RUTHFULLY YOURS

We’ve been told that the ritual of football players kneeling when the national anthem is played signifies their protest of police brutality towards black life. But the American flag has much broader significance than that, specifically its presence draping the coffins of fallen soldiers and veterans. Today’s military numbers more than 1.3 million Americans, 17% of whom are black men and women who have volunteered to serve. What message is being sent to those Americans as well as all other ethnicities who voluntarily put their lives on the line in the ultimate act of patriotism for this country.

By supporting the actions of those players who choose to exercise a freedom that would have them thrown into jail in many other parts of the globe, we become complicit in dissing the families of fallen heroes in other uniforms as well. So soon after the anniversary of 9/11, have we forgotten the sacrifice of first responders – the numbers of policemen and firemen who gave their lives then or subsequently due to prolonged exposure to smoke and chemicals and were similarly buried beneath our flag as the symbol of their sacrifice to the people of this nation. Many of those heroes were black as well.

America has been a land of unequaled opportunity and rewards for its football players. Its failures need to be addressed but if you refuse to honor the flag that stands for so many of its important freedoms, perhaps you should also refuse to partake of its bounty. Rather than take the knee-jerk route of one empty gesture of a few minutes duration, why don’t football players set up a charity to help black youth avoid the pitfalls of gangs, drugs and failure to get an education. If each kneeling player became a Big Brother to a child at risk, think of the publicity value and how many other athletes might be spurred on to join that mission. Black Self-Help, specifically aimed at pro-active projects would certainly surpass the “protests” of Black Lives Matter that often turn into scene of looting, violence and random destruction. Here’s an opportunity for Colin Kaepernick, a bi-racial man who was given up for adoption to a white family, who worships god and kisses the tattoos of His sayings, to do some of God’s work, to get off his knee, stand tall and help to lift his less fortunate brothers and sisters to a better future in a better America.

Anti-Semitism originated during biblical times when Jesus Christ, the most famous Jew in the world, left traditional Judaism to create a new religion. Christ’s first century Jewish following was eventually expelled from the synagogues and Christianity established an identity separate from Rabbinic Judaism. Followers of Christ were called Christians and the original Jewish population was divided.

The Old Testament remained with the Jews and the New Testament belonged to the Christians. Jesus was a Nazarene and lived most of his life in the town of Nazareth in the province of the Galilee. Israel’s history has been a continuous struggle for national sovereignty. Israel was invaded and occupied by Babylonians, Persians, Syrians, Greeks, and Romans but also enjoyed periods of sovereign self-rule under Hebrew Kings. At the time of Jesus the Romans occupied Israel.

During the time of Jesus Judaism was divided into four main groups. The Zealots were revolutionaries who chose a military option to free themselves from the Romans. The Sadducees were wealthy pragmatists who tried to negotiate and compromise with the Romans. The Pharisees chose spiritual purity and strict adherence to the Torah. The Essenes withdrew from the struggle by committing themselves to monastic life waiting for God to save them.

Jesus brought a form of non-violent resistance that resonated among the people and empowered them. During the time of Jesus politics and religion were deeply intertwined so his influential teachings and growing popularity were a threat to Rome and to traditional Judaism. Jesus was sentenced to death by Romans on the charge of political treason for claiming to be “King of the Jews.” The Roman occupiers of Israel considered Jesus to be a political threat and the Jewish leaders considered him to be a religious threat. Both were responsible for his crucifixion yet the Gospel narratives only blame the Jews – it was the beginning of institutionalized anti-semitism for political purposes.

Early Christianity in the Roman empire was considered a sub-sect of Judaism. In 64 AD Emperor Nero blamed the Christians for the Great Fire of Rome and the scapegoating, persecution, and killing of Christians continued until Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and proclaimed the Edict of Milan in 313 AD which insured benevolent treatment for Christians within the Roman Empire. Some consider the Edict of Milan a political pact between Romans and Christians to stabilize the country’s growing instability. Monotheistic Christianity was incompatible with the traditional polytheistic “pagan” Roman religion but Christianity prevailed and became the official religion of Rome in 380 AD under Emperor Theodosius I. The persecution of Christian and non-Christian heretics followed.

Government sanctioned anti-semitism has been used for political purpose since Theodosius I. It is an extremely effective political tactic that deflects attention away from the government’s own failures and focuses attention on the blamed target. Wikipedia lists some examples: The Rhineland massacres preceding the First Crusade in 1096, the Edict of Expulsion from England in 1290, the Massacre of Spanish Jews in 1391, the persecution of the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Cossack massacres in Ukraine from 1648-1657, various anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire from 1821-1906, the Dreyfus affair in France, the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe, official Soviet anti-Jewish policies, and Arab and Muslim involvement in the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries.

As Jews observe the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we enter a period not of celebration—notwithstanding the former being known as the “Jewish New Year”—but of profound reflection. Best known as a period of prayer and repentance, it is also, and explicitly, a period of remembrance: Yom Kippur is one of only four times each year when Jews recite the Yizkor prayer, primarily for deceased parents. It concludes, more broadly, with “Av Harachamim,” the eleventh-century prayer first written after crusaders destroyed German-Jewish communities.

We will recite it this year at a time when remembrance has become complicated—especially as it involves public memorials. It is in that context that a personal story of remembrance comes to mind, for suggesting what may currently seem counterintuitive: that there is much that we miss when a historic site has no monument.

My own encounter with such a site came on a trip to Germany that my wife and I took three years ago. It was a trip inspired by a long-ago conversation with my wife’s elderly cousin Roselle Weitzenkorn, who fled Northern Saxony in 1937. When we spoke with her in the mid-1970s in her Philadelphia apartment, she was still thoroughly German in many ways—and not just in her Kissingerian accent. She was a fan of the Bismarckian social-welfare state and looked down on what she viewed as the benighted United States. Her family, composed of small shopkeepers and cattle traders not far from Hamlin, was well assimilated to German life. Indeed, a member of her own family was named on the village Great War monument for his service to the Kaiser. But once the Nazis took power, Jewish children, such as Roselle’s niece Ilsa, were separated from Christians on the school playground. Soon after, the Hitler youth massed outside Ilsa’s father’s business one evening, threatening him for having traded with Gentiles. If that was not enough to convince them to flee Germany, there was, as Roselle put it, the night “I saw Hitler speak.”

She’d provided a clue as to where she heard him by noting that she’d lived in “Emmerthal on der Weser”—the river in northern Germany. We began to look into events in that rural, agricultural part of the country with the help of German friends whom we had met in graduate school. They arranged for us to meet a Hamlin-based author and guide, Bernhardt Gelderblom, the son of a Nazi soldier who has taken it as his mission to restore desecrated Jewish cemeteries, such as those in which my wife’s family members were buried.

Gelderblom told us that, yes, just outside the municipal limits of Emmerthal—within a short walking distance—was Bückeberg Mountain. This was not just somewhere Hitler spoke; it was a place of chilling Nazi spectacle. There, in the autumns from 1934 to 1937, it was the site of Das Reichserntedankfest, the so-called Nazi harvest festival. In October, 1937, more than 1 million Germans gathered on the mountainside overlooking the river to witness military maneuvers and much more. They massed there in the countryside for a show culminating with Hitler himself striding up the Führerweg (Führer’s way) to a harvest monument. Women were said to have begged for Hitler to touch their children and to serve as their godfather. At a festival altar, he addressed the throng. “The starting point for National Socialism’s views, positions, and decisions lies neither in the individual nor in humanity,” Hitler said. “It consciously places the Volk at the center of its entire way of thinking. For it, this Volk is a phenomenon conditioned by blood in which it perceives the God-given building block of human society.”

Yet when we visited, there was not only no monument to Hitler—of course—but also no historic marker of any kind. No plaque, no explanation—nothing to indicate what had once happened there. Without our guide, we would never have noticed that there remained but one telling remnant: a still-visible path, the Führerweg, where a parade of troops and notables—and Hitler himself—had marched. Otherwise, this was a rural hillside with nothing to distinguish it.

The kiddies are now back at school and both public and private schools will operate under new gender guidelines. Forget grammar and declensions and tenses and hanging participles. Education has went!

Now it is “non-binary” — masculine or feminine — pronouns for students who are gender-nonconforming or who do not prescribe to the gender binary. They may prefer gender-neutral pronouns such as ‘they,’ ‘ze,, xe, hir, hirs and zirs’ or other pronouns.”

And, as the term begins the students have to fill out a form about what their “pronoun identification” is their preference.

Now here is my question:

Why do people want to use gender-neutral pronouns anyway? What’s wrong with gendered pronouns?

Here is a response: (http://motto.time.com/4327915/gender-neutral-pronouns/)

“It’s not that there is something wrong with gendered pronouns; it’s just that the pronouns “he” and “she” come with a certain set of expectations about how someone should express their identity and relate to the world. For many people, gender normativity can get in the way of self-expression—so the words “he” or “she” can feel limiting. “Some people have a gender identity that is non-binary, and conventional pronouns have the effect of assigning them a binary identity,” says Adams.”

Hir does explaint it don’t ze? rsk

In 1946, on September 26, world Jewry gathered for a sad and dispirited New Year numbed by the Holocaust when one third of the world’s Jews had been murdered. For displaced Jews living in harsh detention and refugee camps throughout Europe the gates to Palestine remained shut by Great Britain, but from the ashes, the Zionist spark was rekindled. The rest is history. In 1948 the state of Israel was liberated. In spite of wars and reversals the Jewish homeland prevailed.

Tonight, the eve of the Jewish New Year 5778, is a holiday of wonder and awe and thanksgiving and good and plentiful food and wine. We live and thrive in a great nation and Israel is an amazing source of pride for its accomplishments, its state of the art scientific and technological institutes, and its outsize contributions to the welfare of the entire world.

May the new year bring all of us the blessings of peace, health, a fruitful life…..and good times. rsk

In yesterday’s New York Times “Style” section Hillary Clinton was interviewed about her book and why she lost.

Her lament: ” This has to be called out for what it is: a cultural, political, economic game that’s being played to keep women in their place”

This from the lady that really kept women in “their place” by calling all her husband’s bimbo eruptions “nuts and sluts” and who played a political and economic game by lying, profiteering, and peddling uranium and other favors to adversaries.

I have not posted anything lately, because Hurricane Irma was imminent and on my mind, and then I was without power and the Internet for days. Yes, I live somewhere in Florida, in a region of the state that was relentlessly baptized by an outer band of the storm, rich in rain and howling winds.

Now that I’m back in business, and able to catch up on the news, I see that a new hurricane is imminent, that is, the storm of censorship and the enforcement of politically correct thought, speech, and writing. It promises to wreck destruction not just on Florida, but on the whole of Western civilization. The storm has been collecting strength for decades as it approaches the mainland of Freedom of Speech.

When to date the origins of the storm? Let’s say in 1995, with the publication of a fussy, snarky book, addressed mostly to academics. I quote from the article I wrote about it, “The Ghouls of Grammatical Egalitarianism.”

A small, innocuous-looking book appeared in bookstores recently, published under the auspices of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), an organization which claims to be devoted to the dissemination of knowledge and scholarly research. Its title is Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). It is little more than 100 pages long, weighs less than a pound, yet its contents are more potent than the Oklahoma City bomb. Its ingredients are politically correct jargon, multiculturalism, and the phenomenon of what may be called “grammatical egalitarianism.”

It is important to note at the start that the Association boasts a membership of 114 institutions, mostly university presses, but includes such diverse organizations as the National Academy Press, the National Gallery of Art, the Modern Language Association, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the J. Paul Getty Trust. Its membership includes all major American and Canadian universities, plus Oxford University Press and presses in Tokyo, South America, and Scandinavia. This is an organization with significant cultural clout.

Guidelines promotes and encourages “grammatical egalitarianism,” which in practice serves to stifle the dissemination of knowledge and scholarly research.

Presciently, Guidelines, in 1995, covered virtually every issue now at large in 2017, including feminism, “social justice,” and race. Feelings have replaced language as a mode of expression.

Guidelines includes the disclaimer, “there is no such thing as a truly bias-free language” and stresses that the advice it offers is only “that of white, North American (specifically U.S.), feminist publishing professionals.” The Task Force, which is composed of 21 university press editors (two of them men), recommends euphemistic proxies for all of the terms on its “hit list.” [Brackets mine]

This is true. There is no such thing as a truly bias-free language, but Marilyn Schwartz and her team resisted that truism anyway. A truly bias-free language would be no language at all, except for grunts, gesticulations, and facial expressions. But even those would not be free of bias. Looking through an atomic microscope, without a bias-loaded language, how would a scientist otherwise say that an atom’s valence of electrons is abnormal? How would one say that “this is a very good (or bad) painting”? How would one say, “I love you.”? I leave it to your biasedimagination. Because language is governed by values – that is, by “bias” – such as objective truth, it enables precise communication. Without bias, language, communication, and the formation of concepts would be impossible to men.

This is what President Trump said and repeated about Charlottesville:

“I think especially in light of the advent of Antifa, if you look at what’s going on there. You have some pretty bad dudes on the other side, also, and essentially that’s what I said. Now, because of what’s happened since then with Antifa, you look at, you know, really, what’s happened since Charlottesville, a lot of people have actually written, ‘Gee, Trump might have a point.’ I said, ‘You have some very bad people on the other side, also,’ which is true.”

And given Antifa’s openly stated boast that violence and disruption are part of their agenda, the president is right.

Nonetheless, that statement evoked some self righteous hyperventilation:

Exhibit A:

https://pjmedia.com/video/trump-reiterates-charlottesville-moral-equivalency-argument/

Trump Reiterates His Charlottesville Moral Equivalency Argument By Nathan Lichtman

“In addition to the problems of yet again refusing to call out a genocidal bunch of racists, he used language about Antifa being “the other side.” So, basically, he’s admitting that the neo-Nazis are on his side. “The other side” implies that they are the ones counter to your side. This is certainly as close as he has come to admitting that the racist alt-righters are supporters of his, are in his base. They aren’t the other side to him, Antifa is.

IT IS BEYOND TIME for any true conservative, any true Republican, and really any true American, to condemn Trump’s moral equivalency nonsense. You can say Antifa is bad without drawing equivalence between them and people who want to wipe Jews and minorities off the face of the planet.”

Fall off your high horse Mr, Lichtman! The neo- Nazis are a despicable racist group with zero influence in America. The “other side” are foot soldiers in a war being waged against our national culture and institutions and police.

And, Mr. Lichtman, those that want to wipe Jews and other minorities off the face of the earth are the mullahs of Iran and their terrorist offshoots throughout the globe. rsk

The golden age lasted about ten years.

In November of 1989, the gates of the Berlin Wall were opened. Soon after, the people themselves took to it with sledgehammers, and people who did not know that they could cry from joy learned to. The Wall was a product of that original Antifa, the self-proclaimed anti-fascists of the East German police state, who called it the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, the “antifascist rampart.” They told the subjects of their totalitarian rule that the Wall was built to protect socialism from the evils without, but of course it was designed to stem migration out of East Germany, where people with direct experience of life under socialism went to great lengths to remove themselves and their families from that workers’ paradise.

By 1991, the demolition of the Wall was complete — and so was the demolition of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was dissolved in November of that year. On the radio, pop stars sang about strolling through Gorky Park and “watching the world wake up from History.” The capital H was implicit, denoting History in the Hegelian sense, the force against which National Review proposed to stand athwart yelling “Stop,” the History of “dialectical and historical materialism,” the process which Francis Fukuyama would declare concluded, with liberal democracy having emerged as the unchallenged victor in History’s great contest.

The United States declared victory and then turned its attention to domestic matters. That happens in the wake of every great conflict in which the United States is involved: The people grow weary of it, even in victory, and someone, usually a presidential candidate, comes along and demands: “Why are we spending all that money in Berlin (Baghdad, Kabul, Damascus) when we could be using it to fix potholes in Sheboygan?” Barack Obama would later talk about “nation-building at home,” but he hardly invented that sort of thing, and in 1992 it was Bill Clinton making the case for investing the so-called peace dividend in a larger welfare state at home. President Clinton put his wife, a middling lawyer, in charge of reforming the nation’s health-care system, and the project failed, but not before establishing the Clintons as a kind of ersatz royal house cum crime syndicate.

(The “penicillin-resistant syphilis of American politics,” as I called them, a line I would thank Roger Stone to stop plagiarizing.)

It was a heck of a party. The economy had gone from stagflation and gas lines in the Carter years to booming in the Reagan era, and that continued through the Clinton presidency, turbocharged by the emergence of the Internet and the high-tech economy associated with it. My last year in college, 1996, may have been the best year in American history to have been entering the work force with a halfway respectable bachelor’s degree and a little bit of technological knowhow. But things were pretty good all over: My own personal Austin Economic Indicator — the help-wanted sign at the Taco Bell across from the University of Texas campus — was advertising $10 an hour plus a $1,000 longevity bonus after 90 days, and they couldn’t hire people. My experience at my college newspaper and knowledge of desktop-publishing software was enough to take me around the world as a newspaper editor, but I was something of a slacker: The real go-getters weren’t going to work for anybody but starting their own companies and doing their own thing. The startup ethic wasn’t limited to software bosses like Bill Gates and Marc Andreessen: Robert Rodriguez didn’t sit around waiting for Miramax to make his movie — he took $7,000 to Mexico and made El Mariachi himself. There was a sense not that anybody could do anything, but that the possibilities had become much larger than they once were. The combination of technology, freedom, entrepreneurship, and ready investment capital amplified the individual, and made him if not quite the equal of a Fortune 500 corporation then at least a potential rival to it.

Here are some excerpts from then President George Bush’s speech to the United Nations on November 10, 2001: After paragraphs of blah, blah, blah about the hijacking of a peaceful religion.. the president offered a challenge, but managed to include processing peace between Israel and terrorists. That is the only commitment that has been implemented…forcing Israel to reconcile with and appease terrorists who openly share the agenda of Al-Qaueda. All other promises have been cynically abrogated….rsk

“The conspiracies of terror are being answered by an expanding global coalition. Not every nation will be a part of every action against the enemy, but every nation in our coalition has duties.

“These duties can be demanding, as we in America are learning. We have already made adjustments in our laws and in our daily lives. We’re taking new measures to investigate terror and to protect against threats. The leaders of all nations must now carefully consider their responsibilities and their future.

“Terrorist groups like al Qaeda depend upon the aid or indifference of governments. They need the support of a financial infrastructure and safe havens to train and plan and hide.

“Some nations want to play their part in the fight against terror but tell us they lack the means to enforce their laws and control their borders. We stand ready to help.

“Some governments still turn a blind eye to the terrorists, hoping the threat will pass them by. They are mistaken.

“And some governments, while pledging to uphold the principles of the U.N., have cast their lot with the terrorists. They support them and harbor them, and they will find that their welcomed guests are parasites that will weaken them and eventually consume them.

“For every regime that sponsors terror, there is a price to be paid, and it will be paid. The allies of terror are equally guilty of murder and equally accountable to justice. The Taliban are now learning this lesson. That regime and the terrorists who support it are now virtually indistinguishable.

“Together, they promote terror abroad and impose a reign of terror on the Afghan people. Women are executed in Kabul’s soccer stadium. They can be beaten for wearing socks that are too thin. Men are jailed for missing prayer meetings.

“The United States, supported by many nations, is bringing justice to the terrorists in Afghanistan. We’re making progress against military targets, and that is our objective. Unlike the enemy, we seek to minimize — not maximize — the loss of innocent life. I’m proud of the honorable conduct of the American military.

“The Afghan people do not deserve their present rulers. Years of Taliban misrule have brought nothing but misery and starvation. Even before this current crisis, 4 million Afghans depended on food from the United States and other nations, and millions of Afghans were refugees from Taliban oppression.

“I make this promise to all the victims of that regime: The Taliban’s days of harboring terrorists and dealing in heroin and brutalizing women are drawing to a close. And when that regime is gone, the people of Afghanistan will say with the rest of the world, ‘Good riddance.’

“In this war of terror, each of us must answer for what we have done or what we have left undone. After tragedy, there is a time for sympathy and condolence. And my country has been very grateful for both. The memorials and vigils around the world will not be forgotten, but the time for sympathy has now passed. The time for action has now arrived.

“The most basic obligations in this new conflict have already been defined by the United Nations. On September 28, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1373. Its requirements are clear. Every United Nations member has a responsibility to crack down on terrorist financing. We must pass all necessary laws in our own countries to allow the confiscation of terrorist assets.

“We must apply those laws to every financial institution in every nation. We have a responsibility to share intelligence and coordinate the efforts of law enforcement. If you know something, tell us. If we know something, we’ll tell you. And when we find the terrorists, we must work together to bring them to justice.

“We have a responsibility to deny any sanctuary, safe haven or transit to terrorists. Every known terrorist camp must be shut down, its operators apprehended and evidence of their arrest presented to the United Nations. We have a responsibility to deny weapons to terrorists and to actively prevent private citizens from providing them.

“These obligations are urgent, and they are binding on every nation with a place in this chamber. Many governments are taking these obligations seriously, and my country appreciates it.

“Yet, even beyond Resolution 1373, more is required and more is expected of our coalition against terror.

We’re asking for a comprehensive commitment to this fight. We must unite in opposing all terrorists, not just some of them.

“In this world, there are good causes and bad causes, and we may disagree on where that line is drawn. Yet, there is no such thing as a good terrorist. No national aspiration, no remembered wrong can ever justify the deliberate murder of the innocent. Any government that rejects this principle, trying to pick and choose its terrorist friends, will know the consequences.

“We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th, malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty. To inflame ethnic hatred is to advance the cause of terror.

“The war against terror must not serve as an excuse to persecute ethnic and religious minorities in any country. Innocent people must be allowed to live their own lives, by their own customs, under their own religion.

“Following September 11, these pledges are even more important. In our struggle against hateful groups that exploit poverty and despair, we must offer an alternative of opportunity and hope.

“The American government also stands by its commitment to a just peace in the Middle East. We are working toward the day when two states — Israel and Palestine — live peacefully together within secure and recognized borders as called for by the Security Council resolutions.

“We will do all in our power to bring both parties back into negotiations. But peace will only come when all have sworn off forever incitement, violence and terror.

“And finally, this struggle is a defining moment for the United Nations itself. And the world needs its principled leadership. It undermines the credibility of this great institution, for example, when the Commission on Human Rights offers seats to the world’s most persistent violators of human rights. The United Nations depends above all on its moral authority and that authority must be preserved.

“The steps I’ve described will not be easy. For all nations, they will require effort. For some nations, they will require great courage. Yet, the cost of inaction is far greater. The only alternative to victory is a nightmare world, where every city is a potential killing field.

“As I’ve told the American people, freedom and fear are at war. We face enemies that hate not our policies but our existence, the tolerance of openness and creative culture that defines us. But the outcome of this conflict is certain. There is a current in history, and it runs toward freedom.

“We are confident, too, that history has an author who fills time and eternity with his purpose. We know that evil is real, but good will prevail against it. This is the teaching of many faiths.

“And in that assurance, we gain strength for a long journey. It is our task, the task of this generation, to provide the response to aggression and terror. We have no other choice, because there is no other peace.

“We did not ask for this mission, yet there is honor in history’s call. We have a chance to write the story or our times, a story of courage defeating cruelty and light overcoming darkness. This calling is worthy of any life and worthy of every nation.

“So let us go forward, confident, determined and unafraid.

“Thank you very much.”