RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is an undeniable majesty to the papacy, one that is politically useful to the Left from time to time. The same Western liberals who abominate the Catholic Church as an atavistic relic of more superstitious times, who regard its teachings on abortion and contraception as inhumane and its teachings on sexuality as a hate crime today are celebrating Pope Francis’s global-warming encyclical, Laudato Si’, as a moral mandate for their cause. So much for that seamless garment.

It may be that the carbon tax, like Paris, is worth a Mass.

The main argument of the encyclical will be no surprise to those familiar with Pope Francis’s characteristic line of thought, which combines an admirable and proper concern for the condition of the world’s poor with a crude and backward understanding of economics and politics both. Any number of straw men go up in flames in this rhetorical auto-da-fé, as the pope frames his concern in tendentious economic terms: “By itself, the market cannot guarantee integral human development and social inclusion.” We are familiar with no free-market thinker, even the most extreme, who believes that “by itself, the market can guarantee integral human development.” There are any number of other players in social life — the family, civil society, the large and durable institution of which the pope is the chief executive — that contribute to human flourishing. The pope is here taking a side in a conflict that, so far as we can tell, does not exist.

Hopes that the pope’s encyclical will narrow the climate-change divide are likely to be dashed.

“The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” Pope Francis tells us in his encyclical Laudato si’. The encyclical had climate alarmists in a swoon for the pope’s deep dive into climate policy and taking a swing at skeptics for denial and obstructionism. But the encyclical has the merit of honesty in not maintaining any pretense of objectivity and balance. “Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity” — the pope writes in an allusion to the disinterested quest for scientific knowledge — “but rather to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.”

According to the organization Iran Human Rights, the Iranian regime has executed a prisoner every two hours this month.

“So far in 2015, more than 560 have been executed, and we are just in the first half of the year… What we are witnessing today is not so much different from what ISIS is doing. The difference is that the Iranian authorities do it in a more controlled manner, and represent a country which is a full member of the international community with good diplomatic relations with the West.” — Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, spokesman for Iran Human Rights.

And now the West, with the possibility of a nuclear deal, stands to increase Iran’s diplomatic standing.

As negotiations between the P5+1 countries and Iran continue, human rights concerns under the Iranian regime remain on the periphery.

Though World War II overshadows World War I in American Jewish consciousness, Professor Daniel Schwartz argues that it was the latter that shifted the arc of Jewish history — by fanning virulent anti-Semitism, and by motivating the British-Zionist alliance that led to the creation of the State of Israel.Schwartz spoke with Moment senior editor George E. Johnson about how fears of Jewish disloyalty fueled deportations and massacres in Eastern Europe during and after the war, how the Jewish Legion helped conquer Ottoman Palestine for the British, and why World War I was a turning point for European Jewry.

Daniel Schwartz is an associate professor of history and director of the Program in Judaic Studies at George Washington University. He specializes in modern Jewish and European intellectual and cultural history.

How many Jews fought in World War I?

This is a watershed. The number of Jews who are soldiers for different sides far exceeds any precedent to that point. Approximately a million and a half Jews fought in World War I for their respective countries. On the Allied side, at least 500,000 Jews served in the Russian Army, notwithstanding widespread Russian anti-Semitism and distrust of Jews. After the United States enters the war, U.S. forces get something like 250,000 Jewish soldiers. About 40,000 or so throughout the British Empire fought for Britain. And about 35,000 soldiers for France.

On the side of the Central Powers, nearly 100,000 Jews served in the German Army and 12,000 were killed in action. German Jews were very determined to prove their loyalty to Germany, to the Kaiser. The overall population of German Jews at the time was probably around 500,000. So you had close to 20 percent of the total Jewish population serving. In the Austro-Hungarian Army there were around 275,000 Jews.

Over the past two decades Israel has managed to destroy its regional reputation.

With our own hands, we have twice shown our neighbors they have little reason to tie their fates to ours. We are unreliable.

In 1994, Israel betrayed the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza who had helped us fight against PLO terrorists for decades. Open season on our Palestinian allies officially began in July 1994 with the entrance of thousands of PLO terrorists – led by Yasser Arafat – into Gaza and Jericho. Arafat’s henchmen did not limit their murderous wrath to the Palestinians who saved countless Israeli lives by working with the Shin Bet and the IDF. They killed Palestinians who sold their lands to Jewish buyers. Palestinians who simply enjoyed normal work relations with Israelis found themselves targeted as suspected “collaborators.”

Perfection is not found in economics and governing. Reality interferes. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a case in point. The President and Congress may still find a way to pass this important piece of legislation (they have until July 30), but on Friday they failed – a set-back for President Obama. The House did, narrowly, pass the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), commonly known as “fast-track” trade authorization, 219-211, but failed to pass a related and linked bill, Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) that would have extended a decades-old training and income-support program for workers dislocated because of trade. Because the two bills were linked, both were aborted. TPA must precede passage of TPP. Other nations will not provide concessions, if they believe Congress can re-write the Treaty.

With the news that a woman will be added to the $10 bill — not to the exclusion of founding father Alexander Hamilton, as originally feared, but in addition to him — plenty of people have wondered why the $20 bill wasn’t the one that came in for revision instead. Hamilton, as an author of the Federalist papers, the first Treasury secretary, and essentially the father of the American currency system, seems like he deserves his own bill.

Meanwhile there were calls for a woman to replace Andrew Jackson, who may be a member of President Obama’s party but is a rather controversial figure these days, and was not an especially well-regarded president in the first place. (His signal accomplishments were making America more populist, democratic, and focused on the western frontier — all questionable moves in a way, really.) So why is the ten getting changed?

Oregon’s Gresham-Barlow school district spends $100,000 each year on a white-privilege conference that teaches its faculty that they’re racist and should therefore blame themselves for student misbehavior.

The week-long “Coaching for Educational Equity” conference is mandatory for all administrators (and optional for teachers) in the Portland-area K–12 school district each year, according to the Education Action Group Foundation, a national non-partisan, non-profit education reform organization headquartered in Michigan.

EAG reports that school-board member Dan Chriestenson recently obtained the conference materials after a long battle with the Oregon Center for Educational Equity, the private nonprofit that presents the conference.

‘Trigger Warning’ Professors Aren’t Compassionate; They’re Co-Conspirators in Campus Censorship
Last fall, my friend Wendy Kaminer appeared on a Smith College panel — held in New York City, not on Smith’s campus in Northampton, Mass. — called “Challenging the Ideological Echo Chamber: Civil Discourse and the Liberal Arts.” From the transcript, it appears the panel discussion proceeded as the better academic panels do, with spirited, civil disagreement. Kaminer led the charge — as she always does — for free speech, challenging the audience to speak (and think) freely. And when it comes to free speech, Kaminer practices what she preaches. She self-censors for no one.

When the Smith College newspaper published the transcript, however, it contained the following, absurd statement: “Trigger/Content Warnings: Racism/racial slurs, ableist slurs, antisemitic language, anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language, anti-immigrant language, sexist/misogynistic slurs, references to race-based violence, references to antisemitic violence.” As Kaminer pointed out in her Washington Post piece about the incident, the paper then went on to edit the transcript itself by removing the allegedly “triggering content.” For example, it replaced Smith president Kathleen McCartney’s joking comment, “We’re just wild and crazy, aren’t we?” with “We’re just wild and [ableist slur], aren’t we?”

Adolf Hitler started World War II by attacking Poland on September 1, 1939. Nazi Germany moved only after it had already remilitarized the Rhineland, absorbed Austria, and dismantled Czechoslovakia. Before the outbreak of the war, Hitler’s new Third Reich had created the largest German-speaking nation in European history.

Well before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese government had redrawn the map of Asia and the Pacific. Japan had occupied or annexed Indochina, Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan, in addition to swaths of coastal China. Attacking Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Indonesia was merely the logical 1941 follow-up to more than a decade of Japanese aggression.

Fascist Italy, by the outbreak of World War II in Europe, had already been remaking the map of the Mediterranean region in imitation of ancient Rome. Strongman Benito Mussolini had annexed what is now Ethiopia, Albania, and most of Libya. He promised Italians that the Mediterranean would soon be mare nostrum, “our sea.”