RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a June 7 1776 session in the Pennsylvania State House (later Independence Hall), Richard Henry Lee of Virginia presented a resolution with the famous words: “Resolved: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

On July 1, 1776, the Continental Congress reconvened, and on the following day, the Lee Resolution for independence was adopted by 12 of the 13 colonies, New York not voting. Discussions of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence resulted in some minor changes, but the spirit of the document was unchanged. The process of revision continued through all of July 3 and into the late afternoon of July 4, when the Declaration was officially adopted. Of the 13 colonies, nine voted in favor of the Declaration, two — Pennsylvania and South Carolina — voted No, Delaware was undecided and New York abstained. John Hancock, President of the Continental Congress, signed the Declaration of Independence. It is said that John Hancock’s signed his name “with a great flourish” so England’s “King George can read that without spectacles!”

Alexander Hamilton is all the rage now for the musical “Hamilton” which has deservedly won so many awards. I saw it and loved it and admire the book and author that inspired it.

“Alexander Hamilton” by Ron Chernow. 2005

Ron Chernow is an excellent writer and biographer. In 2011 Chernow wrote an inspiring biography of our magnificent first president George Washington who comes to mind as we celebrate Independence day. It is great reading in any season.
Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

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Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, prolific author and outspoken activist Elie Wiesel died Saturday at the age of 87. Wiesel was perhaps best known for his major role in promoting Holocaust education, and for perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust in the post-World War II era with his memoir “Night,” based on his experience as a teenager in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in the Romanian town of Sighet, to Sarah and Shlomo Wiesel. His maternal grandfather, Dodye Feig, was a member of the Vishnitz Hasidic sect; his strong influence over Wiesel was seen later in some of his writings. Wiesel received a traditional religious education while growing up in Sighet; many years later, in 2002, he returned to his hometown to dedicate the Elie Wiesel Memorial House at the site of his childhood home.

The Wiesel family’s lives were seriously disrupted in 1940, when Hungary annexed Sighet and all the Jews in town were forced to move into one of two ghettoes. In May 1944, the Nazis, with Hungary’s agreement, deported the Jewish community of Sighet to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The teenage Wiesel was sent with his father Shlomo to the Buna Werke labor camp, a sub-camp of Auschwitz III-Monowitz, where they were forced to work for eight months before being transferred to a series of other concentration camps near the war’s end.

The malnourished and dysentery-stricken Shlomo Wiesel died after receiving a beating from a German soldier on January 29, 1945, several weeks after he and Elie were forced-marched to the Buchenwald camp. Wiesel’s mother Sarah and younger sister Tzipora also perished in the Holocaust. He would later recount those and other events in his 1955 memoir “Night.”

After the war, Wiesel was sent with other young survivors by the French Jewish humanitarian organization Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants to an orphanage in Écouis, France. He lived for several years at the home, where he was reunited with the only surviving members of his immediate family: his older sisters Beatrice and Hilda.

In 1948, the 20-year-old Wiesel pursued studies in literature, philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne, but never completed them. Around the same time, after working a series of odd jobs including teaching Hebrew, Wiesel – who mostly wrote in French throughout his life – became a professional journalist, writing for both French and Israeli publications. In 1948, he translated Hebrew articles into Yiddish for Israel’s pre-state Irgun militia. Wiesel visited the nascent State of Israel in 1949 as a foreign correspondent for the French newspaper L’arche. He was subsequently hired by the daily Yedioth Ahronoth as its Paris correspondent, and also worked for the paper as a roving correspondent abroad. He also covered the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for the New York-based Yiddish newspaper The Forward.

The Battle of Gettysburg was fought July 1–3, 1863, in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, by Union and Confederate forces during the American Civil War. 46,000 and 51,000 Confederate and Union soldiers were killed, wounded, captured or missing.

On November 19, 1863 at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg President Abraham Lincoln delivered the following address:

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.

It is rather for us the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

There is a dreary sameness to all too many conservative books. They reflect on America’s cultural, economic, or strategic decline, collect outrageous stories of leftist abuse, and then blame the other side of the aisle for America’s woes. We hear of the Left’s assault on religious liberty, the Left’s war on free speech, and the Left’s hatred of Western civilization. There is certainly value in understanding the Left’s actions and ideology, but it sometimes seems as if conservative publishing has devolved into a contest to see which pundit can write this year’s “progressives wreck America” best-seller.

Pete Hegseth’s new book, then, comes as a tonic. It was inspired by Theodore Roosevelt’s celebrated 1910 speech “Citizenship in a Republic” — the speech in which Roosevelt declared, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better,” and extolled instead the “man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again” and “spends himself in a worthy cause.”

Hegseth is inspired not just by this passage but by the entire speech, and he uses it as a framework for an analysis of our troubled times and as a striking personal challenge. Are you “in the arena”? Are you spending yourself in a worthy cause? Are you striving valiantly? While the book isn’t a memoir, Hegseth does reflect on the lessons he learned during deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and during political battles here at home. It’s a good-spirited and very personal lecture, in which the words “I was wrong” appear far more than they do in the typical political book.

Building on Roosevelt’s observation that great republics require good citizens, Hegseth outlines an ecumenical vision of the “virtues and duties” of citizens. While Hegseth is unabashedly Christian, his virtues are the ones honored across religious traditions. He challenges Americans to be devoted to their work, to be willing to fight for their values, to raise large families (more on that in a moment), and to develop strength of character, specifically the character traits Roosevelt advocated — including “self-restraint, self-mastery, common sense,” and “courage and resolution.”

Hegseth argues that large families (which he defines as those with three or more children) are a check against self-indulgence. Children “humble you, teach you, and keep you grounded.” Hegseth echoes Roosevelt’s condemnation of the “willfully barren” — those who, for the sake of self-actualization, choose not to have children. It’s a counter-cultural message, especially in an era when many progressive ideologues argue that having kids is a form of planet-destroying excess and even decry parents as “breeders”; but that’s exactly why it’s thought-provoking and necessary.

From ObamaCare to executive orders legalizing illegal immigrants, President Obama has shown us that he does not understand the role of the executive branch under our Constitution.

So let me remind you. This is directly from the U.S. Constitution:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

The president is the chief executive officer. He must enforce and obey the laws of the U.S. He does not avoid the ones he dislikes and enforces the ones he likes.

The U.S. embargo is apparently a law that President Obama does not like. Therefore, he must enforce it or call on Congress to repeal it. On immigration, we see a similar situation. President Obama does not like that Congress has not passed the immigration reform that he likes. So he is going around Congress and running into the Supreme Court.

We just read that a U.S. company is going to run a hotel in Cuba. They are partners with the Cuban government because that’s the only option for a foreign company in Cuba.

I agree with Capitol Hill Cubans:

This week, the agreement between the U.S.-based hotel company, Starwood, and the Cuban military’s tourism entity, Gaviota, was consummated.

Under the deal, Starwood will manage the Hotel Quinta Avenida in Havana for the Cuban military.

First and foremost, this arrangement is clearly inconsistent with U.S. law — it’s illegal and should be challenged as such.

Moreover, it proves Obama has not been forthcoming.

Allowing U.S. companies to partner directly with the most repressive security apparatus in the Western Hemisphere neither “empowers the Cuban people,” nor “promotes their independence from the Cuban authorities.”

It’s simply repulsive.

Stretching appeasement to the breaking point, Washington is working overtime to convince global institutions, nations, banks and companies to dismiss their well-founded concerns and do business with the America-hating, terror-sponsoring, nuclear weapons-pursuing regime in Tehran.

Washington’s efforts – which are coming despite no discernable change in Iranian behavior – extend a familiar script of recent years, in which the Obama administration kowtows to the regime, ignores the concerns of America’s regional allies and breaks its promises to monitor Iranian activities closely and act accordingly.

It’s an embarrassing spectacle that diminishes U.S. leadership and credibility in the region and beyond.

Nevertheless, the U.S. effort is having an impact. The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, which sets global standards for fighting money laundering and terror financing, responded to U.S. pressure by deciding last week to suspend for a year its measures to combat Iranian terror sponsorship because Iran has adopted a plan to address the problem – even though Tehran hasn’t actually implemented it. And the plan is meaningless to begin with because it excludes from “terrorism” any group that Iran says is “attempting to end foreign occupation, colonialism, and racism,” as Iran surely would say of its terrorist proxies Hezbollah and Hamas.

The Septembers of Shiraz is not only a compelling movie but an important one to see. Based on the book by Dalia Sofer which recreated the experiences of her own family, the film is the only one I can recall dealing with the plight of Iranian Jews after the fall of the Shah and the takeover by Ayatollah Khomeini. Its contemporary importance is heightened by the recent agreement between the US and Iran and the threat that this poses to Israel and to the many middle-eastern Jews persecuted by Muslims in countries that were formerly hospitable to them. They all learned first-hand how brutal that persecution was – confiscation of wealth and property, imprisonment, torture, expulsion or death.

In a searing performance by Adrien Brody, the character of Isaac goes from that of a successful gemologist and jeweler to the Empress to a bewildered man imprisoned summarily and beaten into submission in an attempt to force him to divulge the whereabouts of his shady brother and his own fortune. His family is never told of his whereabouts or whether he is still alive and part of the story concerns their own travails. The faithful housekeeper who has been with them for many years begins to be influenced by her militant son who believes the propaganda that anyone with money has gotten it by stealing what rightfully belongs to the common, less fortunate man. In this case, forgetting the paternal kindness exhibited by Isaac when the housekeeper and her son were homeless and poverty-stricken, the son steals the jewels and furnishings of the business and threatens to further blackmail Isaac in a way that could prove fatal.

Following the Brexit, Europe may witness even more plebiscites against the undemocratic European Union throughout the continent.

The furor of ignored Europeans against their union is not just directed against rich and powerful government elites per se, or against the flood of mostly young male migrants from the war-torn Middle East. The rage also arises from the hypocrisy of a governing elite that never seems to be subject to the ramifications of its own top-down policies. The bureaucratic class that runs Europe from Brussels and Strasbourg too often lectures European voters on climate change, immigration, politically correct attitudes about diversity, and the constant need for more bureaucracy, more regulations, and more redistributive taxes.

But Euro-managers are able to navigate around their own injunctions, enjoying private schools for their children; generous public pay, retirement packages and perks; frequent carbon-spewing jet travel; homes in non-diverse neighborhoods; and profitable revolving-door careers between government and business.

The Western elite classes, both professedly liberal and conservative, square the circle of their privilege with politically correct sermonizing. They romanticize the distant “other” — usually immigrants and minorities — while condescendingly lecturing the middle and working classes, often the losers in globalization, about their lack of sensitivity.

On this side of the Atlantic, President Obama has developed a curious habit of talking down to Americans about their supposedly reactionary opposition to rampant immigration, affirmative action, multiculturalism, and political correctness — most notably in his caricatures of the purported “clingers” of Pennsylvania.

Yet Obama seems uncomfortable when confronted with the prospect of living out what he envisions for others. He prefers golfing with celebrities to bowling. He vacations in tony Martha’s Vineyard rather than returning home to his Chicago mansion. His travel entourage is royal and hardly green. And he insists on private prep schools for his children rather than enrolling them in the public schools of Washington, D.C., whose educators he so often shields from long-needed reform.

In similar fashion, grandees such as Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and Univision anchorman Jorge Ramos do not live what they profess. They often lecture supposedly less sophisticated Americans on their backward opposition to illegal immigration. But both live in communities segregated from those they champion in the abstract.

Perhaps it’s a Persian riddle. Or a game of diplomatic footsy. Or just spyworld now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t headfakes.

Whatever it was, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan gave an elaborate and cryptic response to a question about his current working relationship with Iran.

“I don’t communicate with Iran,” he told journalist Judy Woodruff at an event Wednesday hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations.
Ms. Woodruff seemed skeptical, “There’s zero communication – indirect?”

“I do not personally have any interaction,” he followed.

Ah, personally.

He went on: “I do not have any interaction, any formal liaison relationship or engagement with Iran,” he said, starting to sound like he was regurgitating something he had memorized.

Ms. Woodruff asked if others at the CIA communicated with Iran if Mr. Brennan did not.

“The agency does not,” he quickly answered.

That seemed to settle it, until he added, “no formal intelligence liaison relationship.”

This elicited laughter from the audience.

Ms. Woodruff seemed willing to leave it at, but Mr. Brennan felt compelled to add, “But we know the Iranians very well. Just saying.”

The diplomatic relationship between the U.S. and Iran has been a constant source of tension within both governments for decades. Many U.S. officials believe Iran is helping fuel chaos in the Middle East through their actions in places like Libya and Syria. CONTINUE AT SITE