RUTHFULLY YOURS

Read the international sensation already translated into 10 languages!

Unearthing the network that hid the “Angel of Death,” the infamous Nazi doctor who escaped justice for more than three decades. 

In 1985, Betina Anton watched Brazilian authorities apprehend her kindergarten teacher for allegedly using false documents to bury in secrecy the remains of Josef Mengele, known worldwide for cruel human experiments and for sending thousands to the Auschwitz gas chambers. Decades later, as an experienced journalist disturbed by the mysteries surrounding the departure of Austrian expat Liselotte Bossert, Anton set out to find her and see if the rumors were true. She could not imagine how deeply into Mengele’s life-on-the-run her investigation would take her.

Josef Mengele was a fugitive in South America for thirty-four years after World War II, sought by Israeli secret service and Nazi hunters. Hidden for half that time in Brazil, thanks to a small circle of expatriate Europeans, Mengele created his own paradise where he could speak German with new friends, maintain his beliefs, stay one step ahead of the global manhunt, and avoid answering for his crimes. 

Translated from the Brazilian Tropical Bavaria edition and based on extensive research, including revelatory interviews and never-before-seen letters and photos, Hiding Mengele is a suspenseful narrative not only haunted by the doctor’s horrific actions but also by the motivations driving a community to protect an evil man. 

The political left has an urgent and rising problem with authoritarianism. An alarmingly high percentage of self-identified progressives are punitive, bullying, and intolerant of disagreement— and the problem is getting worse. As social psychologist Luke Conway demonstrates, it’ s not just right-wing extremists who long for an authority figure to crush their enemies, silence opponents, and restore order; it’ s also those who preach “ be kind” and celebrate their “ inclusivity.” A persistent proportion of left-wingers demonstrate authoritarian tendencies, and they’ re becoming more emboldened as they gain cultural and political power. On a range of scientific and social issues, they are increasingly advocating censorship over free debate, disregarding the rule of law, and dehumanizing their opponents. These tendencies are part of an accelerating “ threat circle” of mutual hatred and fear between left and right that could tear apart our basic democratic norms. Concluding with an eloquent call for firm but rational resistance to this rising tide of liberal bullying, Conway presents a path forward that no one concerned about our hyper-partisan political arena can afford to ignore.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/03/israel-is-not-a-settler-colonial-state/

Portraying Israel as a colonial imposition on indigenous people, a ‘settler state’ expropriating their land and culture, is a major pillar of Israelophobia. As I explain in Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What To Do About It, it is rooted in the suggestion that Jews have no place in the Middle East and are alien to the region, a claim that is easily dismissed with even the briefest look at history. Yet the demonisation persists.

Take Akub, a fashionable Palestinian restaurant in London’s Notting Hill. It is more than just a high-end eatery. In an interview with the New York Times in 2022, its French-trained chef and founder, Fadi Kattan, said his mission was to ‘reclaim a cuisine that is part of a broader Arab tradition involving foods like hummus, falafel, tabbouleh, fattoush and shawarma, that he felt was being co-opted by Israeli cooks’. It seems that whereas normal people cook food, in the eyes of Kattan, Israelis ‘co-opt’ it. This position relies on a highly selective view of history. As one reader remarked in the comments section: ‘Jews have also been making these foods for centuries and have appropriated nothing. There’s been a continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel for thousands of years. What’s more, many of these foods are not limited to the land of Israel, but common across the former Ottoman Empire.’

People often forget that Judaism is two millennia older than Islam and 1,500 years older than Christianity. Israel was the cradle of Jewish civilisation. At least a thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ, Jerusalem’s most famous Jew, King David, made the city the capital of the Land of Israel. It has been home to greater or lesser numbers of Jews – the very word ‘Jew’ is a shortening of Judea, the ancient kingdom radiating from Jerusalem in the Iron Age – in Jerusalem ever since.

Culturally, Jews have always intertwined their identity with the land of Israel, particularly since they were exiled to Babylon around 598 BC, when their powerful yearning for return took hold. For millennia, Jews in the diaspora have prayed facing towards the Holy City, exclaimed ‘next year in Jerusalem’ at Passover, mourned the destruction of the Temple by breaking a glass at weddings, longed to be buried there, prayed at the remaining walls of the destroyed Temple, and visited on pilgrimage. Many throughout history have taken the step of uprooting their families and returning to their homeland. All these practices continue to this day.

A thread can be traced backwards through Jewish history that shows the ancient roots of the ideal of repatriation. Beginning in 1516, Palestine – as it had been renamed by the Romans – fell under Ottoman rule, which would last for more than 400 years. Less than 50 years after the conquest, Joseph Nasi, the Duke of Naxos, a Portuguese Jewish diplomat favoured by the Ottomans, attempted to return Jews to their homeland without regard for scriptural prophecies about awaiting the coming of the messiah. In a way, he was the first Zionist.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/woodward_s_war_deeply_damning_but_not_to_trump.html

Bob Woodward, a past master at the art of marketing bestsellers by reflecting the Democrat zeitgeist, tries his best in his latest offering, War, to put a good face on Biden-Harris incompetence in the Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Israel conflicts. Although Donald Trump was not a government actor during these events, War inserts vignettes purporting, unsuccessfully, to contrast Trump’s unfitness with Biden’s putative steadiness.

Woodward tries but fails to claim that it is Trump’s alleged instability that threatens our fragile world, and not the ineptitude of the senile, perpetually unintelligent Biden. But to his great credit, the dogged reporter in Woodward overcomes the mediocre polemicist. He simply cannot hide Biden’s abject, foolish incompetence in these conflicts, nor can he conceal, try though he might, Trump’s commonsense assessments of the same events. While hoping to help Biden’s political fortunes, his book is a thinly-veiled but strangely ineffective diatribe against the “fascist” former President he awkwardly stumbles to depict.

Before delving into Biden’s actions, we should recall the wise assessment of the well-respected Robert Gates, former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense in the Obama Administration. Biden, Gates wrote in his 2015 book, had been consistently wrong on every national security and foreign policy issue throughout his long tenure in D.C. Moreover, Biden had long been reputed by his colleagues to have been the least intelligent legislator in Congress.

Given Biden’s recently acknowledged mental incompetence, Woodward tries to contextualize it as a recently-developed condition, with only isolated “early markers” in preceding years. But, again, Woodward’s solid factual recitations are far more skillful than his partisan shadings of them.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/the-campaign-against-justice-gorsuchs-new-book-is-an-embarrassment/

An effort to discredit Justice Gorsuch is overhyped and misleading.

The patently coordinated progressive campaign to delegitimize the Supreme Court by personal attacks on the six conservative justices never sleeps. It’s Justice Neil Gorsuch’s turn again in the barrel. Progressives have tried out a number of themes against Gorsuch over the past seven years, to little effect: that he’s arrogant, that he talks too much, that he’s a bad writer, that he’s a plagiarist, or that he did something wrong by selling a house to a Democratic lawyer through an anonymous LLC at below the price he was asking before he joined the Court. Those attacks having gotten nowhere, one of the themes they are still pushing is that Gorsuch misrepresents facts in his opinions.

Given little to work with on this front, they have settled on Gorsuch’s new book, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, which he co-wrote with a former law clerk, Janie Nitze. Gorsuch and Nitze argue that the explosive growth of federal law has costs not only for liberty and small government in general, but for the individual people who find themselves on the business end of all these rules and the people who enforce them.

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post branded it “Justice Gorsuch’s book of fish tales.” An attempted smackdown by Ankush Khardori of Politico was headlined “Neil Gorsuch’s New Book Is an Embarrassment.” Their primary charge is that Gorsuch left out important facts from the stories he tells in the book, chiefly the story of fisherman John Yates. But Marcus and especially Khardori are the ones who should be embarrassed. They are straining to miss the point — and Khardori’s piece is full of its own distortions. I’ll discuss below why Khardori and Marcus are off base on the Yates case. In a second part, I’ll cover the other scraps that they throw at the wall and why Khardori’s past record and his behavior in this episode make him an especially unconvincing advocate against Gorsuch on this score.

Facts and Figures

Woke is not a fad but a cultural revolution—a movement that can only be stopped by a drastic intervention in our institutions and culture.

We in the West are in the third wave of cultural-left ideological enthusiasm. Each “Awokening” has crested, fallen a little, consolidated, then surged again to reach a higher level. The cumulative result is an elite creed which has produced a crime wave, a worsening education system, chaos at the border, and social division. Fired by a cultural socialism that puts equal results and emotional protection for minorities at the center of their moral universe, today’s young people are twice as intolerant of conservative speech as older generations. These young people will be the median voters and employees of tomorrow, leading and controlling the country. Woke cultural socialism is not the classical liberalism of the American Constitution, but a modern “majorities bad, minorities good” Left-liberalism. It is powered by a set of ‘liberal’ emotional attachments rather than liberal principles. These underpin a moral panic about whites and males combined with a starry-eyed patronizing approach to minorities.

Today’s woke extremism is not a repudiation of liberalism, but a perverse extension of it. Our only way out is to use elected, constitutional, government power to break the grip of wokeness in our institutions and schools, steering them toward neutrality and classical liberalism. To do so, the conservative and moderate majority must place culture front and center and spare no effort to win the battle of ideas. Nothing less than the future of our civilization depends on it.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-we-have-never-been-woke-by-musa-al-gharbi

We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, by Musa al-Gharbi (Princeton, 432 pp., $35)

What is a theory? In philosophy, we usually think of it as a set of propositions. These propositions might be challenged directly, or they might turn out to generate empirical predictions or logical consequences that could be challenged instead. But we can also think of theories as things that live in people’s minds—ideas that shape our vocabularies, our maps of the world, our attunements to perceptions, our instincts about what jumps out as important in our environments. Thinking this way, a theory’s measure is its number of adherents. What ought to be evaluated is how they think when gripped by the theory, not what the theory’s abstract implications might be.

Theories of politics in particular seem apt for this sort of evaluation. Some political philosophies do not specifically entail that horrible things ought to be done. But if such a theory’s adherents always seem to do horrible things once they get power, that should count against the theory.

Musa al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke presents an account of the character and causes of woke politics. It fills a gap in this regard: al-Gharbi, primarily a sociologist, gives a different kind of perspective than, say, Yascha Mounk’s relatively centrist history of wokeness as rooted in radical academic ideas or Richard Hanania’s relatively right-wing history of wokeness as rooted in activist jurisprudence and the administrative state. But at a further remove, We Have Never Been Woke is a story of how theories—both the woke theories criticized and the more classically leftist theories used to criticize them—simultaneously open our eyes to some things while blinding us to others.