RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/6341/features/the-betrayal-of-salonikas-jews/

PRINCE PHILLIP’S MOTHER, WHO MARRIED PRINCE ANDREW OF GREECE IS BURIED IN JERUSALEM, SHE RESOLUTELY REMAINED IN GREECE DURING WORLD WAR 11 DEFIANTLY SHELTERING JEWISH REFUGEES….RSK

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/04/world/prince-philip-s-mother-buried-in-jerusalem.html

ALSO PROMINENT GREEK ORTHODOX CLERGY GAVE SHELTER TO JEWS:

On March 23, 1943, Archbiphop Damaskinos of the National Greek OPrthodox Church along with 27 prominent leaders of cultural, academic and professional organizations wrote a document declaring the unbreakable bonds between Christian Orthodox and Jews. That action was unique in the whole of occupied Europe. The 275 Jews of the island of Zakinthos were protected by the mayor and when the Germans ordered a list of the island’s Jews….He gave them 2 names his own and that of Bishop Christomos. RSK

THE COLUMN BY ANDREW APOSTOLOU

THE Nazis’ mass deportations of Jews from Greece in 1943 and 1944 largely ended the life of a thriving community, one responsible for centuries of important contributions to Jewish culture and to the life of the land in which the community lived. Eighty-six percent of Greece’s prewar Jewish population perished. In Salonika, where 70 percent of Greek Jews lived, the death rate exceeded 90 percent. While the German campaign to kill the Jews is no secret, few in Greece acknowledge that the Germans had the support of Greek administrators and police.

Greece’s political leaders have paved the way for this unwillingness to confront Greek collaboration in the Holocaust. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras recently spoke of the Holocaust as if it happened in Greece by chance and as if Greek non-Jews were utterly uninvolved.

Yet the Germans succeeded in their nefarious work precisely because Greek non-Jews were willing to assist. The German occupiers of Salonika implemented their standard battery of anti-Semitic measures with consistent support from Greek Christian administrators, civil servants, and police. The Germans systematically impoverished, isolated, marked, ghettoized, and then deported the Jews. The number of German officials directly involved in deporting tens of thousands of Salonika Jews to Auschwitz in 1943 was relatively small, because the local Greek authorities cooperated and contributed their own manpower.

Salonika is central to the history of the Holocaust in Greece because it had a Jewish identity that many Greeks wanted to erase. Thousands of Jews fleeing from Spain and Portugal (together, Sepharad in Hebrew) had revived the city in the late 15th century. The Sephardim soon became a majority in Salonika, turning the city, then under Ottoman rule, into a major Jewish religious and cultural center. When Greek troops captured Salonika in 1912, they found a city in which the main language was Ladino, not Greek. Although the Jews were anxious about Greek rule, they adjusted, and the younger generations learned the Greek language. By the eve of World War II, the Jews were no longer a majority of the city’s inhabitants, but they had every reason to believe that they were Greeks and that Greece was their country.

The feeling was not reciprocated by many of Salonika’s Christians, and the arrival of the Germans in 1941 provided them with their opportunity. The character of Salonika had changed in the 1920s after a large influx of Greek Christian refugees from Turkey. The Greek government promoted the city’s Greek identity, even discouraging the use of shop signs in Ladino. The Greek press in the city was often viciously anti-Jewish, inciting a 1931 pogrom that claimed two lives. When the Germans entered Salonika on April 6, 1941, they found a willing cadre of collaborators and a broad section of Greek Christian opinion hostile to the Jews.

http://www.steynonline.com/5506/the-party-of-surrender From RNC honcho Reince Priebus, from the senator from Swing-State Central Rob Portman, and even from the great Charles Murray, the same mournful dirge echoes through the cavernous emptiness of the Republican big tent: Give it up, losers — give it up on illegal immigration, gay marriage, abortion, and maybe Americans under 30, 50, […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The day before the Marathon Massacre, the New York Times had scored plaudits for running an op-ed by one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards complaining about his hard life in Guantanamo Bay.

On April 14th, the paper of broken record paid 150 bucks to an Al Qaeda member for the opportunity to complain about being force fed during his hunger strike. On April 15th the bombs went off.

The attacks of September 11 introduced a dividing line between awareness and disregard. There was the world of September 10 and the world of September 11. In one world the planes passing in the sky were a minor reminder of our technological prowess. In the other, we were at war.

There was no such clear dividing line when September 11 faded from memory and we returned to a September 10 world. Nor is there an exact date for when we will return to an April 14 world in which it is okay to pay a terrorist in exchange for his propaganda. But if the media has its way, that day can’t come soon enough.

A day after the bombings, the New York Times wrote that a decade without terror had come to an end. But the terror had never stopped or paused. The FBI and local law enforcement had gone on breaking up numerous terror plots to the skepticism and ridicule of the media which accused them of violating Muslim civil rights and manufacturing threats.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/a-major-syrian-rebel-group-is-now-officially-part-of-al-qaeda/?print=1 Much recent media attention has focused on a series of statements from top al-Qaeda leaders saying that the powerful Jabhat al-Nusra militia in Syria is a franchise of the al-Qaeda global jihadi network. The statements were made by the top al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Jabhat al […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/345874/seeing-things-clear/page/0/1

As regular readers know, I use this column now and then to jot some notes on a book. These do not constitute a proper book review. But sometimes the notes are worthwhile, I think.

I’d very much like to remark on a book by Bruce Bawer, published last year. This one is The Victims’ Revolution. Bawer, if you don’t know him, is one of our finest literary critics and political analysts. He is also uncommonly brave. He writes about the threat of Islamism to our liberal life here in the West, and he does this writing from Scandinavia, where he lives. (Bawer is an American but has lived in Norway for some years.)
This sort of writing wins him no friends — except among people who value the truth, however upsetting it is.

Bawer has the particular gift of shaming people on the left. He asks them, “Won’t you stick up for your own values? Do you realize what the Islamists intend to do to you, and are doing to you already? Do you not have the courage of your convictions? Do you hate the West more than you hate those who would destroy you?”

Among Bawer’s books is While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within.

This new book, The Victims’ Revolution, has a subtitle: “The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind.” You will hear the echo of Allan Bloom’s classic, The Closing of the American Mind. I remember his telling Bill Buckley what he originally wanted to call it: “Souls without Longing.” Bill said, “Oh, what a marvelous title” (or something like that).

How about “Identity Studies”? Bawer devotes chapters to Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Chicano Studies. A later chapter is titled, “Studies, Studies Everywhere.” So true.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed Jeb Bush. And I noted that he had majored in Latin American Studies. I said to him (something like), “That’s a pretty lefty major, isn’t it?” He said (something like), “Yes. Aren’t all ‘studies’ lefty?”

If a person reads only the preface and the first chapter of Bawer’s book, he has more than gotten his money’s worth — more than. This is a vital, sparkling, and truth-telling book.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323309604578428900867620018.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Opinion Atop the quotable Barack Obama there will be this: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” Everyone clings to something. But when it comes to criticizing unseemly political dependencies, it’s almost always liberals accusing them of clinging to […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323809304578428552342222358.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTTopStories
Senate Scuttles Gun Limits
Expanded Background Checks Fail; Obama Denounces ‘Shameful Day for Washington’

WASHINGTON—The biggest push in nearly two decades to restrict firearms in the U.S., touched off by the emotional response to December’s mass shooting of schoolchildren, collapsed in the Senate on Wednesday, scuttling a major element of President Barack Obama’s second-term agenda.

The centerpiece of a Democrat-led gun-control effort—a plan to expand the system of background checks aimed at detecting buyers ineligible to own guns—failed in a 54-46 vote, six votes shy of the 60 needed to advance. Shortly afterward, the Senate blocked a proposal to ban the manufacture and sale of certain semiautomatic rifles often called assault weapons and ban high-capacity ammunition magazines. It drew 40 votes, with 60 senators opposed.

Mr. Obama denounced the Senate action in the White House Rose Garden, where he was joined by victims of gun violence, including former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D., Ariz.), who was gravely injured in a mass shooting. “This was a pretty shameful day for Washington. But this effort is not over,” the president said.

Supporters of the background-check measure had hoped the co-sponsorship of Sen. Pat Toomey, a conservative Republican from Pennsylvania, would draw in his party colleagues. But only four GOP senators joined 50 of the Senate’s 55 Democrats and independents in support.

Wednesday’s votes showed that little has changed in the politics of gun control in the aftermath of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, which left 20 children and six adult staff members dead at an elementary school, as well as the attacker’s mother. Support for tighter laws is strong among most Democrats, but Republicans and those Democrats from GOP-leaning states proved reluctant to vote to tighten access to firearms.

The Senate isn’t expected to take a final vote on its package of gun-control legislation, in essence leaving the issue tabled. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) took a procedural step Wednesday that would enable lawmakers to return to the bill if dynamics changed.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/thomas041813.php3

President Obama rightly asked us not to “jump to conclusions” about motives or responsibility for the two bombs that exploded Monday at the Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding more than 170.

That request was pre-emptively ignored. Some couldn’t wait to project their biases and political agendas on this latest act of terror.

In a tweet Monday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof blamed Senate Republicans for blocking confirmation of a new ATF director. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said, “Normally, domestic terrorists, people, tend to be on the far right…” Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst, echoed Matthews on “The Lead” with Jake Tapper.

Blogger Sargent_Rock, responding to Wednesday’s lead story in The Washington Post on the bombings, wrote, “The evangelical wing of the Republican Party is a mirror reflection of the Islamic right. Irony that neither knows it.” This comment mirrors those that suggested “talk radio” contributed to the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

People ought to be held accountable for their actions, whether they misuse a gun or build a pressure cooker bomb that randomly kills innocent people watching a marathon.

Given the times, the first reaction for some people to such incidents is to suspect Islamic terrorism. Authorities say that “a person of interest,” a 20-year-old student from Saudi Arabia, has been cleared of any responsibility in the attack.

Politics aside, whoever did it and for whatever reason, numerous questions will and should be asked.

Among those questions: Were the bombs placed in trash cans near the finish line? In the aftermath of 9/11, trash cans were removed from airports as a security precaution. Should the same be done at large gatherings? Should people be told to collect their own trash and dispose of it at home, or in receptacles outside the venue?

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13152#.UW5aSr_iB5k
Justin Bieber hopes Anne Frank “would have been a Belieber,” according to a message the teenage pop star wrote in the guestbook of the Amsterdam Museum dedicated to the late Jewish diarist.

And our hypocritical guardians of memory reprimanded the bad guy in unison.

Within the category of Nazi victims, no one is more in the foreground of world imagination than Anne Frank. She is nomen omen of the Holocaust. If people have read just one book about the Holocaust, it is “The Diary”, which has been translated into sixty languages and published in more than 25,000,000 copies.

The Franks’ famous house on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, where the Frank family was hidden in a secret annex and where they were arrested in 1944, is the most frequently visited memory site in Europe (more than Auschwitz) and has had a major impact on how millions of people view Anne Frank.

But the Anne Frank Museum is also one of the reasons that Europe’s conscience is so violently anti-Israel. According to Cynthia Ozick, Anne Frank’s story has been “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced, infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized, falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied”.

The Anne Frank Museum is guilty not only because it sanitized Anne Frank’s story of almost all its Jewish references in order to project what it considered to be more important, the general theme of universal suffering and its transcendence through undying goodness and hope. Anne’s universalism has been intentionally emphasized by the Museum and Foundation in order to play down any threat of Jewish particularism.

http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2013/04/15/obamas-china-syndrome/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=obamas-china-syndrome Secretary of State John Kerry spent the weekend showing what predictably comes of the North Koreans behaving badly:  China benefits.  Unfortunately, this is not the only example of the Obama administration’s cravenness in the face of misbehavior on the part of Beijing and/or its proxies. Call it Team Obama’s China Syndrome. Let’s start with […]