RUTHFULLY YOURS

At a conference in New York last year, the historian Jonathan Sarna spoke on the subject of his book Lincoln and the Jews. The full interview, conducted by Meir Soloveichik, is included in the just-released volume, What America Owes the Jews, What Jews Owe America. We present an excerpt of their conversation here:http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2016/07/we-have-not-yet-appointed-a-hebrew/

Meir Soloveichik: Let me start with the obvious question. More books are written every year on Abraham Lincoln than on almost any other figure in history. But is it so clear that Lincoln was the most important person in American history—more important than say, George Washington? Widening the lens, was he more important for the course of world history than such figures as Napoleon, or Alexander the Great, or Winston Churchill? Why the almost unique fascination with Lincoln in general, and why from a Jewish perspective in particular?

Jonathan Sarna: It’s a fine question. Take the case of Washington and Napoleon. We’re familiar with this story: the story of the great general who becomes a great political leader. It goes back to Joshua. But Lincoln’s story is different: he’s a figure who came out of nowhere, who was probably illiterate in his young life, who later went on to lose several elections—and who only then became what he became. That story is deeply inspiring—in a wholly different way.

But as for who most changed the world, one would be hard-pressed to name anyone who changed the American world, and not just the American world, more than did Lincoln. And here I can cite the testimony of a European Jew. In an essay reflecting on his own childhood, the great scholar Solomon Schechter recalls hearing about Lincoln in Romania as a child—and what a wondrous thing it was to him that a person who came from nothing and nowhere could climb so high and achieve so much.

Nor, for Schechter, did all this have anything to do with the Jews or with the story of Lincoln and the Jews. His essay shows no knowledge of that side of things. But it does touchingly bear on why people all over the world were and remain so impressed with Lincoln, the simple person from a simple background who emerges as president of his country and radically transforms it for the better.

Meir Soloveichik: I wonder whether there isn’t something Jewish about precisely that point. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points to the story of Moses in the Bible as a kind of literary antitype. Many ancient tales of heroes feature the child of a god or a king who is raised by a peasant and in time discovers his true identity and true destiny. By contrast, Moses is the child of slaves, is raised in the king’s palace, rebels, and becomes a great leader. Could this quality be what attracts Jews in particular to the Lincoln story?

Jonathan Sarna: Yes, in a way. More specifically, I think that many Jews also saw in Lincoln a fellow outsider: one who became, as they aspired to become, a kind of ultimate insider. That, too, is a Jewish story. And Jews saw in Lincoln something else as well: aspects of the archetypal righteous prophet.

Meir Soloveichik: That brings us to the matter of Lincoln’s relations with actual Jews. Born in Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln moves to Illinois, works as a lawyer, gets involved in politics—and meets Jews. Eventually, as you say in your book, he will become the first president actually to have Jewish friends.

Thanks to its socialist writers, this one brings to mind the famous quotation: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”

Exalted literary icon Mary McCarthy had a years-long feud with literary avatar and non-capitalist Lillian Hellman. Said McCarthy of Hellman’s oeuvre: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”

While Captain Fantastic is not wholly meretricious, it is filled with so many pretentious assumptions and memes that McCarthy could have had a field day.

Viggo Mortensen, for instance, usually a sexy, serious portrayer of classic males in some distress, future or past, in one genre or another, plays the strict, affect-deprived father of six lively children. Early in the film, their mother, stricken with bipolar or some other mental disorder, dies, a suicide.

The father is living the Walden Pond life, homeschooling his active troupe of kids in the woods, raising them with what used to be a classical education in science, philosophy, medicine (sort of), literature, and languages. Esperanto is apparently one of the latter, a tongue for some reason taboo on one of the family’s rides on the rickety converted school bus they ride when they need groceries or city contact.

But though the sprach is all Trotskist (as opposed to the verboten Trotskyite) sloganeering, and the father wears a faded T-shirt reading Jesse Jackson 1969 or something, and he is too young to have even worn such a T when Jackson rode the racialist bandwagon, the kids do not – contrary to what they sprout and the father hectors anyone who asks – wear homespun, but store bought’n clothes, trendy if dowdy city folks’ notions of what hicks in the woods might wear. They don’t know what Nikes or Adidas are, but they make stealing food from grocery emporia a fun regular event, after staging faux heart attacks. Though they make a thing of organic food, and Mortensen rejects a greasy spoon diner because “they don’t serve any real food here, kids, so let’s go,” the truth is, minutes later, he’s celebrating the odious Noam Chomsky’s birthday (instead of Christmas) with a sprinkle-covered store-made cake and – here’s the thing – Redi-Whip, which is completely artificial and damaging, one figures, to the chromosomes of all concerned. He spritzes it joyously into his mouth, as if it were nectar of the gods. Fake, fake, fake.

Ever the prisoner of PC rectitude, President Obama wrongly fears that opposing — or evening naming — global jihadism as the enemy of civilisation is a declaration of war against Islam. By this reticence he has flung petrol on the Islamist fires.

Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War
by Sebastian Gorka
Regnery, 2016, 256 pages, US$27.99
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President Obama almost always deports himself in public with poise and dignity. His “New Beginning” speech, delivered at Cairo University on June 4, 2009, was no exception. The address was full of generous sentiment and seeming humility. At one point a member of the audience cried out: “Barack Obama, we love you!” A round of applause greeted the US president’s gracious “Thank you.” President Obama’s 2009 charm offensive throughout the Middle East promised to undo the mistakes of President George W. Bush, and yet his tenure in office has only exacerbated matters. Sebastian Gorka’s Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War goes some of the way to explaining Barack Obama’s failure and a potential way forward for his successor.

At the very heart of President Obama’s misapprehension has been his hubris, the Cairo venture being a case in point. Though Obama acknowledged scientific and other contributions of the Islamic world to the dawn of Europe’s Renaissance, he appeared incapable of comprehending that for many in his audience that day, including high-level members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (which has since been outlawed), the Renaissance and all that subsequently ensued—we might call it secular-powered modernity or individual self-determination—are deeply problematic. Nevertheless, Barack Obama blithely based his foretelling of a united world on the principles of European-style humanism and the particular experience of the United States: E pluribus unum or Out of many, one.

Islamic revivalists, as Sebastian Gorka argues, have a very different interpretation of E pluribus unum. To decode the spirit and ambition of the global jihadist movement, insists Gorka, whose father was a political prisoner in the Hungarian People’s Republic, we should not only employ the term “totalitarian” to delineate our Westophobic enemy but also revisit the origins of the Cold War and the writings of George Kennan and Paul Nitze. We must begin, as Paul Nitze did, with Sun Tsu’s cardinal rule of war—Know both yourself and the enemy if you want to win.

Gorka quotes a key early passage from Nitze’s NSC-68 to define a liberal democracy: “In essence, the fundamental purpose is to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual.” The global jihadist movement, in contradistinction, abhors the idea of individual freedom; to the extent an apologist speaks of choice they invariably mean the “freedom” to submit to religious authority and the “freedom” that results from submission. It is totally at odds with liberty.

The Obama administration contends that Islamic terrorism—or should we say extremist violence—is “the result of poverty, unemployment and lack of political enfranchisement”. Religion, including the Muslim Brotherhood’s interpretation of Islam, does not contribute to terrorism but is a safeguard against it, or so the PC narrative goes. Here we have an explanation for Barack Obama’s forbearing relationship with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, naivety about the Arab Spring, support for Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi, intervention in Libya and Yemen, appeasement with Tehran, denial about the motives of domestic terrorists and, of course, why Team Obama insisted on front row seats for the Muslim Brotherhood dignitaries attending the 2009 Cairo University address.

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, said that U.S. sanctions would have no impact on the organization, as it already obtains complete financial and weaponry assistance from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

After the flimsy and uncompleted nuclear agreement, the Obama Administration immediately began transferring billions of dollars to Iran’s Central Bank. One of the payments included $1.7 billion transferred in January 2016. $1.4 billion of this sum came from American taxpayers.

Thanks to President Obama and the continuing lifting of sanctions, the money that Iran is receiving from the U.S., from international trade, and from increased oil sales is most likely being directed toward Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s major beneficiaries, which keep attempting to scuttle U.S. foreign policy objectives in the region.

Nearly 34 years after its inception, Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite militant group, has publicly admitted that it is fully receiving its money and arms from the Iranian government.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, ridiculed the recent U.S. sanctions targeting Hezbollah. His speech was broadcast by the Al-Manar, the Shiite party’s TV station, which isfunded by the Iranian government. Nasrallah said that the U.S. sanctions would have no impact on the organization, as his group already obtains complete financial and weaponry assistance from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Shiite leader pointed out that “We do not have any business projects or investments via banks…” He added that Hezbollah’s survival depends on Iran: “We are open about the fact that Hezbollah’s budget, its income, its expenses, everything it eats and drinks, its weapons and rockets, come from the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said, and pressed the notion that his group “will not be affected” by any type of sanctions.

Nasrallah’s recent speech was also part of a ceremony that marked 40 days after the death of a high level Hezbollah commander, Mustafah Bedreddine, in the Syrian capital of Damascus. Nasrallah has recently vowed to increase Hezbollah’s military presence in Syria, and assist Bashar Al Assad’s forces, although Hezbollah has suffered significant losses in the latest fighting in Aleppo, Syria.

Men need to “be better.”

—Michelle Obama in conversation with Oprah.

Western civilization is clearly coming part at the seams. There are so many destructive elements at work, they are almost impossible to list. But one of the most destructive of these elements, incited by a punitive feminist ideology, is the relentless campaign to delegitimize the very idea of manhood. And the most effective way to do that is to impugn male sexuality.

We are told constantly that we live in a virtual rape culture, a culture in which rape is widespread and condoned, victims are blamed, and rapists receive little or no punishment. There are rape cultures in the world. If one wants to see one in action, all one need do is look at the Muslim world or at Muslim enclaves and populations that have burrowed into Western nations, where atrocities and scandals continue to multiply. In the Western world, by contrast, rape and other forms of sexual misconduct—even mere allegations of sexual misconduct—are universally condemned and harshly punished.

No matter. Islamic culture gets a free pass while Western culture is said to be ravaged by gynophobia under the reign of male supremacism. In the new sexual paradigm that has clamped succubus-like upon the culture, the heterosexual male mainstream is under attack for the crime of harboring a normal sexual drive, which must be ruthlessly expunged in an offensive characterized by media propaganda, legislative bias and institutional practices. Respectable-seeming websites promote the total reform of masculinity using terms such as “mascupathy” to define masculine traits such as aggression and competitiveness as forms of disease needing to be cured. Western men are being progressively demasculanized, a deficiency which results, as Andrew Klavan argues, in “tremulous feminists who hysterically fear rape culture on college campuses where it is not, and Western leaders who don’t dare to see the rape culture inherent in invading Islam, where it is.”

What the Feminization of the West Has Wrought

The signs of anti-male bias are everywhere we look. The university, for example, has become a veritable minefield for male students, who may at any time be hauled before an administrative tribunal and their careers put in jeopardy for sexual misconduct, however trivial or ambiguous. A recent memo from my wife’s university mandates a statement against “sexual violence” in all course syllabi—mind you, nothing against harassing and lying about one’s professor for a better grade, shutting down conservative, Zionist, pro-Life or anti-feminist speakers, perpetrating racist hoaxes, denouncing the teaching of good English and male authors as forms of “microagression,” or any of the other violations of civil conduct that we have witnessed on university campuses recently. The only sexist harassment that takes place regularly in academia is feminist harassment of male students and staff—but that is considered not intimidation but enlightened practice.

A portrait of an iconic movie director and the recovery of an autistic child provide the subject matter for two excellent documentary films just released.

De Palma Directors: Noah Baumbach, Jake Paltrow

Life, AnimatedDirector: Roger Ross Williams

A fascinating and by no means entirely hagiographic week of recording the master filmmaker — he wore the same shirt throughout shooting, for continuity’s sake — of the some-say misogynistic but suspense-drenched filmmaker.

Speaking directly to the camera, the genial, occasionally self-mocking De Palma discusses his methodology, why he chooses certain tracking angles, why specific actors are caught from various heights and distances, and in general gives a chewy, nutritious take on his trademark process, a privileged behind-the-scenes look at an avatar of a certain generation of great lensers, up there with Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg ,and our other faves.

De P delights in talking about the young De Niro and Pacino, whom he discovered in his own early filmmaking and school. De Palma unabashedly honors Hitchcock in camera setups, plotting, framing, suspense sequences and so forth. Provocative, tantalizing excerpts of his many iconic and still virulent films include Sisters, Obsession, loosely inspired by Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Dressed to Kill, and the taut G-man drama, Untouchables, high-school nightmare Carrie, nose-candy Scarface, and illegal eagle skeeves, Carlito’s Way.

There is much adult content, violence and sudden gore, which cut into the overall enjoyment, as did scenes involving women not being treated all that chivalrously. De Palma’s recollections and powerful opinions about his film, and others’ filmmaking, are worth the discomfort. No one is forcing anyone to see those films that handle women as props for bloodletting and screams.

As a doc, it ranks up there with the recent “Brando on Brando” — almost must-viewing for aficionados of the genre.

Sometimes one is tempted to shoot the sheriff. When we take note of what is going on in the town — the moral degeneracy of its affairs, the raging puritanism that has installed itself as a twisted form of prurience, cruel punishment for perceived sexual misconduct and natural behavior meted out under cover of the law, and indeed, the wielding of the law as an instrument of repression — the sheriff can no longer be respected or obeyed. Defiance of an entrenched administration that wears the badge of cultural authority and determines the politics and mores of our lives becomes a duty.

What I call “the town” is simply the place where we now live, the decaying precincts of Western civilization. In the name of “social justice” and a sterile version of sexual propriety — code for a species of depravity — a once-vigorous culture has proceeded to devitalize itself. Normative male heterosexuality is under assault while gays, lesbians, and transgenders are routinely celebrated and seldom if ever the object of police investigations or criminal proceedings for rape, assault, or molestation.

The same exemption applies to heterosexual women who are almost always deemed innocent in sexual misadventures while men are almost inevitably found guilty. Moreover, women who have lied by misrepresentation or salient omission in rape or assault cases are rarely sentenced for perjury or legal mischief. The docket is remorselessly slanted against the male defendant. Just ask the Canadian public broadcaster’s Jian Ghomeshi, the Duke lacrosse team, Columbia University’s Paul Nungesser falsely accused by “mattress girl” Emma Sulkowicz (who has not only remained unpunished but received a “Woman of Courage” Award from the National Organization of Women), the targeted fraternity at the University of Virginia in the Rolling Stone scandal, the as yet unidentified man falsely accused by the RCMP and a provincial judiciary of assaulting his autistic, non-verbal daughter (a suit based on a largely discredited therapeutic technique called “facilitated communication,” the Ottawa University hockey team (in which two players were charged with sexual assault — as yet unproven — and the entire team suspended by former Liberal justice minister and university president Alan Rock).

The feminist attack on a nebulous entity called the “patriarchy” asserting its putatively illegitimate sexist power over the female half of humanity is a paranoiac absurdity, a pathological misandry masking as a cultural verity. The feverish fixation on male sexual “perversion” and on the need for “liberating” alternatives can only lead to social confusion and mental derangement. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man, “There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world,” a truth rejected by the sexual vigilantes of the day pushing a distorted system of sexual values — really a system of anti-values — at the cost of cultural sanity.

I have received several friendly notes reminding me that the founding fathers whom I revere were also slave holders. They were and for the record let me state that slavery was a vile, corrupt and corrupting institution.

But when our Declaration of Independence and Constitution were drafted, what was the scene in Europe?

In England, public executions were the norm and they were conducted at lunch time so that parents and children could watch like a spectator sport.

In France, seventeen years after 1776 the Reign of Terror (September 1793 – July 1794), disregarded the motto of the Revolution “liberte, egalite, fraternite.” The “enemies of the revolution” were summarily executed and the death toll in ten months was 25,000.
In Russia, Catherine the Great (Empress 1762-1796) who has been called an”enlightened” despot she maintained a system of “serfdom”…a form of slavery whose victims lived in squalor and misery working mines and foundries and seldom lived beyond their thirties. She used them as chattel and “gifted” them to her friends and lovers.

Revolutions are not unique. Some countries have revolutions all the time until revolution becomes their national sport. In banana republics the overthrow of one dictator to make way for another gives everyone a day off from work.

These revolutions, no matter how they are cloaked in the familiar rhetoric of liberty, are nothing more than tyranny by other means.

What made the American Revolution unique was that its cause was not the mere transfer of power from one ruler to another or one system to another, but a fundamental transformation of the nature of rule.

Every revolution claims to be carried out in the name of the people, but it’s never the people who end up running things.

The Declaration of Independence did more than talk about the rights of the people. It placed the people at the center of the nation and its government, not as an undifferentiated mass to be harnessed for whatever propaganda purposes they might be good for, but as individuals with hopes and dreams.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

That is not merely some bland reference to a mass of people. There is no collective here, only the individual. The greater good of independence is not some system that will meet with the approval of the mass, but that will make it possible for the individual, each individual, to live a free life, not a life lived purely for the good of the mass, but for his own sake.

In a time when government mandates what you can eat and how much of it, only one of the ways it seeks to regulate every aspect of daily life for the greater good– the declaration that started it all declares that the purpose of government is not social justice, a minimally obese population, universal tolerance or even equality. Equality is acknowledged as a fact, not as a goal.