No posting until June 10…rsk
https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/just-a-pile-of-rocks?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo
Today is June 7 – the secular anniversary of Israel’s capturing the Old City of Jerusalem. Israel has had the Old City for so long – for 54 of its 73 years – that it’s hard for us to remember Israel without it. It’s hard to remember Israel merely nine miles wide, or Israel without the Old City or the Western Wall. But what’s really almost impossible to fathom is something we hardly ever think about: Israel with no holy places whatsoever.
Israel before 1967 had already accomplished much, but it had a blemished soul; it was a Jewish state, but it had no hallowed Jewish places.
To bring Israeli history to life, to make it three dimensional, Israel from the Inside will periodically examine famous speeches, events, eulogies, songs and the like that afford us a more robust understanding of the Jewish state, certainly more than the news can, and even more than many books do. To understand the veritable messianic sentiment that the Six Day War unleashed, we have to return to a speech little known outside Orthodox circles today, delivered on Yom Ha-Atzma’ut 1967 by Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook, the son of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the Chief Rabbi of the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in the Land of Israel).
By 1967, Rabbi Kook the elder had already died (he did not live to see the state founded), but his son, Tzvi Yehudah, was at the height of his powers. And on Independence Day in 1967 (a few weeks before the war), he addressed the students at his yeshiva, explaining why unlike virtually everyone else on that famous night of the United Nations vote on November 29, 1947, he could not rejoice. (In a later post, we’ll examine Amos Oz’s now classic description of that night, one of the most powerful pieces of Israeli writing I’ve ever encountered.)
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/putting_an_end_to_reimagining_the_criminal_justice_system.html
Many majority Democrat cities have fallen victim to progressive prosecutors. Rather than drive down crime, improve public safety, and promote common sense tough-on-crime policies, these zealots campaign on platforms of structural racism, outcome equity, and restorative justice. In these cities, such performances have in fact become a requirement for the office of district attorney (DA). Aspiring DAs must protest the disproportionate prosecution of minorities without examining the underlying causes; they must clamor for the elimination of cash bail in the name of racial fairness; and they must recommend sentence reduction or alternatives to incarceration to mitigate “past injustices.”
Committed to “reimagining” the criminal justice system in the service of “woke” rhetoric, these DAs are neither acting in the public interest to enforce the law nor honoring their oath of office. They forget that their principal duty is to uphold the law, not crusade for changes driven by their political agenda. In the process, they are emboldening offenders, fostering disrespect for the law, unleashing dangerous criminals on society, and – worst of all – robbing victims of due justice. San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, who wears his ideological lineage on his sleeve and currently faces a recall campaign, arrogantly claims that a DA can “challenge the legitimacy of a law by declining to bring charges in certain cases.”
Progressive policies have time and again been proven to be misguided, even inimical to public safety.
A study by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF) found that in six jurisdictions with “social justice” prosecutors, reduced conviction rates and fewer guilty outcomes for serious felonies accompanied rising crime rates. It questioned the supplanting of the standard requirement of “competency and experience” for DAs with “ideological zeal.” In his foreword to the study, former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III wrote that elected leaders, law enforcement and the media should realize that “leftist ideas of social justice and true criminal justice are not compatible.”
The radicalization of DA offices and the clamor for defunding the police comes as crime rates are skyrocketing and Americans are worried. A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that 49% of respondents said that violent crime was their top concern, ahead of the pandemic, the economy, political correctness, and race relations.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/06/the-lethal-wages-of-trump-derangement-madness/
Think about it: For about five years, anything candidate, president-elect, and President Trump said or did, the media, the Left, and progressive popular culture opposed in Pavlovian fashion.
Anything that Trump touched was ridiculed or discredited—regardless of evidence, data, or cogency. The merits of a Trump policy, a Trump assessment, a Trump initiative were irrelevant—given the primordial hatred of the Left of all things Trump: the president, the person, the family.
Under the reductionist malady of Trump Derangement Syndrome, facts and logic did not matter. Instead, anything not said or done in opposition to Trump empowered the supposed existential Trump threat. Ironically, some of the most deductive and reductionist Trump haters were supposedly professionals, the highly educated, and the self-proclaimed devotees of the Enlightenment. And yet in their uncontrolled aversion and detestation, they suspended all the rules of empiricism, logic, and rationality—and people died as a result.
Most Americans did not care much when the apparently sane went completely insane in their irrational hatred of Trump. Few cared whether Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) wished to destroy his career in trying to predicate his crackpot policies in opposition to Trump. Who worried that Anthony Fauci seemed to have tarnished his distinguished career by his anti-Trump triangulations? Did it matter to anyone that the obsessed Lincoln Project grifters were rendered utterly disgraced, or that the NeverTrumpers were left irrelevant and inert by their irrational and uncontrollable venom?
Yet, existentially hating everything Trump said or did—as opposed to expressing political opposition to him and his policies—did not just implode elite careers. It also turned deadly. The result of such knee-jerk revulsion was a great deal of damage to the country in general and unnecessary deaths of Americans in particular.
For over a year, anyone who questioned the official NIH/NIAID/Fauci narrative that the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of a new viral mutation that had jumped to humans from bats (or pangolins)—perhaps carved up in the Wuhan wet market—was attacked both personally and professionally. Why? Mostly because Trump himself had questioned just that improbable hypothesis. And Trump certainly could not be right. But even if he were, it was still the moral thing to say he was not.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/author-1619-project-hails-stalinist-cubas-humberto-fontova/
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and fellow Republicans are demanding Pres. Biden’s Education Department block a planned history education proposal that invokes the 1619 Project. “Americans do not need or want their tax dollars diverted from promoting the principles that unite our nation toward promoting radical ideologies meant to divide us,” McConnell wrote.
“In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist…the origins of racism cannot be separated from the origins of capitalism. The origins of capitalism cannot be separated from the origins of racism.” — Professor Ibram X. Kendi, Big Kahuna of Critical Race Theory, which Biden’s Education Dept. wants force-fed to our schoolchildren.
“What Mitch McConnell and others like him want is for our children to get a propagandistic, nationalistic understanding of history that is not about facts…” — Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of The New York Times’ 1619 Project.
And speaking of propaganda vs facts—and of Nikole Hannah-Jones:
“’Education is the cornerstone of the (Cuban) revolution. Nearly everywhere among the magnificent Havana architecture signs speak of equality and liberation through education. An illiterate person is a person prevented from developing his human condition,’ Jorge Gonzales Corona (Cuban Communist apparatchik) told us.” — A euphoric Nikole Hannah-Jones after a Potemkin tour of Stalinist Cuba.
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” — Vladimir Lenin. Appropriately enough, Castroite Cuba’s most famous “elite” high school is named for Lenin.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17433/hamas-iran-gaza-cemetery
The Arabs are aware that Hamas’s only interest is to appease the mullahs in Tehran for the sake of milking them for more money and weapons. The Arabs understand that this just is another farce by Hamas and particularly Iran.
It is… refreshing to see how many Arabs are aware of the dangers of Iran’s involvement with Palestinian terrorist groups that seek the elimination first of Israel, then of them.
“The Hamas militias in the Gaza Strip belong to Iran…. Iran wants to use the Palestinian issue as a winning card at the Vienna negotiations….. to force the US to lift the sanctions on Iran in return for ending the security escalation which threatens Israel…. Iran’s weapons are for destruction, not construction.” — Amjad Taha, prominent Arab journalist, Twitter, May 27, 2021.
“The more killing and destruction, the more Hamas’s income increases while the Palestinians continue to suffer from siege and poverty.” — Saeed Al-Kahel, Moroccan writer and political analyst, Assahifa, May 29, 2021.
“Iran exploited Hamas and the Islamic Jihad for its own benefit only, and if it wanted the interest of the Palestinians, it would have contributed to the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip…. Tehran has not contributed or made donations for humanitarian or reconstruction projects in Gaza….” — Samir Ghattas, former Egyptian parliament member and head of the Egyptian Middle East Forum for Strategic Studies, Al-Arabiya.net, May 26, 2021.
The Egyptian expert [Muhammad Mujahid Al-Zayyat, a consultant at the Egyptian Center for Thought and Strategic Studies]… is joining other Arabs in warning the Biden administration and the Western powers against allowing Iran to be rewarded for Hamas’s war of terrorism against Israel.
It now remains to be seen whether the Biden administration and the Western powers will heed this warning or continue to bury their heads in the sand, pretending that the mullahs in Iran, in exchange for massive bribes from the US, will magically change their savage stripes. They did not last time; what will happen to the region if they again do not?
Hamas’s claim that it “won” the last war with Israel has become the subject of ridicule and mockery by many Arabs who are not afraid to call out the Iranian-backed terrorist group for lying to the Palestinians and the rest of the world.
The Arabs are also not afraid to hold Hamas responsible for the massive destruction and the loss of the lives of innocent Palestinians and Israelis in order to serve the interests of its masters in Iran.
Scenes of Palestinians celebrating the Hamas “victory” sparked a wave of condemnations in the Arab world, especially in the Gulf states. The reactions of the Arabs to Hamas’s self-proclaimed victory shows that many in the Arab world are not fooled by the terrorist group’s propaganda machine. The Arabs are aware that Hamas’s only interest is to appease the mullahs in Tehran for the sake of milking them for more money and weapons. The Arabs understand that this just is another farce by Hamas and particularly Iran.
My fellow Americans: Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.
And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:
Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.
They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.
They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest, until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war.
For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.
Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.
And for us at home — fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas — whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them — help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.
Many people have urged that I call the Nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.
Give us strength, too — strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.
And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.
And, O Lord, give us Faith. Give us Faith in Thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; Faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.
With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace, a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.
Thy will be done, Almighty God.
Amen.
https://humanevents.com/2021/06/05/an-invented-insurrection/
The Biden Administration is abusing state power to create the appearance of a conspiracy to commit an insurrection on January 6th, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol. The problem is the indictment they just filed with the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia—it proves there was no conspiracy.
The malfeasance of the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the judges involved with the arrest and incarceration without bail of many of those who participated in the riot at the Capitol have been covered brilliantly in a series of pieces by Julie Kelly. These events are abhorrent to anyone who believes in the rule of law and better suited to a totalitarian police state removing political enemies. America is not supposed to have indefinite detention based on political beliefs, and yet here we are.
This treatment is all the more heinous when compared with the near-total lack of interest in prosecuting the year plus-long violence and destruction perpetrated by Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa, some of which involved the seizure and continued occupation for weeks of government buildings. This is a far step from equal treatment under the law and should bring a concerted response from all those on the right who oppose tyranny.
Many of the acts described in the indictment are Constitutionally protected, but it seems that fades away when the left doesn’t like the reason they are being exercised. They attached the term “Big Lie,” a Nazi reference, to any disputes over the 2020 elections. Now they act empowered to treat any related activities as outside the law by that fictional connection.
https://canadafreepress.com/article/remembering-d-day-illuminates-the-relevance-of-memorial-day
They truly deserve to be remembered and to serve as an example of courage and willingness to sacrifice for us in this dark time.
As Americans just celebrated Memorial Day last week, many memories were conjured up of the brave men and women who have sacrificed their lives to advance the cause of Freedom. Truly, the original purpose of Memorial Day, initially intended as a day to honor the brave boys and men who fought to preserve the Republic during the Civil War, remains intact even in 2021. However, one of the most solemn days those from the older generations remember is D-Day because the advancement of Freedom came at such a great cost on such a single day. It is so very right that those of the “greatest generation” who served their country in World War II, should be remembered for sacrificing their lives so that Freedom could survive.
By the end of the first day, more than 12,000 Allied soldiers had been killed or wounded
Today, the anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944, is an especially appropriate time for shining the light a little longer on the relevance or value of Memorial Day as a proper way of honoring those who sacrificed their lives defending or advancing freedom. Memorial Day, in our time, is a day in which we honor all those men and women in uniform who gave their lives for their country, or for the cause of freedom in other countries, throughout any period of our history. So, it is especially fitting that the heroes on D-Day, as well as those who made the ultimate sacrifice during WWII, deserved to be remembered on Memorial Day, as well other moments of opportunity, such as the commemoration of D-Day.
By the end of the first day, more than 12,000 Allied soldiers had been killed or wounded, and many thousands more died that month as the Allies secured Normandy. But, for many of those, their first day in battle was their last. While many young Americans volunteered for military service after the attack at Pearl Harbor, far too many never made it home again. So many went off to Europe to fight against Hitler and the National Socialists who had taken over most of Europe by 1941. Those men gave their lives that freedom could survive, and that others would be freed from tyranny.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/04/why-i-spoke-out-against-lockdowns/
…. the Tech Overlords have decided to support unprecedented government control over citizens’ lives and, in order for that to succeed, they keep from the public any arguments – no matter how expert they may be – that might give the citizenry the ability to question how they are being treated by the people they elected to be their public servants. DPS
By Martin Kulldorff, is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, an infectious-disease epidemiologist.
I had no choice but to speak out against lockdowns. As a public-health scientist with decades of experience working on infectious-disease outbreaks, I couldn’t stay silent. Not when basic principles of public health are thrown out of the window. Not when the working class is thrown under the bus. Not when lockdown opponents were thrown to the wolves. There was never a scientific consensus for lockdowns. That balloon had to be popped.
Two key Covid facts were quickly obvious to me. First, with the early outbreaks in Italy and Iran, this was a severe pandemic that would eventually spread to the rest of the world, resulting in many deaths. That made me nervous. Second, based on the data from Wuhan, in China, there was a dramatic difference in mortality by age, with over a thousand-fold difference between the young and the old. That was a huge relief. I am a single father with a teenager and five-year-old twins. Like most parents, I care more about my children than myself. Unlike the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, children had much less to fear from Covid than from annual influenza or traffic accidents. They could get on with life unharmed — or so I thought.
For society at large, the conclusion was obvious. We had to protect older, high-risk people while younger low-risk adults kept society moving.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, schools closed while nursing homes went unprotected. Why? It made no sense. So, I picked up a pen. To my surprise, I could not interest any US media in my thoughts, despite my knowledge and experience with infectious-disease outbreaks. I had more success in my native Sweden, with op-eds in the major daily newspapers, and, eventually, a piece in spiked. Other like-minded scientists faced similar hurdles.
Instead of understanding the pandemic, we were encouraged to fear it. Instead of life, we got lockdowns and death. We got delayed cancer diagnoses, worse cardiovascular-disease outcomes, deteriorating mental health, and a lot more collateral public-health damage from lockdown. Children, the elderly and the working class were the hardest hit by what can only be described as the biggest public-health fiasco in history.
