RUTHFULLY YOURS

Attorney General Eric Holder, the first Black man to be appointed as United States Attorney General, has resigned. Americans who suffered the slings and arrows of rising above the racial divide since – and before – the enactment of Civil Rights legislation are jubilant in his departure. Never before has an Attorney General belittled the American citizenry as Mr. Holder has in his comments on racism. Never before has an Attorney General abused the power of his office as Mr. Holder has in the pursuit of racial retribution. And never before has an Attorney General overseen such an aggressive division of our citizenry based on race as has Mr, Holder. To put it directly, Mr. Holder, don’t let the door smack you in your racist behind as you leave.

I was raised in the 1960s and 1970s. My parents taught me, in no uncertain terms, to consider individuals through a lens that evaluated their character, not their skin color. When I didn’t, my attitude was “adjusted” and I am thankful for their unyielding insistence on that issue.

I remember all too clearly the evening when my Father returned home from his office the day he found one of his best friends – a Black man – dead on the office floor. He was devastated. Eddie Kaine was more than an employee to my Father. Each day as he arrived at his fledgling business – a new and struggling metal manufacturing company – he was greeted by Mr. Kaine. Each morning they took the time to have a cup of coffee, or two, and discuss family, life, and current events. It was irrelevant that my Father that was the boss and Mr. Kaine was the custodian. Both men looked upon each other with respect, as family men both struggling to achieve so as to take care of their respective families. They were men of equal honor talking like the friends that they were.

Many times, my Father would confer with his friend on business realities that weighed heavily on my Father’s mind. Many times the common sense advice that Mr. Caine offered my Father – as a friend – were decisions that helped to ease my Father’s mind. I like to think that it was out of the catalyst of their friendship that my Father was moved to institute a profit sharing plan that included all of his employees. Mind you, this was in a day and age when such things were considered revolutionary. The harder everyone worked – from the custodian to the CEO – the more everyone would financially benefit; capitalism at its purest; everyone has “skin in the game.”

Also stoning to death is the ultimate weight loss program. Truly Mohammed was the original feminist. Just ask the little girl he raped.

So the team surveyed nearly 600 Muslim women in Britain. About 200 said they never used the hijab. The others said they wore it at least sometimes. Swami and his colleagues also asked the women a whole slew of questions to measure how they felt about their bodies.

The difference between the two groups was small. But across all parameters, the women who wore the hijab, at least some of the time, had more positive views of their bodies on average. They had less desire to be thin.

There’s a rather obvious reason for that. The Muslims who didn’t wear the Hijab were probably more Westernized. The ones who did had standards of beauty rooted in a culture that celebrates morbid obesity.

Take Mauritania, a Muslim country in Africa.

In Mauritania, a West African country situated in between Western Sahara and Senegal, thin isn’t considered beautiful. Skinny women are viewed as poor and not able to afford food.

For women to find husbands in Mauritania, they have to be fat. So they force-feed themselves large quantities of camel milk, bread crumbs soaked in olive oil, and goat meat. This practice is referred to as “gavage” — the same name used to describe the force-feeding of ducks to make foie gras.

As a result, mothers begin force-feeding their daughters at a young age to ensure that when they’re old enough to marry, they are attractive under Mauritanian standards.

There’s nothing particularly Islamic about this except insofar as Islam reinforces the idea that women are property.

Here’s the situation for Pakistani Muslim settlers in Europe.

Overweight has traditionally been associated with being in good health and of high status, and the body ideal has been large. Pakistani women in Norway have a high prevalence of obesity and diabetes.

I could go on, but you get the point.

Dear E-Pals: I love Jewish holidays. I love gathering with my four children and six grand children and eating traditional foods, laughing, retelling anecdotes about my late husband, my parents and their own childhoods. I also love the idea that something which began with the Patriarchs Abraham and Sarah in Hebron continues in an unbroken chain despite all the millennia of efforts to destroy my people.

Seventy nine years ago the Nuremberg Laws were established in Germany, heralding the Holocaust which killed one in every three Jews in the world. The answer to that catastrophe is Israel.

I think my friend and e-pal and one of my favorite journalist David Hornik sums it up today:

“The statistics for 2013 are in, and they confirm that Israel’s amazing demographic trajectory continues. The population now stands at 8.25 million, up by well over a hundred thousand from the previous year, double what it was thirty years ago. And during the Jewish year that began last September, just about 25,000 immigrants came to the country—the highest total in five years. Meanwhile Israel’s birthrate remains by far the highest among Western countries.
Is there an overarching explanation for all this success—awesome economic achievements, dramatically outsize military power, attracting immigrants, an evident love for life despite the difficult environment?
There is—and it’s this: the Jewish people’s return to their land after two millennia, the revival of their language and culture, the concentration of so much talent, the memory of catastrophe and the unfathomable will to survive release huge energies. Israel will stay on this trajectory of success, which all the region’s dark hatred can’t stop.”

I wish you all a sweet and happy holiday. In the Bronx, whose importance cannot be understated,since it is the only borough preceded by the word “the”- we always abbreviated our message and wished one and all “A Happy and a Healthy”….May we have peace and happiness in America, this most wonderful nation.

Sincerely,

rsk

America is silently acquiescing to President Obama’s extraordinarily expensive and flawed plan to fight Ebola in West Africa. On Tuesday, Obama announced he is committing $763 million dollars and 3,000 military personnel to taming the outbreak that so far has killed 2,400 people.

Though help is urgently needed there, the plan does too little to protect Americans.

Obama said nothing about temporarily banning commercial air travel between the U.S. and West Africa, in order to help prevent Ebola from coming here. Some 220,000 residents of West African countries have visas that permit them to enter the United States. As the disease increases exponentially, the likelihood also increases that a person carrying Ebola, perhaps unknowingly, travels to the United States before symptom’s appear. Northeastern University professor Allesandra Vespignanini and his research team have developed a computerized risk assessment based on travel patterns, and pegs the risk at no more than 15%.

Regardless of the small figure, the frightening truth is that most hospitals in the U.S. are unprepared for a patient unknowingly infected with Ebola. Hospitals that cannot stop the spread of MRSA, C. diff and VRE won’t be able to contain Ebola. Some seventy-five thousand patients die each year in U.S. hospitals from infections spread patient-to-patient, according to the CDC. The same lax hygiene that allows those deaths to occur would allow Ebola to race through hospitals as well.

On August 1, the CDC issued guidelines to U.S. hospitals on how to dispose of bodily fluids, soiled bed linens, and other contamination from an Ebola-infected patient. But one misstep could cost healthcare workers or other patients their lives.

The World Health Organization and West African political leaders have pleaded against a travel ban, saying it will cripple the economies of these stricken countries. But our president also has an obligation to protect us.

Here is where our President’s plan fails most. Less than one month ago, the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security released a shocking report showing that the stockpiles of medications, protective clothing, and other supplies needed to protect Americans in the event of a man-made or naturally caused disease outbreak were expired or near-expired, damaged, missing, or inappropriate. Where’s the attention to protecting Americans? The Inspector General flunked Homeland Security on all measures: planning, storage, and replenishment of the medical supplies that would be needed in a national emergency.

Since the deadly terror attacks of 1993 at the CIA and the World Trade Center, there have been a series of terror attacks attempted inside the United States by radical Islamists.

On September 11, 2001 our nation suffered the worst terror attacks ever carried out within the borders of our country.

Every one of these attacks had something in common: The perpetrators were all aliens who had managed to gain entry into the United States and managed to hide in plain sight, or in the jargon of the 9/11 Commission, they embedded themselves in our country as they went about their deadly preparations.

Our borders and our immigration laws are our first line of defense and last line of defense against international terrorists who seek to attack America and Americans. Yet this essential fact is blithely ignored by the president, members of his administration, members of Congress who seek to implement a variant of “comprehensive immigration reform” and local and state politicians who proudly proclaim that they have created “sanctuaries” for aliens who have run our borders or violated the terms of their admission into the United States and have violated those critical immigration laws.

On Friday, September 19th, I was a guest on “America’s Forum” on Newsmax TV hosted by former Congressional Representative JD Hayworth. NewsMax posted a video of my segment with a synopsis of our discussion. The title of this article was: “Michael Cutler: Sanctuary Cities Are Safe Havens for Terrorists.”

The starting point for my interview was an important news report that contained a video clip of an interview that Rep. Jason Chaffetz participated in with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly. The title of the report was: “BREAKING: Four Terrorists Captured on US Border on September 10 – Day Before 9-11.”

The video clip of the Chaffetz interview on Kelly’s program also contained a brief video of an exchange between Congressman Chaffetz and Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security at a hearing conducted earlier that day. The exchange was infuriating. At first Johnson stated that he was not aware of terrorists running our borders. Rep. Chaffetz then confronted Secretary Johnson, saying that there was information that four terrorists had been apprehended attempting to run our borders at two locations along the U.S./Mexican border. Johnson became extremely uncomfortable and started rubbing his face and all but twitching in his seat. He then claimed that he had heard about it but that they were trying to confirm the information. Next Chaffetz asked Johnson about what level of “operational control” DHS has over the U.S./Mexican border. Johnson said he did not know, whereupon Chaffetz stated that he had information that at present there is 6% operation control.

Every ideology needs to believe in its inevitability. Religions get their inevitability from prophecies; secular ideologies get theirs from the modernist fallacy.

The modernist fallacy says that history is moving on an inevitable track toward their ideology. Resistance is futile, you will be liberalized. Marxism predicted the inevitable breakdown of capitalism. Obama keeps talking about being “on the right side of history” as if history, like a university history curriculum, has a right side and a wrong side. All everyone has to do is grab a sign and march “Forward!” to the future.

The bad economics and sociology around which the left builds its Socialist sand castles assume that technological progress will mean improved control. Capitalism with its mass production convinced budding Socialists that the entire world could be run like a giant factory under technocrats who would use industrial techniques to control the economic production of mankind in line with their ideals.

The USSR and moribund European economies broke that theory into a million little pieces.

The dot com revolution with its databases and subtle tools for manipulating individuals on a collective basis led to a Facebook Socialism that crowdsources its culture wars and “nudges” everyone into better habits, lower body masses and conveniently available death panels.

The iSocialist, like his industrial predecessor, assumes that technology gives superintelligent leftists better tools for controlling everything. The planned economy failed in the twentieth because the tools of propaganda posters, quotas and gulags were too crude. This time he is certain that it will work.

Intelligence is to leftists what divine right was to the crowned kings of Europe. They frantically brand themselves as smart because in a technocracy, superiority comes from intelligence. Their vision is the right one because they are the smart ones. Their shiny future is backed by what they call “science.”

The umpteenth case of child sex abuse in Britain perpetrated by Muslims, the Rotherham abuse case, has understandably left the self-proclaimed “progressives” and multiculturalists in disarray. The Leftist media outlets are on the defensive but still trying to maintain their ground.

Their best weapons are to distract public attention by diverting it to whatever has not been committed by Muslims, and the use of double standards, of which the most shocking example is the differential treatment of Muslims versus the Catholic Church.

The same people, assorted Leftists and secularists, who immediately jumped to the conclusion that all Catholic clergymen are either directly involved in paedophile abuse or in its cover-up are now bending over backwards to deny any connection between the Muslim grooming and sex-slavery gangs and Islam.

An article in The Guardian by Slovenian Marxist psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek, included by Foreign Policy in its 2012 list of Top 100 Global Thinkers (no less), seems to condemn but in fact displays this behaviour. Deceitfully entitled “Rotherham child sex abuse: it is our duty to ask difficult questions,” it covers just about everything but Rotherham – and generally Muslim — child sex abuse.

The word “Muslim” appears twice, “Islam” once, “Islamophobic” once, “Catholic” three times (the same number as “priests” and “racism”), plus assorted uses of “Christian” and “Christianity”.

It doesn’t talk about Islam at all, except to briefly mention women’s second place within it, but immediately prevents the reader from dwelling on the subject too much: “Without blaming Islam as such (which is in itself no more misogynistic than Christianity)…”

The most ironic part of the piece is where Žižek blames his comrades for doing the same thing as he does:

The left exhibited the worst of political correctness, mostly via generalisations: perpetrators were vaguely designated as “Asians”, claims were made that it was not about ethnicity and religion but about the domination of men over women, plus who are we – with our church paedophilia and Jimmy Savile – to adopt a high moral ground against a victimised minority.

The double standard in this kind of coverage and comment is so gigantic that it’s better described as a total reversal of the truth.

Boston’s WCVB.com reported Monday that “the federal government is targeting Boston and two other American cities to shut down what they are calling the U.S.-Jihad pipeline to ISIS in an attempt to stop Americans from joining the terrorist organization.” Boston apparently made this elite list because Ahmad Abousamra, “an American college graduate from Boston, who has been on the run from the FBI for years, is suspected of joining ISIS and leveraging his computer skills to spread the Iraqi terror group’s propaganda on social media.” And so now Boston is reaping what it has sown for so many years.

The Islamic State has been linked to the Islamic Society of Boston. The Tsarnaev brothers, the Boston Marathon jihad mass murderers, went to mosque at the Islamic Society of Boston. So did other convicted jihad terrorists, Tarek Mehanna and Aafia Siddiqui. During all this, the FBI conducted “outreach” to the Islamic Society of Boston but never investigated it. Now they’re reaping the fruits of their politically correct willful ignorance.

Former Boston Mayor Thomas Menino really, really wanted the Islamic Society of Boston to be well situated in the city. He gave the ISB an astonishing sweetheart deal on the land for the mosque. Menino, according to a 2008 Boston Phoenix exposé, “in a fit of multicultural ecumenicalism, approved the sale of city-owned land to the mosque for the bargain basement — and still controversial — price of $175,000, plus the promise of in-kind services, including upkeep of nearby parks. The predictable uproar that arose in the wake of not only selling land well below market rates, but also selling it to a religious institution in contravention of the supposed separation of church and state, was supposed to be muffled by making the complex available for community use. But oops — that never happened. The promised community facilities for non-congregant use still have not been built.”

Not only that, but although it was “originally intended to minister to an urban congregation of African-American Muslims, the mosque project was turned over by the city, with no fanfare and little notice, to the control of suburban-based Muslims of largely Saudi Arabian heritage: the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), which more recently became the Muslim American Society of Boston (MAS-Boston). Perhaps the city believed, incorrectly, that one Muslim community could easily step in for another. In fact, the two groups are quite different.”

The Muslim American Society is the principal name under which the Muslim Brotherhood operates in the United States. According to a captured internal Muslim Brotherhood document, the Brotherhood’s “work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

For some reason, or for obvious reasons, this time of year, our High Holy Days, leads us to remembering, and these remembrances are often salted with pain and broken hearts. In this week’s portion of Deuteronomy it summons us “Ask your father, and he will tell you.”

That phrase alone touches deeply, and does indeed bring back memories of my father.

Years ago I sat down to write a short, swift book of memoirs, not about the Holocaust, but what it was like to arrive in Montreal after the Holocaust.

I named the book “Escape From Mount Moriah” and it still does quite well as literature and then along came a Canadian moviemaker. She asked for permission to turn the book’s first short story, “My Father, Joe” into a short film. I said okay and about eight years later the movie was done.

I was not totally thrilled with the movie. But obviously she knew what she was doing because the 10-minute film won about a dozen film festival awards around the world and was even honored at CANNES, which is like Europe’s Academy Awards.

So why “My Father, Joe?” Why Joe?

With your indulgence, I am reprinting it here as it appears in the book of memoirs, since I cannot do it better the second time as I did it the first time.

“My Father, Joe”

From the book of memoirs, “Escape from Mount Moriah”

Now we had it good. Six million never made it out. We…we escaped France when the Nazis and their gendarmes were beginning their roundups in our district in Toulouse. We walked the Pyrenees…hid in Spain…rested in Portugal…and found refuge in Montreal, Canada — much later we moved to America.