RUTHFULLY YOURS

Denis M. MacEoin (born 1949, Belfast, Northern Ireland) has been editor of Middle East Quarterly since June 2009. A former lecturer in Islamic studies, his academic specialisations are Shi‘ism, Shaykhism, Bábism, and the Bahá’í Faith, on all of which he has written extensively. MacEoin is also a novelist, writing under the pen names Daniel Easterman and Jonathan Aycliffe
Dear Revs. Meader, Winkett and Valentine,

The last time I was in your beautiful church was for a memorial service for my dear friend Patricia Parkin, a leading literary editor and my own editor for a great many years. Thbe service was a thing of great beauty, with some wonderful music, as one might expect from your church. My attention was drawn by the magnificent Grinling Gibbons carvings on the font and reredos. Having recently read David Esterly’s lyrical account of his restoration of Gibbon’s carvings, my appreciation of the quality of your specimens has much increased. You are very welcome to visit my parish church, St. George’s in Jesmond, which is widely thought to be the most beautiful church in the North of England.

The welcomes you extend to LGBT people, the homeless, refugees, and innovative approaches to the liturgy and beyond (as in your Zen group) have always interested. My own background is in Persian, Arabic and Islamic Studies (especially Shi’ite Islam), on all of which I have written extensively. The bulk of my academic work has centered on the Baha’i religion and its precursors. I am very conscious of the plight of the Baha’is still living in Iran, where they have been and are being persecuted with great severity. I don’t know if you include them in your prayers, but perhaps I can ask you to.

Compassion for those who suffer is necessarily an automatic response of Christians, given the emphasis Christ placed on love for one’s fellow man.

For myself, my earliest encounter with true suffering came through a teacher at my drama school in Belfast, Helen Lewis (née Katz). I had heard that she had been imprisoned in a concentration camp, but it wasn’t till one day when she rolled her sleeve up and I saw numbers tattooed on her arm that her plight came home to me. She had spent a long time in Theresianstadt (Terezin), where she saved her life because she was a professional ballet dancer: the Nazis used Terezin as a Potemkin village with dancers, musicians, actors, painters and writers to impress the Red Cross and others with their kindly treatment of inmates (while thousands died behind the scenes). Helen’s husband died in Auschwitz.

http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303849604579278722657163880-lMyQjAxMTAzMDIwODEyNDgyWj
A Controversial New Movement Wants to Cooperate More Closely With the Jewish State

As Christmas neared, an 85-foot-high tree presided over the little square in front of the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth. Kindergarten children with Santa Claus hats entered the church and listened to their teacher explain in Arabic the Greek inscriptions on the walls, while a group of Russian pilgrims knelt on their knees and whispered in prayer. In Nazareth’s old city, merchants sold the usual array of Christmas wares.

This year, however, the familiar rhythms of Christmas season in the Holy Land have been disturbed by a new development: the rise of an independent voice for Israel’s Christian community, which is increasingly trying to assert its separate identity. For decades, Arab Christians were considered part of Israel’s sizable Palestinian minority, which comprises both Muslims and Christians and makes up about a fifth of the country’s citizens, according to the Israeli government.

But now, an informal grass-roots movement, prompted in part by the persecution of Christians elsewhere in the region since the Arab Spring, wants to cooperate more closely with Israeli Jewish society—which could mean a historic change in attitude toward the Jewish state. “Israel is my country, and I want to defend it,” says Henry Zaher, an 18-year-old Christian from the village of Reineh who was visiting Nazareth. “The Jewish state is good for us.”

A Deadly Mix in Benghazi
By David D. Kirkpatrick

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/benghazi/?emc=edit_na_20131228#/?chapt=0

It was Sept. 9, 2012. Gathered on folding chairs in a banquet hall by the Mediterranean, the Libyans warned of rising threats against Americans from extremists in Benghazi. One militia leader, with a long beard and mismatched military fatigues, mentioned time in exile in Afghanistan. An American guard discreetly touched his gun.

“Since Benghazi isn’t safe, it is better for you to leave now,” Mohamed al-Gharabi, the leader of the Rafallah al-Sehati Brigade, later recalled telling the Americans. “I specifically told the Americans myself that we hoped that they would leave Benghazi as soon as possible.”

Yet as the militiamen snacked on Twinkie-style cakes with their American guests, they also gushed about their gratitude for President Obama’s support in their uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. They emphasized that they wanted to build a partnership with the United States, especially in the form of more investment. They specifically asked for Benghazi outlets of McDonald’s and KFC.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4110/palestinians-is-abbas-being-asked-to-sign-his PLO President Mahmoud Abbas undoubtedly knows that the minute he signs a peace deal with Israel, the Palestinian terrorist organizations will assassinate him. The mismanagement by Europe, the UN and Abbas’s own weakness have prepared the ground for a takeover by radical elements, and it will occur in the foreseeable future. If elections were […]

My friend Daniel Greenfield included some of Ben Hecht’s broadcasts in his weekly roundup today. Who was Ben Hecht born in 1884- died in 1964?

For starters, he was called the Shakespeare of his time. He started as a newspaper reporter, writing columns for the Chicago Daily News. At the urging of Herman Mankiewicz he relocated to Hollywood where he became a screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, and novelist. He worked on over seventy films, wrote over thirty books and was the recipient of the first Oscar for Original Screenplay for the movie “Underworld.” Among his hits were “Scarface”, “The Front Page”, “Mutiny on the Bounty”, “Notorious”, “Spellbound” and “Some Like it Hot.” Six of his movies were nominated for Oscars and two won.

That was his paying day job. In 1943, plagued with concern and fear for the plight of European Jewry, and offended by government indifference, he organized a rally in Madison Square Garden with the help of Billy Rose, Ernst Lubitsch, Kurt Weill and Moss Hart. The production named “We Will Never Die” drew over 40,000 people to Madison Square Garden. Although the pageant made a national tour, Hecht was disappointed in its outcome. Weill is quoted as saying “The pageant has accomplished nothing. Actually, all we have done is make a lot of Jews cry, which is not a unique accomplishment.”

Hecht turned to active militant Zionism. He wrote “Perfidy” a plea to save the Jews and began his collaboration with Peter Bergson to help create independence for Jews in Palestine. When the war ended he wrote the screenplay for the Bergson Group’s production of” A Flag is Born” which opened on September 5, 1946 in New York, starring Marlon Brando and Paul Muni. Hecht became the most effective spokesman for the Irgun. After the bombing of the military headquarters in the King David Hotel, Hecht said ” Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts. ”

His work was blacklisted in Great Britain.

When Israel was established, the Bergson group was disbanded and Hecht turned his effort to raising funds. The speaker of honor at the first dinner in 1948 was Menachem Begin who also deliverd a eulogy at Hecht’s funeral in 1964.

The first flagship of Israel’s nascent Navy was the S.S. Ben Hecht.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
UNION POLITICS

This story is about a labor leader I once met whom I did understood. This fellow was named Herr Eichhorn and he’d become dictator in a town in Germany named Dusseldorf.

There’d been an uprising and the Bolsheviks captured the town. Eichhorn had been a street car conductor and now he found himself in the Burgomeister’s Palace as a dictator of whatever province Dusseldorf was in. He was running the works.

I met him at the palace to talk. He was a very fine street car conductor who sat there beaming and happy at his desk. I asked him what he’d done since he’d become a dictator.

“Well the first thing O did is two days after I was dictator, I doubled the salaries of all the street car employees,” he said.

“That’s fine, what else did you do?”

“I doubled the salaries of all the street cleaners. In fact I’ve doubled all the salaries in Dusseldorf.”

“Where do you get all the money to pay all these double wages?” I asked.

He said, “I get it out of the treasury of Dusseldorf.”

So I thought for a moment and I asked him, “What’ll happen when you run out of the money in the Treasury of Dusseldorf? How are you going to pay these double wages?”

He grinned. “I’m not worried about that, by the time that happens I won’t be dictator.”

(The Ben Hecht Show Dec 4, 1958)

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
IT DIDN’T TAKE A SEAL TEAM
Osama bin Laden’s lawyer didn’t live in a cave in Afghanistan. Like so many terrorist lawyers, he was a New Yorker. His law office, which has seen more terrorists and their files pass through it than an Afghan cave, sits above a Muslim 99 cent store that offers discounted napkins, sandals and toasters, and is a four-minute drive away from the World Trade Center.

“If I don’t support the politics of political clients, I don’t take the case,” he once said. A few weeks after September 11, he said, “If Osama bin Laden arrived in the United States today and asked me to represent him, sure I’d represent him.”

Osama bin Laden never did arrive in the United States, though perhaps one day pieces of him will wash up on a California beach, and his wannabe lawyer had to settle for representing his son-in-law, who, after September 11, had appeared in a video threatening that “the storm of planes will not stop.”

BDS GANDER

Eighty years ago, the Nazis dispatched thousands of SA thugs to enforce their boycott of Jewish businesses. Stars of David were painted on windows. Leaflets listing the crimes of the Jews were handed out. Cameras were set up outside stores to photograph anyone violating the Nazi BDS campaign.

Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, called the boycott a “great moral victory.” Modern BDS activists echo his rhetoric calling their attacks on Jewish businesses and academics a “moral victory”.

The Muslim boycott of Jewish businesses in Israel began in the twenties and predated the Nazi boycott. It may have even helped to inspire it. This was followed by the Arab League boycott of Israel after the Holocaust. The modern BDS boycott is the direct successor of a Saudi policy under a progressive flag.

http://www.steynonline.com/5933/sharia-protector

Rohullah Qarizada is one of those Afghans you used to see a lot on American TV in the immediate aftermath of the Taliban’s fall. Trimly bearded, dapper in Western suit and tie, he heads the Afghan Independent Bar Association in Kabul. Did you know Kabul had a bar association? A few years back, I ran into one of the U.S. prosecutors who helped set it up, with a grant from the Swedish foreign ministry. Mr. Qarizada currently sits on a committee charged with making revisions to the Afghan legal code. What kind of revisions? Well, for example: “Men and women who commit adultery shall be punished based on the circumstances by one of the following punishments: lashing, stoning.”

As in stoning to death. That’s the proposed improvement to Article 21. Article 23 specifies that said punishment shall be performed in public. Mr. Qarizada gave an interview to Reuters, explaining that the reintroduction of stoning was really no big deal: You’d have to have witnesses, and they’d better be consistent. “The judge asks each witness many questions,” he said, “and if one answer differs from other witnesses then the court will reject the claim.” So that’s all right then.

Stoning is making something of a comeback in the world’s legal codes — in October the Sultan of Brunei announced plans to put it on his books. Nevertheless, Kabul has the unique distinction of proposing to introduce the practice on America’s watch. Afghanistan is an American protectorate; its kleptocrat president is an American client, kept alive these last twelve years only by American arms. The Afghan campaign is this nation’s longest war — and our longest un-won war: That’s to say, nowadays we can’t even lose in under a decade. I used to say that, 24 hours after the last Western soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will be as if we were never there. But it’s already as if we were never there: The last Christian church in the country was razed to the ground in 2010.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367105/fuss-and-feathers-deroy-murdock

It’s amazing how much this Christmas season has been dominated by the words of a big man with a fulsome head of hair and a huge, flowing beard. Santa Claus? No, Phil Robertson.

The “reality TV” star landed in a cauldron of duck soup thanks to his comments on homosexuality. How odd that so many fret so much about his views and so little about others who target gay people.

Robertson told GQ, “Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers — they won’t inherit the kingdom of God.” The leading man of A&E’s Duck Dynasty added: “It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”

Fair enough. Like karaoke, the male posterior is not for everyone. But Robertson would have suffered less grief had he focused on religion and not drifted into sexual mechanics. Still, this story should not have exceeded 90 seconds on Entertainment Tonight.

Amid transcontinental flights, Christmas carols, and family gatherings, America became obsessed with the pronouncements of a man who resembles Mullah Omar. (Why is someone so epically ungroomed in GQ anyway?) Is Phil Robertson the governor of Louisiana? Is he a U.S. senator? Does he run Apple?

Nope. Robertson makes duck calls.

Hillary & Co. create a climate for bullying.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/367132/print

In “protecting the rights of all people to worship the way they choose,” then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton vowed “to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.”

Mrs. Clinton required translation into the language of truth, as she generally does when her lips are moving. By the “rights” of “all people” to “worship” as “they choose,” she meant the sharia-based desire of Muslim supremacists to foreclose critical examination of Islam. Madame Secretary, you see, was speechifying before her friends at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — the bloc of 56 Muslim countries plus the Palestinian territories.

At that very moment in July 2011, Christians were under siege in Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, and Iran — being gradually purged from those Islamic countries just as they’d been purged from Turkey, which hosted Mrs. Clinton’s speech. As Christians from the Middle East to West Monroe, La., can tell you, the Left and its Obama vanguard are not remotely interested in their “rights . . . to worship the way they choose.”

What they choose, after all, is to honor Christian tenets about sexuality, freedom of conscience, and the sanctity of life. Those tenets, just like honest criticism of Islam, are consigned to the category Clinton calls “what we abhor.” And if progressives abhor something, it somehow always becomes everyone’s duty to make certain that those who embrace that something “don’t feel that they have . . . support.”