Displaying posts categorized under

HISTORY

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the American Jewish Press :Alex Grobman

https://thejewishvoiceandopinion.com/the-warsaw-ghetto-uprising-in-the-american-jewish-press/

On April 19, 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an act of Jewish resistance in German-occupied Poland undertaken to oppose the Nazis’ final effort to transport the remaining 55,000-60,000 Jews in the ghetto to extermination camps, began.

The effort to build bunkers and smuggle weapons and explosives into the ghetto had begun after the summer of 1942, when the German Nazis deported more than a quarter of a million Jews to be murdered in Treblinka.

On April 19, 1943, the ghetto refused to surrender to the Nazi police commander SS- Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop.

First Report

The first news of the ghetto uprising was published three days later, on April 22, on the front pages of the New York Times and the Yiddish daily Forward.

The Times transmitted a dispatch from the Associated Press in Stockholm, Sweden, which reported that, one night earlier, April 21, the secret Polish radio had appealed from Poland for help after which “suddenly, the station went dead.”

The AP report continued, “The broadcast, as heard here, said: ‘The last 35,000 Jews at Warsaw had been condemned to execution. Warsaw is again echoing to musketry volleys. The people are murdered. Women and children defend themselves with their naked arms! Save us….’”

Appeals

On April 22, the Forward reported that the Nazis were slaughtering the last Jews in Warsaw, explaining that, on January 21, an appeal was sent by these Jews that was not received by the Jewish Labor Committee in New York until April 21.

According to the Forward, six requests were made, only a few of which could be revealed to the public. One was that 10,000 of the remaining children in the ghetto be exchanged for German prisoners of war. The Jews of the ghetto also demanded material help, including food.

The appeal ended with the warning: “Brothers, the remaining Jews in Poland believe that in these most frightening days of our history, you didn’t help us. Answer now at least in these last days of our lives; this is our last appeal to you.”

If You Want To Be Multicultural, Learn Real History, Not Identity Politicized Garbage By Elizabeth Bauer

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/02/want-multicultural-learn-real-history-

All this I might well expect from a pundit or a columnist in a college newspaper. But it’s a particular disappointment for this to have been authored by a professor of history.

This is not a joke: John Broich, a history professor at Case Western Reserve University, published an opinion article in The Washington Post on Tuesday titled, “Allied leaders were anti-Nazi, but not anti-racist. We’re now paying the price for their failure.”

Broich writes: “While Allied countries opposed the Nazis and Allied troops defeated them, the leaders of the United States and Britain rarely attacked the core tenet of Nazism: the belief in a master race.” He continues:

The Allied leadership did not fight the war over fascist race-nationalism. That was the historical path not taken. As it’s once again on the ascent across the globe, this historian imagines where we might be today had the Allies fought on the basis of eliminating the racial supremacy of the Germans (and, in their variation, the Japanese). What if that principle had been, through the greatest global struggle of humankind, woven into our social DNA? And how can we make that principle central to our societies today?

All this I might well expect from a pundit or a columnist in a college newspaper. But it’s a particular disappointment for this to have been authored by a professor of history.

The Wars of Our Fathers Michael Dunn

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/anzac-2/2019/04/the-wars-of-our-fathers/

Family history sometimes surprises us into reflecting on larger historical and moral questions. On Anazac Day, like so many, I think about what my parents and grandparents did during the great wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45.

One of my grandfathers came out from Ireland around 1910 as a young doctor. He married here and his wife had a son in 1913. In 1915, he joined the army as a doctor and ended up serving in France until 1917 when he was sent home, honourably discharged, suffering from severe shell shock. Although he managed to set up a medical practice again, his health declined and he died six years later, leaving my grandmother to care for her newly-born second son and, of course, her older son, then ten years old. On the other side of the family, my other grandfather, a young mining engineer, also joined the Australian army. He too served in France, until an explosion so damaged his left arm that he had to sent to England to have it amputated. There he met my grandmother who had enlisted as a nurse, and they married on their return to Australia. In the 1939-45 war my father and his brother both served. My mother worked in the Army Department in Melbourne and her brother joined the RAAF.

The striking fact from these details is that everyone on both sides of the family joined the war effort if they could, voluntarily and out of a sense of personal duty. Their service was not exceptional in Australia, but from knowing more of the family history, I have come to better appreciate the importance of ANZAC Day.

Anzac Day commemorates and remembers service and sacrifice, not shallow triumphalism, perhaps because it first remembered duty done for our country, even in a campaign that failed. The war of 1914-18 caused enormous military casualties, killing mostly young men who would be so badly missed in the years of peace that followed. Many people still ask if that war was worth the price and if it was morally right? The same questions do not trouble us so much about the 1939-45 war, even though the casualties were higher and mainly civilian. This difference probably arises from the horror at what the Nazis did and how the Japanese army behaved in the countries it occupied. First World War atrocities did occur, but not on such a terrible scale.

However, at the start of both wars, nobody knew what atrocities were yet to come. Every citizen had to decide if he would fight for the cause. The fundamental moral question was plain to see. In each war, Germany had launched a war of aggression against its neighbours by invading the Low Countries, France, and then Russia (or the USSR). In launching such a war, Germany authorised and commanded its soldiers to go out and kill anybody who resisted and to seize or destroy any property as necessary.

In everyday life, such acts would be condemned as murder, wanton destruction and robbery. In exceptional times, the only allowable excuse for such violent acts is in reasonable self-defence, and only if carried out with care and restraint. Where there is that excuse, the use of force is then a positive moral obligation. It is part of an unspoken bond that obliges every citizen to do whatever they can, if the cause is just, to sacrifice comfort, property and life for our neighbours. Helping other nations to defend themselves is also a moral act. Of course, acting in self-defence requires a high standard of caution and care which is very hard to maintain once the dogs of war have been unleashed. No nation acted perfectly in carrying on these wars. As Australians, at least we can be grateful that in the battles at Anzac Cove and in France, as in the 1939-45 war, our country was fighting the aggressors. How much sadder and more solemn a day it would be if we had happened to be on the other side, now forced to reflect not only on our own losses but on the losses we inflicted on others.

Michael Dunn lives in Paris and wrote most recently for Quadrant Online of the Notre Dame fire

Why Mark Levin Must Give Voice To Informed Jewish Analysts Of Muslim Antisemitism Andrew Bostom

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2019/04/why-mark-levin-must-give-voice-to-informed-jewish-analysts-of-muslim-antisemitism/

The iconic Jewish conservative media figure Mark Levin recently devoted air time (here; starting at 1 hr 43 mins 4 secs) to a discussion of the Antisemitism expressed by Muslima Rep. Ilhan Omar. While I commend Mr. Levin for simply acknowledging this ugly phenomenon, his exploration of the matter did more to obfuscate, than educate.

The approach to the question of Omar’s Antisemitism adopted by Levin was rather warped. Absent any Jews who have studied the Islamic ideological drivers and/or manifestations ofMuslim Antisemitism, not to mention being its target, Levin’s audience was only allowed to understand the Islamic Jew-hatred Ilhan Omar embodies through the bowdlerizing prism of a self-designated “Muslim reformer,” who is actually an apologist/revisionist (here; here). As a result, no basic orienting information was imparted to Levin’s sizable radio audience.

Neither the overwhelming scope, and intensity of Muslim Jew-hatred—now a global pandemic, documented by hard polling data—nor its intimate nexus to canonical Islam as promulgated by Islamdom’s most important religious teaching centers, were illuminated. Sadly, Levin clung to this presentation format—well below accepted fair play standards for honest, informed discourse—after Zionist Organization of America President Mort Klein’s courageous, landmark testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, April 9, 2019.

The Cathedral: Mirror of the West, Then and Now By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/notre-dame-cathedral-fire-religion-decline-western-civilization/

We are not much interested today in building such expressions of transcendence.

The recent fires at the medieval Catholic cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris almost immediately were seen as a referendum on the West, even by those who are not Christians.

How at the supposed apex of Western technology, science, and affluence could a sudden inferno devour the spire, roof, and some of the interior icons of the nearly 800-year-old cathedral, itself perched on the bank of a river, and the survivor of centuries of desecrations, remodels, expansions, and repairs, when the arts of preservation, fire prevention and response, and engineering were supposedly backward by our standards?

Logically or not, many saw the fire as a curtain call for the West, or at least an eclipse of the ancient marriage of European Christian belief and scientific brilliance that together produced the most impressive and beautiful expressions of Western transcendence.

And now the second-most-revered church in the West smolders — something that neither French revolutionaries nor World War II bombers could accomplish.

In our smug era of high tech and conspicuous consumption, Western Europeans and Americans do not build Christian cathedrals anymore. Our challenge is simply to keep standing — at least sort of — what we inherited.

Progressive Religion and the Ritual Scapegoating of Sir Roger Scruton The high cost of blaspheming against leftist doctrine. Jules Gomes

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273491/progressive-religion-and-ritual-scapegoating-sir-jules-gomes

“We are not religious,” screech the vulturine volt of jeering, sneering, secular, postmodern, cultural Marxists. The high priests of secularism are pious and pompous, even Pecksniffian, in their iconoclastic vandalism of religion and ritual. Yet, one week before Good Friday, they orgiastically partake in one of the oldest religious rituals—a rite going back three thousand years.

In this ancient rite, the people choose a goat. The high priest lays his hands on the goat’s head and confesses over it the sins of the people. He symbolically transfers the sins of the nation on to the goat and banishes it to the wilderness (where nothing human lives). William Tyndale, in his 1530 English translation of the Bible, coined the word “scapegoat” (literally the goat that escapes) for the animal.

In popular parlance, a scapegoat is one who is blamed or punished for the sins of others. Sir James Frazer, social anthropologist, in The Golden Bough (3rd edition)—his 12-volume study on comparative religions, titled Volume 9 The Scapegoat. He packed it with “countless instances of irrational mass violence against individuals, from all periods of history, and every imaginable country.”

There is another goat in this Yom Kippur ritual. This goat is slaughtered. Its blood is used to cleanse the “mercy seat” in the inner Tabernacle. This goat pays for the sins of the people with its life. Thus, the people ritually deal with their sins in two ways.

The new religion of progressivism both plagiarises and perverts the scapegoat ritual. It does this in three stages: first, it creates its own theology of sin.

How The Allied Powers Won The Fight For The Sky In World War II By Madeline Osburn

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/17/allied-powers-won-fight-sky-world-war-ii/

To achieve air supremacy in war means to be able to put your assets in the air with the ability to destroy your enemy’s cities, troops, and ability to fight back. In the online course, “The Second World Wars,” Professor Victor David Hanson discusses the technological advances in air power made by German, American, and Japanese forces throughout the course of World World II, and how one side slowly achieved air supremacy.

Before 1941, there was a clear pattern to the victories achieved by German forces. Germany invaded Poland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Holland, Norway, Belgium, France, and Yugoslavia. Each one of these victories was against an unprepared neighbor and a surprise attack. Germany shocked everyone with their sudden domination of European democracies, especially with their success with a new military tactic: blitzkrieg. The blitzkrieg method involved violently and quickly mobilizing forces in the air and on the ground, defeating opponents with series of short attacks.
What we know now is that Germany’s opponents, presumably stunned and alarmed by the attacks, never stopped to evaluate the limitations of Germany’s power, specifically in the air. Could they defeat an enemy in a battle that was not a surprise attack? Could their planes reach the United States? Britain? The answer was no.

Iran, BDS, and Tales (Tails?) of Binx and Jahandir… Redux by Gerald A. Honigman

With increasing popularity of assorted overt and covert anti-Semitic causes and individuals, such as those camouflaged by the so-called Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and characterized by folks like the plethora of duplicitous academics and emerging superstars of the Democrat Party like The Three Amigas (https://ekurd.net/the-three-amigas-2019-02-19), perhaps it’s time to consult a real expert on these matters…my cat, of blessed memory.

Please allow me to backtrack a bit, and I guess it was my own fault.

Way back in late 2004, my two elder daughters brought home a momma cat and two small kittens they had found late at night wandering on the road. Another kitten was allegedly spotted not far away which lost out in its chance encounter with a car…Who could say no to them?

The problem was that we already had three established cats. While we earlier had similar situations involving the two original females, it was Binx, the young male, who (even after being neutered) really proved to be a pistol regarding the newcomers. And I suspect he began by first blaming me.

I kept a box in my bedroom closet with some important material and memorabilia in it. Not a problem–until after our new feline additions entered the picture. Soon after their arrival, Binx was caught in the act of leaving unpleasant souvenirs, if you get my drift, in the box.

Not having much of a choice, I next had to gingerly weed through decades of materials I had saved. Funny what you’ll find when you do this sort of thing.

FEAR AND PANIC: ALEX GROBMAN

https://www.jewishlinknj.com/features/30756-fear-and-panic

Part XVII
Throughout April, May and June 1940, the Nazis continued their drive to dominate Europe by conquering Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. As Saul Friedlander noted, the stunning Nazi victories caused panic in the U.S. and fear that an invasion of the Western hemisphere might be imminent.

The Germans understood that America was impotent as a result of the defeat of the Allies, and that no matter how vociferous their verbal objections might be, they were not in a position to initiate practical action. The U.S. was virtually in a state of paralysis in light of a looming election campaign, the speed in which 120 German divisions attacked the entire length of the Western front and the complete lack of preparedness on the part of the American armed forces.

The Jews had “worked themselves into a state of panic, verging on catastrophic despair,” observed Salo Baron, professor of Jewish history at Columbia University in the July-August 1940 edition of the Contemporary Jewish Record. An ever-increasing number of Jews began to believe that there was little use in attempting to ameliorate even a “small fraction” of the distress, for the refugee crisis seemed to be growing beyond their ability to cope with it.

The point had been reached where some Jews were “beginning sincerely to favor, or else find a ready excuse for, complete inertness and a fatalistic suspension of all activities, including even the financial contributions for relief of European Jewry and the reconstruction of Palestine.”

Ahmed al-Tayeb, Sunni Islam’s Jew-Hating Papal Equivalent, In His Own Words :Andrew Bostom

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2019/04/ahmed-al-tayeb-sunni-islams-jew-hating-papal-equivalent-in-his-own-words/

Since its founding in 973 C.E., Al Azhar University (and its mosque) have represented a pinnacle of Islamic religious education, which evolved into the de facto Vatican of Sunni Islam.

Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University, Ahmed al-Tayeb, was the number 1 ranked Muslim figure for 2017 in “The Muslim 500”. His “The Muslim 500” profile states,

Influence: Highest scholarly authority for the majority of Sunni Muslims, runs the foremost and largest Sunni Islamic university.

School of Thought: Traditional Sunni

During an interview with Al-Tayeb, which aired on Channel 1, Egyptian TV, October 25, 2013, he gave a brief explanation of the ongoing relevance of the Koranic verse 5:82 which has been invoked—“successfully”—to inspire violent Muslim hatred of Jews since the advent of Islam:

A verse in the Koran explains the Muslims’ relations with the Jews…This is an historical perspective, which has not changed to this day. See how we suffer today from global Zionism and Judaism…Since the inception of Islam 1,400 years ago, we have been suffering from Jewish and Zionist interference in Muslim affairs. This is a cause of great distress for the Muslims. The Koran said it and history has proven it: “You shall find the strongest among men in enmity to the believers to be the Jews…”