RUTHFULLY YOURS

BISHOFTU, Ethiopia—Several dozen people died in a stampede Sunday morning when a religious celebration in Ethiopia turned into an antigovernment protest that led police to fire tear gas and rubber bullets.

Witnesses said people were crushed in nearby ditches as they tried to flee the chaos.

An estimated two million people were attending the annual Irrecha thanksgiving event in Bishoftu town southeast of the capital, Addis Ababa. The event took place in one of the country’s most sensitive regions, Oromia, which has seen several months of sometimes deadly protests demanding wider freedoms.

Ethiopia’s government acknowledged deaths during Sunday’s event. Through a spokesman, it blamed “people that prepared to cause trouble.” The spokesman’s office said many people were taken to hospitals. It didn’t provide figures for deaths or injuries.

Witnesses said the crush began as protesters chanted antigovernment slogans and pushed toward a stage where religious leaders were speaking. Some threw rocks and plastic bottles. Police responded by using tear gas and firing rubber bullets. People tried to flee.

Before the stampede, an Associated Press reporter saw a crowd of people holding up crossed wrists in a popular gesture of antigovernment protest. The reporter also saw police firing tear gas and, later, several injured people.

PARIS — It’s 1944, in occupied Paris. Four friends spend their days in a narrow room atop a Left Bank apartment building. The neighbors think they’re painters — a cover story to explain the chemical smell. In fact, the friends are members of a Jewish resistance cell. They’re operating a clandestine laboratory to make false passports for children and families about to be deported to concentration camps. The youngest member of the group, the lab’s technical director, is practically a child himself: Adolfo Kaminsky, age 18.

If you’re doubting whether you’ve done enough with your life, don’t compare yourself to Mr. Kaminsky. By his 19th birthday, he had helped save the lives of thousands of people by making false documents to get them into hiding or out of the country. He went on to forge papers for people in practically every major conflict of the mid-20th century.

Now 91, Mr. Kaminsky is a small man with a long white beard and tweed jacket, who shuffles around his neighborhood with a cane. He lives in a modest apartment for people with low incomes, not far from his former laboratory.

When I followed him around with a film crew one day, neighbors kept asking me who he was. I told them he was a hero of World War II, though his story goes on long after that. It remains painfully relevant today, when children are being bombed in Syria or boarding shabby boats to escape by sea.

Like most Westerners, I usually ignore their suffering, and assume that someone else will step in to help. But Mr. Kaminsky — a poor, hunted teenager — stepped in himself, during the war and then for many different causes afterward. Why did he do it?

It wasn’t for the glory. He worked in secret and only spoke about it years later. His daughter Sarah learned her father’s whole story only while writing a book about him, “Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life.” The English translation comes out this week.

It wasn’t for the money, either. Mr. Kaminsky says he never accepted payment for forgeries, so that he could keep his motives clear and work only for causes he believed in. He was perpetually broke, and scraped together a living as a commercial photographer, he said. The wartime work put such a strain on his vision that he eventually went blind in one eye.

Though he was a skilled forger — creating passports from scratch and improvising a device to make them look older — there was little joy in it. “The smallest error and you send someone to prison or death,” he told me. “It’s a great responsibility. It’s heavy. It’s not at all a pleasure.” Years later he’s still haunted by the work, explaining: “I think mostly of the people that I couldn’t save.”

In 2009, author Lila Rosenbloom wrote about the act of remembrance in Judaism. One of the most important ways that the State of Israel chooses to remember the Holocaust is to sound a two-minute long siren throughout the country. Sirens that are typically used to alert the country to imminent danger, are sounded so that during the appointed time, siren blasts shriek in every village, town, and city in the land and people stop in their tracks. Vehicles stop in mid-intersections, and all is silent. Yet “all the silent space is pervaded by the fullness of the same wail.”

The “wailing cries of the siren are reminiscent of the piercing, awakening cries of the shofar,” the instrument blown on Rosh Hashanah, also known as the Day of Remembrance, which begins tonight. The chief metaphor employed is the Book of Life, in which deeds and behavior stand in witness for or against us at this time of year. God judges us to determine our future — who shall live and who shall die.

It is particularly apt that a ram’s horn is used because it is also reminiscent of the radical notion that human sacrifice is abhorrent. An angel stops Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac and “the substitution of a ram . . . is a reminder to the Jewish people that though God’s creatures will be entangled in misfortunes, in the end they will be redeemed by the horns of a ram. For the Jewish people the shofar is meant to remind them of “their eternality and future promises of redemption.”

The sound of the shofar is meant to shake one into action because while Rosh Hashanah is a day of remembrance, it is also one meant for repentance. It is about “coming back home after a period of absence.” It is the sense that someone has missed the mark but has the opportunity for renewal.

So what does this have to do with America and the West, in general? Quite simply, the West has lost its moral compass. Though America has, as Ronald Reagan described “been blessed with the opportunity to stand for something — for liberty and freedom and fairness,” we have surrendered to the contortions of political correctness and language manipulation. Consequently, evil grows.

While we abhor stories of biblical sacrifice, women around the world are being sacrificed at the altar of mass Muslim immigration into Europe. And instead of railing against this assault, European leaders meekly accept this barbarism and urge women to dye their hair and stay indoors. In a searing article Anne-Marie Waters speaks of Europe’s rape epidemic where in “Norway, recent statistics revealed that 100 per cent of violent street-rapes committed in the capital city of Oslo were committed by ‘non-western’ immigrants. It’s a similar story in Denmark, where the majority of rapes are committed by immigrants, usually Muslim.”

Moreover, “[i]n England, it’s been rape after rape – tens of thousands of young British girls are brutalised, tortured, beaten and raped by organised gangs comprised almost exclusively of Muslims. And now we have Germany. When Chancellor Merkel threw open the doors of her country to hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, she opened the door to the rape of German women.” Thus, “rape in Germany has already been described as an ‘epidemic’ and one that the German authorities, and media, are keeping rather quiet about. The reality is that German authorities . . . allow [the refugee] men to live freely among German women – they have decided to allow German women to be raped, just like authorities all across Europe.”

TEHRAN, Iran—Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has built a new attack drone that is similar to a U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle captured five years ago, Iranian media reported Saturday.

The semiofficial Tasnim news agency says the “Saegheh” (Thunderbolt) drone is similar to the RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone. Iran’s state-run Press TV says the long-range drone can carry four precision-guided bombs. Neither report gave figures for the drone’s range.

Iran claimed to have shot down an RQ-170 drone used by the Central Intelligence Agency in December 2011 and broadcast footage of the recovered aircraft. It also claims to have captured three American ScanEagle drones.

Iran said last year that it had successfully tested its replica of the RQ-170.

Also on Saturday, Tasnim published photos of what it said was a U.S.-made MQ-1C drone captured recently by the Revolutionary Guard. It didn’t say when or how the drone was captured.

Three Muslim men slaughtered a 15-year-old Christian student, Wajaesh Shono. One of the murderers was the boy’s schoolteacher. — Pakistan.

A Muslim mob killed and beheaded a Christian pastor’s wife based on a false accusation of “blasphemy.” — Nigeria.

His father and stepmother became furious when they learned of the boy’s conversion. They began… starving him, in keeping with Islamic law recommendations for apostate women and children. — Uganda.

As usual, Egyptian TV reported the one-sided attacks from the Muslim majority on the Christian minority as “clashes.” After arriving, the police stood back and allowed the mob to continue rioting, plundering and setting more Christian homes and vehicles on fire. — Egypt.

A Christian woman who escaped ISIS said the militants “married and divorced” her as many as nine times every night to justify the act of raping her. — Iraq.

Christians reciting the rosary inside St. Anthony Church in Ventimiglia, Italy were told by refugee-volunteers to keep their prayers down as they were bothering newly arrived Muslim migrants. — Italy..

At the height of one of the worst months for Christians under Islam, June, 2016, both the U.S. government and “mainstream” media continued to ignore the plight of Christians.

Despite the U.S. government acknowledging that ISIS is committing genocide against Christians in Iraq and Syria, statistics showed the number of refugees the Obama administration has welcomed since the start of 2015:

From Syria: 5,435 Muslims; 28 Christians
From Iraq: 11,086 Muslims; 433 Christians

As for the mainstream media, the death of a gorilla was covered six times more than the Muslim slaughter of Christians for their faith, according to a report.

Is Japan a democracy or a Shinto democracy?

The president of the United States was suggesting to Europe’s rich club of nations that it must admit as full member not a democracy but a “Muslim democracy.”

Obama did not understand that Turkey could never join the EU before it has fully transformed from being a Muslim democracy into a democracy.

Apparently, Erdogan thinks that the U.S. is ruled as Turkey is ruled. He does not understand that the president of the U.S. cannot phone a judge and order an arrest warrant for a foreign national.

Can there be democracies and democracies with religious prefixes? Is the United States a democracy or a Christian democracy? Is Israel a democracy or a Jewish democracy? Is Japan a democracy or a Shinto democracy?

In a 2010 interview with the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, U.S. President Barack Obama referred to Turkey as a “great Muslim democracy.” In the same interview, he said that: “The U.S. always expressed the opinion that it would be wise to accept Turkey into the European Union.” All that was music to Turkish ears. But in reality, the president of the United States was suggesting to Europe’s rich club of nations that it must admit as full member not a democracy but a “Muslim democracy.” Obama did not understand that Turkey could never join the EU before it has fully transformed from being a Muslim democracy into a democracy.

South Africa is a country in suspense, waiting for the fallout from a series of interlinked decisions. First, the liberal opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) last month won Johannesburg, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town in the local elections, a huge blow to the ruling African National Congress (ANC). Second, the country is waiting on tenterhooks for the credit rating agencies to re-rate the country’s creditworthiness in November: most fear relegation to junk status. Third, President Jacob Zuma, a crony capitalist par excellence, is trying to hand as many favours as possible to his allies, the Gupta family. This is being resisted by his finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, and a showdown between Zuma and Gordhan cannot be long averted. Finally, there is the question of the presidential succession, to be decided by an ANC conference in 2017. Rumours fly that Zuma has already accepted $200 million from Vladimir Putin to commission a string of Russian nuclear power stations; that fearing jail, he is planning to retire offshore; and that he will push his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, into the presidency to succeed him. And so on.

One could write: “Apart from that, normal politics goes on.” In one sense that is true — we have rioting students burning down university buildings, affirmative action causing a flight of white cricketers and rugby players — but mainly it’s not true simply because the ANC, which has ruled the country since 1994, is disassembling before one’s eyes. There is an almost complete absence of leadership. Zuma remains largely passive when in-country, and he’s often out. The police, doubtless on his instructions, endlessly harass and threaten the finance minister, Pravin Gordhan. Not only do individual cabinet ministers squabble in public and make unilateral decisions without any semblance of cabinet co-ordination but even subordinate state agencies sometimes make large policy announcements, apparently chancing their arm to see what they can get away with. Many of the ministers are clearly buffoons, while ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte has made announcements that suggest complete economic illiteracy. But then the president himself has said he doesn’t really believe in markets and relies on Marx’s labour theory of value, which even Marxist economists stopped using in the 1950s.