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What Should We Submit To? Harold F. Callahan

By on January 18th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/16/what-should-we-submit-to/

Ministers, “watchmen on … the wall of liberty,” according to Franklin Cole, editor of “They Preached Liberty,” were among America’s greatest revolutionary influences. The most influential was Boston Congregationalist minister, Jonathan Mayhew.

Declaration of Independence signer Robert Treat Paine called Mayhew America’s “Father of Civil and Religious Liberty.” Especially important was his Jan. 30, 1750, address, which was widely printed and read. Given for the centennial of Charles I’s execution, Mayhew argued that obedience was not due oppressive governments, because such tyranny violated the divinely-instituted purpose of government to benefit the people. And if rebellion against Charles I for eviscerating British liberty was justifiable, the same arguments applied to the American loss of liberty under George III.

As we commemorate Mayhew’s birth, reconsider his argument for our liberty, which is safe only when we recognize its fundamental importance, an argument so important John Adams called it “the spark that ignited the American Revolution.”

Such as really performed the duty of magistrates would be enemies only to the evil actions of men … But how is this an argument that we must honor and submit to … such as are not a common blessing, but a common curse, to society … If magistrates are unrighteous … the main end of civil government will be frustrated. And what reason is there for submitting to that government, which does by no means answer the design of government? 

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HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Mystery of Theodor Herzl A young secular Viennese writer had an experience 125 years ago that would lead him to change Jewish history forever. He could never explain it. Can anyone else? Rick Richman

By on January 5th, 2021

https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2021/01/the-mystery-of-theodor-herzl/?utm_source=

Not since Moses led the 40-year Exodus from Egypt did anyone transform Jewish history as fundamentally as Theodor Herzl did in the seven years from the publication in 1896 of his pamphlet The Jewish State to his historic pledge in 1903 on the subject of Jerusalem at the Sixth Zionist Congress. Then he died suddenly in 1904, at the age of forty-four.

In 2017, on the centennial of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Britain’s historic promise to facilitate a Jewish national home in Palestine, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Declaration resulted “largely thanks to Herzl’s brilliant appearances in England.”

Herzl created something out of nothing. He turned Zionism into a mass movement. He created the organizational and economic tools for the World Zionist Organization. Perhaps above all, he gained access to kings and counts . . . and this was no small thing [because a Jewish statesman] did not exist at the time, . . . certainly not one who was a journalist and playwright, and who was only thirty-six years old. It was unthinkable.

How did a man opposed by Orthodox rabbis (who believed a Jewish state should await the messiah), Reform rabbis (who wanted a Jewish state relegated permanently to the past), assimilated Jews (who feared accusations of dual loyalty), Jewish socialists (who considered any type of nationalism reactionary), and Jewish public figures (who thought the whole idea absurd) create a worldwide movement? How did a young writer with no political connections, no ties to Jewish organizations, and no financial backing beyond his own resources negotiate with leading figures in the Western world’s ruling empires, engaging in what Netanyahu called “inconceivable diplomatic actions” that would lead to the Balfour Declaration and eventually the creation of the state of Israel?

Those are important questions. Even more important a question is that of why Herzl did all this, given his minimal ties to Judaism and the Jewish people during his early adulthood. While he had a bar mitzvah and attended a predominantly Jewish high school, he had sought assimilation ever since his days as a university student in Vienna. Nor was he religiously observant as an adult: when his son was born in 1891, he did not have him circumcised. On December 24, 1895, six weeks before the publication of The Jewish State, Herzl was at home lighting a Christmas tree for his three children.

For many years, biographers believed Herzl became a Zionist after covering the Dreyfus trial in 1894 in Paris, as a foreign correspondent for a Viennese newspaper. More recently, however, scholars have shown that Herzl’s embrace of Zionism had virtually nothing to do with that case.

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‘Churchill’s favourite spy’, a Polish-Jewish woman, honoured with Blue Plaque Christine Granville – born Krystyna Skarbek – recognised for her exploits during the war, which included saving secret agents from execution

By on December 29th, 2020

https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/churchills-favourite-spy-a-polish-jewish-woman

A Jewish woman from Poland who became a top British spy during the Second World War has been honoured with a Blue Plaque in Kensington.

Christine Granville, born Krystyna Skarbek to a Jewish mother and Christian father, was “Churchill’s favourite spy” for her incredible wartime exploits operating behind enemy lines. She survived the war only to be killed in 1952 by an obsessed stalker.

A law unto herself, Granville was first female special agent of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), conducting espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance missions in Nazi-occupied Europe. She was motivated to sign up in 1939 after the Nazis invaded her homeland, and was ultimately its longest serving agent.

Her recruiter called her “a flaming Polish patriot, expert skier and great adventuress”, a description she lived up to across the continent, albeit as many aliases.

Among her exploits she crossed the snow-bound Polish border on skis in temperatures of -30°C, smuggled microfilm across Europe to show Hitler’s USSR invasion plans and rescued French agents from the Gestapo.

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EDUCATION, HISTORY Comments turned off

1619 and All That Salvatore Babones

By on December 26th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/1619-and-all-that/

The New York Times is right: the United States was born in slavery in 1619. At least, its America was. Of course, the genteel America of mannered New York society that has formed the core readership of the New York Times since its inception never owned slaves themselves. They merely lived off the proceeds of slavery while disparaging the Deplorables who did the dirty work of cruelty and oppression on the cotton plantations of the deep South. The New Yorkers were the bankers, the brokers, the jobbers, the lawyers, the accountants, the insurers—in short, the money-men of the slave economy. They opposed slavery while appropriating its profits.

The 1619 Project, placing “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of [America’s] national narrative”, is the signature initiative of today’s New York Times. Launched with the August 18, 2019, issue of the New York Times Magazine, the 1619 Project commemorates 400 years of slavery in America, dating from the transport of the first African slaves to the English colony at Jamestown, Virginia. The conceit of the project is that “out of slavery—and the anti-black racism it required—grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional”. At least they left it at “nearly”.

Faithful to its subscribers (and its advertisers), the 100-page special issue of the magazine manages to mention various forms of the word “bank” fifty-six times without naming any banks that happen to be based in New York. Well, that’s not quite true. It does mention an African-American “former financial adviser at Morgan Stanley [who] chose to leave a successful career in finance to take his rightful place as a fifth-generation farmer”. How inspiring! Never mind the Pulitzer Prizes; Hollywood is on the line.

Of course, the 1619 Project did win a Pulitzer Prize for its director, Nikole Hannah-Jones. And truth be told, the individual essays that make up the special issue are pretty good. The National Association of Scholars has harped on a half-dozen or so mostly minor historical inaccuracies, but the sins of the 1619 Project are much more sins of omission than commission. There really is a straight line from the birth of the Southern slavocracy at Jamestown to the United States Constitution, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and Black Lives Matter. An America without African-Americans wouldn’t be the United States we know today. In fact, it might look a lot more like … Australia.

But the aristocratic Jamestown colony of the Virginia Company, founded in 1607 and focused on cash crops, was only one of three early settlements of what would become the United States. The second was New Amsterdam, founded as a trading colony in 1614, with the first permanent settlement on Manhattan island established in 1624. While the Virginia planters populated their baronial manors with African slaves, the Dutch patroons of the Hudson valley left their massive estates largely untilled, since they were unable to attract free farmers from the Old World to become feudal tenants in the New.

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BOOKS, HISTORY Comments turned off

Tintin and the Jews By Michael Connor

By on December 19th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/tintin-and-the-jews/

The journalist, one of the real figures on whom the cartoon Tintin was based, spent three days in the Lwow ghetto. What he saw overturns much that I thought I knew about the Holocaust. The Jews he observed in the pretty Polish city, now in Ukraine, were crammed into hell: “The life they live here is infernal. They all want to flee.”

The people:

The sons of Israel, walking vultures, wander day and night in the alleyways, as though searching for scraps. Their hands wrapped in pieces of cloth, black against the snow, heads hunched into their shoulders by the mallet of misery, thoughtful, idle, standing still for no reason, in the middle of squares like prophets without a voice and without listeners, they afforest this ghetto rather than animate it, with their tormented, cypress-like silhouettes.

The centre of the ghetto:

A market? A field of manure, yes! The rabbits, whose skins are on offer, appear to have been slaughtered with a machine gun. The furs are nothing more than a mass of hair.

Streets of misery:

On the first day, I had to rush out from one of these doghouses in order to overcome the nausea caused by the smell. For the same reason, I had to rush out on the second day and twice on the third day. The two Jews who accompanied me cried and, in the evening, they sat at my table but were unable to eat.

Here were families, their children “crying of cold and hunger and rotting on the foulest of dung heaps”. In one dark basement two small infants stand beside something:

The pallet seems to stir. We lower our candles. A woman is lying there. But in what is she lying? In wet shavings? In stable straw? I touch it; it is cold and sticky. What is covering the woman would have once been a quilt, but is now nothing more than a mush of feathers and cloth oozing damp like a wall. We notice two more heads in the mush, tiny tots, four months, fifteen months old. The oldest smiles at the flame, which we wave above them. The woman did not utter a word.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, HISTORY Comments turned off

Darkest Hour By: Judd Garrett

By on December 16th, 2020

‘For those who reject the “America First” approach to international relations that Trump has promoted, answer this, does China put China first? Yes. Does Russia put Russia first? Yes. Does Germany put Germany first? Yes. Does (fill in the blank) country put their country’s interests first? Yes. Why is it only evil when America puts American interests first? And since America, the greatest force of good in the world, a strong America, America as the world’s superpower, is unequivocally what’s in the best interest of the world.”

I was re-watching the movie, Darkest Hour, the other day, about the weeks leading up to Great Britain’s entrance into World War II, and I was struck by the similarities between the political dynamics of their country during that time to the United States, today. England was facing an existential threat from an evil totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany, and England’s Prime Minister was a loud, outspoken, rude, politically incorrect man named Winston Churchill. Churchill believed the best course of action was to stand up to the evil Nazi regime, and if they were to negotiate, they could then do so from a position of strength. He understood that the most dangerous course of action for the country would be not to fight.

Churchill was not well received by the elites or the political class of England. He was brash and outspoken, saying unpopular things. The King told Churchill once, “you scare people. One never knows what’s going to come out of your mouth next. Something that will flatter. Something that will wound.”

One does not have to be perfect to be a great leader, in fact, many times, their flaws are what makes them great. Churchill’s wife told him, “you are strong because you are imperfect. You are wise because you have doubts.”

A contingent of career politicians worked behind the scenes, colluding together to oust Churchill because they believed their positions and their special interests were best served not to fight. They were willing to achieve a peace treaty with the Nazis at-all-cost even if it meant negotiating from a position of weakness. It was highly unlikely that Germany would have abided by the terms of the agreement forged under those circumstances. The treaty would only have been used by Germany to exploit England’s weaker position.

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50th anniversary of Leningrad trial sparks memories, educational initiatives: Judy Lash Balint

By on December 16th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/50th-anniversary-of-leningrad-trial-sparks-memories-and-educational-initiatives/

The foiled takeover of a plane in the USSR prompted worldwide involvement in the Soviet Jewry movement, even though those in “Operation Wedding” paid a price for their actions.

(December 15, 2020 / JNS) On Dec. 15, 1970, a small item appeared at the top of page three of The New York Times under the jarring headline, ‘Soviets Reported Trying 11, Mostly Jews, in Hijacking.’ Few could have predicted that the trial of those young Jewish activists held in a grim Leningrad courtroom would transform the lives of millions of people on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

The accused were part of a group that tried to carry out a plan in June 1970 to take over a small plane that would then fly under the radar across the Soviet border to freedom.

It was a radical scheme whose goal was to focus attention on the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union and their desire to emigrate. Those who took part were seasoned activists who understood that there was a far greater likelihood of being killed or arrested than of reaching Sweden, but they went ahead anyway. The result? Arrests, death sentences, long years in the Gulag—and the jumpstart to a movement that ultimately brought freedom to millions of Soviet Jews, and strengthened the identity and commitment to Jewish peoplehood of untold others in the West.

Fifty years later, the names of those courageous young Soviet Jews and their daring deed, called “Operation Wedding” (the Jewish activists claimed to be traveling together to a wedding), remain largely forgotten. Many of those involved wonder why the Jewish world has paid little attention to such a positive, inspiring and dramatic movement. Now, two new educational initiatives, one in Hebrew and the other in English, hold the promise of reviving interest.

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HISTORY, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Windermere Children: Safe at Last: Joe Dolce

By on December 12th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/the-windermere-children-safe-at-last-joe-dolce/

The Montefiore Home in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda is a Jewish residential aged-care facility that opened in 1897, and was named after Sir Moses Montefiore, 1st Baronet (1784–1885), a philanthropist, British banker and Sheriff of London.

Montefiore was from an Italian-Jewish family and had no children of his own, but his long and active life got him a mention in the letters of George Eliot, the diaries of Charles Dickens and James Joyce’s Ulysses. His great-grandnephew Leonard G. Montefiore (1886–1961) was the founding member of the Central British Fund for Jewish Relief, and the driving force behind the Windermere Children Project, a scheme in 1945 to allow young Jewish concentration camp survivors into Britain.

Montefiore had previously helped to bring 10,000 Jewish children to the UK before the Second World War, in a scheme known as the Kindertransport. But Britain was now in an economic crisis and practically bankrupt from six years of war, and assisting foreign refugees was not a priority.

Through persistent letter-writing and lobbying, he secured an agreement with the Home Office to allow 300 children to be air-lifted on two RAF Stirling bombers from the liberated concentration
camp and ghetto of Theresienstadt in northern Czechoslovakia (right). They would be housed in a former seaplane factory, closed at the end of the war, known as Calgarth Estate, on the banks of Lake Windermere in England’s Lake District. The workers’ barracks-style accommodation of the factory would allow each child to have their own room. A team of counsellors, led by German-Jewish psychoanalyst Oscar Friedmann, was tasked with the social experiment of rehabilitating the traumatised children in four months. The Home Office stipulated that Montefiore had to arrange the finance to support the project. He appealed to Britain’s Jewish community and donations started arriving from rich and poor.

This inspiring true story is dramatised in a movie, The Windermere Children (2020), directed by Michael Samuels, co-written by Samuels and Simon Block, and produced for BBC and ZDF.

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PRESIDENT FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT DECEMBER 8, 1941..

By on December 8th, 2020

“I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.”

Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

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The Founders’ priceless legacy by Myron Magnet *****

By on November 1st, 2020

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/11/the-founders-priceless-legacy

“Today’s slogan seems to be: speak power to truth.”

However unfashionable to say so at the moment, the American Founding is one of the noblest achievements of the Western Enlightenment. It created something breathtakingly new in history: a self-governing republic that protects the right of individuals—not serfs, not subjects, but equal citizens before the law—to pursue their own happiness in their own way. Who could have imagined that such a triumph would come under the violent attack that now seeks to deny and besmirch it? Whether it flies the banner of The 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter, or Critical Race Theory, the new anti-Americanism condemns the Founding Fathers’ project as conceived in slavery, not liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that we can never be equal citizens with equal rights.

It is a militant anti-Americanism, too. Like the iconoclasm of the most violent English Puritans, who smashed the faces off the carved saints and angels in one sublime medieval church after another, or of the French sans-culottes, who dug up and desecrated nine centuries of royal bodies from their tombs in the Abbey of Saint-Denis, defacing for good measure the statues of the Old Testament kings on the façade of this first great Gothic building, today’s anti-Americanism seeks to pulverize and obliterate our national past as something too offensive and obscene to have existed.

The current upheaval is the latest paroxysm of a cultural revolution that has gained momentum for half a century or more, and its trajectory from the universities to popular culture is too well known to need repeating. What I want to discuss here is the precious value of our inheritance from the Founding Fathers that today’s vandals want to destroy. If they succeed—since history, even our own, doesn’t always go forward and upward, despite the claims of the so-called “progressives”—we will find ourselves in a new Dark Age of constraint and superstition.

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