RUTHFULLY YOURS

A near-indecipherable tattoo on a woman’s leg helps unravel a mystery surrounding the 1943 anthem of the Jewish resistance.

The photograph of a tattooed pair of women’s legs appearing atop this column was e-mailed to me by a friend after having been sent to him by an acquaintance who’d taken it in New York. The legs—belonging, apparently, to a feministically inclined Jewish patriot—bear three inscriptions. On the left calf are “Never Again” and a barbed-wire Star of David. The left ankle (not pictured here) has two words in Hebrew or Yiddish that I can’t make out. On the right calf are the faces of two young women wearing military-style berets and lettering that, though a bit difficult to decipher, spells the Yiddish words dos lid geshribn iz mit blut, “the song is written with blood,” above the faces, and un nit blay, “and not lead,” beneath them. Or is it, on the contrary, un mit blay, “and with lead”? It’s hard to tell—and thereby hangs a tale.

The words of this tattoo come from the well-known song Zog nit keynmol az du geyst dem letztn veg, “Never say the road you’re on will be your last,” also known as the Partisans’ Song. Written in the Vilna ghetto in May 1943, it quickly became the anthem of anti-German Jewish partisan units all over Eastern Europe. After the war it was widely performed and recorded, and it continues to be sung in various languages at Holocaust commemorations and other events to this day. In its accepted version, the fourth of its five stanzas goes:

Obama’s first hope was to reach a deal with his Iranian friends that would leave the Assad regime in place. But the Iranians blew him off.While Israel and much of official Washington remain focused on the deal President Barack Obama just cut with the ayatollahs that gives them $150 billion and a guaranteed nuclear arsenal within a decade, Obama has already moved on – to Syria.

Obama’s first hope was to reach a deal with his Iranian friends that would leave the Assad regime in place. But the Iranians blew him off.

The Clintons rarely feel obliged to obey the normal rules, whether for email security, the Lincoln Bedroom, or even the expectation that potential Presidents will comment on the issues of the day so people know what they believe and how they would act in office. Try to parse Hillary Clinton’s blanket refusal to take a position on the Keystone XL pipeline, as if it is ridiculous for anyone to ask.

“If it’s undecided when I become President, I will answer your question,” Mrs. Clinton advised a voter on Tuesday in Nashua, New Hampshire. That seems likely given that the oil project that may one day connect Canada to the Gulf Coast has been waiting for a State Department permit since 2008, and President Obama—who vetoed a bipartisan approval bill in February—has extended regulatory review to infinity to appease the green lobby.

The Cold War almost seems a forgotten era these days, but its stalwarts deserve recognition as they now pass from American public life. One of them was Rosanne Klass, an American who led the fight to liberate Afghanistan from the Soviets and who died this week at age 86.

Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Klass joined her husband to teach English in rural Afghanistan in the 1950s, among the first Western women to do so. She became an authority on Afghan culture and politics and wrote a well received account of her experiences in that country, “Land of the High Flags.”

After the Soviet invasion in 1979, she became an advocate of U.S. support for the Afghan insurgents and chronicled the many Soviet depredations. She joined Freedom House, that great advocate of human liberty in authoritarian states, and wrote books and op-eds, including for these pages.

The nuclear deal with Iran’s fanatical anti-Jewish regime will fuel racism on a global scale.

Barack Obama’s election to the presidency represented to many Americans this country’s final triumph over racism. Reversing the record of slavery and institutionalized discrimination, his victory was hailed as a redemptive moment for America and potentially for humankind. How grotesque that the president should now douse that hope by fueling racism on a global scale.

The Iranian regime is currently the world’s leading exponent of anti-Jewish racism. Comparisons to Nazi Germany are always a last resort, since even with all the evidence before us it is hard to fathom the evil the Nazis perpetrated. Yet Iran’s frank genocidal ambition dwarfs its predecessor’s. Whereas Adolf Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich had to plot the “Final Solution” in secrecy, using euphemisms for their intended annihilation of the Jews of Europe, Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweets that Israel “has no cure but to be annihilated.” Iran’s leaders, relishing how small Israel is, call it a “one bomb state,” and until the time arrives to deliver that bomb, they sponsor anti-Israel terrorism through Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militias.

Everyone—from her aides to the State and Justice departments—is bending over backward to protect her.
‘Friends of Bill” was a 1990s Washington catchphrase, shorthand for President Clinton’s favored inner circle. His wife, it turns out, has a far bigger fan club. “Friends of Hillary”—the people looking out for her welfare, and benefiting in turn—seem to occupy the highest echelons of government and business.

That’s one way of synthesizing this week’s slew of disparate Clinton revelations. The Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee is grappling with a range of scandals, from her use of a private email server while secretary of state, to actions she took while in office that look to have financially benefited her family’s foundation. But what ties all these stories together is the extraordinary number of people who continue to run cover for Mrs. Clinton’s ambitions.

“Shame on you. Look at these children – look at what you are planting in their minds.”Following Arab rioting and continued unrest on the Temple Mount, an inflammatory video emerged online Tuesday of more than two dozen Muslim children being indoctrinated about violent martyrdom by a sheikh running the so-called al-Aksa Mosque Summer Camp.

In the four-minute video – taken near the Temple Mount on Monday, and published online by the Middle East Media Research Institute – Sheikh Khaled al-Maghrabi tells the group of boys and girls that, “The martyr is absolved with the first drop of his blood,” while heavily armed Border Police officers casually look on and do not intervene.

Israel’s military is the most powerful in the Middle East, while its air force ranks second to none globally, according to a study conducted by military experts for Business Insider.

The business and technology news website ranked the 15 strongest armies in the region while noting the size of the countries’ respective defense budgets as well as the latest geopolitical tumult and its impact on military strength.

“A close defense relationship with the US and an energetic domestic defense industry give Israel a qualitative edge over all of the region’s other militaries,” the report stated.

“Israel has space assets, advanced fighter jets, hi-tech armed drones and nuclear weapons. Its air force has incredibly high entry and training standards.”

“Pilot to pilot, airframe to airframe, the Israeli air force is the best in the world,” Chris Harmer, a senior naval analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, told Business Insider.

It is glaringly obvious that the US military played no role, or only a minor role, in the recently concocted Iran deal. The absence of any senior military officials in Geneva illustrates better than anything else that the deal is an entirely political one which is designed to mainly be window dressing on a restart of relations with the Iranian regime. For this pleasure the United States and its allies in Europe are contributing massive amounts of high technology and releasing money so Iran can buy products from them. Ironically, the fact is that Iran will probably spend the bulk of the money on armaments, mostly from Russia, China and North Korea, and on underwriting the costs of its nuclear and missile programs.

They aren’t much allowed anymore, neither on the pages of contemporary fiction nor in modern movies or on TV, not unless they’re latent homosexuals, confused about gender, tolerant of gays, lesbians and Muslims, anti-gun, anti-violence, and worried about global warming. Also, they don’t much smoke, don’t drink, aren’t “sexist,” try to keep their “microaggressions” to a minimum, know they must be non-patriarchal and non-patronizing to women and minorities, and they drive fuel efficient and environmentally friendly cars. They have become, as Chess Hanrahan calls them in Honors Due, “social workers with guns,” armed also with a clown’s trick flower to squirt into your face. They’re little else but a corrupt, nihilistic culture’s court jesters.

Give them a serious moment or two, but always follow it up with laughter and humor at the hero’s expense, or at the expense of the story. Don’t let the public walk out of a theatre feeling uplifted and invincible, or let them turn off a TV without the uneasy feeling that they’re fools and that they shouldn’t take it seriously.