MELANIE KIRKPATRICK: ON PERE MARIE-BENOIT ****

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323844804578531732457565050.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion At the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, there is a tree planted in honor of a French priest. Père Marie-Benoît is one of the “Righteous Among the Nations,” non-Jews honored by the state of Israel for protecting and rescuing Jews during that black moment in human history. Working with underground Jewish rescue organizations, […]

MARK STEYN: CINEMA EX-MACHINA

http://www.steynonline.com/5686/cinema-ex-machina Of my two local-ish movie theaters in New Hampshire, one has an irksome habit of always showing the film just a little larger than the screen, so that anything happening out on the borders of the frame remains a mystery: If memory serves, it was the most recent Die Hard sequel that had all […]

ANDREW BOSTOM: MEET TODAY’S PSEUDO ACADEMIC ATTACKER OF DIANA WEST. JEFFREY HERF

Meet Today’s Frontpage Pseudo-academic Attacker of Diana West, Jeffrey Herf

Jeffrey Herf is another pseudo-historian whose alleged specialty is “Germany,” and recently, in particular, the supposed “Nazification” of Islam.

He was a major promoter of the idiotic, counterfactual “Kuntzel hypothesis”—a debunking of which you can still read at Frontpage (hurry before they take it down now that I am defending one of the Frontpage “Untermentschen,” Diana West) http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=29031

Of course like Kuntzel, he went about this with the same level of pseudo-academic charlatanism.

If you look at “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism” I demonstrated this briefly in a footnote, reproduced below.

Herf who is a respected German translator FAILED to translate the writings of von Leers in a manner that reflected their important contents, or context. In Sharia Versus Freedom I further included discussion of a full pious Muslim-perspective treatise on jihad that von Leers wrote in 1942-43, which I arranged to get out of captured German archives held in Russia, and have translated. Got that? I obtained these vaunted “primary source documents,” not the pseudo-academic Herf. They confirmed Leer’s Islamic reverence which, in fact, dated back to the early 1930s—twenty years before he converted to Islam, in Egypt, his conversion being overseen by Hajj Amin el-Husseini.

Leers adopted the name—as I NOT Herf—documented in a primary source letter of Leers I obtained from the Hoover Inst (written to a US Nazi H. Keith Thompson, who, in turn donated his papers to the Hoover)—“Omar Amin von Leers,” in “honor” of both his friend Hajj Amin, AND Caliph Omar (“Rightly Guided” Caliph # 2), the latter because Leers dubbed Caliph Omar, appropriately, as per the hadith, “a bitter enemy of the Jews”!

ZILCH/NADA/NONE of this and more appears in Herf’s “oeuvre” as of 2006—and he was supposed to be the “expert scholar” !

ON HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI THE MORAL CHOICE DAVID FRENCH ****

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/355313/remembering-when-we-were-strong-hiroshima-nagasaki-and-moral-necessity-nuclear-strike

Remembering When We Were Strong: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Moral Necessity of a Nuclear Strike

In a time when America lacks the strength of will to force an active-duty Army officer (and admitted terrorist) to shave his jihadist beard before appearing at a court-martial, when we wring our hands in guilt over the use of the most precise weapons ever devised against an enemy of unquestioned cruelty and malice, and when we respond to threats with weakness that merely encourages greater violence, it’s worth remembering a time when this nation understood the necessity — the moral necessity — of decisive force.

By July 26, 1945, Imperial Japan was well on its way to defeat, yet it was still capable of great harm. Our navy (with the able and courageous British assistance) had swept the once-fearsome Japanese navy from the seas, and we were slowly destroying Japan’s capacity to wage war. Allied forces were on the move in Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union was poised to enter the conflict with overwhelming force (1.5 million men massed on the border of Japanese-held mainland territory), and the American army was barely a month removed from a decisive victory in the months-long battle for Okinawa. Japan was going to lose the war. It was inevitable.

That was the good news. But that good news was more than tempered by the bad news of the cost of that ultimate victory. It’s tough for us to understand now, as many Americans have spent time in the new Japan, buy Japanese products, and rightly regard Japan as an indispensable ally, but in World War II the Japanese military fought with a ferocity that made al-Qaeda look casual and uncommitted. In Okinawa, the Japanese hurled more than 1,000 kamikaze suicide bombers at the American fleet, and tens of thousands more kamikazes readied to defend the Japanese home islands. Japan still held huge swathes of Chinese territory, where unrelenting war and mass-scale atrocities had already cost more than 10 million Chinese lives.

ANDREW McCARTHY: CHAFFETZ’S MISSTEPS

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/355346/chaffetzs-missteps-andrew-c-mccarthy No one has pushed harder than Representative Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) to get to the bottom of the Benghazi massacre. He has admirably fought to hold President Obama and the administration to account for their shocking derelictions of duty. Nevertheless, one can only be baffled by his tendentious reaction to news that the Justice […]

MARK KRIKORIAN: OBAMA’S PLAN B DISPENSES WITH THE CONSTITUION

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/355358/print There’s still a real chance that the Captain Schettinos of the House Republican brain trust will rescue Obama’s presidency by passing an amnesty. But some in the open-borders crowd are getting nervous about John Boehner’s ability to achieve Obama’s objectives. Their fear is that this session of Congress will end with no amnesty bill […]

DIANA WEST: DID UNCLE SAM LEAVE 15,000-20,000 GIs IN STALIN’S HANDS?

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/08/08/Did-Uncle-Sam-leave-15000-to-20000-GIs-in-Stalin-s-hands
This is the fifth and final part in a series based on the new book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press) by Diana West.

On March 3, 1945, under prodding from both the senior US military commander and US ambassador in Moscow, FDR cabled Stalin to request “urgently” that provisions be made for ten American rescue crews to move in and out of Soviet-captured territories to evacuate liberated American prisoners or war, many of whom required medical attention. With uncharacteristic punch, FDR underscored his request as being “of the greatest importance.”

On March 5, 1945, Stalin replied: Nyet. There were no groups of American ex-POWs in the Red zone, so no flights necessary. The Soviets would tell the British the same thing about an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 British ex-prisoners.

The US ambassador, Averill Harriman, knew Stalin was lying. He was hearing about hundreds, even thousands of lost American men roaming Soviet-held territory, and he was hearing straight from some who had made their way to Moscow.

On March 6, 1945, the Soviets forcibly took over Romania, shredding the Yalta agreement.

On March 8, 1945, Harriman cabled FDR that he had positive proof that Stalin’s statement regarding American POWs “was not repeat not true.” He stated that some three to four thousand Americans had been freed from German POW camps and were still unaccounted for.

On March 16, 1945, Churchill cabled FDR. “At present all entry into Poland has been barred to our representatives… This extends even to the liaison officers, British and American, who were to help in bringing out rescued prisoners of war… There is no doubt in my mind that the Soviets fear much our seeing what is going on in Poland.”

DIANA WEST: REDISCOVERING AMERICA’S TRUTH TELLERS- JULIUS EPSTEIN

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2613/Rediscovering-Americas-Truth-Tellers-Julius-Epstein.aspx NOTE: This is the third in an occasional series on the truth-tellers of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press). One point I try to convey when speaking to audiences about my new book, “American Betrayal,” is the inspiration of the truth-tellers. These are the men and women who […]

DANIEL GREENFIELD:HIROSHIMA’S LESSONS FOR THE WAR ON TERROR

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/hiroshimas-lessons-for-the-war-on-terror/print/ In the summer of ’45, the United States concluded a war that had come to be seen by some as unwinnable after the carnage at Iwo Jima, with a bang. On August 6th, the bomb fell on Hiroshima. And then on the 9th, it was Nagasaki’s turn. Six days later, Japan, which had been […]

CAROLINE GLICK: PROUD TO BE HOME OF THE “WEAK”??? ****

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0813/glick080813.php3

The media’s collusion with the Obama administration’s false portrayal of jihadist attacks on US targets gives foreign leaders concerned about the US’s lackadaisical attitude towards jihadist threats no reason for confidence. In the absence of public pressure, the Obama administration has no reason to change course when its policies fail

This week, after a three and a half year delay, US Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was finally placed on trial for massacring 13 and wounding 32 at Ft. Hood on November 5, 2009.

Hasan was a self-identified jihadist. His paper and electronic trail provided mountains of evidence that he committed the massacre to advance the cause of Islamic supremacy. Islamic supremacists like Hasan, and his early mentor al Qaeda operations chief Anwar al-Awlaki view as enemies all people who oppose totalitarian Islam’s quest for global domination.

Before, during and following his assault, Hasan made his jihadist motives obvious to the point of caricature in his statements about the US, the US military and the duties of pious Muslims.

But rather than believe Hasan, and so do justice to his victims, the Obama administration, with the active collusion of senior US military commanders went to great lengths to cover up Hasan’s ideological motivations and hence the nature of his crime. On the day of the attack, Lt. General Robert Cone, then commander of III Corps at Ft. Hood said preliminary evidence didn’t suggest that the shooting was terrorism. Cone said this even though it was immediately known that before he began shooting Hasan called out “Allahu Akhbar.” He called himself a “Soldier of Islam” on his business cards.

In an interview with CNN three after the attack, Army Chief of Staff George Casey said, “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

The intensity of the Obama administration’s participation in this cover-up became clear in May 2012. At that time, Congress had placed a clause inside the Defense Appropriations Act requiring the Pentagon to award Purple Hearts to Ft. Hood’s victims. Rather than accept this eminently reasonable demand, which simply required the administration to acknowledge reality, Obama’s emissaries announced he would veto the appropriations bill and so leave the Pentagon without a budget unless the clause was removed.

Rather than define Hasan’s attack as an enemy attack or a terrorist act, the administration has defined it as a case of “workplace violence.” Following this determination, those wounded in the attack, as well as the families of the murdered are denied the support conferred on soldiers killed or wounded by enemy fire.