Displaying posts published in

April 2022

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Chabad’s Ukraine Mission The story of the Jews plays an outsize role in the country’s history and present. By Dovid Margolin

By on April 1st, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chabads-ukraine-communism-ussr-tsar-de-nazification-russia-invasion-hasidic-movement-jewish-community-repression-persecution-antisemitism-refugee-11648745664?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

History has been a battleground between Russia and Ukraine for years, and the story of the Jews has been part of that fight. This can be heard today in Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric about “de-Nazification” or Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s exhortations, amid Russian bombing, to remember Babyn Yar’s murdered Jews. But the past is more than a backdrop for geopolitical maneuvering.

The founding of the Hasidic movement by Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760) in what is today western Ukraine revolutionized Jewish life. And Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson—the Rebbe, or the seventh leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement—was born in Ukraine 120 years ago and later helped spark Judaism’s post-Holocaust religious revival.

The Rebbe was born in Mykolaiv on April 18, 1902, to Rabbi Levi Yitzchak and Chana Schneerson. His maternal forefathers had been the city’s chief rabbis since 1854. During a 1905 pogrom, his mother hid in a cellar with other women, whose children’s terrified screams risked attracting the anti-Semitic marauders outside. Years later, she would recall her 3-year-old son soothing the other children.

In 1908 Levi Yitzchak Schneerson was elected chief rabbi of what is now Dnipro. There the future Rebbe celebrated his bar mitzvah while helping his parents care for Jewish World War I refugees forcibly expelled from the Russian Empire’s western provinces. But Czarist persecution paled in comparison with the destruction of Jewish religious and communal life under communism.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Takes Over the Solomon Islands — And the Pacific by Gordon G. Chang

By on April 1st, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18384/china-takes-over-solomon-islands

China, after years of persistent commercial, diplomatic, and military efforts, is taking over the Pacific.

Beijing is moving from island group to island group, and soon the People’s Liberation Army will be in striking distance of Hawaii.

The five-year deal, subject to automatic renewals, will allow Beijing to use the islands to base its military and to do pretty much what the Chinese military wants.

If implemented to its full extent, the Framework Agreement will give China the ability to sever shipping lanes and air links connecting the U.S. with its treaty ally Australia and partner New Zealand.

For decades, Washington allowed Canberra and Wellington to manage the Solomons and its region…. Beijing, through payoffs now detailed in public, essentially owns Sogavare’s government.

There is now talk that China will ink a security agreement with Papua New Guinea, just north of Australia.

Moreover, China wants to upgrade an airstrip in Kiribati. Beijing says the improvements are for civilian purposes only, yet the military uses are apparent and no one believes the Chinese assurances.

The facility is just 1,900 miles south of Hawaii. In Pacific terms, Kiribati is America’s next-door neighbor.

On March 25, the Solomon Islands announced it was “expanding” security arrangements, “diversifying the country’s security partnership including with China.”

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘Pay-for-slay’ Abbas takes his cue from ‘Iran-Deal’ Blinken By Ruthie Blum

By on April 1st, 2022

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-702916

Following Tuesday night’s terrorist attack in Bnei Brak, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued what the media reported as a “rare condemnation.” While it’s true that Abbas doesn’t usually come out against the murder of Israelis (though, in this case, three of the five people killed were not Jewish), his statement should not be viewed as cause for optimism.

On the contrary, the PA chief hasn’t changed his colors one iota. Nor has he ceased the stipends for “martyrs for Allah” through his proud “pay-for-slay” program. No, the message he conveyed, allegedly due to pressure by Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, was carefully worded in a way that would satisfy the powers-that-be in Washington.

“The killing of Palestinian and Israeli civilians will only lead to further deterioration of the situation, especially as we are approaching the holy month of Ramadan and the Christian and Jewish holidays,” he declared, going on to warn “Israeli settlers” and others not to use the “incident” as an excuse to carry out assaults on “our Palestinian people.”

He then referred to the “cycle of violence,” asserting that a “permanent, comprehensive and just peace is the shortest way to provide security and stability for the Palestinian and Israeli peoples and the peoples of the entire region.”

As a consistent rejectionist of peace with the Jewish state, whose very existence he opposes, Abbas was simply parroting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

At a joint press conference on Monday in Jerusalem with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Blinken reported that he and the Israeli premier had “discussed ways to foster a peaceful Passover, Ramadan and Easter across Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, particularly in Jerusalem, a city of such profound importance to Jews, to Christians, to Muslims.”

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Can Ukraine Kill Climate Change? The war in Ukraine may cause the climate movement to meet its end. by Rael Jean Isaac

By on April 1st, 2022

https://spectator.org/can-ukraine-kill-climate-change/

All apocalyptic movements end in failure, but often only after they have wreaked untold damage on the societies that believe in them. That’s the takeaway from Richard Landes’s Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, which explores the appeal of these movements over the centuries, their chief characteristics, and how they take over societies and eventually run out of steam.

Global warming, for all its scientific veneer, has the basic characteristics of an apocalyptic movement: there is a prophecy of impending doom, a demand for repentance and societal self-sacrifice (in this case, giving up the fossil fuels upon which industrial society depends), and a sense of urgency that if action is not taken immediately, it will be too late. In the end, if the required sacrifices are made, there is an idyllic future. In this case, it’s a green new world, powered by sun and wind. Since its emergence in the 1980s, the global warming apocalypse has shown remarkable resilience, emerging stronger than ever from a near-death experience in November 2009 when leaked emails between top climate scientists exposed their shenanigans in suppressing scientific dissent and deleting data.

What probably saved the movement was that the West’s political elite had by then committed themselves. At the beginning of 2009, global warming had scored its most important convert: President Barack Obama. The hacked emails became news just before 40,000 delegates, including over 100 heads of state, Obama among them, converged on Copenhagen for the 15th annual UN climate conference.

In 2018, the movement obtained a major public relations boost when Greta Thunberg launched an international children’s crusade. President Donald Trump took the United States on a brief time out, but even while still on the campaign trail, now-President Joe Biden promised, “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels.” At the 2021 UN climate conference in Glasgow, Biden showed up from Rome in an 85-car emissions-spewing cavalcade. This time, along with the unusually huge number of delegates — including 27 from Palau (total population: 18,000) — he was one of 120 heads of state. Today, the movement would seem by most measures to be at its peak, riding what Landes would call its “cresting wave.” Yet, it is possible that the crisis in Ukraine may mark the beginning of its end.

Continue reading →