RUTHFULLY YOURS

Though you wouldn’t know it from our current political tempers, the wealth of 20th-century America wasn’t created in Washington, D.C. It was built by the likes of Tom Jones, the Californian and aerospace visionary who died last week at age 93.

Jones’s spectacular career spanned the modern age of aviation—from victory in the Pacific in World War II to the era of stealth and drone aircraft. Fresh out of Stanford with an engineering degree, he worked for Douglas Aircraft and helped design the planes that won the war against the Japanese fleet.After a postwar stint advising Brazil’s nascent aviation system, Jones went to Rand Corp. and wrote a path-breaking study on “The Capabilities and Operating Cost of Possible Future Transport Airplanes.” A major theme of his career was adapting new technology in ways that were effective and affordable for military platforms.

He pursued that credo at Northrop, a faltering aviation company that he turned into a giant over his 37-year tenure, including some 30 years as CEO starting in 1960. He helped to make the company, now Northrop Grumman, a backbone of American national defense.

The judge’s ruling that it was not anti-Semitic for the fifteen-year-old to declare, “Let’s burn the Jew” as he set fire to his classmate’s hair is a disturbing case that reveals the talons of anti-Semitism in both the courtroom and the school system, and represents an open tolerance for again hating “the Jew.”

Anti-semitism sank to a new low in Canada after a Winnipeg judge ruled that grabbing a Jewish classmate, flicking a lighter to her hair and saying, “Let’s burn the Jew,” was not anti-Semitic. The incident took place between two fifteen-year-old classmates, where the defendant pleaded guilty to assault with a weapon. The lawyer for the defendant implied that it was the girl’s fault that her hair caught fire — because she pulled away. Then Manitoba Provincial Court Judge Robert Finlayson agreed with the defense that the action was one of teen impulsiveness.

The victim not only stated that the incident “changed her world upside down,” but that she needed therapy to deal with her fears and felt that she was blamed by some people in the school for making too much out of the incident.

Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center in Canada expressed horror at Finlayson’s ruling. In a press release, CEO Avi Benlolo stated that he could not imagine “the same decision would have been rendered had the perpetrator targeted any other minority group in a similar way.”

In December, two new studies, one funded by the German government, found that the majority of Muslims believe that Islamic Sharia law should take precedence over the secular constitutions and laws of their European host countries.

“Critics of Islamic ideology and its organizations are constantly confronted with lawsuits and have to legally defend themselves against the accusations of blasphemy or incitement-to-hatred. Even if it does not come to a conviction, such processes cost a lot of time and money…Thus… we are experiencing a de facto application of Islamic law.” — Felix Strüning, Gustav Stresemann Foundation Report.

“[It] must be recognized: democracies must beware of those who believe a free society is something that needs to be vanquished.” — Die Welt.

What follows is a chronological review of some of the most important stories about the rise of Islam in Germany during 2013:

In January, the Turkish-run Kuba Camii Mosque in Eschweiler, a city situated along the German-Belgian-Dutch border and about 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Cologne, for the first time began publicly calling Muslims to prayer.

The call to prayer was described as an “historical event” and was attended by numerous dignitaries, including the Turkish consul and the Turkish attaché.

In January 1939, as Germany and Russia rearmed, Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, spoke to the former chancellor and war secretary about the prospects of conflict and how Britain should prepare.
British statesman Winston Churchill speaking to recruits to the armed forces
British statesman Winston Churchill speaking to recruits to the armed forces at Mansion House, London, in 1939. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

The Second World War was still eight months away when Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, interviewed Winston Churchill about the need for rearmament and the British attitude to war. Their conversation was published in the NS of 7 January 1939.

A famous journalist once told me of an alarming interview that he had with Mr Churchill some years before the last war. Mr Churchill happened to be in full Privy Councillor’s uniform and emphasised his points with finely executed passes and slashes of his sword. Mr Churchill himself declares that this is a fairy tale; and certainly, when I went to see him the other day, he was wielding nothing more ferocious than the builder’s trowel with which he was completing an arch in the house that he has built with his own hands this summer. He was not, however, too much absorbed to discuss very fully the problem of Democracy and Efficiency.

Kingsley Martin The country has learnt to associate you with the view that we must all get together as quickly as possible to rearm in defence of democracy. In view of the strength and character of the totalitarian states, is it possible to combine the reality of democratic freedom with efficient military organisation?

Mr Winston Churchill The essential aspects of democracy are the freedom of the individual, within the framework of laws passed by Parliament, to order his life as he pleases, and the uniform enforcement of tribunals independent of the executive. The laws are based on Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, the Petition of Right and others. Without this foundation there can be no freedom or civilisation, anyone being at the mercy of officials and liable to be spied upon and betrayed even in his own home. As long as these rights are defended, the foundations of freedom are secure. I see no reason why democracies should not be able to defend themselves without sacrificing these fundamental values.

KM One point people are especially afraid of is that free criticism in Parliament and in the press may be sacrificed. The totalitarian states, it is said, are regimented, organised and unhampered, as the Prime Minister suggested the other day, by critics of the Government “who foul their own nest”.

WC Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things. If it is heeded in time, danger may be averted; if it is suppressed, a fatal distemper may develop.

DAVID HORNIK IS ONE OF THE BEST COLUMNISTS FROM ISRAEL- AMONG THE TOP THREE WITH MARTIN SHERMAN AND RUTHIE BLUM….WHILE I AGREE WITH HIS GENERAL ASSESSMENT OF ARIEL SHARON, I DISAGREE THAT THE WITHDRAWAL FROM GAZA IS HARD TO ASSESS. IT HAS BEEN AN UNMITIGATED DISASTER AND HARD EVIDENCE THAT ANY FURTHER SURRENDER OF LAND WILL NOT BRING PEACE BUT ONLY EMBOLDEN THE JIHADISTS…..RSK

Ariel Sharon was laid to rest on Monday at his beloved ranch in southern Israel. As Sharon said in a speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2005:

If the circumstances had not demanded it, I would not have become a soldier, but rather a farmer and agriculturist. My first love was, and remains, manual labor; sowing and harvesting, the pastures, the flock and the cattle.

Sharon was born in 1928 in Kfar Malal, an agricultural village north of Tel Aviv. His love of farming was, indeed, part of his profile as in many ways a quintessential sabra—a native-born son of Zionist pioneers. So was his chutzpah—an audacity composed in large part of a slapdash disdain for rules and constraints.

Sharon had the trait so strongly that he became known as the bulldozer—someone who, when he thought he saw the solution to a problem, plowed straight toward it without regard for protocol and niceties.

Some of Sharon’s moves, both as a general and a statesman, were so dramatic that he in fact made history. That makes his legacy difficult to evaluate, since its entails speculation—speculation about what would have happened if Arik Sharon had not taken his daring, often stunning initiatives.

The Freedom Center’s Shillman Fellow unveils how and why Obama gave Iraq to al-Qaeda.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/robert-gates-revelations-confirm-horowitzs-party-of-defeat-on-the-glazov-gang/

On this special episode of The Glazov Gang, Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director and Editor-in-Chief of PolitiChicks.tv, filled in for Jamie and interviewed Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, Daniel Greenfield, who runs the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com

Ann-Marie and Daniel discussed Abandoning Iraq. The dialogue occurred in Part I (starting at the 9:50 mark) and focused on How and Why Obama Gave Iraq to Al-Qaeda.

Two years before Occupy Wall Street’s band of radical grad students set up their tents and cardboard signs in Zuccotti Park, Mayor Bloomberg warned the City Council against frivolous tax hikes. “One percent of the households that file in this city pay something like 50% of the taxes. In the city, that’s something like 40,000 people. If a handful left, any raise would make it revenue neutral.”

And then the 1 percent became the target of the left’s answer to the Tea Party. It wasn’t unusual to see bus riders wearing “We Are the 99%” buttons the way they had once carried I Heart New York bags.

New York City now has a radical leftist in Gracie Mansion, Bill de Blasio, a radical leftist City Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, and a radical leftist public advocate, Letitia James. The city is now run by the Working Families Party/ACORN and tax hikes will be used to finance generous payoffs to unions.

But the unions who rigged this election may never see those payoffs. New York City’s unfunded pensions are estimated as being as high as $136 billion. The crash may only be four years away.

The top 1 percent pay half the income taxes in the city and the top 10 percent pay 71 percent. Drive them away with tax hikes for municipal union goodies and the unions will have as much trouble collecting even basic benefits from New York as they do from Detroit.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/world-war-i-continues-to-have-relevance-100-years-later-a-941523.html

It has now been 100 years since the outbreak of World War I, but the European catastrophe remains relevant today. As the Continent looks back this year, old wounds could once again be rubbed raw.

Joachim Gauck, the 11th president of the Federal Republic of Germany, executes his duties in a palace built for the Hohenzollern dynasty. But almost all memories of Prussian glory have been eliminated from Bellevue Palace in Berlin, where there is no pomp and there are no uniforms and few flags. The second door on the left in the entrance hall leads into a parlor where Gauck receives visitors.

In the so-called official room, there are busts of poet Heinrich von Kleist and Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, the first German president after Kaiser Wilhelm II fled the country into exile, on a shelf behind the desk. There are two paintings on the wall: an Italian landscape by a German painter, and a view of Dresden by Canaletto, the Italian painter.

Gauck likes the symbolism. Nations and their people often view both the world and the past from different perspectives. The president says that he doesn’t find this disconcerting, because he is aware of the reasons. In 2014, the year of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, the eyes of the world will be focused on Germany’s head of state. It will be the biggest historical event to date in the 21st century.

And Gauck represents the losers.

More than 60 million soldiers from five continents participated in that orgy of violence. Almost one in six men died, and millions returned home with injuries or missing body parts — noses, jaws, arms. Countries like France, Belgium and the United Kingdom are planning international memorial events, wreath-laying ceremonies, concerts and exhibits, as are faraway nations like New Zealand and Australia, which formed their identities during the war.

Poles, citizens of the Baltic countries, Czechs and Slovaks will also commemorate the years between 1914 and 1918, because they emerged as sovereign nations from the murderous conflict between the Entente and the Central Powers.

Unthinkable in Germany

In the coming months, World War I will become a mega issue in the public culture of commemoration. The international book market will present about 150 titles in Germany alone, and twice as many in France — probably a world record for a historic subject. The story of a generation that has long passed on will be retold. New questions will be asked and new debates will unfold. British Prime Minister David Cameron is even making funds available to enable all children attending Britain’s government-run schools to visit the battlefields of the Western Front.

A response of this nature would be unthinkable in pacifist Germany.

But Western Europeans paid a higher death toll in World War I than in any other war in their history, which is why they call it “The Great War” or “La Grande Guerre.” Twice as many Britons, three times as many Belgians and four times as many Frenchmen died on the Maas and the Somme than in all of World War II. That’s one of the reasons, says Gauck in his office in the Hohenzollern palace, why he could imagine “a German commemoration of World War I as merely a sign of respect for the suffering of those we were fighting at the time.”

The “Great War” was not only particularly bloody, but it also ushered in a new era of warfare, involving tanks, aircraft and even chemical weapons. Its outcome would shape the course of history for years to come, even for an entire century in some regions.

In the coming weeks, SPIEGEL will describe the consequences of World War I that continue to affect us today: the emergence of the United States as the world’s policeman, France’s unique view of Germany, the ethnic hostilities in the Balkans and the arbitrary drawing of borders in the Middle East, consequences that continue to burden and impede the peaceful coexistence of nations to this day.

Several summit meetings are scheduled for the 2014 political calendar, some with and some without Gauck. Queen Elizabeth II will receive the leaders of Commonwealth countries in Glasgow Cathedral. Australia, New Zealand, Poland and Slovenia are also planning meetings of the presidents or prime ministers of all or selected countries involved in World War I.

‘A Different Nation Today’

August 3 is at the top of Gauck’s list. On that day, he and French President François Hollande will commemorate the war dead at Hartmannswillerkopf, a peak in the Alsace region that was bitterly contested by the Germans and the French in the war. The German president is also among the more than 50 heads of state of all countries involved in World War I who will attend a ceremony at the fortress of Liège hosted by Belgium’s King Philippe. Gauck, a former citizen of East Germany, sees himself as “the German who represents a different nation today, and who remembers the various horrors that are associated with the German state.”

The 73-year-old president hopes that the series of commemorative events will remind Europeans how far European integration has come since 1945. Gauck notes that the “absolute focus on national interests” à la 1914/1918 did not led to happy times for any of the wartime enemies.

But he knows that the memory of the horrors of a war doesn’t just reconcile former enemies but can also tear open wounds that had become scarred over. In this respect, the centenary of World War I comes at an unfavorable time. Many European countries are seeing a surge of nationalist movements and of anti-German sentiment prior to elections to the European Parliament in May 2014.

In a recent poll, 88 percent of Spanish, 82 percent of Italian and 56 percent of French respondents said that Germany has too much influence in the European Union. Some even likened today’s Germany to the realm of the blustering Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Last August, a British journalist emerged from a conversation with the press attaché at the German Embassy in London with the impression that Berlin, in the interest of promoting reconciliation, wanted to take part in commemorative ceremony in neighboring countries. This led to an outcry in the British press, which claimed that the Germans were trying to prevent the British from celebrating their victory in World War I.

I don’t celebrate death of anyone. Sharon will meet his Creator and answer to massacres and destruction committed by him. He was a criminal.

— Linda Sarsour (@lsarsour) January 11, 2014

Editor’s Note: This is Part V of an ongoing series by Robert Spencer highlighting human rights hypocrisy and fraudulent peace activists. For Part I, see “The Hypocrisy of the ‘Islamophobia’ Scam,” for Part II, see “The Hypocrisy of the Fatwa Against Terrorism,” for Part III “The Hypocrisy of the Feminist Response to Islam’s Oppression of Women,” for Part IV see last week’s “The Hypocrisy of the Western Christian Response to Muslim Persecution of Christians.”

Leftists and Islamic supremacists took to Twitter on Saturday morning to take their last shots at Ariel Sharon.

New York-based Linda Sarsour tweeted piously: “I don’t celebrate death of anyone. Sharon will meet his Creator and answer to massacres and destruction committed by him. He was a criminal.” Sarsour is a rabidly antisemitic Islamic supremacist who has said that “nothing is creepier than Zionism” and has equated it with “racism.” She is also a frequent visitor to the Obama White House, and has claimed that the jihad underwear bomber was a CIA agent – part of what she claims is a U.S. war against Islam.

Sarsour is a practiced exploiter of the “hate” smear against foes of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, and has never apologized for using the Islamic honor murder of Shaima Alawadi to spread lies about the prevalence of hate crimes against Muslims in America. Although she decries “hate,” she is venomously hateful herself – as is clear in this self-righteous, self-pitying, foul-mouthed, hate-filled and utterly off-putting performance at a “comedy show,” which reveals that the preening preachers of the “Islamophobia” myth are the real haters. Her lurid tweet envisioning Sharon being damned to hell by a vengeful Allah showed it yet again.

Sarsour wasn’t alone. Others focused on Sharon’s alleged “war crimes.” Hard-Left journalist Glenn Greenwald, hero of the Snowden scandal, pointed out helpfully:

THE MOST STAGGERING STATISTIC OF THE HOLOCAUST IS THAT ONE OF EVERY THREE JEWS IN THE WORLD WAS KILLED…..RSK

People who argue that Holocaust Memorial Day is past its sell-by date are wrong. There is still so much to learn from such unprecedented evil

Holocaust Memorial Day falls again on January 27. It is the ninth consecutive year that this (in many ways uniquely) evil event is being officially commemorated in Britain and the EU.

Predictably there are voices — including some Jewish — who say, haven’t we heard enough about the Holocaust? What more is there to learn?

I take the opposite view — that collectively the world has not studied it nearly enough, and has not properly learned its lessons. If it had, anti-Semitism wouldn’t once again be rife in so many countries, including European ones.

And if it had, I don’t think President Assad of Syria could have used chemical weapons to kill 1,429 civilians, including hundreds of children, in a suburb of his own capital last August, without punitive action being taken by the world in response.