RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her “: Jesus Book of John 8:7

In the rubric above, Jesus is not denying the value of criticism; he is noting that mob-like attacks on an accused should be tempered by the realization we all have faults. He was not condoning the woman but urging the scribes and the Pharisees to maintain perspective. It was a subject covered by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter. What we are witnessing today in Virginia is similar to the attack on Judge Kavanaugh. Each accuser became more vitriolic, while claiming the high moral ground. If youth were more exposed to the Bible and classical literature, understanding and forgiveness would be more forthcoming.

This is written not to excuse or take lightly the mocking of others, based on race, religion, gender or for any reason, but to place the Governor’s silly behavior of thirty-five years ago within context of its time and to highlight the hypocrisy of those who follow one another, in lemming-like fashion, down the path of self-righteous indignation. This is not written with the understanding we have achieved color-blind goals, though we have made strides. It is written in the belief that people change, and that we should not be judged solely on our behavior when young, especially when that past is more than a generation ago.

Governor Northram is accused of having posed for a photograph in 1984, which he admitted doing, dressed either as a black-face or as a member of the KKK. He didn’t recall which. The next day he denied being in the photograph, though he did admit to having dressed once as Michael Jackson. While his denial was disturbing – I have a problem with those who deliberately lie – the fact that he performed college-boy antics when he was a student was neither unusual nor – necessarily – racist. (There is, however, irony in the fact that the weapon of racism he used to defeat Ed Gillespie in 2017 is the one being used against him today.)

https://newswithviews.com/suicidal-jews/

When individuals kill themselves, we look for answers in their DNA, their environments, their personal reactions to feelings of impotent rage, rejection, disappointment, heartbreak.

But how to explain group suicide? Wikipedia lists numerous cases, starting in 206 B.C., and these relatively recent cases:

● In 1943, in the final phase of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, many of the Jewish fighters besieged in the “bunker” at Miła 18 committed mass suicide by ingesting poison rather than surrender to the Nazis.
● In 1945, about 1,000 residents of Demmin, Germany, committed mass suicide after the Red Army had sacked the town.
● In 1978, 918 Americans––including 276 children––died of cyanide poisoning in the Peoples Temple led by Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana.
● In 1997, 39 followers of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California died in a mass suicide, believing they would travel on a spaceship that followed comet Hale–Bopp.

Clearly, some groups took their lives en masse for ideological reasons, while others––particularly vulnerable people in dire need of a “leader”––simply followed orders.

In all the mass suicides in recorded history, dozens, hundreds, and up to one-thousand people took their own lives.

But today, when looking at suicidal Jews, the numbers could be in the millions!

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/06/the-return-of-ancient

In the latter half of the 19th century and early in the 20th century, as Catholic immigrants poured in from Ireland and eastern Europe, an anti-Catholic wave spread over a mostly Protestant United States. The majority slur then was that Catholic newcomers’ first loyalty would be to “Rome,” not the U.S.

Anti-Semitism grew even more deeply rooted, marked by Ivy League quotas on Jewish applicants and exclusionary clauses against Jews in clubs and neighborhoods. It was no accident that the Ku Klux Klan often targeted Catholics and Jews as well as African-Americans.

In the late 19th century, with the influx of Japanese and Chinese immigrants arose the “yellow peril” scare, a racist distrust of supposedly workaholic automatons and unassimilable immigrants whose first loyalty was to their close-knit Asian communities and homelands, not the U.S.

Most of these injustices grew from both original prejudices (as evidenced by slavery) and fears of demographic change. An original population that was mostly British, Protestant and white gradually was augmented by people who were not northern European, often Catholic and increasingly non-white.

The stereotyped hatreds were battled by the melting-pot forces of assimilation, integration and intermarriage. Civil rights legislation and broad education programs gradually convinced the country to judge all Americans on the content of their characters rather than the color of their skins or their religious beliefs. And over the last half-century, the effort to end institutional bias against African-Americans largely succeeded.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272764/moral-idiocy-our-times-bruce-thornton

One of the foundational myths of modernity holds that the progress of scientific knowledge and technology has been accompanied by moral progress. As wealth and knowledge increase, the old impediments to moral improvement such as poverty, religious superstition, and ignorance are being swept away, resulting in a kinder, gentler, and more pacific human nature.

Last week we were presented with evidence that this argument is woefully mistaken. In New York a bill was passed that removed restrictions on late-term abortions, allowing infants viable outside the womb to be killed “at any time” to protect the mother’s life or “health.” Worse yet, this regression into primitive custom was met with celebratory cheers and a standing ovation by the “lawmakers” who had approved it. In Virginia a similar law was proposed but rejected. It had been defended by Del. Kathy Tran and Gov. Ralph Northam (pictured above). They admitted that a baby could be killed even after the mother went into labor, or after delivery. Tran, by the way, on the same day as she introduced the bill to liberalize late-term abortions, also introduced a bill to protect gypsy moths and cankerworms.

In other words, infanticide, once a practice of savage and barbaric cultures like cannibalism, incest, and human sacrifice, has now been legalized by the culture that boasts of its moral progress and superiority. But this legislation is not just a return to ancient brutality, but a species of moral idiocy much worse than the savagery of the past.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13680/democracies-trouble

It is apparent that, over time, Jewish American Democrats will find themselves the voters and donors of a party that will initially seek to marginalize them, then ostracize them, and finally, demonize them.

With the last election cycle putting Islamists, who are openly hostile to Jews, in the House of Representatives, the Democratic Party has jettisoned even the pretense of repudiating their anti-Semites.

This transformation will be brought about by a group of new leaders who will have the means effectively to rebrand their emerging power base, either implicitly or explicitly, as the Neo-Islamic Democratic Party, thereby asserting a dominance that will make today’s political landscape unrecognizable.

It is more than painful, as anti-Semitic libels are whitewashed by the media or risk becoming part of the Congressional Record, to watch the American Jewish community being played by the political party that many have called “home.”

Are democracies in trouble?

As someone outside the world’s most powerful democracy, the United States, it is concerning to see how many countries in the West are being transformed. In Europe, free speech continues to be seriously eroded, churches are desecrated, and religious Europeans murdered.

There are signs that the same transformation is beginning in the United States, as well.

https://spectator.us/donald-trump-state-union-greatness/

Donald Trump is not always as charming as P.G. Wodehouse. Nevertheless, his magnificent State of the Union Address tonight put me in mind of this remark from the preface of Plum’s great novel Summer Lightning: ‘A certain critic,’ Wodehouse wrote, ‘made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained “all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.”’ Waxing utopian, Wodehouse wondered whether, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha, that critic had by now been eaten by bears. Had he survived, though, said critic would not be able to make the same complaint about Summer Lightning. ‘With my superior intelligence,’ Wodehouse gloated, I have outgeneraled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names.’

So, mutatis very much mutandis, did the president do tonight. SOTU 2019 bears a marked similarity to SOTU 2018. There was the same reaching across the aisle, the effort, as I put it last year, to restore the first person plural in American civic discourse, a ‘We’ that Democrats and Republicans and Independents could alike affirm.

Last year, the president spoke of putting aside the partisan passions that divide us in order to go forward as a people united in pursuing the goal of making a better America.

This year, he echoed that, noting that the choice before us was the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution, on the one hand, and cooperation, compromise, and the common good, on the other. ‘Victory,’ he said ‘is not winning for our party. Victory is winning for our country.’ Sounds good to me. Nancy, Chuck, what do you think?

Everything that makes America great is challenged- our educational standards, our national language and culture, our porous borders and homeland security, the ability to debate without rancor and insult, and there is a pernicious hatred of capitalism and wealth without which there would be no support for all our scientific, philanthropic, and cultural institutions.

President Trump is no great orator, but he is a straight shooter and that is why I continue to support him. I liked his speech, and it pleased me that our national leader is confronting the serious issues that plague our nation. I admire his “cool” in spite of the smirks of Pelosi and Schumer and the street theater Democrat damsels in white. His rousing promise that America will never succumb to Socialism gave me hope.

The reply by sore loser Stacy Abrams was pure boilerplate Trump bashing with hyperbole and nothing to recommend. rsk

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/04/why

Last month’s attack on the Covington Catholic High School boys should be one of those electrifying moments of correction, as when Senator Joseph McCarthy was asked, “have you no shame?”

Instead, it is electrifying only in its illumination: the Democrats have no shame.

Liberals watch their politicians, celebrities, and media leaders attack individuals, even children, and our precious civil liberties. Instead of recoiling, they immediately parrot the vicious talking point of the day. The few exceptions of public protest, the exemplary Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, and last week, Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), makes the ominous acquiescence of other Democrats all the more noticeable.

The mobbing of the Covington boys, and the feeble excuse-apologies—and continued attacks—that followed, join what is now a long series of hate-filled words and acts by leftists that cause regular Democrats no shame, no dark night of the soul, no revulsion towards what they are becoming as people and as a party.

Everything America has ever stood for must go. Being colorblind is attacked as racist. Equality before the law is attacked as sexist. The list of Democrat doublespeak becomes a tedious rant, and what’s the point? Democrats are not listening and if forced to listen, plug their ears and scream at the top of the lungs that it is Trump, Trump, Trump who is ruining everything.

Meanwhile, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom to bear arms, freedom to organize politically (for conservatives), the right to life for a baby about to be born—have all been redefined as violence against blacks, women or gays. A religious teenager standing still in a MAGA hat is an attempt to “erase” minorities that justifies violence to wipe the smile off his face.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13684/henry-ford-historical-revisionism

Henry Ford devoted his life to two passions: making cars and demonizing Jews. When Hitler said, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” he wasn’t referring to his car manufacturing. He was referring to Ford’s anti-Semitic ideology that eventuated in the genocide of six million Jews.

Henry Ford does not deserve to be honored. The question the good people of Dearborn should ask themselves is: What would you do if the Performance Center were named after Jefferson Davis? If the answer is that you would remove Davis’s name, then you should remove Ford’s.

There cannot be differences between how anti-Black, anti-gay, anti-women and anti-Jewish practitioners of bigotry are treated. There must be a single standard for historical revisionism.

Imagine if an American city continued to celebrate a prominent businessman who had published newspapers and books advocating overt racism and racial discrimination against Black people. Imagine if the Grand Wizard of the KKK had a picture of this man in his office and credited him with inspiring him to kill African Americans. Imagine statues and photographs commemorating the life of such a bigot. Imagine if a preforming arts center was named after him and African American performers who wanted to appear in the city had to walk into a building bearing the name of this racist. The reaction would be immediate and uncompromising: all glorification of this racist must stop; statues and pictures must be removed; history must treat him as a pariah despite his positive accomplishments as a businessman.

Well, the city Dearborn, Michigan is celebrating such a racist bigot today. But no one is demanding that his images must be removed or his despicable history and ideology publicized. His name is Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company.

Articles abound denouncing the hypocrites and cretins who organize to bash Israel throughout academia. Sometimes, two short paragraphs say it all. Today on Gatestone Institute Bassam Tawil nails it:
The Palestinians: Who Really Cares? by Bassam Tawil
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13655/palestinians-lebanon

“The real “pro-Palestinian” groups are those who are willing to raise their voices against the mistreatment of Palestinians at the hands of their Arab brothers. The real “pro-Palestinian” groups are those who are prepared to defend the rights of women and gays living under Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The real “pro-Palestinian” groups are those that are prepared to advocate for democracy and free speech for Palestinians living under the repressive regimes of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The real “pro-Palestinian” groups are those who are prepared to condemn Lebanon for its racist and discriminatory measures against Palestinians, living and dead.

“Hiding at a university campus and spewing hatred against Israel does not make one “pro-Palestinian.” Rather, it makes one just an Israel-hater. Will the “pro-Palestinian” groups listen to the urgent messages coming from the people in Lebanon they claim to represent?…”