RUTHFULLY YOURS

Of the many kinds of trains exhibited in Birmingham’s Wonderful World of Trains and Planes, in Birmingham, England, the only display in dispute was the model train set of Auschwitz, noted the Daily Mail. The photos included in the column certainly verify that the set was painstakingly designed to provide authenticity, was sufficiently informative, and respectfully and tastefully executed. Although I have visited Auschwitz, I have seen an authentic and replicas of boxcars in other museums, not to mention in newsreels, so I was dismayed to learn that only this one was considered objectionable.

One such objection came from a Holocaust survivor and while my heart goes out to him, this was an important teaching moment that would not be obtained in a classroom or home environment, and must not be obliterated from collective memory. It is not the presentation, but the Holocaust itself that is offensive. The mass murder of millions of innocent men, women, and children is inconceivably offensive. The obliteration of human beings by fascists – and now by Islamo-fascists – is severely offensive. And last year, I was privileged to edit a book of Holocaust survivors’ memoirs that were immensely offensive, but surely not to be dismissed or disregarded.

There are striking similarities between the objectives of Churchill’s speech nearly 75 years ago and Netanyahu’s today; both with no less purpose than to avert global conflagration. And, like Churchill’s in the 1930s, Netanyahu’s is the lone voice among world leaders today.

There is no doubt about Iran’s intent. It has been described as a nuclear Auschwitz. Israel is not the only target of Iranian violence. Iran has long been making good on its promises to mobilize Islamic forces against the US, as well as the UK and other American allies. Attacks directed and supported by Iran have killed an estimated 1,100 American troops in Iraq in recent years. Iran provided direct support to Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks.

Between 2010 and 2013, Iran either ordered or allowed at least three major terrorist plots against the US and Europe to be planned from its soil. Fortunately, all were foiled.

Iran’s ballistic missile program, inexplicably outside the scope of current P5+1 negotiations, brings Europe into Iran’s range, and future development will extend Tehran’s reach to the US.

“Thank you. Wow, 16,000 people. Anyone here from California? Florida? New York?

Well, these are the easy ones. How about Colorado? Indiana? I think I got it. Montana?Texas?

You’re here in record numbers. You’re here from coast to coast,from every part of this great land. And you’re here at a critical time. You’re here to tell the world that reports of the demise of the Israeli-U.S. relations are not only premature, they’re just wrong.

You’re here to tell the world that our alliance is stronger than ever.

And because of you, and millions like you, across this great country, it’s going to get even stronger in the coming years.

Thank you Bob Cohen, Michael Kassen, Howard Kohr and all the leadership of AIPAC. Thank you for your tireless, dedicated work to strengthen the partnership between Israel and the United States.

I want to thank,most especially, Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans. I deeply appreciate your steadfast support for Israel, year in, year out. You have our boundless gratitude.

While under fierce attack from President Obama, the Israeli prime minister defends Western values and speaks the truth about Iran.
The leader of the free world will be addressing Congress on Tuesday. The American president is doing everything possible to undermine him. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads a nation surrounded by enemies, a nation so small that it narrows at one point to just 9.3 miles. Yet, in a world where the Oval Office is manned by someone openly apologetic for most American exercises of power; and where Western Europe’s economy is enervated, its people largely faithless, and its leadership feckless; and where Freedom House has found “an overall drop in [global] freedom for the ninth consecutive year,” the safeguarding of our civilization might rely more on leaders who possess uncommon moral courage than on those who possess the most nukes or biggest armies.
Right now, nobody on the world stage speaks for civilization the way Netanyahu does. While Barack Obama babbles about the supposedly “legitimate grievances” of those who turn to jihad, Netanyahu talks like this (from his speech to the United Nations on September 27, 2012): The clash between modernity and medievalism need not be a clash between progress and tradition. The traditions of the Jewish people go back thousands of years. They are the source of our collective values and the foundation of our national strength. At the same time, the Jewish people have always looked towards the future. Throughout history, we have been at the forefront of efforts to expand liberty, promote equality, and advance human rights. We champion these principles not despite of our traditions but because of them.

John Kerry generally enters into diplomacy concerning Israel like a bull in a china shop; or, shall we say, like a Cossack in a sukkeh. (That is a simile that would have been familiar to Kerry’s Yiddish-speaking paternal grandparents, originally named Kohn.) It therefore came as no surprise when, in a nearly apopleptic outburst to a congressional committee on February 25, he assailed Benjamin Netanyahu for having the temerity to accept an invitation from the U. S. Congress to warn of the imminent danger of allowing Iran to acquire the capacity to develop and the ability to “deliver” nuclear weapons, including Special Delivery to Israel.

Kerry alleged that Netanyahu (“the prime minister”) had already shown extremely bad judgment about the Middle East back in 2002 when “the prime minister was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq.” “And,” he snidely added, “you remember how that turned out.” Whether that invasion was wise or foolish, Kerry himself had made exactly the same judgment about it on October 11, 2002 when he voted (as he had also speechified) in favor of the invasion. “Bibi” did indeed in 2002 recommend “taking out” Saddam Hussein, though whether he did it in “forward-leaning” position I couldn’t say. Of course Ariel Sharon was PM at that time, and Bibi had testified, publicly, as a private citizen. But one does not expect fine distinctions from people like Kerry, who first came to prominence in 1971 by accusing the entire American chain of military command of being “war criminals.”

I don’t know what Israel’s Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is going to say to the U.S. Congress on Tuesday. Obama and the sleaze media will try to make this story all about Bibi and phony “violations of protocol.”
Bibi will try to tell the truth.
Who will you listen to? This is a once-in-a-lifetime event. This time it really matters. Life or death, war or peace, lies or the truth.
This time it’s literally life or death -– not just for one person, but for entire nations and ethnic peoples.
If you doubt that, just see what ISIS is doing to the indigenous Christians who lived in the Middle East centuries before Islam.
Here’s what I hope he will say.

Israel is not the problem in the ME. Nor is any concession Israel could make “the solution,” as liberals seem to think, in their amazingly delusional way. If Israel were to surrender to its genocidal enemies tomorrow, it wouldn’t make a smidgen of difference to all the warring cults and regimes over there. ISIS would still be killing all the same people, because ISIS follows Wahhabi (Saudi) war theology, in which all infidels (you and me), heretics (the mullahs), and polytheists (Hindus and Buddhists) deserve to die by “striking at the neck,” as the Koran says, just like those innocent flight attendants on 9/11/01.
The idea that “Israel is the problem in the Middle East” has obsessed liberal foreign policy professors at least since Arab Oil Embargo of 1973. Today the Muslim Brotherhood runs the “Muslim Student Union” at UC Berkeley and its ilk, in active collusion with radical leftists — like Obama.
Last week Admiral James (“Ace) Lyons (USN, ret.) spoke the blunt truth about Muslim infiltration, subversion, and sabotage of the U.S. government.

Chuck Schumer and other liberal fence-sitters will have their reputations stained forever if they let this Iran deal pass.

The Democratic Party is on the cusp of abandoning the state of Israel. That’s a shame, though less for Israel than it is for the Democrats.

The Democrats’ historic support for the Jewish state has always been what’s best about the party. The understanding not only that Jews are entitled to a state, but also that a liberal democracy is entitled to defend itself—robustly and sometimes pre-emptively—against illiberal enemies, is why the party of Harry Truman, Scoop Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan commands historic respect.

But that party is evaporating. A 2014 Pew survey found that just 39% of liberal Democrats are more sympathetic to Israel than they are to the Palestinians. That compares with 77% of conservative Republicans. During last summer’s war in Gaza, Pew found liberals about as likely to blame Israel as they were to blame Hamas for the violence.

Bill de Blasio built his 2013 campaign for New York City mayor around unapologetically progressive policies: an end to the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” practices, loosened restrictions on welfare availability, universal prekindergarten, and various other initiatives designed to reduce the economic inequality that, he claimed, had made Gotham “a tale of two cities.” De Blasio’s victory has quickly given him a national profile as one of liberalism’s standard-bearers, and he appears to have broader ambitions. Realizing any such aspirations will depend, of course, on how he performs as mayor, but de Blasio came into office with an advantage that his recent predecessors lacked: overwhelming support in the city council, whose members, as one lawmaker put it, are like a “cult of true believers,” eager to follow their leader. In New York, the mayor makes most of the news, and it’s easy to ignore the city council.

As my friend and e-pal Jack Englehard wrote: “Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hours away from giving the speech of his life. Pray for him to succeed.Pray for the welfare of Israel. Pray for the welfare of the United States. Both nations are in the same boat. We share the same values. We share the same perils.” Amen…rsk

The following column was written by Rick Richman in December 2013 . On the eve of Netanyahu’s momentous speech to both Houses of Congress…please take the time to read it.

“Jabotinsky’s June 19 speech is a forgotten piece of history, but it relates to the history we are living through now.”
Just weeks before he died, one of Zionism’s early prophets was starting to get real traction in his plan to create a Jewish army in the heart of the Holocaust.

In June 1940—at the darkest military moment of World War II—three speeches were given in two days: one by a prime minister; another by a general; the third by a Zionist leader. Everyone knows the first; some have heard of the second; few are aware of the third. But the three are of a piece, and the third still resonates today, nearly 75 years later.

On June 18, Winston Churchill—who became prime minister only five weeks before—delivered a lengthy address to a subdued Parliament, dealing primarily with the catastrophic Dunkirk evacuation he had ordered. In May, Nazi Germany had overwhelmed the low countries of Western Europe in a massive new blitzkrieg; Hitler was days away from defeating France, and Britain was unprepared for the invasion it knew would be coming next. Today everyone remembers Churchill’s speech by its final sentence: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

The same day, a little-known general, who had escaped the day before from France and would one day be heralded as the greatest French leader of the twentieth century, delivered a radio address in a London BBC studio. He called on French officers and men who were in Britain, or might be in the future, to get in touch with him, with or without their arms, to form a resistance. The next day he broadcast another call: “Faced by the bewilderment of my countrymen … by the fact that the institutions of my country are incapable, at the moment, of functioning, I, General de Gaulle, a French soldier and military leader, realize that I now speak for France.” In France, June 18 is now a national commemorative event, celebrated each year in memory of De Gaulle’s radio addresses.

On June 18, Vladimir Jabotinsky, head of the New Zionist Organization, was in New York City, preparing to deliver an address the next evening at the 4,500-seat Manhattan Center. He had spoken there in March to an overflow crowd of 5,000 people; now he held a press conference to preview the second address: he would call for a Jewish Army to fight “the giant rattlesnake.” On June 19 another overflow crowd showed up at the Manhattan Center, despite an extraordinary public effort by American Jewish leaders to thwart the event.

For those of us in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast states, February seemed longer than twenty-eight days. March, which in three weeks will welcome spring, arrived just in time. Temperatures in the single digits, with piles of snow that while beautiful appear will never melt, defined our days and nights. The wind whistling across the river left drifts as high as the stockade fence that separates us from our neighbor.

But the world does not center on Old Lyme. It was – dare I call them what they are? – Islamic terrorists that dominated the news this month. Boko Haram, which persists in abducting and killing, has found a use for the school girls taken last spring – remember those ridiculous hashtags “Bring back our girls?” In northeastern Nigeria, several girls as young as ten were fitted out with explosive vests and made to walk into crowded markets. The vests were detonated, disintegrating the child and killing many others. A Jordanian pilot, captured last December by ISIS in Syria, was caged, doused with gasoline and then burned alive. Two people in Copenhagen were killed by an Islamic “lone wolf,” one at a “free-speech” symposium and the second outside a synagogue. The killer was shot. Knife-wielding, 6’5” ISIS Insurgents in Libya marched twenty-one Egyptian Coptic Christians along a beach preliminary to sawing off their heads. The victims were killed solely for their religion. Toward the end of the month, ISIS kidnapped 70 Assyrian Christians, including women and children. Their fate is unknown, but the likelihood is that they are already dead, either burned or crucified. The month ended with some good news as well as bad. Three Central Asians (residents of the U.S.) living in Brooklyn were arrested for conspiring to join ISIS, the purpose being to carry out terrorist plots against the U.S. And Austria passed a law which would ban the use of foreign funds for financing mosques, Imam’s and Muslim organizations. The law would also require that Muslims living in Austria submit to Austrian law, not Sharia law. That law should become the standard for the West. On the other hand, al Shabaab threatened to blow up the Mall of America outside Minneapolis.