http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5965 It is fitting that on the 75th anniversary of the appeasement at Munich, which enabled Adolf Hitler to seize parts of Czechoslovakia without a fight, the current presumed “leader of the free world,” President Barack Obama of the United States, has decided that the avoidance of war with Iran is now the principal […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4017/uk-muslim-underage-marriage “Forced marriage is probably the last form of slavery in the UK.” — Nazir Afzal, Chief Crown Prosecutor for Northwest England. More than a dozen Muslim clerics at some of the biggest mosques in Britain have been caught on camera agreeing to marry off girls as young as 14. Undercover reporters filming a documentary […]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/arts/design/museum-of-tolerance-inaugurates-an-anne-frank-exhibition.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1381831630-2TP5n1L5mwaGt8H403LQDQ
Museum of Tolerance Inaugurates an Anne Frank Exhibition
A new exhibit at Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance restores Anne Frank’s diary to its horrific historical context—and then distills that context into fantasy and platitudes.
LOS ANGELES — What lessons do we learn from Anne Frank? Since her diary is the chronicle of an education, we learn what she learns: the lessons of daily life and early adolescence, acquired during a horrific time. We watch a meticulously observant girl, age 13, evolve into a self-consciously observant young woman, age 15. We watch — as one of Philip Roth’s characters pungently remarked — a fetus growing a face.
What we don’t learn from the diary is what happened after the last entry, on Aug. 1, 1944. We don’t learn how this self-described “chatterbox,” whose most-quoted pronouncement is “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart,” must have come to doubt that sentiment; nor do we learn that by that winter, she was a typhus-ridden, starving, naked, weeping, walking corpse in Bergen-Belsen, where the Germans had shipped her from Auschwitz along with other condemned souls in the waning months of the war.
One achievement of a permanent exhibition opening on Monday at the Museum of Tolerance here is that we do learn those things; history is not treated as the diary’s footnote but as its context. The exhibition is a $4 million, 9,000-square-foot examination of Anne’s life and times, offering films, touch-screens, reproductions and artifacts; it is perhaps the most extensive exploration of Anne Frank in any museum outside Amsterdam. It required arrangements with both the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel, which holds the copyright to the diary and most of the images here. (The museum is charging a supplementary fee of up to $15.50 for admission to the exhibition.)
Bizarrely, though, for all its strengths, the installation nearly undermines its own achievement at the end. Understanding that also requires some history.
Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the sole survivor of the “secret annex” where Anne, her parents and sister, and four others hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam, published an edited version of Anne’s diary in 1947. Since then, partly because the diary only vaguely reports on history, the temptation has been to make history almost irrelevant. The diary’s subject is often turned into a generalized idea of injustice.
Sometimes the effort to lift the diary out of the particulars of its past has just meant a shift in emphasis. Mr. Frank wanted it treated as a universal tale. (“Do not make a Jewish play out of it!” he instructed the writer Meyer Levin in 1952, when Levin was trying to bring it to the stage.) And sometimes the diary is so wrenched from history that it can hardly be recognized; the Anne Frank House has long used Anne’s history and hiding place to champion causes including opposition to the Vietnam War or “the ugly face of nationalism” in the Balkan conflict.
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/10/14/cmon-man Obama wants a debt ceillng default so he can blame Republicans. But they can turn this game around. Before October 1, one of the highlights of my family’s week was the “C’mon, Man!” segment of Monday Night Football. The blown plays, missed calls by blind refs, and part-time stupidity of some football players is […]
Explorer and navigator Christopher Columbus was born in 1451 in the Republic of Genoa, Italy. His first voyage into the Atlantic Ocean in 1476 nearly cost him his life. Columbus participated in several other expeditions to Africa. 1492, Columbus left Spain in the Santa Maria, with the Pinta and the Niña along side. He opened up the Americas to European colonization.
A YIDDISH SONG IN TRIBUTE TO COLUMBUS
THERE WAS AN OLD YIDDISH SONG NAMED “LEBEN SOL COLUMBUS” TRANSLATED TO MEAN “COLUMBUS SHOULD LIVE” A TRIBUTE TO THE MAN WHO DISCOVERED AMERICA WHICH BECAME A HAVEN FOR MILLIONS SEEKING FREEDOM AND OPPORTUNITY. FOR JEWS IT BECAME THE ONLY NATION IN THE ENTIRE DIASPORA WHERE JEWS COULD FIND SECURITY, PROTECTION BY LAW AND THE FREEDOM TO WORSHIP IN PEACE.
ABRAHAM ROSENSTEIN WAS THE VOCALIST IN 1916. HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY!!!
http://victor.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/matrix/detail/700002432/B-17402-Leben_sol_Columbus_Leyben_zol_Columbus
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/iran-is-prepared-for-the-new-orbital-launches?f=puball
This is a serious, new development. Iran is preparing for an orbital satellite launch, reportedly within 3 months.
From what I understand, the flight profile and payload characteristics of an orbital satellite launch are virtually identical to that of an ICBM with a warhead. ICBMs are long-range missiles – more than 3,400 miles – designed for nuclear weapons delivery – one or more nuclear warheads. A single missile can carry several warheads which can strike different targets. Payloads are 30 megatons plus. (As a basis of comparison, Little Boy (the bomb used in Hiroshima) had a payload of 16 kilotons (1 megaton = 1000 kilotons) and Fat Man (Nagasaki) had a payload of 20 kilotons.)
(Military people who may have more information on this development and a greater understanding of the technology, please weigh in).
Scarier is the prospect of our government’s current negotiations with Iran (recently appointed to the U.N. Nuclear Disarmament Committee), while the American people are watching a charade in Washington.
Janet Levy,
Los Angeles
http://vestnikkavkaza.net/news/economy/46175.html
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamas-dangerous-claim-to-executive-power
Negotiating with Republicans has never been in Obama’s playbook.
Three days after his inauguration in 2009, President Barack Obama silenced Republican lawmakers who voiced concerned about the enormity of spending in his stimulus bill by uttering two brash words, “I won.”
That was his governing philosophy, as he rammed through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.
But in the fall of 2010, Republicans swept into control of the House of Representatives, and since then, Obama’s agenda has been stalled.
With little prospect of gaining control of the House in 2014, Obama is resorting to discrediting the Constitution’s limits on presidential power rather than bargain with congressional Republicans.
Here are the president’s own words, explaining why he refuses to negotiate to end the government shutdown and resolve the fast approaching debt ceiling problem.
His views on presidential power ought to alarm all Americans.
“I will not pay ransom,” said Obama, for a stopgap-spending bill to open the government.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/kerry-praises-multi-faith-model-of-muslim-country-that-banned-bible/print/
It’s good to know that Secretary of State John Kerry’s ideal multi-faith model is a country that seized 20,000 Christian bibles, banned Ahmadis from praying and destroys a Hindu temple every 3 weeks.
Let’s hope his boss doesn’t intend to introduce this multi-faith model in the United States.
Kerry said, “We meet in Kuala Lumpur because this is a multi-cultural city at the heart of a multi-ethnic, multi-faith country, and history has proven time and again that diversity is one of the most important catalysts for discovery.
“Here in Malaysia, people of different heritages have been in conversation for a long, long time. You see it in the open houses that you host during holidays, welcoming people of different faiths into your living rooms.”
How has that conversation been going? Let’s look at some highlights.
Authorities in Malaysia have seized more than 20,000 Bibles in recent months because they refer to God as “Allah,” Christian leaders said Thursday.
The seizures have fed fears among minority groups, which see signs of encroaching Islamic fundamentalism in the predominantly Muslim but multi-racial country.
And some more highlights of multi-cultural and multi-faith and multi-ethnic Malaysia.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/humberto-fontova/a-lesson-on-cubas-healthcare-for-bill-de-blasio/ “I have a huge critique of the current government there [in Cuba] because it’s undemocratic,” snapped de Bill de Blasio to a Cuban-American radio interviewer two weeks ago. “I also think it’s well known that there’s some good things that happened — for example, in health care.” Does it occur to people nowadays that […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/will-israels-left-destroy-israel/print/
The anniversaries of the Yom Kippur War and the Rabin assassination have come and gone. Both historical events are national traumas laden with ambiguous meanings.
The Yom Kippur War destroyed the political fortunes of Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan and moved Rabin into the big chair. Rabin couldn’t hold on to power as Labor corruption ended the unbroken rule of the left commencing what was effectively fifteen years of rule by the right.
Rabin’s return to power was an equally brief window for the left. Since Peres’ loss to Netanyahu, there has only been one Labor prime minister and he barely lasted two years in office.
From one angle, Israel has emerged out of the shadows of the left. Under conservative governments, it has modernized and innovated. The Israel of the startup probably would not exist if the kibbutz was still a viable proposition. From another angle, Israel is a conservative country in the grip of an unelected left.
The peace process, a desperate attempt by the Labor Party to become relevant again, is headed into its third decade. The casualties of the endless Peace War and the expansion of the enemy’s capabilities to the point that Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have been shelled are all terrible, but they are not the real threat.
The terrorist war against Israel is a war of nerves. It is meant to drain Israel’s energies, to tie it down and make its people and soldiers feel futile and desperate in the face of a threat that can’t be pinned down. These are the same exact tactics being used against the United States. Terrorists are proxy armies. They are not the ultimate threat. They are a strategic means of disabling an enemy before the real attack.
