RUTHFULLY YOURS

There’s a demagogue loose in the land. He uses immigration and the war on terror to drive a wedge into the American populace. He traffics in absurd conspiracy theories about foreign influence, he mocks his political opponents, and he inspires friends and allies to lash out, lawlessly, against them. He compares patriotic Americans to jihadists, and he endangers our national security with his reckless rhetoric.

I’m speaking, of course, about the President of the United States. It’s been amusing to watch the media hyperventilate over Donald Trump’s comments when it has largely cheered or ignored our own president’s rhetoric — rhetoric that’s inspired serial violations of First Amendment freedoms, and been used as justification for executive overreach and deadly mistakes at home and abroad.

We knew of Barack Obama’s contempt for his political opponents in 2008, when he famously mocked Hillary Clinton’s blue-collar supporters, calling them “bitter” and saying they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” But this was small potatoes compared to the rhetoric he’d employ once he was elected.

Obama’s Chanukah parties have had issues in the past. But this time it teetered over into full-blown violently offensive territory. Obama’s own remarks were boilerplate inoffensive stuff. Israel’s President Rivlin, a political hack who desperately sucks up to the media, was equally insipid.

But the White House chose Susan Talve to light the Menorah. Talve is a member of the anti-Israel group T’ruah which is currently promoting assorted “soft BDS” programs. She’s also a Ferguson activist. Her behavior was deeply insulting to the religious Jewish community and made it clear that the White House was determined to hijack even a Chanukah party to promote an anti-Jewish agenda.

So the general conviviality of the Chanukah party was disrupted by a crazed rant from Susan Talve in which she seemed determined to jam as many leftist talking points as possible in her limited time. Instead of talking about Chanukah, Talve blathered on about getting, “guns off our streets” and to “clean up the fires of toxic nuclear waste”.

Talve screeched, “I stand here with my fierce family of clergy and black lives matter activists who took to the streets of Ferguson”.

Our country lost a hero last Saturday (December 5), a hero it acquired along the way, when Tibor Rubin—“Ted,” as he liked to be called because that was his “American name”—died. His birth certificate said he was 86, but by his own calculation he was actually a little younger than that since he believed that he had a second birthday when he arrived in America 67 years ago.

Ted’s story is one of the most remarkable in U.S. military history. It is a story of daring and determination not quite like any other. It is a story given flesh and bones by simple human decency.

Voluble and mordantly funny, Rubin, a thick and powerful man even in old age and still speaking an immigrant’s eccentric English, told me about it a few years ago during a couple of interviews I conducted with him for a book I was doing on the Medal of Honor.

The story begins in Hungary where he was born in 1929 in the small town of Paszto. His family were Jews, but this didn’t matter to their neighbors—not yet, anyhow. “We have a beautiful life there,” Rubin said. “We didn’t bother nobody and nobody bothered us.”

As World War II approached, things changed as the Hungarian government, Hitler’s ally, passed a series of anti-Jewish measures imitating those the Nazis had used in laying down a foundation for the Holocaust. When he was 13 and they sensed that night was falling, Rubin’s parents sent him to Budapest in the hope that he would be absorbed by the big city. He survived on his own for a couple of years, but when the round up came, he couldn’t hide. He was arrested and packed with hundreds of others into cattle cars headed for the Mauthausen camp in Austria. He never forgot the German commandant’s chilling greeting upon their arrival there: “You Jews, none of you are going to get out of here alive.”