RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 1948, as Israel was heading into its first war, an IDF general sent a letter to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s new prime minister, politely declining his offer to become chief of staff because he had learned the Jewish State only had six million bullets. “We will need 1 million bullets a day in a war and I am not willing to be chief of staff for just six days,” he wrote.

The Weapon Wizards, an engaging look at Israel’s weapons industry, is replete with such anecdotes. (Another that’s hard to resist is how Jewish forces in Jerusalem held off Arab rioters with one gun and 11 bullets. Afterward, the commander criticized the “gratuitous use of ammo.”) Such stories drive home how little Israel had militarily in its early years. Israel’s humble beginnings make it even more remarkable that it has become a military power. The goal of the authors, Israeli journalists Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot, is to explain how that transformation came about. As they write, 60 years ago Israel’s biggest exports were oranges and false teeth. Today, weapons make up 10 percent of Israel’s exports.

Like Start-Up Nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Katz and Bohbot identify national characteristics that have led to a “culture of innovation.” Leading the list is a creativity born of necessity. “With barely any resources beyond the human capital that had immigrated to the new state, Israelis had to make the most of the little they had,” the authors write. Israel has even created a subunit of autistic soldiers to analyze satellite pictures.

The Weapon Wizards is at its best showing these characteristics in action, from amusing episodes to in-depth stories focusing on the development of certain weapons systems. For instance, when illustrating the advantages of the IDF’s flexible hierarchy, the authors describe a visit by the U.S. Air Force’s F-16 program director. During a tour of IDF squadrons, one of the participants started lecturing his commander on everything that was wrong with the plane. The U.S. representative, a lieutenant general, asked the person to identify himself. He was shocked to learn the critic was a lowly mechanic. In America, the authors write, it’s unheard of to talk out of turn and argue with your commander, especially in front of a foreign officer. “In Israel, though, no one thinks in those terms. What the mechanic was doing was exactly what he had been trained to do and what he thought was expected of him—to speak his mind,” the authors write.

In a similar vein, Israel nurtures its best and brightest. A fascinating example of this characteristic is a program called Talpiot. Created in 1979, it pulls together some of Israel’s most promising young people, who sign on for nine years of service in return for degrees in fields like physics, math, and computer science. Thousands apply each year; only 30 are accepted. Talpiot graduates, called Talpions, are seeded throughout the army where they have an impact far beyond their numbers. In 40 years, the program has produced roughly 1,000 graduates, but a single one can revolutionize a unit, the authors say. Although the program met resistance early on, within a few years generals were demanding to know: “Where is my Talpion?” The prime minister was forced to hold a special meeting to resolve the issue.

Although Katz and Bohbot don’t come right out and say it, it’s evident that for all the encouragement of innovation, there remains resistance within the military one would expect from any large establishment. Talpiot had to overcome naysayers before it was embraced, and so did many of the programs the authors discuss, from satellites to the Iron Dome. This suggests the IDF fosters innovation only after a fight. What appears to distinguish the IDF from other militaries is that innovative individuals don’t quit. They also have an admirably dismissive attitude toward army regulations. The premier example is Brigadier General Danny Gold, who developed the Iron Dome.

May 4-5 was Holocaust Remembrance Day, also known as Yom HaShoah. The day honors the victims of the Holocaust, and marked the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The overwhelming theme on this day is recalling the victims of this catastrophe, and insuring that such a tragedy never happens again.

President Trump said in a speech observing this day, “We know that in the end good will triumphs over evil and that as long as we refuse to close our eyes or to silence our voices, we know that justice will ultimately prevail. We will never, ever be silent in the face of evil again. It only takes one light to illuminate even the darkest space, just like it takes only truth to crush a thousand lies and one hero to change the course of history.”

A recent novel is based on the factual story of one hero who did change the course of history, fighting against the tyranny of the Nazis. Although Beneath A Scarlet Sky is a work of fiction, based upon true facts, it will make readers think about how many other extraordinary stories of heroism are untold and in the shadows, especially since this generation is dying out? Mark Sullivan chronicles the life of Pino Lella, a seventeen-year-old boy who grew into a man during the last years of World War II. Sullivan told American Thinker “I wrote it as a novel because some minor details could not be verified, but the overall heroism of Pino is true, including his survival of an avalanche while helping Jews escape. I contacted the daughter of the Nazi General who brutally used slave labors as well as his spiritual advisor. Regarding Pino, he is still living today and I was able to verify that he did indeed work as a spy and save Jewish refuges. I did the research and verification over the course of ten years and lived in Italy spending three weeks with Pino and finding other witnesses to what he told me. His name was given to a researcher by the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Center, Yad Vashem.”

This inspiring story is a lesson on courage. Americans today should read it to realize that their current difficulties are nothing compared to what those suffered through the Nazi regime. Sullivan tells Lella’s story, showing man’s inhumanity to man in Italy, the forgotten front, where the Nazi war machine made the citizenship suffer and struggle.

The book begins in the summer of 1943, as the allies started bombing Milan. As in England, Italian families sent their children to the countryside to save them from possible death. But Pino was not content to lead a normal teenage life; instead, deciding to join the underground railroad of the Catholic Church and the Italian resistance to save Jewish lives. Unfortunately, despite heroic efforts nearly 20% of the Italian Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust. Readers will learn how the German SS found a list of Jews, rounded them up, put them on trains, and transported them to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Many others were machine gunned down or thrown into the lake, forced to freeze to death.

Yet, throughout the last years of World War II Pino risked his own life to save Jews. A very compelling scene tells how he led Jewish refugees across the dangerously snowy Alps to the Swiss border, having endured an avalanche that almost buried him and his rescues alive. Many of those trying to escape the grips of the Nazis did not have the physical strength; yet some how found the perseverance. Pino made the demanding climb up the mountain near Casa Alpina, many times with the refugees on his back, as he skied them to safety in icy weather.

The author noted, “I read accounts of what the Nazis actually did and confirmed a lot of what Pino told me. We cannot forget they had a long-range vision of genocide and atrocities, including hanging young boys’ head on barbed wire posts. I actually did the climb he did and made a video. After getting to the top, you cannot believe what these people went through to escape. It was a very dangerous and unforgiving setting.”

In addition to helping Jews escape, he also became a spy while the driver for General Hans Leyer, a commander in the Nazi engineering and construction group, Organization Todt. Pino’s parents, who insisted he sign up with Todt to avoid being conscripted by the Germans to fight on the Russian front, put him in this situation.

Unfortunately, very little is known about the general, until Pino came forward, because Leyer destroyed many of the documents.

Diana West’s seminal and exhaustive exposé of FDR’s betrayal of the U.S. deserves revisiting and re-reading by anyone who wants to grasp why the U.S. is now incrementally submitting to and allowing the invasion of this country by Islam.. This is the original Rule of Reason review, with some minor corrections, from June 8th, 2013.

Where to begin?

In American Betrayal *, Diana West begins in 1933.

In the name of establishing historical causo-connections, Iwould have begun in 1781, when Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, a brain-cracking treatise which relied on reality to prove that reality was unknowable. That is, by reading his book, a real thing in your real hands, you were expected to agree with Kant that real things were only rough reflections of things whose “essences” existed were beyond the evidence of our benighted, warping senses, in some other realm. Kant counted on everyone not noticing the contradiction and not seeing the ease with which his elaborately constructed mare’s nest could be exploded.

No contemporary, I gather, ever confronted Kant and said, “Herr Professor! If what you say is true, then this book is just a shadow, and the print in it, and all your words, too! What could they mean? How could they be true? Are your words noumena, or mere phenomena?”

In 1781, the year of America’s decisive victory over Britain at Yorktown, there appeared in Europe a book of philosophy called the Critique of Pure Reason. When he read it, a friend of the author wailed and called his colleague “the smasher of everything.”

But no one ever did confront Kant with his contradictions, fallacies, and cerebral legerdemain, except for some Hegelian hair-splitters – except for Arthur Schopenhauer in 1818 after Kant’s death in 1804 – and the Western world has been the worse for it.

1781. Just as the American Revolution, a product of the Enlightenm

This was an interesting, important read. It is getting a fair amount of attention on Twitter.

Former Pakistani parliamentarian Farahnaz Ispahani analyzes “Pakistan’s foundational dilemma—Muslim homeland or Islamic state” in her new book, Purifying the Land of the Pure: A History of Pakistan’s Religious Minorities. Therein she provides an observant overview of how recurring drives for Islamic theocracy dashed any founding vision of Pakistan as a secular state, to the detriment alike of Pakistan’s Muslim-majority and non-Muslim minorities.

Ispahani begins her historical review with the 1947 partition of Britain’s Indian colony into the newly independent states of India and Pakistan. “Pakistan was carved out of British India as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims—a majority enclave designed to protect against minority status in an undivided India” with its Hindu-majority. Given disparate ethnicities and new borders drawn along Hindu/Muslim sectarian lines, “Pakistan was not a territorial nation in the traditional sense. Its leaders had to explain its raison d’être, and most found it convenient to do so in religious terms.”

This faith-based identity appears in Pakistan’s name, the source of Ispahani’s book title. Pakistan arose amidst the 1930s Muslim India independence movement from an acronym encompassing the future country’s regions. Yet Pakistan also means “Land of the Pure” in Urdu, a “meaning embraced by Islamist activists since the country’s founding.”

While Pakistan’s population today is only three percent non-Muslim, Ispahani notes that in 1947 Pakistan (then including modern Bangladesh) was almost 23 percent non-Muslim. This previously more pluralistic Pakistani population drew hope from Pakistan’s founding Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader), Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Days before Pakistan’s August 14 independence, his famous August 11, 1947, “speech advanced the case for a secular, albeit Muslim-majority, Pakistan.”

Several of Jinnah’s fellow Muslim League leaders tried to suppress his speech’s publication, indicating for Ispahani the controversy surrounding Westernized, secular Pakistani leaders like him. “As time went on, Pakistan’s religious parties ferociously attacked Pakistan’s elites for their un-Islamic lifestyle while demanding greater Islamization,” demands often receiving appeasement. “Each round of Islamization was followed by demands for an even greater role for religion in public life.”

Already in 1949, notes Ispahani, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, offered a “vision for Pakistan diametrically-opposed to the secular one Jinnah had offered” in Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly. “Liaquat, an Oxford-educated and thoroughly westernized landowner not known for personal religiosity,” supported the Objectives Resolution declaring an Islamic state as the objective in the drafting of Pakistan’s constitution. Many believe that he thereby “intended to placate clerics and Islamists only in the most cosmetic sense.” Nonetheless, Pakistan’s 1956 constitution, with the Objectives Resolution as preamble and numerous Islamic references, proclaimed the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Ispahani examines a similar duality in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in Pakistan’s 1970 elections. He “spoke of Islam as the personal religion of the majority” on the campaign trail but under his leadership Pakistan’s new “1973 constitution not only retained the Islamic provisions from earlier versions but also added new ones.” A 1974 constitutional amendment then began the ongoing persecution of the Ahmadi sect by declaring them non-Muslim. “Rejecting Bhutto’s hard-cultivated Islamic credentials,” his Islamist opposition in the 1977 elections emphasized his alcohol consumption.

Following the elections, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto in a coup and had him executed on trumped-up charges. Many associate Pakistan’s Islamization with Zia, Ispahani notes, who “used the phrase ‘soldier of Islam’ to describe himself in his very first speech” in power. Until his death in a mysterious 1988 plane crash, this dictator’s “Islamization of the nation was global in its scope and almost obsessive in its thoroughness,” as she documents in detail.

From “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” a forthcoming book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, excerpted at TheHill.com, April 12:

Hillary Clinton turned her fury on her consultants and campaign aides, blaming them for a failure to focus the media on her platform.

In her ear the whole time, spurring her on to cast blame on others and never admit to anything, was her husband. Neither Clinton could accept the simple fact that Hillary had hamstrung her own campaign and dealt the most serious blow to her own presidential aspirations.

That state of denial would become more obvious than ever to her top aides and consultants during one conference call in the thick of the public discussion of her server. Joel Benenson, Mandy Grunwald, Jim Margolis, John Anzalone, John Podesta, [Robby] Mook, Huma Abedin and Dan Schwerin were among the small coterie who huddled in Abedin’s mostly bare corner office overlooking the East River at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters. Hillary and Bill, who rarely visited, joined them by phone.

Hillary’s severe, controlled voice crackled through the line first. It carried the sound of a disappointed teacher or mother delivering a lecture before a whipping. That back end was left to Bill, who lashed out with abandon. Eyes cast downward, stomachs turning—both from the scare tactics and from their own revulsion at being chastised for Hillary’s failures—Hillary’s talented and accomplished team of professionals and loyalists simply took it. There was no arguing with Bill Clinton.