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HISTORY

The Beginning of a Nation By Thomas Wendel ****

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/american-history-beginning-of-a-nation/

The aftermath of the revolutionary story, even in brief, is rich and exciting.

Editor’s Note: The following article appeared in the July 23, 1976, issue of National Review.

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O! Ye unborn Inhabitants of America! Should this Page escape its destin’d Conflagration at the Year’s End, and these Alphabetical Letters remain legible — when your Eyes behold the Sun after he has rolled the Seasons round for two or three Centuries more, you will know that in Anno Domini 1758, we dream’d of your times. 

So the Boston philomath Nathaniel Ames wrote in his almanac almost two decades before Congress declared the 13 colonies independence from Britain. It had been a century and a half since Captain Newport established at Jamestown the first permanent English foothold; almost as long since Ames’s New England forebears established their “city upon a hill” along Massachusetts Bay. Now, in the mid-eighteenth century, England’s American colonists began to share a sense of special destiny that would later be woven into the fabric of a new American nationalism.

Without this awakening consciousness of the uniqueness of the American experience, the colonists could never have transcended their traditional loyalty to the “English nation.” Their commitment crossed colonial boundaries to embrace the American continent. It is this cultural phenomenon — the emergence after 1750 of a new American self-consciousness — that underlay the American Revolution begun in 1763 and consummated in 1789.

We are commemorating on July 4 of this year the Bicentennial of one event in that tremendous transformation. Independence, however, did not then and there create the American nation. Independence alone, without the existence of a continental political structure, could not have fulfilled the vision Ames articulated 18 years before. It was one thing for a South Carolinian, for example, to feel a sense of common destiny with a citizen of New York. It was quite another for the Carolinian and the New Yorker to come together under a single national government. Separation from Great Britain was one step in the morphology of the Revolution. But the “real revolution,” to use John Adams’ term, consisted in the creation of the United States of America out of 13 highly individualistic English colonies.

Remembering Islam’s July 4th Victory By Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/remembering_islams_july_4th_victory.html

Soon after liberating the ancient Christian city of Antioch from Muslim oppression, the First Crusaders managed in 1099 to realize their primary goal: take Jerusalem from Islam.

Despite all the propaganda that surrounds the conquest of Jerusalem, there were very few Muslim calls to jihad (only one is known, and it quickly fell on deaf ears).  After all, in the preceding decades, and thanks to Sunni and Shia infighting, local Muslim populations were hardly unused to such invasions and bloodbaths.

In Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir’s words, “[w]hile the Franks — Allah damn them! — were conquering and settling in a part of the territories of Islam, the rulers and armies of Islam were fighting among themselves, causing discord and disunity among their people and weakening their power to combat the enemy.”

In this context, the pure doctrine of jihad — warfare against infidels — was lost to the average Muslim, who watched and suffered as Muslim empires and sects collided.

It was only during the reign of Imad al-Din Zengi (d. 1146) — a particularly ruthless Turkish warlord and atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo — and even more so under his son and successor, Nur al-Din (r. 1146-1174), that the old duty of jihad was resuscitated.  They founded numerous madrasas, mosques, and Sufi orders all devoted to propagandizing the virtues of jihad and martyrdom.  Contemporary literature makes clear that Islamic zeal (or, in modern parlance, “radicalization”) reached a fever pitch during their reigns.

A Kosher Fourth of July Two hundred forty-three years ago, a new nation was inspired by the Old Testament. William McGurn

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-kosher-fourth-of-july-11562020803

Since that fateful July 4 when the Second Continental Congress invoked the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to declare independence from King George III, an argument has raged over the Christian roots of the American Founding. Now a group of scholars suggest that if we are looking only to the Gospels to understand the new American nation, we may be arguing over the wrong testament.

“The American Republic,” they write, “was born to the music of the Hebrew Bible.”

The book is called “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States: A Sourcebook.” The title comes from Leviticus and is inscribed on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. The book comes courtesy of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, where it was pulled together by Meir Soloveichik, Matthew Holbreich, Jonathan Silver and Stuart Halpern.

These men are not arguing that America was founded as a Jewish nation. Nor is their subject Jews in America, or the role of Jews in the American Founding. Their proposition is more supple and profound: that at key moments in the national story, Americans have looked to the ancient Israelites to understand themselves, their blessings and their challenges.

From Islam’s Shahada To Communism’s Credo: Shared Totalitarian “Religious” Visions Andrew Bostom

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2019/06/from-islams-shahada-to-communisms-credo-shared-totalitarian-religious-visions/

A century ago, in April, 1918, the Burlington Vermont Daily News, captured, unintentionally, the quintessential, shared ideological roots of Neo-Marxist Bernie Sanders’ Red [Communism]- Green [Islam] Alliance, foreshadowing the ugly consequences of this nexus:

 “[M]any of the Protestant churches in Germany are no more than empty shells. This lack of horizon, spiritually speaking, has led to the growth of socialism to a marked degree in Germany. Karl Marx was its founder and its slogan is ‘There is no God, and Karl Marx is his prophet.’”

Even earlier, five years before the October, 1917 Bolshevik Revolution would begin to impose Communist totalitarianism on Russia, Henry C. Vedder, observed in his 1912 study of Socialism, that the Marxist Social Labor Federation of Britain had adopted Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” [Capital] as their infallible authority, “an article of faith from which they will permit no dissent, on pain of excommunication.”  Vedder, a Professor of Church History at the Upland, Pennsylvania Crozer Theological Seminary, added that this British Marxist organization rejected the orthodoxy of its own votaries unless they too professed as their credo, “There is no God, and Karl Marx is his prophet.”— mirroring the Islamic declaration of faith (p.730), or “shahada”—“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.”

Late doyen of Islamic studies, Bernard Lewis, had erroneously attributed the origins of this Communist profession of faith to an unnamed mid-20th century “humorist” in his 1954 essay, “Communism and Islam”. Despite that rather egregious error—attributing the established, obligatory creed of humorless Marxists, some four decades after the fact, to a witty quip by some anonymous comic—Lewis did keenly point out how this statement highlighted “real affinity” between Islamic and Communist totalitarianism, a theme his essay developed quite well, and at some length.

A Century of Disorder By:Srdja Trifkovic |

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/a-century-of-disorder/

A hundred years ago, on June 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed in the illustrious Hall of Mirrors, the same spot where the German Empire was proclaimed in January 1871. It was the most ambitious gathering of its kind in history. Leaders and diplomats of 27 nations convened to establish a new order and make the world “safe for democracy,” as President Woodrow Wilson had summarized America’s war aims in his message to Congress two years earlier.

Far from reestablishing a solid new order after over four years of carnage and destruction, the Treaty was deeply flawed from the outset. It produced an unstable system which lacked legitimacyin the eyes of the vanquished states, especially Germany. This hindered their prospects of eventual integration into the new order, or even their willingness to try doing so in good faith. Perhaps it could not have been otherwise:

The war had been of such magnitude – affecting so many lives directly, creating both domestic and international divisions, and engendering insatiable expectations of the peace – that the peacemakers were all but impotent to deal sensibly with its consequences. This was not a settlement in which the peacemakers carelessly let the opportunity for consensus–building slip through their fingers: the basic problem of Versailles was that no such consensus could possibly be found.

“Versailles” contained the seeds of another, even more destructive war a generation later. On the centennial of the convening of the conference I wrote an article for the print edition of Chronicles(“A Century of Disorder,” January 2019) dealing with the Treaty’s shortcomings and their consequences. Today’s anniversary calls for a rewrite and more detailed treatment of some key themes. The subject is relevant in our own time: since the end of the Cold War, the bipartisan “foreign policy community” in Washington has been trying to create and uphold an international system based on America’s self-proclaimed authority to impose the universal regime of “benevolent global hegemony.”

The Fog of Youth: The Cornell Student Takeover, 50 Years On written by Tony Fels

https://quillette.com/2019/06/25/the-fog-of-youth-the-cornell-student-takeover-50-years-on/

On April 20, 1969, an era of student rebellions that had rocked American campuses at Berkeley, Columbia, San Francisco State, and Harvard reached a culmination of sorts with the triumphant exit of armed black students from Cornell’s Willard Straight student union building after a two-day occupation. The students had just won sweeping concessions from the university’s administration, including a pledge to urge faculty governing bodies to nullify reprimands of several members of the Afro-American Society (AAS) for previous campus disruptions on behalf of starting up a black studies program, judicial actions that had prompted the takeover. White student supporters cheered the outcome. And when the faculty, at an emergency meeting attended by 1,200 professors, initially balked at the administration’s request to overturn the reprimands, the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) led a body that grew to six thousand students in a three-day possession of the university’s Barton gymnasium. Amid threats of violence by and against the student activists, the faculty, in a series of tumultuous meetings, voted to reverse themselves, allowing the crisis to end. Student protestors claimed victory for a blow successfully dealt to what they held to be a racist institution.

This positive interpretation of the meaning of the Cornell events has surprisingly remained mostly in place among the left-leaning participants (all within the SDS orbit) with whom I have kept in touch over the past 50 years. Most other former New Leftists whom I have spoken with or who have written about the crisis see it roughly the same way. One might have thought that decades of personal maturation would have produced profound doubts about the wisdom of such extreme actions taken when we were still in, or just past, our teenage years.

The continuity in interpretation by former SDSers is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that the nation at large took a distinctly critical view of the same events right from the start. Most Americans immediately recoiled at the sight of the widely reproduced image, captured in a Pulitzer prize-winning photograph, of the bandolier-wearing student leading the Willard Straight Hall activists, rifles at their side, out of the building. Headlines describing Cornell’s “capitulation” and “disgrace” typified national news coverage. Among 4,000 letters written to Cornell’s top administrators after the crisis, under five percent viewed the administrators’ actions favorably, and the student rebellion no doubt helped reinforce the country’s shift toward conservative dominance that had begun the previous November with the election of Richard Nixon. Yet through this immediate aftermath and on into the future, most of the aging participants have shown little evidence of rethinking.

Nazis Killed Her Father. Then She Fell in Love With One. By Katrin Bennhold

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/business/reimann

Their billionaire descendants, who control Krispy Kreme, Stumptown and other brands, are grappling with the exposure of an unspeakable secret. Emilie Landecker, circa 1961. Her Jewish father, Alfred, was killed by the Nazis. When her children asked about the family’s roots, she would admonish them to stop talking about “that old stuff.”

1. Such appalling events

Emilie Landecker was 19 when she went to work for Benckiser, a German company that made industrial cleaning products and also took pride in cleansing its staff of non-Aryan elements.

It was 1941. Ms. Landecker was half Jewish and terrified of deportation. Her new boss, Albert Reimann Jr., was an early disciple of Adolf Hitler and described himself as an “unconditional follower” of Nazi race theory.

Somehow, inexplicably, they fell in love.

The story of Ms. Landecker, whose Jewish father was murdered by the Nazis, and Mr. Reimann, whose fervent Nazism and abuse of forced laborers did not stop his family from attaining colossal wealth after the war, is a tale of death and devotion and human contradictions. It is also a tale of modern-day corporate atonement.

Decades after World War II, Benckiser evolved into one of the largest consumer goods conglomerates on the planet. Known today as JAB Holding Company and still controlled by the Reimann family, it is worth more than $20 billion and owns Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Peet’s Coffee, Einstein Bros. Bagels, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Pret A Manger, Keurig and other breakfast brands.

The relationship between Mr. Reimann and Ms. Landecker was for many years a secret. He was married, but had no children with his wife. He and Ms. Landecker had three, and he adopted them in the 1960s; today, two of them own a combined stake in JAB of about 45 percent. For decades, they say, they did not know about their father’s Nazism and the abuses that took place at the company they inherited: The female forced laborers who had to stand at attention outside their barracks naked. A prisoner of war who was kicked out of a bomb shelter and died.

Norman Borlaugh: The man who helped feed the world By Tim Harford

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47643456?utm_source=pocket-newtab

In the early 1900s, newlyweds Cathy and Cappy Jones left Connecticut in the US to start a new life as farmers in north-west Mexico’s Yaqui Valley, a little-known dry and dusty place, a few hundred kilometres south of the Arizona border.

When Cappy died in 1931, Cathy decided to stay on. By then she had a new neighbour: the Yaqui Valley Experiment Station, a grand agricultural research centre with impressive stone pillars, and cleverly designed irrigation canals.

For a while, the centre raised cattle, sheep and pigs, and grew oranges, figs and grapefruit.

But by 1945, the fields were overgrown, the fences fallen and the windows shattered. The station was infested with rats.

So when Cathy heard strange rumours about a young American man setting up camp in this dilapidated place – despite the lack of electricity, sanitation, or running water – she drove over to investigate.

There she found the Rockefeller Foundation’s Norman E Borlaug, who was trying to breed wheat which could resist stem rust, a disease that ruined many crops.

EDWARD CLINE: ORIANA FALLACI REMEMBERED

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

An essential history lesson from the great Oriana Fallaci that should be required study in all schools. If enough people actually understood what Islam means in practice, there would be no tolerance for it and it would, finally, be relegated to the dustbin of history along with evils like Nazism. Read it all:

“LESSON OF HISTORY
In 635 AD, that is, three years after the death of Mohammed, the army of the Holy Crescent invaded Christian Syria and Christian Palestine.

In 638 they took Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. 

In 640, seizing Persia, Armenia and Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), they invaded Christian Egypt and conquered the Christian Maghreb, that is, modern Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
In 668 they first attacked Constantinople and besieged it for five years.

In 711 they crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and landed on the highly Catholic Iberian Peninsula, crushing Portugal and Spain, where, despite the resistance of the heroic warriors of Pelayo, Sid Campeador and others, they remained as much as eight centuries.

And the one who believes in “peaceful coexistence that marked the relationship between conquerors and conquered” let him re-read stories about burned abbeys and monasteries, desecrated churches, raped nuns, Christian and Jewish women who were locked in their harems.

Let him remember about those crucified in Cordoba, hanged in Granada, beheaded in Toledo and Barcelona, Seville and Zamora. (The decapitation in Seville was ordered by Mutamid: he used these severed heads of Jews and Christians to decorate his palace. In Zamora, heads were cut at the order of Almanzur, the vizier who is known as the “patron of philosophers and the greatest leader of Islamic Spain”! 

Saying the name of Jesus meant instant execution. Crucifixion, of course, or decapitation, or hanging, or impalement. The same followed those who dared to ring the bell. The same for wearing green, which belonged exclusively to Islam. When a Muslim passed by, every Jew and Christian was obliged to step aside and worship. And woe to that Jew or Christian who dared to respond to an insult from a Muslim. As for that widely advertised detail, that the unfaithful dogs were not obliged to convert to Islam and they were not even pushed towards it, do you know why they were not pushed? 

“Omar Amin” von Leers and the Islamization of Nazism by Andrew Bostom

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24000

Exclusive: How a Nazi disciple of the Mufti of Jerusalem converted to Islam and embraced the millenium-old Muslim ideology of destroying the West by Jihad.

Johannes “Omar Amin” von Leers (d. 1965), was a Nazi disciple of Hajj Amin el-Husseiniwho converted to Islam, found a haven in Egypt, and embraced a 1300 year-old ideology to destroy the Judeo-Christian West—Islamic jihad.

Sixty-four years ago, June 8, 1955, while still in exile in Argentina, Leers wrote a letter to W.E.B. DuBois, extolling Islam and African Muslim soldiers under WWI-era German colonial governance, as follows:  

“[The] German administration was openly in favor of Islam. No African became a color sergeant in the Askari Army [i.e., African soldiers fighting under German colonial leadership] who was not a steadfast Moslem. And also in Cameroon the Germans never forgot to give power and dignities to the Moslem Amirs of the North. The Germans were convinced Islam makes good soldiers and reliable men—and that a Moslem does not drink alcohol and therefore can be used for positions of confidence. An uncle of mine who was for a long time [an] officer in the Askari Army told me, when I was a boy, ‘You must know that Islam is the best religion for soldiers. By disgrace of history, we Germans have not go it [Islam] and now cannot change the situation. ..[I]n Africa, a negro converted religion often becomes the ape of the European, imitating him in his worst aspects—but Islam makes him a noble African with a feeling of his own dignity. As an officer I like better a noble African on my side in the battle, than an ape of mine.”

As I noted in my 2013 analysis of the first fully annotated English translation of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s 1937 fatwa on the Jews—which re-affirms canonical Islam’s Jew-hating motifs used to foment murderous violence against them by Muhammad himself, since the advent of Islam, and till now—this seminal proclamation of incitement by the “Godfather” of the Palestinian Muslim movement, was pure Islamic dogma, devoid of any themes from the writings of Nazi racial theorists epitomized by von Leers’ 1936, “History on a Racial Basis”.