RUTHFULLY YOURS

Clinton Charities Review Tax Returns Amid Scrutiny of Foreign Grants
The Clinton family’s namesake foundation and signature health initiative are reviewing several years of tax returns after questions were raised about the charities’ reporting of tens of millions of dollars in grants from foreign governments, foundation officials said Friday.
The review comes amid intense scrutiny of the foundation’s donors and their political and business relationships with Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Democratic presidential candidate, and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Much of that scrutiny has focused on Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, a period during which the foundation had pledged to restrict donations from foreign governments, seek State Department clearance for new foreign donations, and disclose all its donors. In at least some instances, the foundation appears to have ignored those voluntary agreements.

But like all nonprofit organizations, the foundation is also required by law to file publicly available tax returns detailing broad categories of revenue and expenses, including the total financing it received from government entities. The Clinton Foundation and its work are heavily financed by grants from foreign governments, and the foundation reported substantial income from government entities as recently as 2009, when tax returns indicate it took in more than $122 million in government grants.
For the next three tax years, however, the foundation reported no government financing at all. Craig Minassian, a foundation spokesman, said the foreign grants had accidentally been lumped into a different category, listing other grants, gifts and large contributions.

The German officers would often speak of us as Christian Jews and as blood sucking usurers of the Turkish people. What a falsification of the wretched realities prevailing in Asia Minor, and what a reversal of roles! Yes indeed, there was an oppressor. Either the Germans were consciously distorting the facts and roles, or the Turks had really convinced them that the Turks were the victims and the Armenians were criminals. How appropriate it is to recall here this pair of Turkish sayings: “The clever thief has the master of the house hanged” and “The one who steals the minaret prepares its sheath in advance, of course.”

—Grigoris Balakian, from his eyewitness memoir of events during 1915-1918

**

Grigoris Balakian’s eyewitness account of the Jihad Genocide of the Armenians from 1915-1918—recorded in his diaries during World War I, and already published by 1922 (but not in English till 2009, as Armenian Golgotha)—provide a unique confirmation of the ideological, and genocidal nexus, between plight of the Armenians during World War I, and the Jews during World War II, antedating The Holocaust by two decades. Specifically, Balakian’s striking observations (on pp. 280-281) from a chapter entitled, “The Treatment of the Armenians by the German Soldiers” captures attitudes of German military officers towards the Armenians that foreshadow, chillingly, the genocidal depredations they would inflict upon European Jewry during World War II.

Putting a nuclear powered 100,000 ton aircraft carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, in the Gulf of Aden along with other U.S. naval assets, was presumably to warn off Iranian freighters bringing arms supplies to the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Yet both the White House and State Department refused to give any assurances to reporters that those Iranian ships would ever be boarded. Such a policy stretches incredulity to the extreme. What, after all, was the U.S. naval flotilla going to do?

At the same time, Obama, who is desperately pushing forward with a terrible deal with that same Iranian Islamic regime, is essentially allowing them to continue keeping the thousands of centrifuges spinning while backing down on any enforcement of inspections at the secret and underground Iranian nuclear facilities.

In addition, Obama is anxious to release billions of dollars of Iran’s frozen assets back to the mullahs who will use that bonanza to finance and spread yet more terror around the globe.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

The world’s largest oxygen chamber. The new hyperbaric unit at Israel’s Assaf Harofeh Medical Center has a capacity for 150 patients per day. It provides high-pressure oxygen to treat victims of diving accidents, burns, carbon monoxide poisoning, radiation damage, bone infections, fibromyalgia, strokes, dementia and more.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Health/Assaf-Harofeh-acquires-worlds-largest-high-pressure-oxygen-chamber-390599

The blind can “see” sounds. Hebrew University of Jerusalem scientists have published more results of their research into the brains of the blind from birth. Their visual cortexes are similar to the fully sighted. They can even be trained to “see” sounds. http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/04/10/brain.awv083
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J9AGklNDUc

Kids in sync physically and socially. Research by Hebrew University of Jerusalem psychologist Prof. Ariel Knafo shows that children who mimic each other’s body language for mere minutes are more likely to share feelings of similarity and closeness, and to potentially engage in more pro-social, positive behaviors.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/26278 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0120878

Bacteria use DNA memory to stop viruses. Researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have discovered how bacteria protect themselves from invasive viruses called phages. Their immune system adds part of the phage DNA into the bacteria’s genome. The research may lead to new treatments for autoimmune diseases.
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2015/04/13/israeli-scientists-discover-how-a-bacterial-cell-recognizes-its-own-dna/

Arthritis treatment can stop hair loss. Joint research between Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and Columbia University has discovered that the rheumatoid arthritis medication Baricitinib is effective in the treatment of Alopecia Areata – an autoimmune disease that causes sudden or gradual hair loss.
http://www.hadassah-med.com/about/news/hadassah-doctors-discover-potential-treatment-of-alopecia-areata
http://www.ebiomedicine.com/article/S2352-3964%2815%2900063-8/abstract?cc=y

Tablets to lower your blood pressure. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Teva has launched, in the USA, a generic alternative to Exforge (amlodopine and valsartan) tablets used to treat hypertension (high blood pressure).
http://www.tevapharm.com/news/?itemid={590B9327-6DFF-48BE-AF70-6DBD27CEF82C}

Probiotic for kids in South Korea. Israel’s Anlit has developed a new probiotic supplement for children in South Korea. Released in Costco stores under the global Cenovis Kids brand, the new supplement has a delicious vanilla flavor and teddy bear shape.
http://www.anlit4kids.com/web/8888/nsf/ProLookup.taf?_function=details&_ID=3676&PF=16&did=1217&G=7648&lang=EN&SM=7667

The future with no brain diseases. Professor Marta Weinstock-Rosin – inventor of Exelon for treating Alzheimer’s – says that the end is in sight for the debilitating disease and others like it. Dr Weinstock-Rosin lit one of the ceremonial torches at this year’s Israeli Independence Day ceremony.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-exelon-inventor-sees-an-end-to-alzheimers/

A college education is meant to expand ones freedom of thought and stimulate curiosity in a safe environment. Unfortunately most parents and grandparents are not aware that this is not the case in many schools

College campuses across the country have become a hotbed for anti-Israel activism. like never before. Anti-Semitism is on the rise , in the form of hate speech, harassment and intimidation by the student body as well as in the class room by the indtrrictor.

According to a nationwide survey conducted by Trinity College and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, It found that Jewish students are saying they are being targeted on the basis of their religion,

The survey interviewed 1,157 self-identified Jewish students at 55 U.S. colleges, found that 54 percent experienced or witnessed “anti-Semitism on campus during the first six months of the 2013-2014 academic year.”The report found evidence of anti-Semitism across the country strongly suggesting it is a nationwide problem.

As a historian of the Holocaust I have always recognized its uniqueness. But without the ability to correctly read warning signals of looming catastrophes, history may repeat itself.

As a historian of the Holocaust I have always recognized its uniqueness. But without comparisons and the ability to correctly read the warning signals of looming catastrophes, such knowledge remains sterile and liable to paralyze timely action. Hence I respectfully disagree with The Jerusalem Post’s April 17 editorial, “Bad Comparisons,” which targets the “conflation” of Nazi Germany and contemporary Iran, allegedly made in my book A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (2010).

The quotation from the book which is offered is not an assertion of identity between Nazism and Shi’ite fundamentalism.

It points rather to the similarity between Iran’s “apocalyptic anti-Semitism” (a term I coined 30 years ago) and the Nazi fixation on the annihilation of Jews as a necessary prologue to the “liberation of humanity.” This hideous project is now focused on the Jewish state in the Middle East and once again, six million Jews find themselves at risk. Not only that, but the Iranian leadership still uses a familiar Nazi language – describing the Jews of Israel as a “cancerous tumor” that must be totally excised. From ayatollah Khomeini through president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the present supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, the “Zionist entity” has been repeatedly dehumanized as a “filthy microbe,” a “deadly virus,” a “cancer,” or as an “agent of Satan.” The supposedly “moderate” President Hassan Rouhani is no different in this regard, having referred to Israel on July 31, 2014, as this “festering Zionist tumor.”

The writer, an engineer living in Toronto, Canada is co-founder of Canadians for Israel’s Legal Rights – CILR www.cilr.org.

How can there be peace and reconciliation without acknowledging fundamental historical and legal facts?

Ninety five years ago, prime ministers, ambassadors and other dignitaries from Europe and America gathered in the Italian Riviera. Journalists from around the world reported on the upcoming San Remo Peace Conference and the great expectations the international community placed on this event, just a year after the Paris Peace Conference had settled the political map of Europe at the end of World War One.

On Sunday, April 25, 1920, after hectic deliberation, the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers (Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan and the U.S. acting as an observer) adopted the San Remo Resolution — a 500 word document which defined the future political landscape of the Middle East out of the defunct Ottoman Empire.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning. We will remember them.
Beach Burial

Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs
The convoys of dead sailors come;
At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,
But morning rolls them in the foam.

Between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire
Someone, it seems, has time for this,
To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows
And tread the sand upon their nakedness;

And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,
Bears the last signature of men,
Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,
The words choke as they begin –

‘Unknown seaman’ – the ghostly pencil
Wavers and fades, the purple drips,
The breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions
As blue as drowned men’s lips,

Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,
Whether as enemies they fought,
Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,
Enlisted on the other front.
–Kenneth Slessor

Anzac Day marks the anniversary of the first major military action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces during the First World War. rsk

As academics and revisionists tirelessly re-cast the Anzac story according to preference and political persuasion, the author’s account his experiences at Gallipoli and beyond has slipped from view. Yes, there are patches of Boy’s Own prose, but the sentiments are bracingly and thoroughly Australian.

Chatting with old friends the other day, the subject of “best-remembered books of our youth” came up. It came as no surprise that of six participants in the discussion, all aged in our late sixties or beyond, there was unanimity: the best-remembered book was The Desert Column by Ion Idriess.

I read The Desert Column when I was about fifteen or sixteen, and I can still remember being enthralled by it. I had been given a copy for a birthday, and I treasured it for ages before it went astray somewhere and I forgot about it—although I did not forget about Idriess, several of whose wonderful books I also read back then. I still have an old hardback copy of Lasseter’s Last Ride, and I re-read this recently and enjoyed once more the way Idriess so uniquely combined history, fiction and Australiana.

The discussions amongst friends about The Desert Column intrigued me, so I acquired a copy from the library. Again, I read it enthralled, staying up late on cold winter nights to finish it off and then, my interest piqued, following up references about the desert campaign in the Middle East during the First World War, the Australian Light Horse, the “waler” horses, and Idriess himself.

The Desert Column (sub-titled Leaves from the Diary of an Australian Trooper in Gallipoli, Sinai and Palestine) was first published in 1932, and then, remarkably, was reprinted in 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1939, 1941, 1944 and 1951, demonstrating its astounding popularity with Australian readers of that generation. Re-reading the book in 2011, it’s not hard to see why, as it combines so many fascinating elements: history, war, mateship, horses, bushmanship, hardship, disaster, triumph. It is also well written in the simple language of the outback and the bush poet.

The Desert Column is not a conventional history nor is it fiction, but grew piecemeal as diary entries by the author, jotted down day by day. In a note at the beginning, Idriess says:

I began the diary as we crowded the decks off Gallipoli and watched the first shells crash into Turkish soil. Gradually it grew to be a mania: I would whip out the little book and note, immediately, anything exciting that was happening. As the years dragged on, my haversack became full of little notebooks. These memories … are my sole souvenirs of the War, except of course stray bits of shrapnel, bomb and high explosive splinters which nearly every soldier collected …

This approach gives the book immediacy, a sense that the author was writing a story in the present tense with no foreknowledge of what was coming, for better or for worse. There are characters, but no plot, just the unfolding of events. In other words, the usual situation is reversed: the reader, especially one with some knowledge of military history, knows the plot and the ending, and furthermore has access to the bigger picture, something denied the author in his status as an ordinary trooper on the ground at the time.
This essay was published in the September, 2011, edition of Quadrant.
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The diary commences on May 18, 1915, off Cape Helles in the Dardanelles, a few days before Idriess and his fellow troopers land at Gallipoli. The Australian Light Horse, it will be remembered, was sent to Gallipoli to fight as infantry, to support the troops who had landed a few weeks before and found themselves in an appalling debacle from the outset. Through these early chapters Idriess does not spare the reader; he writes with controlled emotion, almost matter-of-factly, but this makes the ghastly situation seem even worse. The Australians were repeatedly asked to do the impossible—to charge over open ground against entrenched defenders armed with machine guns and occupying the heights. The facilities for treating the wounded were totally inadequate, as were the water supply, the nutrition and the sanitary arrangements. After the first battle-lines had deteriorated into stalemate, Australians and Turks were eating, breathing, sleeping and fighting amongst decomposing bodies. Little wonder that septicaemia was rife. Indeed this is what threatened to end Trooper Idriess’s Gallipoli campaign—a scratch from a shell splinter to his knee was left untreated, became infected (there were, of course, no antibiotics in those days), and rendered him virtually a cripple. Eventually he was stretchered off to a naval vessel and to the Government Hospital in Alexandria.

idriess in uniformAs was always the case in the First World War, the moment he could walk again, Idriess was declared fit and posted back to Gallipoli. Here the situation for the Anzacs had deteriorated further, with the Turkish defence well entrenched and now supported by German artillery. Before long Idriess was even more seriously wounded when he was blown up by a bomb that landed directly in his trench. At that stage, the Australian and Turkish trenches were only a few metres apart, and grenades were being lobbed across by both parties, with terrible results. Again Idriess (right) survived. Again he was stretchered out and spent many weeks in the hospital and convalescing in Alexandria.

Reading about Gallipoli always makes me angry, and the early chapters of The Desert Column did it again. The gross incompetence of the British generals and their support staff stands in such stark contrast to the courage and sacrifice of the soldiers. Idriess’s descriptions are matter-of-fact, but the impact is blood-chilling. All these years later, I could smell the cordite fumes and the reek of the dead, hear the cries and clamour, feel the percussion of shells and the whistle of snipers’ bullets, and sense the exhaustion, the relentless danger and stress, and the constant loss of good mates, cut down on all sides.

“To man a trench and live among the lice…”

All things considered, today’s Commonwealth service marking the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings was moving and dignified. It was Winston Churchill’s idea to open up a new front in the Great War as “an alternative to chewing barbed wire in Flanders”. It proved to be one of the worst disasters in 20th century imperial history: By the end, the British and Ottoman empires had lost roughly the same number of men – about 200,000 apiece. On the invading side, the dead numbered 34,072 from the British Isles, 8,709 from Australia, 2,721 from New Zealand, 1,358 from India, and 49 from the Royal Newfoundland Regiment (the only North American participants) – plus 9,798 of Britain’s French allies. Those numbers do not include death from illness. In the botched landings, the sea ran red. In the carnage of the metropolitan power’s miscalculations, a post-colonial Australia and New Zealand were born.

There were certain ironies at today’s observances. Kemal Atatürk first made his name as a Turkish commander at Gallipoli. Playing host today was President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the man who is systematically dismantling the modern secular state Kemal founded and replacing it with something harder and older, explicitly Islamic and slyly neo-Ottoman. The chumminess between him and the Prince of Wales was one of the queasier aspects of the day.

His Royal Highness read from John Masefield’s account of Gallipoli, published in 1916. His son, Prince Harry, chose an excerpt from A P Herbert’s poem “The Bathe”. I think of Herbert as a light versifier and musical comedy man (he wrote the lyrics for Vivian Ellis’ big West End hit, Bless The Bride). But a century ago he was part of the Royal Naval Division’s Hawke Batallion, en route to Cape Helles. This is what he wrote: