RUTHFULLY YOURS

Free speech is fundamental to ensuring that any country remains free. Trifling with it should not be taken lightly. Three recent events in the U.S. remind us of its value. One was the Prophet Muhammad Art Exhibition and Contest in Garland, Texas. That incident created a debate between “free” speech and “hate” speech. Another was the PEN (poets, essayists and novelists) award to Charlie Hebdo, which was boycotted by some prominent writers who claimed the magazine is “racist.” The third, and scariest, was the assertion by Hillary Clinton and others that the Constitution may have to be amended; so that Congress in its wisdom can determine what is appropriate and what is not in regard to political speech during Presidential campaigns.

The example that is always used to define the limits of free speech is the crying of “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire. It is malicious and is intended to scare and harm those that are there. But words that are distasteful to some, or even to most, are protected. When Chris Ofili displayed his elephant dung-covered Madonna at the Brooklyn Museum in 1996, it was described by then Mayor Giuliano as “sick,” an assessment with which I agreed. But when he tried to have the City of New York withhold a $7 million grant, the museum sued on the grounds that the mayor’s action was an infringement of its First Amendment rights. The museum, rightly, won.

Some of our liberal friends, particularly the art lovers among them, are terrified of the hobgoblins that Ralph Waldo Emerson warned about. “A foolish consistency,” he famously said, “is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines.”

We see this writ large in the threat to public peace and the lives of the innocent by Islamic radicals. The radicals, who maim and kill in the name of the Prophet, are treated with respect (if not terror), and the Christians who have threatened no one, must be hectored, lectured and exiled to the fringes of the public square.

In a Camp David summit meeting Thursday, leaders of Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations will attempt to persuade President Obama to enter into a military agreement to counteract the inevitable consequences of his nuclear weapons deal with Iran. This is their final opportunity to do so before the scheduled June 30 completion of that agreement.

The Arab leaders seek an agreement requiring the United States to “contain” Iran and sell their nations the weapons that could give them a qualitative military advantage over Iran. The containment statement and security agreement they seek would be a formal memorandum of understanding on regional security but, according to a Financial Times report, “something short of a treaty.”

President, London Center for Policy Research

Despite the Marxist assertion that economic factors drive the forces of history, modernity offers a different response. Jacobins during the French Revolution argued that politics – understood as the quest for power – drives history. Here, too, history provides an equivocal response. It is in the warehouse of liberal dogma that if you have a democracy and a free market, the quest for historical justification is in the offing. Presumably these are the characteristics of a smooth running machine of state.

While politics and economics are certainly undeniably important in historical assessment, they in themselves are not the dynamic force in history. At the core of historical movement is what people believe, cherish, worship. The real test of history is over what a people are willing to sacrifice; on what are they willing to stake their lives.

Blame you know who: At the Park Slope Food Coop, a foiled BDS push against SodaStream has anti-Israel activists seething.

The zealots who seek to isolate and punish Israel by boycotting, divesting from and sanctioning businesses in the Jewish state are on the march in New York City. Again.

Where? Park Slope, of course. The Food Coop, of course.

When Adolf Hitler published “Mein Kampf” in 1926, he spelled out his vision for Germany’s domination of the world and annihilation of the Jews. Germany would not have lost WWI, he wrote, “if twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas.”

In 1933, Hitler’s Nazis took power. The few people who had read Hitler’s manifesto and took him seriously fled in time to save their lives. But most – including most Jews – didn’t. Comfortable, often prominent, and fully accepted, they believed in German society and could not fathom that a madman actually meant what he said and intended to fully carry out his malevolent vision.

Even as things grew increasingly menacing – through Kristallnacht, book burnings, the stultifying restriction of civil liberties, the expulsion of Jewish children from schools, the construction of Dachau, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death camps – there were Jews and others who downplayed Hitler’s ominous threat. Worse, they derided and vilified those who took him seriously, calling them fear-mongers and haters and liars. Sound familiar?

The two zealots who drove from Phoenix with automatic weapons, body armor, and the encouragement of Islamic State recruiters arrived in Garland, Texas, apparently bent on murder. They didn’t succeed. After wounding an unarmed man, they were gunned down by a traffic cop moonlighting as a security guard. But what they were really attacking was the Constitution of the United States, specifically the First Amendment. That fight continues.

As the gun battle unfolded, an ISIS propagandist who’d encouraged the doomed gunmen offered up a rationale for terrorism—on Twitter.

“Allahu Akbar!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire,” tweeted British-born ISIS fighter Junaid Hussain. “If there is no check on the freedom of your speech,” he added, “then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions.”

Obviously, this is not a coherent philosophy around which civilization can be organized: You’re free to say what you want—unless I don’t like it, and then I can kill you. It’s not what most Americans would recognize as a legitimate religious tenet, either. It’s fascism, exactly what the organizers of the Garland event were highlighting.

In 1819, Joseph Perl, Hebrew literature’s first novelist, published The Revealer of Secrets. A riotous satire of the ḥasidic movement, it remains largely and unjustly forgotten.

With this essay, we inaugurate a series of fresh looks by Hillel Halkin at Zionist or proto-Zionist writers and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some are well known. Others, like the Galician Jewish writer Joseph Perl, deserve to be.

Exactly 200 years ago, a Hebrew book called Shivḥey ha-Besht (The Praises of the Baal Shem Tov), was published in the Belarussian town of Kopys. The Baal Shem Tov, the legendary founder of Ḥasidism, had died in 1760, more than a half-century previously, and the book’s author, Dov Ber of Linitz, was the son-in-law of a man who had been his secretary.

Shivḥey ha-Besht, a collection of stories about the Baal Shem, some of them heard by Dov Ber from his father-in-law, quickly went through many editions. In more ways than one, it was a literary milestone. It was the first written life of a figure known until then to his followers and detractors alike only by word of mouth. It also initiated a new Hebrew genre, the ḥasidic tale, which would proliferate in hundreds of volumes in the years to come. And though modeled on an earlier book, The Praises of the Ari, a hagiography of the Safed kabbalist Yitzḥak Luria Ashkenazi printed in 1629, it was written in prose never before seen in a published Hebrew work: simple, functional, and lively, yet riddled with grammatical errors, calque translations from Yiddish, and Yiddish and Slavic words whose Hebrew equivalents Dov Ber did not know or bother to look for. He was a ritual slaughterer, not a rabbi, and the rabbinic language of his times, with its scholarly conventions, densely compressive style, heavy mixture of Aramaic, and erudite allusions to biblical and rabbinic texts did not interest him and was probably beyond his ke

Do you know what’s really bad for the environment? Environmentalists.

There they are every day spewing more carbon, printing up posters, holding Earth Day rallies that create more trash than a year’s worth of tabloids and generally making a mess. They own giant homes, fly on jets to warn us that the the sky is falling and never stop bleating, crying and whining.

Their latest whinge is Mother’s Day because you’re not an official environmentalist until you ruin something for other people [2].

Like so many other aspects of our contemporary culture, historical facts are overlooked in favor of “feelings” and perceived “rights.” In today’s American high schools and universities, teachers are focused on aggrieved minorities, and “victims” of all kinds, rather than on historical truth. For example, many in the media and academia repeatedly herald the victimization of the Palestinian-Arabs. Some professors and media outlets have even inferred that the State of Israel was founded on “stolen” Palestinian land. While others accuse Israel of an illegal “occupation” – a lie that has become an accepted truth.

April 25 marked a significant historical date – unknown by most. On that date in 1920, members of the League of Nations, the UN predecessor, assembled at the Italian city of San Remo and signed a deed – the first in two millenniums – that granted the Jewish people total and exclusive ownership of the Land of Israel. Leaders of the victorious World War 1 allied countries, including the United States (observer, not a member), Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan along with 51 other states representing the League of Nations, signed the document.