BACK ON MONDAY MAY 1
I lost an entire family in the Holocaust- grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins all perished among the one in every three Jews in the world that were exterminated. My brother and I were born in Bolivia where my parents presciently went before the war. I read the speeches and sermons and editorials this event evokes, but for me there is only one answer. and that is unstinting support for the security and future of Israel.
Only three years after the end of the Holocaust Israel was reborn in the ancient homeland where the unbroken chain of Jewish survival in spite of oppression, dislocation, murder and genocide, was started in Hebron. In Europe the words “Shma Israel”…Hear oh Israel were the last words uttered by the martyred.
Israel heard and offered succor and rescue.
Today, I cringe when supporters of BDS or J Street or other serial bashers of Israel grow solemn at the mention of the Holocaust but are complicit in criticism and libels of Israel which weaken the Jewish State and by extension encourage violent anti-Semitism throughout the world…even in this wonderful corner of the Diaspora.
Damn their caterwauling tears and hypocrisy. The only memorial and answer to the extermination of 6,000,000 Jews is a safe Israel within the boundaries of the ancient homeland where there has been a Jewish presence from time immemorial. The rest is just commentary. rsk
US President Donald Trump paid tribute to the victims of the Holocaust on Sunday and lauded Jewish courage in the face of genocide, in Holocaust Remembrance Day remarks to a leading international Jewish group.
“On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, we tell the stories of the fathers, mothers and children, whose lives were extinguished and whose love was torn from this earth,” Trump said, in a pre-recorded video address to the World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly in New York. “We also tell the stories of courage in the face of death, humanity in the face of barbarity, and the unbreakable spirit of the Jewish people.”
He added, “On Yom HaShoah, we look back at the darkest chapter of human history. We mourn, we remember, we pray, and we pledge: Never again. I say it, never again.”
Trump also spoke about the achievements of the state of Israel and about the importance of combating antisemitism, including from the Iranian regime.
“Today, only decades removed from the Holocaust, we see a great nation risen from the desert and we see a proud Star of David waving above the State of Israel.” he said. “That star is a symbol of Jewish perseverance. It’s a monument to unyielding strength. We recall the famous words attributed to Theodor Herzl: If you will, it is no dream. If you will it, it is no dream.”
He continued, “Jews across the world have proved the truth of these words day after day. In the memory of those who were lost, we renew our commitment and our determination not to disregard the warnings of our own times. We must stamp out prejudice and antisemitism everywhere it is found. We must defeat terrorism, and we must not ignore the threats of a regime that talks openly of Israel’s destruction. We cannot let that ever even be thought of.”
Trump’s remarks stood in contrast to the White House’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement in January which was roundly criticized for neglecting to specifically mention Jews.
The president also had words of praise for WJC president Ronald Lauder, with whom he reportedly attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s.
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump, adding to strong criticism of the Iran nuclear deal voiced by his administration, said on Thursday that Tehran is “not living up to the spirit of the agreement.”
His comments, in a joint press conference with Italy’s Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, added to signals from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and others that the Trump administration could back away from the landmark deal reached in 2015 between six world powers and Iran.
“We’re analyzing it very, very carefully and we’ll have something to say about it in the not-too-distant future,” Mr. Trump said. “Iran has not lived up to the spirit of the agreement and they have to do that.”
The Trump administration certified to Congress earlier this week that Iran is abiding by the accord, but senior officials have said they are reviewing whether to stick with the deal.
Mr. Trump’s comments come a day after Mr. Tillerson made a rare public appearance to list U.S. complaints against Iran, complaining about its destabilizing activities in the Middle East, and Next week, Tom Shannon, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, will attend a meeting in Vienna with Iran and the other world powers who were party to the accord in what will be the first session with Trump administration representation.
Mr. Trump on Thursday also questioned another key U.S. policy position in the Middle East—its role in Libya. The Obama administration had carried out strikes against Islamic State and backed the Government of National Accord, which stemmed from a 2015 U.N.-brokered deal. The internationally recognized Government of National Accord has struggled to assert itself since then.
“I do not see a role in Libya,” Mr. Trump said Thursday. “I do see a role in getting rid of ISIS.” CONTINUE AT SITE
Yesterday, like all Americans, I ruefully sent my tax returns and payments to New York State and the IRS. Do you ever wonder, as I do, where that money goes? Would you be shocked to learn that those funds feed corruption and rampant wast at the state and federal levels?
Some examples are mind boggling….Veterans who languish in a hospital for the blind don’t get to see doctors, nor do they get to see the costly statues that are placed on their lawn at taxpayers’ expense. At the EPA the coercive regulatory agency they use funds from American taxpayers like us to buy $800.00 inkwells and high end furniture….desks and chairs which they occupy to make regulations that kill infrastructure repairs and construction work and jobs. At the Ivy League Colleges government grants fund ridiculous programs that implement bias and ignorance to the tune of $41.59 billion dollars.
How do I know this? Because of the meanest and leanest and most informative organization in America which exposes rampant waste and corruption. Home Page | Open the Books http://www.openthebooks.com/
Home Page – Banner
Go to their website and please support them. rsk
Mr. Reno is the editor of the religious journal First Things. He was formerly a professor of theology and ethics at Creighton University.
Easter stalks Passover. They arrive together every spring, like the daffodils and magnolia blossoms. This year, Easter Sunday falls as the eight-day Jewish festival nears its end. Over the years, I have come to see that Christianity’s most important day recapitulates Passover. Both holidays face head-on the daunting power of death—and both announce God’s greater power of life.
In March, my wife, who is Jewish, was on the phone, herding her parents, uncles, brothers and cousins. “No, it’s not Tuesday. The first night of Passover is on Monday this year.” She made arrangements for the Seder, the festive meal with a traditional liturgy that retells the familiar story of the Exodus. Emails and texts were exchanged to sort out who would bring what, and this past Monday night we sang and recited the age-old prayers and set out a cup for Elijah, the harbinger of the messianic era. We ended, as always, with the declaration: “Next year in Jerusalem!”
Now, just a few days later, the holiest days of the year for Christians are under way. As the solitary Catholic in my Jewish household, I’m planning to head to church on Saturday night for the Easter Vigil—where I’ll be celebrating Passover once again……
Put in Christian terms: The Passover Seder recalls and celebrates the resurrection of the people of Israel.
Today we tend to think of slavery strictly as an injustice, which of course it is, and some modern Seders treat the Passover as the triumph of justice over oppression. But this is not the traditional view. In the ancient world, slavery was not just a hardship for individuals but a kind of communal death. An enslaved nation can survive for a time, perhaps, but they have no future. A people in bondage is slowly crushed and extinguished.
The notion of slavery as a form of death is accentuated in the story told in the Passover Seder. The small clan descended from Abraham settles in Egypt. They are fruitful and multiply, becoming numerous and mighty. The glow of life in the people of Israel arouses Egyptian resentment. Set upon and subjugated, they are ground down by hard labor and harsh oppression. But the descendants of Abraham call out to God—and he raises them up out of slavery, parts the Red Sea, and delivers them from Pharaoh’s murderous anger.
Judaism is realistic. Passover does not promote a dreamy optimism or cheery confidence that God will keep everything neat and nice. Even the chosen people are vulnerable to oppression and murderous hatred. There’s room in Passover for Auschwitz.
In the story of Exodus, the Israelites make it through the split waters of the Red Sea to dry land. But they are not simply safe. God releases the waters, and Pharaoh’s army is destroyed.
So it is at the Easter Vigil. A chant known as the Exultet announces that the darkness shall not triumph. “Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her.” With a haunting refrain, the ancient song links Passover to Easter: “This is the night,” we are told, “when once you led our forbearers, Israel’s children, from slavery in Egypt and made them pass dry-shod through the Red Sea.” And “this is the night when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld.”
We were not made for death. The Almighty delivers his people. He unlocks the prison of darkness and shatters the power of death. This is the meaning of Easter, the Christian Passover.
READ THE FULL ESSAY AT SITE
Much has been made of Donald Trump’s decision to retain ownership of his businesses during his presidency. Earlier this year a group of law professors and prominent attorneys filed a lawsuit in New York federal court that called into question the constitutionality of this decision. The suit argues that the Trump Organization’s hotel rentals to a Chinese state-owned bank—along with royalties on “The Apprentice” from state television in countries such as Vietnam—violate the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause.
Mr. Trump is not the first president to have business dealings with foreigners. That was actually George Washington, whose conduct in office has been a model for every president.
By the 1790s, Washington was wealthy primarily because of real estate—renting and selling his vast holdings. When Washington became president he did not sell his farm and estates. Rather, his nephew George Augustine Washington managed them while Washington remained involved. As with Mr. Trump’s hotels, Washington’s renters or purchasers could include foreigners.
The president received constant reports from his nephew and subsequent managers and wrote to them weekly. His letters could run 10 pages, with granular instructions on what to buy, sell and plant. This wasn’t an anomaly: Thomas Jefferson, the third president, also continued to supervise his business while holding the nation’s highest office. This belies the notion that the Constitution limits a president’s management of, or benefit from, his existing business ventures.
The new view of the Emoluments Clause advanced against Mr. Trump is that any pecuniary advantage constitutes a forbidden “emolument.” That would mean Washington and Jefferson would have had to ensure that no U.S. or foreign official stood on the other side of any transaction. Yet neither president, despite their close supervision, appears to have taken any such steps to curtail who they did business with.
One letter written by Washington deserves great attention in the current debate. On Dec. 12, 1793, Washington wrote to Arthur Young, an officer of the U.K. Board of Agriculture, an entity newly created and funded by Parliament at the initiative of William Pitt. The president asked for Young’s help in renting out his Mount Vernon lands to secure an income for his retirement. Not finding customers in America, he wondered if Young, with his agricultural connections, could find and organize some would-be farmers in his home country and send them over.
Washington noted that the land would surely increase in value because of its close proximity to what would become the nation’s capital in 1800. Large public-works projects were taking place—a circumstance over which he had some control.
Such a direct business solicitation of a foreigner with foreign government ties would surely lead to cries of constitutional breach if Mr. Trump did it. But the emoluments restriction only applies to benefits from “foreign states,” and what entities count as parts of a “foreign state” for these purposes remains fuzzy. CONTINUE AT SITE
Anna Wintour, world famous garmentologist, Hillaryac and Obama supporter is editor of Vogue Magazine.
In 2011 the magazine tucked among its ad pages featuring $20,000.00 pocketbooks and other expensive must have accessories, a column praising Asma-al Assad, the wife of Bashar al Assad titled “A Rose in the Desert.”
Here is what the article said about Syria:
“Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. ”
Rather Vague on Syria wouldn’t you say?????rsk
Last year, President Obama assured the world that “we are living in the most peaceful, prosperous, and progressive era in human history,” and that “the world has never been less violent.”
Translated, those statements meant that active foreign-policy volcanoes in China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and the Middle East would probably not blow up on what little was left of Obama’s watch.
Obama is the U.S. version of Stanley Baldwin, the suave, three-time British prime minister of the 1920s and 1930s. Baldwin’s last tenure (1935–1937) coincided with the rapid rise of aggressive German, Italian, and Japanese Fascism.
Baldwin was a passionate spokesman for disarmament. He helped organize peace conferences. He tirelessly lectured on the need for pacifism. He basked in the praise of his good intentions.
Baldwin assured Fascists that he was not rearming Britain. Instead, he preached that the deadly new weapons of the 20th century made war so unthinkable that it would be almost impossible for it to break out.
Baldwin left office when the world was still relatively quiet. But his appeasement and pacifism had sown the seeds for a global conflagration soon to come.
Obama, the Nobel peace laureate and former president, resembles Baldwin. Both seemed to believe that war breaks out only because of misunderstandings that reflect honest differences. Therefore, tensions between aggressors and their targets can be remedied by more talk, international agreements, goodwill, and concessions.
Ideas such as strategic deterrence were apparently considered by both Baldwin and Obama to be Neanderthal, judging from Baldwin’s naÏve efforts to ask Hitler not to rearm or annex territory, and Obama’s “lead from behind” foreign policy and his pledge never to “do stupid sh**” abroad.
Obama issued various empty deadlines to Iran to cease enriching uranium before concluding a 2015 deal that allowed the Iranians to continue working their centrifuges.
Aggressors clearly assumed that Obama’s assurances were green lights to further their own agendas without consequences.
Iran routinely threatened U.S. Navy ships, even taking ten American sailors into custody early last year. Obama issued various empty deadlines to Iran to cease enriching uranium before concluding a 2015 deal that allowed the Iranians to continue working their centrifuges. Iran was freed from crippling economic sanctions. And Iran quietly received $400 million in cash (in the dead of night) for the release of American hostages.
The final report of the Senate’s “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” revealed that U.S.-stationed Saudi intelligence officers, who provided assistance to the hijackers ahead of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, were in direct contact with senior members of the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
During the Taliban regime in Kabul, the Brotherhood had training camps in Afghanistan for Kashmiri militants fighting against India and Central Asian states.
In his inaugural address on January 20, U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to “unite the civilized world against… and eradicate radical Islamic terrorism.” So far, however, the administration in Washington, like its predecessors, has done little to rein in one of the key sources of this growing global phenomenon — the Muslim Brotherhood.
Founded by Sheikh Hassan al-Banna in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood does not always openly advocate violence. But its main agenda is to establish a worldwide Islamic Caliphate by way of the sword. As its motto reads: “The Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; death for the sake of Allah is our wish.”The Brotherhood’s hostility towards the United States has been clear. It not only backed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but founded al Qaeda, nineteen of whose operatives perpetrated the 9/11 attacks.
The final report of the Senate’s “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” — released in December 2002 — revealed that U.S.-stationed Saudi intelligence officers, who provided assistance to the hijackers ahead of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, were in direct contact with senior members of the American branch of the Brotherhood.
