http://pjmedia.com/blog/in-syria-western-illusions-lead-to-ill-advised-action/?print=1 The signs are now unmistakable: both openly and behind the scenes, a major Western effort to bring the Syrian civil war to a close with the defeat of the Assad regime is now underway. This is being undertaken with intentions of ending the stalemate in the war, and of preventing the dominance within the […]
EVERYTHING YOU EXPECT IT TO BE
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Obama’s Israel trip was everything you expected it to be. 40 pounds of flattery with a few ounces of poisonous substance.
In between all the scripted compliments about Israel, Obama pushed a diplomatic solution with Iran, concessions to terrorists and a softer line on Hamas. He hinted at having his own peace plan that he wanted to impose.
And after he left, he oversaw a phone call in which Netanyahu apologized to Turkey’s Islamist thug for the interception of a Turkish pro-Hamas boat on the way to Gaza and agreed to give its Islamist regime a role in Gaza.
It was a disgusting act of appeasement by a man who has become Israel’s own version of Bush.
Netanyahu gave Hamas a major victory by making the Shalit deal. He gave Islamist Turkey a major victory over Israel with his apology. He gave Islamist Egypt an earlier victory by calling off a ground operation.
While Netanyahu allowed Obama and Erdogan to push him around, he allowed Barak to demolish Jewish homes and in has decided now to declare war on Haredi Jews. And he presided over an election in which a left wing party became the dominant player in his coalition.
As a technocrat, Netanyahu has done a good job on the economy. But he’s been terrible on national defense, maintaining a status quo while repeatedly talking about how someone should do something on Iran. It may not have occurred to him that, that someone is him. It certainly won’t be Obama.
The real problem among Israeli conservatives, as among American conservatives, is a lack of leadership. When Netanyahu is the default choice, there is something very wrong with the process. Bennett showed some promise, but has been flailing since. Perhaps he’ll grow into it, but that is so long as he doesn’t turn out to be another Netanyahu.
After Begin and Shamir, the right needed a technocrat. It needed someone who could talk to foreign leaders and understand some of the bigger issues. But it also needs principles.
The Likud needs a post-Netanyahu plan and it doesn’t have one. (And no, not Feiglin. I mean a realistic electable plan.) Instead the country is tied up in the usual factitious politics with no end in sight. Haredi and Dati Leumi leaders shriek at each other as if the country’s biggest problem were girls schools. The left exploits social dicontents while the right has tried and failed to steal the Shinui vote by trying to draft the undraftable.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
DON’T CALL IT AMNESTY
Amnesty is bad. Everyone agrees on that. Even the senators who support amnesty claim not to support it. Instead they support “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” with “A Path to Citizenship”. They support a comprehensive solution that will be compassionate and work as an immigration policy for the 21st century.
No one uses the term “amnesty” anymore except opponents of amnesty for illegal aliens and their more vociferous advocates. This makes for some confusing speeches and press conferences.
The most bizarre argument that advocates of amnesty are making is that we have “de facto amnesty” now. The argument goes that since we have de facto amnesty now, we should just have the real thing and get it over with.
A lack of proper enforcement is not de facto amnesty. Amnesty is legalization. What Rubio and Rand Paul call de facto amnesty is the difference between not arresting a drug dealer and legalizing heroin.
The big sales pitch for 2012 was overall electability. The sales pitch for 2016 is Latino electability. The GOP only wants someone who has a shot with the Latino vote. And Marco Rubio and Rand Paul are busy polishing their Latino vote credentials. It’s a stupid way to run a political movement, but a great way to get ahead.
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/rita-kramer-a-dark-passover.html
When families gather around the Seder table, many recall the dark Passover of 1943 and the climax of the months-long battle in which the small number of men and women remaining in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against the Nazi murderers. They knew they were doomed but they were determined to go down fighting. We honor them as heroes.
There are many ways to be heroic. Because of tradition and circumstances Jews were not bred to be fighters. They were thinkers, readers, writers. And among the most heroic of those trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto was a historian named Emanuel Ringelblum, who determined to record life in the Ghetto in its reality, not as it might be misrepresented later in elegiac memorials or accusations of passivity by those who would not really know what it had been like.
In the interwar years Ringelblum had been one of the leading historians of Jewish life in Poland from the earliest times of settlement to the present, when a renaissance of learning and cultural creativity was taking place among the Jews of cities like Vilna, Lodz, and Warsaw. At the time, the greatest number of Jews anywhere in the world lived in Poland. And Warsaw, the largest Jewish community in Europe, was their intellectual center.
The movement from the isolated world of the market-town shtetlech to the cities, to acquaintance with past and present secular learning, resulted in the flowering of a vibrant culture in both Yiddish and Hebrew. The Jewish intelligentsia produced poetry, novels, plays on the one hand, scholarship on the other. All this would be destroyed by the middle of the twentieth century along with the men and women who had created it–except for the records created and left behind under the shattered buildings of the Ghetto, to be recovered only decades later.
Ringelblum, born in a small Galician town in 1900, grew up amid the often antagonistic worlds of the socialist Yiddish-speaking labor Bund; the Marxist/Zionist Poalei Tsiyon, the party to which he became attached; and the Hasidic rebbes who retained their traditions and their way of life. By the time he arrived in Warsaw in 1919 he had defined his future as a historian and political activist. He joined YIVO, the new research institution devoted to scholarship in Yiddish. Ringelblum saw Yiddish as the living language of a nation, not as the jargon of an impoverished religious group. And he set out, with YIVO, to encourage the Jewish masses to gather (zaml) documents of the everyday life of the Polish-Jewish poor, workers as well as entrepreneurs, to “democratize” their history. He saw his mission as developing a sense of Jewish national identity through historical consciousness.
He supported the establishment of modern Yiddish secular schools, wrote articles for the Yiddish press on Yiddish culture and its threatened loss through assimilation, joined street demonstrations against the British White Paper of 1939 limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine, and attended the Zionist World Congress in Geneva, returning to Poland just days before the outbreak of World War II.
Although Jews in Poland considered themselves Polish and had willingly fought alongside Poles in World War I in the service of their common country, relations between them had not always been without prejudice and rancor. But nothing prepared the Jews for what awaited them at the hands of the Nazis once they had subdued and entered Poland. Nazi strategy in the war against the Jews was based on secrecy, lies, and surprise, and was carried out in stages, little by little.
In November 1940 a wall topped with barbed wire was constructed around an area of the city, and all Jews were required to live within its boundaries. Those who lived in other parts of the city were forced to move until all 450,000 thousand of Warsaw’s Jews had been packed into the densely overcrowded space in which about 1,500 Poles had lived. Jews had met persecution before, and there was no obvious reason in 1940/41 to suspect that this time would be different. It would mean hard times, but then the war would end and life would begin again, as before…
At first, efforts were made to construct as normal a life as possible in the Ghetto. Committees were formed in apartment buildings, schools were opened, lectures were given, plays and concerts were performed. Soup kitchens were set up to offset the starvation rations permitted by the Germans, smuggling food from the Aryan side flourished, and underground bunkers were built as hiding places. But food was increasingly scarce, hunger and disease soon prevailed, and random killings by the Nazis accompanied the herding of Jews at the Umschlagplatz, the space beside the railroad station from which men, women, and children, young and old, were shipped east for “resettlement.”
From the beginning, Ringelblum was involved in the self-help organizations (Aleynhilf) that sprang up. He determined to go on working on his history of the Jews in Poland and in addition decided to record daily life in the Ghetto for posterity. He called his group of memoirists Oyneg Shabes, the Joy of Sabbath, because they met on Saturday afternoons. He recruited not only former journalists, writers, and teachers, but also ordinary people, zammlers, to write about their observations and experiences. Thousands of pages were produced, collected, and hidden, recording first-hand the efforts to stay alive in the face of starvation, overcrowding, and rampant contagion, the threat of random German brutality, and the increasing number being rounded up for transport in boxcars to the unknown. Everything was described. The corruption of the Judenrat, the official Jewish leadership body; the cruelty of the Jewish Police–nothing was left out. There were acts of heroism as well as betrayals, suicides as well as helpless children left behind when their parents were seized.
By early 1942 the truth of the “resettlement” trains’ destination was revealed. Escapees from Treblinka had surfaced to tell the story of what awaited at the end of the line. Members of the various youth groups turned from discussions of the future to plans for resistance in the present. Then in July 1942 the Nazis announced the Great Deportation, making it clear that they intended to destroy the Ghetto and everyone in it. The resisters were led by a twenty-four-year-old member of the socialist-Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair named Mordecai Anielewicz. They had few arms, no help could be expected from the Polish Home Army and hardly any from the Polish Underground. It was clearly a hopeless cause. But handguns and a few other small arms were procured somehow from the other side of the wall and attempts by German officers to enter the Ghetto were finally met with fire and their surprised retreat. Sporadic raids continued until September when there was a halt–temporary, as it turned out–to the deportations.
Vastly outgunned and outnumbered, the Ghetto fighters hid in bunkers, emerging at crucial moments to fire on the Germans while the women fighting alongside them threw homemade bombs. It was clear that the end was near. The Nazis were bent on the destruction of the Ghetto and the extermination of all those who were left. During these last days Ringelblum and the remaining members of the Oyneg Shabes group worked frantically to sort and pack the archive in metal boxes and milk cans, the best they could do against the future ravages of moisture and seepage, and bury them beneath what would soon become the rubble of the buildings in which they had lived for three years in fear and suffering, hope and despair. Now they sent their last message to the outside world–This is what mass murder was like. Remember us.
To those who after the war accused the Jews of going “like sheep to the slaughter,” the answer lies in the secrecy, the slow insidious weakening through starvation and disease, the demoralizing presence of emaciated corpses dead of starvation or typhus that lay in the Ghetto streets, the daily humiliations of de-lousings and beatings, the tiny orphaned children begging for food when there was none. There was the hope of outliving the war, and reluctance to take action that would result in brutal mass retaliation on fellow Jews. It was a miracle that there was any resistance at all by the spring of 1943.
On Sunday, April 18, the eve of Passover 1943, the last battle took place. Ringelblum, the recorder of the vibrant Polish-Jewish culture, witnessed its destruction as he sat, still writing, in the corner of an underground bunker. The Germans had destroyed the intellectuals, the writers and teachers, and the only traces that were left of the Jewish experience in Poland were stuffed into around twenty tin containers in the ground. An escape plan was offered to Ringelblum but he would not leave his wife and young son. Their hiding place was betrayed and they disappeared into the common void with the rest of his people, including young Anielewicz, dead in the fighters’ command bunker in May 1943.
David Graber helped to bury the boxes and included his own message in one of them. It read in part:
“What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground….So the world may know all….We would [have been] the fathers, the teachers and educators of the future….But no, we shall certainly not live to see [the recovery of the archive], and so I write my last will. May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world to what happened…in the twentieth century….We may now die in peace. We fulfilled our mission. May history attest for us.”
David was nineteen years old. He was one of those who fought their battle with words, their only weapons, hoping to win in the far-off future.
“Who Will Write Our History?” is the title of Samuel D. Kassow’s detailed account of Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes record of life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto (Indiana University Press, 2007). Years before, the journalist and novelist John Hersey had written a best-selling novel, The Wall, about the Ghetto uprising, based largely on the facts known at the time. But Hersey’s well researched and well written fiction (like the popular Mila 18 by Leon Uris) pales almost into invisibility next to Kassow’s account, rich in historical context and told largely in the voices of the men and women actually living through the moments, days and years they are writing about. They seem to live again, individuals with faces and feelings, as we read their words. And in bringing them to life again in their reports, poems, letters, notes, diaries, memoirs, photographs, and artifacts, Kassow, like Ringelblum before him, joins the line of historians who have kept our past before us in order that we may better know ourselves.
Rita Kramer’s books include Flames in the Field: The Story of Four S.O.E. Agents in Occupied France.
www.TheEttingerReport.Com
THE OTHER PRESSING QUESTION IS HAS NETANYAHU LEARNED ANYTHING?…..RSK
Is President Obama learning from history by avoiding – or repeating – the crucial errors of his 2009 visit to the Middle East?
In 2009, Obama anticipated engagement, rather than confrontation, with Iran, which threatens the survival of pro-US Arab regimes in the Persian Gulf and beyond. Obama expected an Arab Spring and a march of pro-US democracy on the Arab Street, rather than the stormy, tectonic anti-US Arab Winter. Just like President Carter’s reckless abandonment of the Shah and his courting of Khomeini, President Obama turned his back on America’s ally, Mubarak, while extending his hand to America’s inherent enemy, the trans-national, subversive Muslim Brotherhood. The desertion of Mubarak undermined US reliability in the eyes of pro-US Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf States. Furthermore, the newly-elected President promoted the UN as the quarterback of international relations and the US as a multilateral arbitrator/mediator, rather than a unilateral, determined military superpower. Such a policy has eroded America’s posture of deterrence, which is the backbone of the dwindling club of pro-US Arab regimes.
In 2013, President Obama is increasingly aware that a nuclear Iran would primarily target vital US economic, national and homeland security interests. He is better acquainted with the threat of the Arab Winter, the potential disintegration of a few Arab countries and the intensification of Islamic terrorism. The 2013 visit aims to reassure pro-US Arab regimes, who dread a nuclear Iran and are disillusioned with the US focus on diplomacy and economic sanctions. They doubt Washington’s intent to employ the only effective option against Iran: a surgical, disproportional military preemption with no boots on the ground. President Obama aspires to secure the remaining pro-US Arab regimes in the face of the conventional and chemical lava erupting on the Syrian Street, which could sweep through Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and other Arab countries.
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/mar/22/obamas-high-noon-switcheroo-jerusalem/ NEW YORK, March 22, 2013 – That could have been Theodor Herzl addressing those enthusiastic young Israelis this Thursday in Jerusalem, or perhaps Moses himself. Instead, the man who proclaimed himself so Zionistic was our very own president, Barack Obama. He invoked the Bible itself to verify Israel’s sovereignty and legitimacy, and then in […]
http://totallyjewish.com/news/national/c-19543/archbishop-exclusive-my-cousin-the-rabbi/
The Archbishop of Canterbury this week expressed excitement at discovering his Jewish relatives and voiced unease over a controversial Israel motion backed by the Church of England.
Justin Welby’s comments, on the eve of his enthronement at Canterbury Cathedral today, came during an interview with the Jewish News in which he also voiced opposition to Israel boycotts, revealed plans to visit the Jewish state this summer and praised the Chief Rabbi as “one of the most significant religious thinkers”.
The past few months since being named as Archbishop have been transformative for Welby, not just because of his elevation within the Church of England but because he learned for the first time – as a result of a Daily Telegraph investigation – of his family’s Jewish roots.
Chemist Dr Gerhard Weiler, a cousin of the Archbishop’s father Gavin, fled with his family after Hitler came to power, later being registered as an “enemy alien” in the UK.
The 57-year-old former bishop of Durham said he was “really, really pleased” to discover details of his Jewish ancestry, but added: “It’s quite sobering to think I had a bunch of second cousins that didn’t escape.”
The great-grandfather of the man who will be formally confirmed today as the leader of 80 million Anglicans worldwide, along with three of his brothers, headed to London more than four decades earlier. The father-of-five told the Jewish News: “Once we’ve moved in properly, we’re going to meet up with some cousins who I had no idea about. One of them is a rabbi who recently wrote to me. He’s one of the senior teachers at a Jewish college in London. We’ll try to meet up, or get them to Lambeth Palace to do something fun to celebrate. To discover you’ve got a family you didn’t know about is really exciting.”
He also revealed he hopes to visit the grave at Hoop Lane Cemetery in Golders Green of his great-grandmother Amalie, who lived in Hampstead until her death in 1914. The Cambridge-educated former oil executive comes to office just eight months after Anglican-Jewish relations were severely strained when the Church’s Synod voted to affirm support for a programme accused by the Board of Deputies of producing “very partisan activists” on the Middle East.
The Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel takes participants to the region for around three months, but critics point out that only a fraction of that time is spent in Israel, before accompaniers return to give public talks about their experiences. The private member’s motion also expressed support for Israelis and Palestinians working for peace and for aid agencies in the region.
THIS OUTRAGEOUS APOLOGY IS BIBIDHIMMITUDE WRIT LARGE…RSK http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2013/03/an-israeli-apology-to-turkey On Feb. 27, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told a conference in Vienna, “Just like Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism, Islamophobia must be regarded as a crime against humanity.” His calling the Jewish nationalist movement that built the State of Israel a “crime against humanity” prompted widespread criticism, including by […]
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/03/22/author-criticizes-british-muslims-for-deeply-anti-semitic-views/
WHEREFORE ARE THESE MUSLIMS DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHER MUSLIMS ALL OVER EUROPE?….AND CONTRARY TO MR. HASAN’S DECENT INTENTIONS, MUSLIM ANTI-SEMITISM ANTEDATES THE ARAB/ISRAEL CONFLICT BY MANY CENTURIES OF FAITH DRIVEN JEW HATRED……RSK
An author and former editor at the British publication the New Statesman took the bold step of admonishing the Muslim community in his home country for its “Judaeophobia.”
Writing in the New Statesman, Mehdi Hasan addressed a recent controversy surrounding Lord Ahmed, a British Labor party peer and one of the most powerful Muslims in England, saying, “To claim that your jail sentence for dangerous driving is the result of a Jewish plot is bigoted and stupid”
Lord Ahmed was sentenced to jail after hitting and killing a man with his car only moments after having sent text messages while driving. In a later interview he blamed a Jewish conspiracy on his having to serve jail time for the crime.
Hasan pointed out that he has defended Lord Ahmed before and that “He is not a latter-day Goebbels. But herein lies the problem. There are thousands of Lord Ahmeds out there: mild-mannered and well-integrated British Muslims who nevertheless harbour deeply anti-Semitic views.”
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-Fray-The-New-York-Times-versus-the-Jews-307351
Over the last fortnight, the so-called “paper of record” has ratcheted up its bias and bile a notch or two.
There is an unavoidable conflict between being a Jewish state and a democratic state.
– Joseph Levine, “On Questioning the Jewish State,” The New York Times, March 9
There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.
— George Orwell
Last week I cautioned that a crucial intellectual battle has been launched to strip the Jews of their political independence and national sovereignty. As promised, in this week’s column I will elaborate on the inanity and iniquity of this Judeophobic initiative.
Pernicious, perverse, paradoxical
The Times – together with several other major mainstream media entities – has chosen to throw its weight decisively behind this patently pernicious, perverse and paradoxical endeavor.
But over the last fortnight, the so-called “paper of record” has ratcheted up its bias and bile a notch or two. This prompted the following comment from Commentary’s Seth Mandel in his “A New Low for the Times” (March 18): “The bias against Israel in the press, and especially the New York Times, has become so steady and predictable that it can be difficult to muster outrage.
Since the paper flaunts, rather than attempts to disguise, its hostility to Israel, it can be easy to miss when the Times crosses yet another line. And the paper and its editors have done so again this weekend.”
I have not designated this drive to denigrate, delegitimize and demonize the conduct of the Jewish state — and of late, the very idea of a Jewish state – “pernicious,” “perverse” and “paradoxical” without reason.
Should this unholy crusade achieve its declared objectives, it will precipitate a reality that reflects a total negation of the very values invoked for its promotion, and the antithesis of those allegedly cherished by its propagators.
Escalating enmity
Until relatively recently, the bulk of the Times’s censure of Israel’s actions focused on its policy regarding the status of the territories beyond the pre-1967 Green Line, and the fate of the Palestinian Arabs resident there.
But with the emerging realization — indeed, perhaps resignation — that the previously preferred outcome of establishing a Palestinian state in these territories, is becoming increasingly unworkable, emphasis has shifted and enmity escalated. It now seems that the paper has begun to channel condemnation less against what the Jewish state does, and more against what it is — i.e. Jewish.
This is a line that it is apparently pursuing with increasing virulence, frequency and prominence on its pages, last week touting it on both the front page of its Sunday edition and the cover of its weekly magazine.
Barely a week previously, a lengthy opinion piece by University of Massachusetts professor of philosophy Joseph Levine appeared, advancing contrived and contorted claims disputing the conceptual validity of the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination and political sovereignty, now even within the Green Line.
To recap
Readers will recall that in my column last week, I pointed out the conceptual fallacies and faults in Levine’s approach to statehood, which seems to postulate that no state can be considered “democratic” if the conduct of its public life reflects the sociocultural dominance of the major ethnic group — even if it comprises a “vast majority.”
