of American Jews to the Beginning of the War in Europe

American Jewish leaders were not surprised that the war would produce immense suffering for their European brethren. The initial reports deeply concerned them about the precarious position of the Jews in Eastern and Central Europe. Even before the war began, Hayim Greenberg, head of Poalei Zion and editor of the Labor Zionist Jewish Frontier, warned on June 15, 1939, that Jews “will be the first to suffer,” and that the conflict “might envelope the entire world.”

On September 13, 1939, Jacob Lestchinsky, the noted historian, sociologist and authority on Jewish demography and economic history, advised American Jews “to be prepared for events whose frightfulness will eclipse” the pogroms and massacres of the last war. “Human imagination,” he said, “is simply too limited to grasp the probable magnitude of the war’s toll or how much Jewish blood will be shed.” He feared the Jews of Ukraine, Galicia and Romania were in grave danger.

Writing in B’nai B’rith’s The National Call in October, 1939, Albert Viton, a journalist who reported from Palestine before joining the US Department of Agriculture in early 1940, observed that “everywhere Jews are the chief sufferers…and that there is no limit to their possible misery….” He believed that “a terribly large portion of Jews in Central, Eastern and Northern Europe will not survive the war; possibly as many as half of them will perish before the end.”

In the September-October 1939 issue of the Contemporary Jewish Record, published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Committee expressed uncertainty as to what awaited the Jews in the future. “It is as yet too early today to comprehend the full extent of the tragedy which has overtaken the world… but [it] is sufficiently great to defy the imagination and stir the deep sympathy of those who still believe in mercy, justice and the protection of the weak.”

The November 1939 edition of The Call, the official organ of the English-speaking division of the Workman’s Circle, acknowledged that European Jewry would be greatly affected. “In the coming days, the areas of Jewish wretchedness will increase, the intensity of Jewish agony will reach a breaking point.”

https://www.jewishlinknj.com/features/25865-what-did-they-know-when-did-they-know-how-did-they-interpret-the-information

Part I

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum recently announced it is opening a new special exhibition, “Americans and the Holocaust,” in the spring of 2018 as a part of a museum-wide initiative exploring American responses to the Holocaust.

Among the questions the exhibit will attempt to answer are: What did American Jews know about the Holocaust, when did they know about the destruction and how did they respond?

If we are to learn from our past, we need to understand what American Jews knew about the plight of the Jews in Europe. When did the first reports appear in the Anglo-Jewish, American, Yiddish, and press about attacks against Jews? Did the accounts appear sporadically or often? How were they interpreted by American Jews? At any point did American Jews realize that the Nazi onslaught might be different than past massacres and persecution?

We begin our inquiry on September 1, 1939, when the war in Europe began. A wide range of national, regional and organizational papers and periodicals were reviewed. Another major source of information is derived from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin (JTA), a bureau established in 1914 to gather and distribute news about Jews. The New York Times is included in the survey since it is the newspaper of record in the U.S. The Times generally relegated the news concerning Jews to the inside or back pages of the paper. But this did not mean Jews did not see these articles. When reading a newspaper, Jews generally tend to look for items about the Jewish community no matter where they are positioned in the paper.

The Torah begins with descriptions of a world without form, the evolution of distinctions and differentiation – light/darkness, day/night, sea/dry land, and the origins of life – and with rules: what is permitted and what is forbidden.

The purpose of this narrative is not to teach us how, but why. It is meant not as a precise record of the world’s creation and the way it works, but as a guiding metaphor: Life has meaning because it has order, structure and rules that define purpose and link us to transcendence.

From a Torah perspective, the origins of the universe and life are not scientific questions, but moral obligations. It’s irrelevant whether the world is 5,776 years old or 50 million years old. What matters is how one lives – and the structure that the Torah provides is what shows us how to do so in a way that connects us to God.

This approach is apparent in God’s commandment to Noah to build an ark – not only what to build, but how to build it, the type of wood, dimensions, etc. Yet the size of the ark is not important; it is significant only as a God-inspired vessel – a metaphor for our own bodies and our lives. Noah was building a ship not only to save himself and his family, but to create a new civilization, one that would eventually produce Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, followed by the Jewish people, and influence mankind.

This idea of a God-ordered universe is intended to counter pagan ideas that nature and natural forces occur randomly. In the biblical pagan societies, there were no moral or ethical boundaries. In contrast, Judaism is based on the belief that everything and everyone has a divine purpose in the world. Regardless of difficulties and tragedies, one is obligated to fulfill that purpose.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/269596/scott-shay-leap-of-faith

Scott Shay is a banker, not a rabbi or professor. He’s a founder and chairman of Signature Bank, a New York lender catering to local middle-market businesses and one of the financial success stories of the past decade. He dedicates a large part of his time to Jewish community work—the Chai Mitzvah movement, the local Jewish Federation, his Modern Orthodox synagogue Kehilath Jeshurun—and in 2006 published a well-received book about Jewish outreach and engagement through community initiatives.

A few years ago, Shay noticed that Jewish kids with a high degree of Jewish literacy, including day-school students, drew a blank on the central premise of Judaism, or any religion: that there is a God who wants something from us. He noted the cultural impact of the New Atheists, a small but influential group of writers—including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and neuroscientist Sam Harris—who claim that gene science and brain biology demolish the notion of a personal God. He couldn’t find a book that took on the New Atheists, so he wrote it himself: In Good Faith: Questioning Atheism and Religion.

Shay wants his readers to think hard about the implications of belief or non-belief, and to take responsibility for the implications of what they believe. He writes in his new book: “The existence of God is a matter of belief in the plausible rationality of the biblical description of God and our contemporary personal experiences of God. So yes, today one must believe in God; no one can be certain that He does or does not exist.”

The New Atheists want to dethrone God—whom Dawkins mocked as “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak”—but they worship something else in the place of God, Shay told me. “I think it’s a matter of belief either to acknowledge that there is a God, or to claim that there is no God,” he said. “I think both require a leap of faith.” For Dawkins and his atheist fellows, that means worshiping man, says Shay—but that’s also an expression of faith, with dire consequences.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/30/the-angry-

Sarah Jeong’s nasty tweets raise a personal question, not a political one: why is she so bitter when she has enjoyed so much success?

Her animus against white people sounds like a teen version of 1960s-era race radicals who demonized the white race as, in Susan Sontag’s infamous words, “the cancer of human history.” The ascent of this nonwhite, nonmale who doesn’t seem particularly astute or witty should produce the happy recognition that the long dominance of one identity group, white men, has diminished. Liberalism is winning—rejoice!

No gratitude from her, though, or from others, either. The Atlantic’s former correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates has made millions from his writings and speeches (his MacArthur award alone brought in $625,000), but that hasn’t blunted his anti-American rancor.

Women have earned more bachelor’s degrees and doctorates than men for many years, but feminists haven’t slowed their complaints about an enduring patriarchy.

When multiculturalists entered higher education in the 1970s and ’80s, they insisted that Western civilization move over and make room for “other” cultures and traditions. Now that Western Civ requirements have disappeared and “diversity” requirements have proliferated, though, we see more accusations of an alignment of Western civilization with white supremacy than we did 20 years ago (as with the response to President Trump’s magnificent speech in Warsaw).

Humanities professors, nearly all of them liberal or leftist, lead blessed lives in the bucolic enclaves of rich, selective schools, but I don’t know of any labor group that grumbles so much about the national condition (especially as measured by the election of President Trump).

A Comprehensive Mindset
Now, when people’s personal circumstances run squarely against their political judgments, something funny is going on in their heads. Way back in the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche saw it clearly and gave it a name: ressentiment.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271191/enough-victimhood-millionaire-athletes-and-their-sylvia-thompson

Reprinted from BarbWire.com.

I must admit I have never in my life purchased a ticket to a sports event. I am not a sports enthusiast. But I am an American black citizen, and I have had it up to the gills with black people who embrace victimhood. I also highly resent my being expected to do the same in order to affirm my “blackness.”

Black victims these days, for the most part, are the product of decades of Black Americans being used primarily by white progressive leftists to advance an anti-American agenda.

The current brouhaha surrounding the despicable behavior of NFL athletes toward the National Anthem and the American flag is a prime example of what the Left has done to my race.

One must assume these players and their guilt-conflicted white coaches and owners (and victimhood-inflicted black coaches) are being manipulated by the Left, because no intelligent, thinking people would deliberately cut themselves off at the knees. Essentially, what these young misguided mostly black men are doing is ensuring the demise of their lucrative paychecks. Further, I would wager that if these teams consisted of all white athletes, none of this idiocy would be allowed. We are witnessing this travesty because the vast majority of players are black and can whine “oppression” if appropriate action is taken against them for their unconscionable behavior.

The twisted reasoning that claims these protests are to highlight “injustice” and “police brutality” is a laughable crock. What they do in fact is dishonor valued symbols of this nation’s heritage and cover over truth about black crime.

Black males bear the brunt of police encounters because black males commit disproportionately more crimes. Police encounters with black men are so often confrontational because so many of these men, especially the young, don’t think “compliance” applies to them. They foolishly assume they are above the law and disrespect for police officers is an act of honor.

https://www.steynonline.com/8773/the-priorities-of-us-justice

News from the justice system:

Jakiv Palij, a 94-year-old concentration-camp guard, is in Germany tonight, having been arrested by ICE agents at his home in New York and deported from the United States. His deportation order was issued in 2004, so it only took twice as long to enforce it as the war in which he committed his crimes. And this for one of the few offenses specifically spelled out to this day in US immigration paperwork: “Between 1933 and 1945 were you involved, in any way, in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?” If so, don’t worry, because we’ll take two years longer than the entire twelve years of Nazi rule to enforce the deportation order.

Also today, the body of poor, twenty-year-old Mollie Tibbetts was found in an Iowa cornfield. She went jogging in one of those small towns where everybody knows everybody and they leave their doors unlocked. But she ran into an “undocumented” immigrant and he killed her, and her parents will live with that hole in their hearts till the day they die. The AP’s Zeke Miller played it for laughs:

Likely coming to a Trump rally near you…. Investigators: Suspect in Mollie Tibbetts death is in custody, subject to immigration detainer

Funny. Or, per MSNBC, Mollie Tibbetts is “some girl in Iowa Fox News is talking about”. Because, as the pajama boys at Mediaite will tell you, only “racist fearmongers” are boorish enough to make a fuss about homicidal illegal aliens. It’s no surprise that a bureaucracy that can’t deport a Nazi in fourteen years cannot reliably inform its citizens just how long Mollie Tibbetts’ killer has been in the country. He broke into a nation that has supposedly been on “orange alert” since September 12th 2001, but the authorities cannot tell us when he did it – except that he’s been here “between four and seven years”. Close enough for government work.

The global warming climateers have eased their way into the three major groups of American Christians – Catholics, non-evangelical Protestants, and even Evangelicals who were the most skeptical of the junk science, false research and doctored statistics of the “warmists.”

Here are statements from the Evangelicals..

(https://www.npr.org/documents/2006/feb/evangelical/calltoaction.pdf)

Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action
Preamble

As American evangelical Christian leaders, we recognize both our opportunity and our responsibility to offer a biblically based moral witness that can help shape public policy in the most powerful nation on earth, and therefore contribute to the well-being of the entire world.1 Whether we will enter the public square and offer our witness there is no longer an open question. We are in that square, and we will not withdraw.

And this summoning religious like faith: ”

“The Evangelical Climate Initiative is an organization of Christian leaders in America whose “love for God and neighbor…compels [them] to recognize that human-induced climate change is a serious Christian issue requiring action now.”

“The same love for God and neighbor that compels us to preach salvation through Jesus Christ, protect the unborn, preserve the family and the sanctity of marriage, and take the whole Gospel to a hurting world, also compels us to recognize that human-induced climate change is a serious Christian issue requiring action now.”
Very disappointing at a time when the faithful are under attack, mocked in popular TV shows, in the media, and in the movies…..rsk

https://www.city-journal.org/html/strange-kind-authoritarian-16129.html

The double whammy of yesterday’s guilty verdict in the case of Paul Manafort and guilty plea in that of Michael Cohen—President Trump’s former campaign manager and personal attorney, respectively—must have stunned the White House, and certainly elated the president’s critics, who are busy filing their teeth in preparation for an impeachment case. But as the nation moves into untrodden constitutional territory, with demands that Trump be indicted for political corruption, it’s worth examining the balance of power in the U.S. today, and the extent to which the president—frequently accused of unprecedented abuse of executive authority—may actually be more respectful of legal procedure and norms than his critics charge.

While the Mueller investigation moves laboriously toward its ostensible focus—Russian meddling in the 2016 election—it has been blazingly fast in racking up convictions and guilty pleas on what appear to be less-than-urgent tax-fraud cases. Paul Manafort, Trump’s onetime campaign manager, was indicted, tried, and convicted for crimes pertaining to his political-consultancy business in Ukraine. No link was alleged between these activities and Trump; it was an ancillary case that, as the judge observed early on, was part of an effort to put pressure on the president. Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, pled guilty to a slew of financial-related crimes. He confessed, among other felonies, to having made $30,000 by brokering the sale of an expensive piece of luggage, and failing to report this income. The kicker in Cohen’s confession was the last count, where he appears to implicate Trump in an effort to influence the 2016 election; the president directed him, he claims, to make “an excessive campaign contribution” to buy silence from women with whom Trump had had sexual relationships with in the past. Cohen, facing 65 years in prison, appears responsive to the prosecutorial squeeze play, and is willing to testify to Trump’s involvement in nefarious doings.