RUTHFULLY YOURS

I thought that maybe I’d start with a rendition of Paul McCartney’s plaintive masterpiece “Yesterday”… “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they’re here to stay, oh I believe in yesterday” – but then I thought too romantic.

And then I thought, how about the favorite classic we all learned as children – “Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques, Dormez-vous, Dormez-vous, Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines, Ding Daing Dong, ding daing dong. Are you sleeping, are you sleeping, Brother John, Brother John” but then I said to myself…too French.

Perhaps the story of Chicken Little – “The sky is falling. The sky is falling” and I thought getting closer but too childish. What about Santayana’s “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Maybe, but too philosophical. And then I remembered Joseph Conrad’s sadly, cynical observation – – “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary. Men alone are quite capable of every wickedness,” and sadly it felt right. And so, here were are in a place of unimagined chaos and cowardice, paralysis and brutality. The beast roams the earth; we are stymied, stunned and continue to fiddle.

My friends, “Ehr Kumpt. Part 2, the Sequel.”

This is not a time for delicacy. For tiptoeing. It is not a time to parse words nor worry about offending someone with unfiltered vocabulary. Time is no longer a luxury we possess. Distance, no longer provides protection. We are being threatened like no time before, by an enemy obsessed with an apocalyptic end game that will bring only disaster. An enemy that worships savagery. An enemy that celebrates depravity. An enemy that glorifies the death of the young.

There has been a seismic shift in our world. We feel it. We see it. We know it. We dare not deny it. Pick up any newspaper on any day, the first page, the second page, the third page, the fourth page and beyond – – most of the articles are about radical Muslims, not just ISIS, immersed in a vicious culture of blood and slaughter. Skip to the sports page or the crossword puzzle if you wish but that doesn’t make the uncomfortable news go away.

In fact, it brings joy to the jihadists who hope for our indifference. If we deny evil then we need not fight it. It doesn’t exist – just a few lunatics, thousands of miles away, pounding sand, blowing each other up and occasionally beheading an unlucky journalist. Not so bad.

For years we have been mercifully spared the ugliness and intimacy of war. The Battle of the Bulge and Iwo Jima were a black and white movie tone newsreel after Tom & Jerry and before the Pride of the Yankees. We planted victory gardens, rolled up tin foil, bought Liberty Bonds, said goodbye to fathers, sons and brothers. But the trenches were on the other side of the Atlantic and Pacific. So too, every other subsequent conflict. The Yanks were coming but the shooting was “over there.” We suffered little. But today, war has been redefined and relocated. Geneva is finished. We are all combatants in the cross hairs. We are all on the front lines, like it or not. The battlefield has no boundaries and the war, no rules. The enemy targets deliberately, fiendishly, any place of innocence. All are vulnerable and so we must recalculate our strategy, re-examine our tolerance, re-energize our resolve and unequivocally identify the evil doers. Let us not be silenced by fear, by feckless goodwill, by reckless hope, by meaningless rhetoric.

There are one billion Muslims in the world and authorities agree that 5% are committed Islamists who embrace terror and wish to see, by any means possible, the Muslim flag fly over every capital, on every continent. I was relieved when I heard only 5%. Thank God it’s only 5%. Now I could sleep soundly. But wait, let me figure this out, 5% of a billion is… 50 million Koran waving, Allah Akbar howling Muslim murderers out there planning to slit our throats, blow us up or forcibly convert us.

It only took 19 of Osama bin Laden’s disciples to bring down the Twin Towers, plow into the Pentagon and crash a plane into Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Over 3,000 dead. Over $10 billion in damages on that sad day. 19 Al Qaeda. 50 million Islamists. Do the math.

But what disturbs me is where are the other 950 million Muslims who are not terrorists? Who are not bomb blasting, acid throwing, zealots? Where are the other 950 million Muslims who tuck their children in at night with a lullaby, who are okay with Christians and Jews, crave a peaceful world and wish nothing more than a tasty bowl of hummus and a friendly game of Shesh Besh with a neighbor?

I want to believe they are out there for their sake and for ours. I want to believe they weep in pain over the desecration of their faith. I want to believe that we have partners who dream the dreams we do and wish upon the same star.

I want to believe – – but where are they?

A silent partnership is no partnership. Sin is not just in the act of commission – it is also in the act of omission. Most Germans were not Nazis – but it did not matter.

Most Russians were not Stalinists – but it did not matter.

Most Muslims are not terrorists – but it does not matter.

Stand up righteously or get out of the way. Perhaps in every mosque, in every midrassah, in every Muslim neighborhood, Edmund Burke’s powerful warning should be chiseled on a wall in Arabic, in Farsi, in Pashto, in Urdu, for all to read and heed. “All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.”

A couple of months ago, 3 young Israelis were kidnapped by Hamas terrorists and killed. And so began Operation Protective Edge. But the Gaza war was much more than shooting down rockets and blowing up tunnels – it was the preview, the soft opening, for a much more serious war – a genuine world war. It was a test of resolve, of fortitude. It was a test watched carefully by the indecent forces of a rising Islamist world. Israel is only the beginning. The first prize sought in what promises to be a protracted, multi-generational Kulterkampf. Israel made the headlines but the front lines are all over the map – we just don’t know it yet. The whole world was watching and our performance was pathetic. We, the good guys, stumbled at the gate; tripped clumsily in an embarrassing display of moral confusion and ineptitude. It was amateur hour and the bad guys were licking their chops.

I say the following unapologetically and with a heavy heart. When the war began, the President of the United States, the leader of the Free World, should have immediately, instinctively invited to the Oval Office, the leading Democrats and Republicans of the Senate and the House, his cabinet and all significant Washington political players. Every domestic and international news organization should have been notified and the following talk broadcast across the planet.

“Fellow Americans – a crisis has erupted once again in the Middle East and I have been told that the war between Israel and Hamas is complex and nuanced. I have been told that our great nation must be evenhanded- but I am here to say with no equivocation, with no hesitation, this war is not complex. This war is not nuanced and we will not be evenhanded in this confrontation of good and evil, of right and wrong, of civilization and savagery. We Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives from sea to shining sea, stand together in unshakable support of Israel against foul, corrupt, murderers who sacrifice the lives of children in their pursuit of power. To Israel we say – do whatever you must. To Israel we say, take whatever time you need to crush this vile enemy and whatever you require, you can count on us. To the world we say, Israel is fighting for all of us – for our values, for our principles, for our civilization. Support her efforts, as we do, in every way possible. I will not tolerate any words of disparagement against our greatest ally and friend in the Middle East. God bless Israel and God bless the United States of America.”

But these words did not ring forth from the White House, the capital of the free world. What we did hear was “No victor, no vanquished.” This statement was our President’s strategic plan. No call for triumph over terrorism, but a weak kneed, stalemate with butchers – a tie between good and evil. Right and wrong. Civilization and savagery.

This did not go unnoticed.

Media coverage during the war was biased and shameful with a few notable exceptions. To permit Hamas spokesmen and Hamas sympathizers to speak and to defend their monstrous deeds to millions of viewers is morally shocking. To promote equivalency between Israel and Hamas is morally appalling. With my remote, I would channel surf, go from station to station and I could not believe what I was hearing on CNN, CBS, BBC, ABC, MSNBC, and all the rest. The grotesque propaganda, the repulsive distortions – the tolerance of the wicked.

And this did not go unnoticed.

As I sat through these numbing broadsides, I wondered if our mainstream media during WWII would have invited the Germans and the Japanese to share their perspectives on the hostilities in Europe and in the Pacific. As they moaned about Dresden and the Doolittle Raid, would the anchors have nodded in sympathy? When the Germans and Japanese explained the need for the V1 and V2 bombardment of London and the necessity for the Bataan Death March, would the anchors have expressed understanding?

The obscenities and outright lies given airtime and legitimacy should be sickening to any person of conscience.

Words distinguish us from the beast. In a powerful Holocaust tale, Eli Wiesel painfully writes that when words lose their meaning, disaster follows. In today’s Middle East, lexicon; restraint means suicide. Terrorists have become militants. Self-defense is a war crime. Democracy is apartheid. Israelis and Jews have become Nazis. Warning civilians to get out of harm’s way has become genocide. 38 Muslim countries – 22 Arab countries and Israel, the only Jewish nation, must constantly defend her right to exist.

Russia invades. Nigeria enslaves. China oppresses. Pakistan rapes. Iraq slaughters. North Korea starves. Iran nuclearizes. Syria massacres. Venezuela plunders. Afghanistan tortures. Sudan annihilates. ISIS beheads and Israel is the pariah state, put under the microscope by the morally noxious.

And this did not go unnoticed.

Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher, wrote the following in 1968 – 46 years ago. His words have not grown stale with the passage of time. To the contrary, they are every bit as relevant and meaningful today, nearly 1/2 a century later.

I quote: “The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out 1,000’s, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey drove out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out, heaven knows how many Chinese and no one says a word about refugees. But, in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield, dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious on the battlefield, it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in the world…Other nations when they are defeated, survive and recover, but should Israel be defeated, it would be destroyed…” Hoffers’ final words are chilling and prophetic. “I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the Holocaust will be upon us.” To those who are morally obtuse I say shame on you– from university professors to the useful idiots of the media, from liberal churches to Hollywood, from the United Nations to the clueless left – let me remind all the ‘misguided do-gooders” – your deeds do not go unnoticed.”

The world does not like a righteous Goliath especially if Goliath speaks Hebrew.

Let’s leave the Middle East and head to Europe. For those who have not been recently, it has changed. It has changed dramatically. The sights. The sounds. The crowds. The streets are much different than when we backpacked with our Eurorail passes – strolling down the Champs-Elysees, chasing pigeons at Trafalgar Square, wandering the backstreets of Amsterdam after dark. The continent that gave birth to Western civilization, the continent that defined high culture is crumbling before our very eyes. Because of well-intentioned tolerance and an undisciplined pluralism, Europe is returning to the dark ages. By most estimates, Europe will be unrecognizable by the middle of this century – crushed by a demographic tsunami. The birthrate of the Brits, the French, the Dutch and the rest of the EU is well below ZPG. The Muslim community’s birthrate is prolific. The danger, however, is that Europe has not been a melting pot, assimilating new Muslims. And these new Muslims, for the most part, are not interested in respecting the great democracies of Europe. They want Sharia law and Islamic culture to be ascendant and with their birthrate, the ballot box and their disdain for the West, in time, they will get it.

The element that is surging and redefining Europe are not the democracy respecting Muslims but those who are rampaging in nearly every capital. They are preaching hate for Jews, for Christians, for Israel, for America, for the entire Western world. It is not our grandfather’s Europe and it will not be a Europe our grandchildren will recognize.

For the record, Europe is being flooded not by freedom loving, tolerant, assimilating Muslims who wish to share in Western freedom, in Western tolerance, in Western culture but rather by violent Islamists, extremists who reject every value we treasure. We love ethnic communities – they are vibrant, exciting, magical faraway places only a walk away. Chinatown, Little Odessa, Greek town, Little Havana, Lower Eastside, Little Italy, but what is spreading across Europe are not charming, quaint neighborhoods enjoyed by locals and camera toting tourists in search of a charming restaurant. These are beachheads for invasion.

Want to stare down a guard at Buckingham Palace? Do it soon.

Want to see the Follies-Bergere dance the Can Can? Do it soon.

Want to sip wine at the vineyards of Tuscany? Do it soon.

Want to sunbathe on the beaches of San Trope? Do it soon.

The sun never set on the British Empire but now there is a cold darkness settling on Europe. A Nihilism. A corruption. A perversion in the name of Allah. A Kristallnacht of European and Western culture is coming that will destroy a millennia of creative genius. Don’t listen to me. Listen to what the Islamists preach. Don’t listen to me. Look at what the Islamists do. It is not a leap into fantasy to perceive a dystopian future that is irretrievably ugly and inconceivably vile.

· The Sistine Chapel demolished for portraying God’s image.

· The Pieta, Venus de Milo, David smashed. Idolatry.

· Botticelli’s and Goya’s and Renoirs and Rubens torched – paintings of women not wearing a hijab and chador.

· The Guttenberg Bible. The Magna Carta. Tossed into a bonfire. Profane literature.

· Museums all across Europe vandalized by marauding Islamist fanatics.

Even the Nazis saved the masterpieces.

· Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart silenced.

· The end of opera. Rossini, Verdi, Puccini gone.

· For Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere. The Final curtain, a dark stage.

Even the Nazis enjoyed the classics.

I must assume there are skeptics out there – folks who disbelieve my warnings and might label me an alarmist – a Paul Revere wannabe – galloping across the Pyrenees through the European heartland in the shadow of the Alps crying out “The Muslims are coming. The Muslims are coming.” I weighed each and every word carefully. Repeatedly. Was I treading into bigotry? … into melodrama?

Speak with the ‘canaries in the mine’, the Jews of Europe, fleeing in record numbers. Synagogues fire bombed. Jewish businesses vandalized. Children threatened on their way to school. Kippot buried in their pockets. Mezuzot. Hamsas. Magen Davids dangling on chains tucked under shirts and under blouses to hide Jewish identity. Israeli products pulled off store shelves. This is not the 1930’s nor the 1940’s and yet it is. 68 years since the Nazis defeat but their descendants are making Hitler proud picking up where he left off.

“I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the Holocaust will be upon us.” Slip in the word “Jew” for Israel and we see the future of Europe.

This ever-growing tragedy doesn’t end neatly in Europe, in the Middle East, in Mumbai or the Philippines. Most of us have never tasted the bitterness of war. Witnessed its horror. Clawed our way out from beneath tons of rubble. But we dare not be complacent and cry out confidently – “we have 2 oceans and the TSA to protect us.” We live in a shrunken world. In a porous country. In an open society. We have become perilously naïve. Recklessly evenhanded. Unacceptably tolerant. Dangerously comfortable. The greatest generation has spawned the clueless generation. I say it again loudly, slowly and clearly – we are at war, here in America as well, with radical Islamists. We have been attacked repeatedly and yet we continue to turn away. We euphemize the enemy. Disguising his identity and his intent. There will not be armadas chanting “Allah Akbar” landing on the beaches of Malibu and Boca. No vast battalions chanting “Allah Akbar” while crossing the Rio Grande or the 45th Parallel – but make no mistake – we are at war, right now, this very minute. The tactics have changed. The battlefield is different. The rules of engagement have been redefined but we dare not make the mistake that all is well and that Islamic terrorists are simply violent criminals. That Islamic terrorists are just a bunch of unemployed losers, no part of a vast network hell bent on destroying our country. Their disunity in numbers but their unity in purpose is their power. The Lone Wolf is deadly and we are the prey.

Ask the man or woman on the street when did this all start and most would reply: “On 9/11.” That was a catastrophic day, but not the start. For us here in America, the war began in Teheran in 1979 when our embassy was taken over. It has continued ruthlessly and without pause ever since. Lockerbie and Scotland, TWA Flight 840, the USS Cole, embassies and American interests bombed and Americans killed in Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Spain, Kenya, Germany, Egypt, Kuwait, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.

Connect the dots.

Here on American soil, before 9/11, the Twin Towers were attacked in 1993. The Times Square bomber. The Tsarnev brothers in the Boston Marathon bombing. The Fort Hood massacre was not work place violence but the calculated, cold blooded murder of 13 American soldiers by a Muslim Jihadist yelling “Allah Akbar.” The shooting up in Little Rock, Arkansas of an army recruiting station. The murder of 2 CIA agents outside Langley by a Pakistani whose final words before meeting his maker were “There is no God but Allah.” The indignant, impious, arrogant claim By CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic relations-that anyone who commits an act of violence is by definition, not a Muslim. Therefore, a Muslim terrorist, a Muslim killer, a Muslim suicide bomber, is a misleading term of bigotry and Islamophobia. The slick, masterful ISIS recruitment in Minneapolis. New York. Colorado. On Facebook. On Twitter and across the country.

Connect the dots.

Let’s get Jewish-personal. A Zim Line cargo ship was prevented from offloading it’s cargo for 3 days because of pro-Palestinian mobs in Oakland, California. A young man from our shul on his 1st day of university was taught by his PhD, tenured professor that Israel committed ethnic cleansing in 1948… In Dade County a synagogue was defaced with swastikas and the words Hamas scrawled on its walls. A JCC in Seattle was attacked. A pro-Palestinian rally in Miami called for “the massacre of the Jews.” University campuses across the country, hot beds of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish hostility. A local merchant in Roswell told one of our members (not realizing she was Jewish and vocal) that she was fed up with Israel’s brutal treatment of the children of Gaza.

We are not Europe but connect the dots.

I am concerned, as we all should be, of the alarming surge in Islamist rhetoric, violence and influence. I am equally concerned, as we all should be, of the alarming silence and inaction of mainstream Muslims.

I fear political correctness run amuck. I fear the worship of multiculturalism. I fear progressive voices of repression. I fear a distorted media tolerant of intolerance. I fear politicians who prefer the easy, still of the night to the noble, necessary struggle of the day. I fear we are not so far away from where we thought we would never be.

Three thoughts to ponder. This past year many of us saw the Book of Mormon at the Fox. An irreverent, vulgar, hysterically entertaining musical about the Mormons. We parked our car at the Georgian Terrace and crossed Peachtree Street. In front of the theater were a half dozen, well dressed, mannerly Mormons handing out literature. “Sir, if you would like to know more about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,” a young woman said to me as I took her brochure, “Please go to our website.” I thanked her. She smiled, wished me a pleasant evening and turned to speak with another ticket holder. I thought, “God bless these folks. This is how we disagree in America.” At the same moment I had another thought. What if Trey Parker and Matt Stone came out with a tasteless, bawdy musical that was hysterically entertaining entitled “The Quran, Allah’s Holy Book.” What would happen? It doesn’t take much imagination to answer that question. Jeff Foxworthy correctly wrote, “Have you ever wondered why it’s okay to make jokes about Catholics, the Pope, Jews, Christians, the Irish, the Italians, the Polish, the Chinese, the French (including French Canadians)…but it’s insensitive to make jokes about Muslims?”

A few years back, a Danish newspaper “Jyllanns-Posten” printed 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad to illustrate an article. If the photos published were of Moses or Buddha or of the Apostle Paul, the event would have been met with a yawn. But not so with our Islamist friends. The reaction? Not a letter to the editor. Not a request to submit an op-ed. Not a friendly visit to the publisher – – but worldwide rage. Riots. Boycotts. Embassies burned. Ambassadors recalled. Attacks on Christians and on churches. 200 killed.

Soon after, a professor from Brandeis wrote a book on this outrageous event entitled, “12 Cartoons That Shook the World.” It was published by Yale University Press located at 302 Temple Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, United States of America. But what was missing in the book? What Yale University refused to print were the 12 cartoons and images of Muhammad. This self-censorship was shameful, cowardly, un-American and a sniveling submission to Islamic narcissism and intimidation.

Where is a great university’s courage? Where is Freedom of the Press? This happened in America. In the land of the free and in the home of, I hope, still the brave.

I recall, as we all do, the good old days when air travel was a pleasure. When I flew here to Etz Chaim in my commuting, student days, I’d catch a cab outside my apartment on the upper West side and be at LaGuardia in about 20 minutes. I’d check my bags in 2 minutes and be at the gate in 4 minutes, just in time to board my flight. I even got a meal.

In those days, flying was an adventure, even in coach. Today it is irritating and exhausting. What happened? What changed? Who’s to blame? Who has created the need for a multibillion dollar security industry? Who has created a tedious need for us to remove our shoes and belts, empty our pockets, pack only 3-1/2 ounces of Listerine, go through metal detectors and x-ray machines, submit to frisks and wand searches? Arrive hours before departure? Who is responsible? Let’s see – – not the Italian Mob, not skin heads, not neo Nazis, not Columbian drug cartels, not the Russian mafia, not the Crips nor the Bloods nor the Aryan Brotherhood, not the Ku Klux Klan. So who is it that has irretrievably ruined worldwide air travel?

So, think of a Muslim play on Broadway.

Think of a scholarly text on Muhammad.

Think of flying Delta or United or AirTran.

Think about it and connect the dots.

For us, WWII lasted 4 years. It has been 13 years since 9/11. 35 years since the invasion of our Iranian embassy and like it or not, we are still at war with radical Islam. Declaring we are not at war with radical Islam does not make it so. Roosevelt and Churchill got it and understood that the stakes were not just the Sudetenland and a few islands in the South Pacific. From the White House and 10 Downing Street, they understood it was planet earth. Today, the radical Islamists seek the same prize – not just Bagdad or Benghazi – but planet earth.

This is not dramatic fiction but the real thing. A handful of us, here today experienced the real thing about 11 weeks ago in Israel. We didn’t see the real thing on the nightly news nor read about it in the evening paper or hear about it in a long distance phone call from uncle Moshe in Tel Aviv. We were there as Kassam rockets rained down on Israel, on us, targeting, not military bases, not Merkava tanks, not IDF divisions, but children at play, families enjoying dinner, friends laughing over a beer, lovers strolling through a park, teenagers playing volleyball on the beach. The world watched and preached and judged and only now has begun to stir from their slumber of hypocrisy and inaction. Hamas is ISIS. ISIS is Hamas. They are all the same. Hezbollah. Islamic Jihad. Al Shabab. Muslim Brotherhood. Boko Haram. Al Qaeda. Taliban. Iran. The only difference, is the length of the knife they use in their butchery.

Israeli blood bleeds the same red as the blood of James Foley, of Steven Satloff, of David Hawthorne Haines of Christians and Yazidis.

Let’s reason some suggest. One last Hail Mary negotiation. Maybe we can figure out what’s bothering these troubled Muslims and perhaps they’ll tell us what we can do to resolve the friction. I am all for dialogue, but we are dealing with a moral species that eats its own, kills it’s young and celebrates innocent death as homage to God.

Osama bin Laden eluded capture for 10 years. Ever wonder why? There was a $25 million bounty on his head. That’s a lot of money. $25 million can by a lot of plastic surgery. A new identity. Rosetta Stone tapes. Elocution lesson. A suburban home. A Brooks Brothers wardrobe. New partners. New friends. Surf and turf every night and a round of golf every day.

In 10 years, there was not one betrayal of Osama bin Laden – – not one. And I asked myself, “why not?” – $25 million is a great amount of money and can easily facilitate a luxurious disappearance. The answer is simple. These Islamist criminals are unlike us in the most basic of ways and we have yet to accept and understand their total immersion in moral debauchery.

The enemy has eyes and ears. Fingers and toes. Speaks with lips. Runs with legs. Eats. Drinks. Has the face of a human being – but, has a much different heart and a much different soul.

Three years ago on this bima, on this very same day, standing at this podium, I cried out, “Ehr Kumpt – they are coming.” 3 years later on this bima, on this very same day, standing at this podium, I cry out not “Ehr Kumpt – they are coming,” I cry out, “Ehr daw – they are here.”

The fury of ultimate evil is upon us and we must act – not to contain it. Not to degrade it. Not to manage it. Not to tolerate it, but to exterminate it utterly and absolutely.

If we fail in this holy crusade, we will live in a world bereft of color. Empty of music, of art, of romance, of laughter, of freedom, of invention. A world barren of all beauty. Depleted of all virtue.

We are divided today not by faith nor holy book. We are divided today by decency and indecency. By right and wrong. By moral and corrupt. By courage and cowardice. By righteousness and evil.

The good citizens of earth must rise up. Gather on the mountain top and proclaim in thundering unison the words of Isaiah:

“Hoy ha’omrim lera tov v’la’tov rah – woe to them that call evil, good and good, evil. Who present darkness as light and light as darkness. Who call bitter, sweet and sweet, bitter.

We must turn back the evil.

We must turn back the darkness.

We must turn back the bitter.

My friends – Ehr daw – they are here.

Rabbi Lewis’s first day Rosh Hashanah sermon September, 2014

PLEASE READ: ELIANA JOHNSON

Upstate New York’s Conservative Hope Meet House candidate Elise Stefanik, 30.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/389221/upstate-new-yorks-conservative-hope-eliana-johnson

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/new-york-part-ii-of-ii-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand

REGULATORY AND TAX BURDENS Reduce the out-of-control tax and regulatory burdens facing small businesses by reforming the tax code to be flatter and fairer The U.S. tax code is over 3 million words and over 85,000 pages long. Each year Americans spend billions of hours and hundreds of billions of dollars just trying to comply with it. What if small businesses and hardworking families could use that money, time and energy to buy a house, grow their business, save for the future, or hire an additional employee? Elise will work to pursue fundamental tax reform, make it flatter and fairer for everyone, close special-interest loop holes, and eliminate burdensome regulations that hinder job growth and family savings.

HEALTHCARE Repeal Obamacare and replace it with common sense solutions to lower health care costs and improve quality and access Families and small businesses in the North Country want health care that works for them and fits their specific needs. Instead, Obamacare has caused premiums to rise, coverage plans to be dropped, and small businesses to cut employees and reduce shifts and work hours. This is not the way to reform health care to improve quality and increase access. My family’s business lost our health care plan as a result of Obamacare, and we are now forced to pay more for less coverage. To lower costs and improve care, Elise believes we need to repeal Obamacare and replace with common sense solutions; including to allow Upstate families and businesses to shop for insurance across state lines; pursue real tort reform; fight the waste, fraud and abuse that costs our health care system billions each year; protect those with pre-existing conditions by funding state-level high-risk pools; and allow individuals and families to purchase insurance on the same tax-advantaged basis as businesses.

ENERGY Affordable energy means ‘all of the above’ Energy costs are often times the highest expenses for a family or business in Upstate New York. Gas for the car, heating bills for home or the office – these costs add up quickly. The federal government often places unnecessary mandates and regulations on energy suppliers and development. However, America is home to vast supplies of energy that if fully utilized will supply a growing nation and fuel our economy into the future. Elise supports a national energy policy that increases American-made energy, reduces our dependency on foreign oil, protects the environment, and brings down energy costs for New Yorkers.

Expanding energy exploration and drilling for oil and natural gas where it can be reached; utilizing alternative energy sources like solar and wind; developing more clean-coal and nuclear energy; and keeping government mandates and taxes low on energy suppliers and developers – these are critical components of an American-made ‘All of the Above’ energy policy.

IMMIGRATION Securing our Borders, Addressing a Broken Immigration System

A nation of immigrants, a nation of laws Elise does not support amnesty of any kind for immigrants who have broken the law and entered the country illegally. The first step in fixing our broken immigration system must involve making our borders secure and ensuring law enforcement has the tools and resources they need to keep us safe. America is a nation of immigrants, but is also a nation of laws. But our immigration system is currently broken and doing nothing amounts to de facto amnesty. The more than 11 million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States are doing so outside the law. On the other hand, immigrants trying to do so legally can wait more than 15 years in some cases to obtain legal citizenship. Our system penalizes those who follow the law and rewards those who do not. The North Country has a unique understanding of immigration not only due to our proximity to the Canadian border, but also because of the needs of our local farmers and agriculture businesses, as well as students attending New York universities using student visas. Elise will work in Washington towards an immigration system that upholds the law and keeps Americans safe, while also encouraging economic growth in New York.

It took the gruesome videos of two American journalists being beheaded by a masked Islamic State (ISIS) butcher, followed since then by more victims, to finally wake Americans to the threat that they face from Islam, but the beheading of a Moore, Oklahoma victim by a man who had been trying to get his co-workers to convert to Islam that brought the threat to the homeland.

The memory of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon have long since begun to fade, but Islam has returned to page one with a display of the violence that is the heart and soul of a cult based on the life and teachings of Muhammad.

Don’t call it a religion. And surely do not call it the “religion of peace.” There was nothing peaceful about Islam from its earliest days when the citizens of Mecca came to the conclusion that Muhammad and his followers were a threat to them. That was 1,400 years ago.

If it were in my power, I would require every American to read “It’s All About Muhammad: A Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet” by F.W. Burleigh ($`6.95, Zenga Books).

Instead, I will only highly recommend it as the best way to understand the man who literally invented a so-called religion based on his own pathologies and then, through terror, ensured it spread to the entirety of Arabia in his lifetime.

As the author notes in its introduction, the biography is based almost entirely on the original literature of Islam as well as early biographies, histories, and collections of traditions. Twenty thousand pages of material were given line-by-line scrutiny “because what is written about him in the original literature is disturbing.”

“More than two-thirds of the canonical biographical materials have to do with the violence he used to spread his religion.” It was a short step from Muhammad, the self-proclaimed prophet who later called himself the messenger of Allah, to Alton Nolen, the Muslim convert who is alleged to have beheaded a former co-worker.

What is little known about Muhammad is that he suffered from epileptic fits throughout his life and had had a troubled youth that would have unhinged anyone. A fortunate marriage at age 24 took him out of a life of low status and poverty. His wife was twenty years his senior, a woman of wealth. Though a grave concern in an era when the fits were seen as demon possession, Muhammad began to interpret them as the voices of Allah and his angels, particularly Gabriel.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/arguing-with-sharia-supporting-muslims-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Louis Lionheart, a Christian preacher who engages in open-air debates, dialogues and evangelism on 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, Ca. For information on his ministry visit his web site: TruthDefenders.com.

Louis came on the show to discuss “Arguing With Sharia-Supporting Muslims,” sharing his experience of being told that Islam is peaceful and then being threatened in the same conversation. The dialogue occurred within the context of a focus on “The Battle Over Islam on the Streets of L.A.,” in which Louis discussed his experience of engaging Muslims about their religion on 3rd St. Promenade:

If the weather is too hot or too cold, if there is a natural disaster, if a plane crashes, if crime increases, if crime decreases, if the Ebola virus rampages across of Africa or stays home to read a good book instead, if the price of coffee goes up or if a war breaks out… it will eventually be connected to Global Warming

Even the rise of ISIS has been blamed not on the Koran, but on Global Warming.

Meanwhile a Muslim terrorist can blow himself up at Ground Zero on September 11 while screaming, “I am doing this because I am a Muslim and I hate you all” and those same experts will tell us that it had nothing to do with Islam, but it was caused by the impact of Global Warming on the molecules of his brain.

It’s all a matter of how you connect the dots.

Democrats think that Global Warming is a bigger threat to America than Al Qaeda. That’s the profitable notion that Al Gore has been selling for some time. When ISIS began making headlines, lefty publications scurried to explain how ISIS had been caused by Global Warming. If you can’t get rid of ISIS, you can always promise to make it go away with another few billion for Bay Area Green Tech liberal donors.

That’s why Homeland Security is focusing on Global Warming. Why bother with Islam when the root cause of Islamic terrorism turns out to be neither Islam nor terrorism, but your failure to buy recycled toilet paper and pay much higher prices for energy. Instead of droning ISIS, we will drone on about sustainable sustainability and how eagles would rather be killed by wind turbines than by oil spills.

Ideas are roads to conclusion and conclusions lead to policies. If you want to control the policy, you have to control where the roads go. The media narratives are roads. If you take them, you can never reach the right conclusions because they just don’t go there. The media’s map of America has highways going from climate change to marriage equality to death panels. The policies we end up with are based on that map and the policies determine where all the money and the power end up.

Disturbed Americans rack up attacks that al-Qaeda and the Islamic State would envy.

Americans are right to be concerned about the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and other international terrorist threats.

But in recent days, we’ve seen a sudden flurry of disturbing examples of non-terrorist Americans carrying out terrorist-style attacks against other people.

Let’s stipulate that Alton Nolen, the Oklahoma man who beheaded one of his co-workers, may be a case of “do-it-yourself jihadism” — he had no direct ties to terror groups but behaved as an ally of those groups. Nolen converted to Islam, and a prosecutor said he had “an infatuation with beheadings.”

Then there’s the strange case of Federal Aviation Administration contract worker Brian Howard, who attempted suicide, then allegedly attempted arson of an FAA control center, prompting enormous numbers of delayed flights across the country:

According to an affidavit, first responders found smoke when they arrived in the basement of the control center after a 911 call about 5:40 a.m. Friday.

They also found blood on the floor. They followed the trail and found two knives and a lighter and then Howard, who was in the process of cutting his throat, according to the affidavit.

The paramedics took a knife from him and began to treat Howard, who told them to leave him alone. Howard was taken to a hospital in Aurora.

It’s funny how President Obama is always talking about “I” and “me” whenever it makes him look good, but suddenly it’s “they” and “we” when mistakes are made.

For instance, for years Obama boasted about how he ended the Iraq War and how he withdrew American troops. “You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say,” he boasted on the campaign trail in 2012. “I said I’d end the war in Iraq. I ended it.”

Then, over the summer, as one Iraqi city after another fell to Islamic State militants, and as critics insisted that Obama’s decision to pull all our troops out of Iraq was partly to blame, he suddenly changed his tune, mocking the critics. “What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision [to withdraw U.S. troops].”

On Sunday night, the always-congenial Steve Kroft of CBS’s 60 Minutes noted comments by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. Clapper said, “We overestimated the ability and the will of our allies, the Iraqi army, to fight.”

“That’s true. That’s absolutely true,” Obama replied. “Jim Clapper has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”

Eli Lake of the Daily Beast contacted a “former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq,” who was, in Lake’s words, “flabbergasted” by the president’s remarks. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bulls****ing,” the official said.

It’s almost surely the latter. Lake and others have gone on to detail how the intelligence and defense communities were briefing the White House and Congress about the threat even when Obama was still dismissing the Islamic State as the “jayvee squad” of terrorism.

Fort Bliss: Moms at War Myer’s movie offers a satisfying completion of the Long War Trilogy started by The Hurt Locker and Lone Survivor. It would be a shame if Fort Bliss isn’t given the opportunity to reach a bigger audience.

America has been at war for over a decade. In that time, Hollywood has managed to make only three films worthy of the people who do our fighting—The Hurt Locker, Lone Survivor, and Fort Bliss. In one way or another, all three stood apart from mainstream Tinseltown. They reached the big screen more because of the passion and vision of the filmmakers than the Hollywood suits who usually pick and choose what gets released to the corner cinema.

Take the The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s story tracing the harrowing experiences of a three-man bomb disposal squad in Iraq. Big studios were not that interested in it. As Bigelow noted in a 2009 New York Times interview, “I’ve never made a studio film.” But audiences loved this movie. The Hurt Locker won the Best Picture Oscar in 2008.

Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor (2013) performed equally well at the box office, but was snubbed by Oscar. Although Berg has made his share of standard Hollywood fare, this film was anything but mainstream cinema. The director struggled to find support and financing to bring the story of an ill-fated Special Operations mission in Afghanistan to the screen. “Nobody puts a gun to your head and makes you do something,” Berg said in one interview, “It’s just better when you care.” Audiences cared. It was one of the highest-grossing films of the year.

Less well-known is Claudia Myers’ Fort Bliss. It recently opened with only a very limited theatrical release. The movie follows an Army medic—a single mom who returns home and struggles to reconnect with her young son only to be confronted with the possibility of being deployed once again.

In addition to the fierce commitment of their creators, the films have something else in common. They are all small movies about long, difficult wars. Yet each is virtually devoid of the politics of war. They aren’t films for the right wing or the left wing. They are smart enough to recognize that, for the people who fight our wars, politics are left at the war’s edge. It is not possible to make an authentic American war film and wrap it in a political agenda.

Further, each of these movies could have been transported to any American war, and the stories would have worked just as well. They each focus on the quintessential and timeless experience of Americans at war. They are studies rooted in why we fight and the impact that service has as it ripples through the lives of men and women in uniform and their families.

This summer saw an eruption of anti-Semitism across Europe that included firebombs thrown at synagogues and cries of “Jews to the gas!” Now the European Parliament has named an Egyptian activist notorious for violent rhetoric against Israel to the list of nominees for its annual Sakharov Prize, named after the great Soviet dissident.

Alaa Abdel Fattah, a Web developer and blogger, was among the secularist leaders of the 2011 uprising that overthrew Hosni Mubarak . He was sentenced to 15 years in prison earlier this year for violating the restrictive new protest law enacted by the regime of Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. He is out on bail, pending a retrial.

Mr. Abdel Fattah may have been brave in confronting authoritarianism in his own country. But his rhetoric on Israel and moderate Arabs is another story. “One should only debate human beings,” he tweeted in 2009. “Zionists and other imperialists are not human beings.” In late 2010 he tweeted: “Dear zionists please don’t ever talk to me, I’m a violent person who advocated the killing of all zionists including civilians.”

“My heroes have always killed colonialists,” Mr. Abdel Fattah tweeted in 2010, linking to a news article marking the death of Abu Daoud, the Palestinian terrorist who masterminded the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes. In 2012 he wrote: “Assassinating [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat isn’t something that should shame a man, but instead honor him.”

Mr. Abdel Fattah’s nomination is part of a pattern of subverting the Sakharov Prize to embarrass certain unpopular supporters of global freedom, such as the U.S. and Israel. The Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left, or GUE/NGL, the parliamentary bloc that put forth Mr. Abdel Fattah’s name, nominated Edward Snowden for last year’s prize.

Such stunts sully the legacy of Andrei Sakharov who, according to his wife, the dissident Yelena Bonner, once said that “all wars that Israel has waged have been just, forced upon it by the irresponsibility of Arab leaders.” The European Parliament should uphold this distinction and remove Mr. Abdel Fattah’s name from the list.

Double Trouble Carbon Regulation
The D.C. Circuit will hear an important challenge to EPA abuse.

President Obama prophesied at the United Nations last week that climate change is the “one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other,” and perhaps this vision of Apocalypse explains why he thinks he can disregard the law to regulate carbon. Whatever they think about warming, the courts may pay more respect to statutes.

This month a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to hear a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s new climate rules under the Clean Air Act. The order was unusual because the courts generally review rules only after they are finalized, which could take another year or more. The Ohio-based coal company Murray Energy and a dozen states are suing under the All Writs Act of 1789.

Murray drew a D.C. Circuit panel including a liberal (Judge Sri Srinivasan ), a moderate (Judge Thomas Griffith ) and a conservative (senior Judge Douglas Ginsburg ). Murray also happens to be correct on the legal merits.

The EPA wants to reorganize U.S. electric power generation and drive coal and eventually natural gas out of the energy mix under a rarely used backwater of the Clean Air Act called section 111(d), whose mandates apply state by state. The problem is that the law also includes a clause meant to prevent double regulation: Air pollutants that are controlled at the national level under the act’s section 112 are therefore specifically excluded from section 111 control. Carbon emissions, under a separate 2012 rule, are already subject to 112, but the EPA wants to have it both ways.

In a legal memorandum, the EPA claims that “a literal reading of that language would mean that the EPA could not regulate any air pollutant from a source category regulated under section 112,” and thus such a reading is “not reasonable.” In other words, obeying the law would not let the agency do what it wants to do, so the law must go.