RUTHFULLY YOURS

Given its physical heft, it’s no surprise that the new Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary published last month by Indiana University Press is the work of generations.

Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, its editor, worked on the 856-page, 4 1/2-pound volume for some 20 years in her Teaneck basement. At its core are words collected a generation earlier by her father Mordkhe Schaechter in the family’s house in the Bronx. For many of those years, when Gitl was a teenager, she helped her father as he cataloged Yiddish words at the dining room table.

But before that, the family legend goes, there was her grandfather, Khayem-Benyomen Shekhter, and his enthusiasm for the Yiddish language. The memory of his enthusiasm is tied to a date more than a century ago: 1908, the year he made sure to attend the great Yiddish language conference in his hometown of Czernowitz, at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
In Czernowitz, Mordkhe Schaechter, with his arms crossed, stands in front of his parents.

In Czernowitz, Mordkhe Schaechter, with his arms crossed, stands in front of his parents.

Of course, all languages are the work of generations. It took time for Yiddish to evolve from the medieval German that was picked up by Jews living in the Rhineland, mixed with their inherently Jewish Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary, and then given Slavic vocabulary (e.g. bubbe and zeide) and even touches of syntax. (That’s the most accepted, broad-brush origin story for Yiddish, notwithstanding recent clickbait headlines arguing for more exotic origins.)

And it took time for Yiddish to be seen as a language worthy in its own right, something worth cataloging and defining and even writing in. Where people speak two languages, those languages seldom are on equal footing; people always are inclined to value one more than the other. Jews may have loved the dialect they spoke among themselves more than the language of the neighbors, which they generally mastered as well, but in Jewish culture pride of place went to Hebrew, the language of the Torah and the rabbis. Popular demand led to the publication of the first Yiddish books in the 16th century, even though the rabbis objected to it. (The first Yiddish bestseller was “Bovo Bukh,” a rhymed retelling of an Italian poem about Bevis of Hampton; this knightly romance is the origin of the term bubbe meise; rather than the popular, and wrong, etymology linking it to bubbe, or grandmother.) And in the 19th century, with the spread of printing and newspapers, came the great Yiddish writers: Sholom Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, and Mendele Mocher Sforim.

Which brings us to the 1908 Czernowitz conference. The 20th century was young. Change was in the air. And Nathan Birnbaum, the 44-year-old Austrian Jew who had coined the word “Zionism” and advocated for Jews in Eastern Europe, championed Yiddish as the Jewish national language. Peoples throughout Europe were coming to understand themselves as separate nations, wearying of being under the rule of the grand European empires, and Mr. Birnbaum’s Yiddishism offered an equivalent national identity to Jews — without demanding that they leave for Palestine. (He later would abandon Jewish nationalism altogether and help found the Orthodox Agudath Israel movement.) He sent out a call for everyone interested in Yiddish to come to the Yiddish language conference.

For once, let’s have no “grief counselors” standing by with banal consolations, as if the purpose, in the midst of all this, were merely to make everyone feel better as quickly as possible. We shouldn’t feel better.

For once, let’s have no fatuous rhetoric about “healing.” Healing is inappropriate now, and dangerous. There will be time later for the tears of sorrow.A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let’s have rage.

Let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with a short attention span. America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred.

As the bodies are counted, into the thousands and thousands, hatred will not, I think, be a difficult emotion to summon. Is the medicine too strong? Call it, rather, a wholesome and intelligent enmity the sort that impels even such a prosperous, messily tolerant organism as America to act. Anyone who does not loathe the people who did these things, and the people who cheer them on, is too philosophical for decent company.It is a practical matter, anyway. In war, enemies are enemies. You find them and put them out of business, on the sound principle that that’s what they are trying to do to you. If what happened on Tuesday does not give Americans the political will needed to exterminate men like Osama bin Laden and those who conspire with them in evil mischief, then nothing ever will and we are in for a procession of black Tuesdays.

“The worst times, as we see, separate the civilised of the world from the uncivilised. This is the moment of clarity. Let the civilised toughen up, and let the uncivilised take their chances in the game they started.” Amen! rsk

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1000762,00.html

Kerry: U.S. Will Meet Fiscal Year Goal of ‘Welcoming 10,000 Syrian Refugees’By Bridget Johnson
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/2016/07/13/kerry-u-s-will-meet-fiscal-year-goal-of-welcoming-10000-syrian-refugees/

John Kerry was in Moscow this week, where he invoked Thursday’s terror attack in Nice to press the need to broker an end to the civil war in Syria. “Nowhere is there a greater hotbed or incubator for these terrorist than in Syria,” he said, and on that score he’s right. Too bad another bad deal with Russia isn’t likely to achieve that goal.

The Administration wants the Kremlin to force Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to ground his air force, which continues to use barrel bombs and chemical munitions against civilian targets in rebel-held areas. In exchange, Mr. Kerry is offering Russia enhanced intelligence cooperation, including target coordinates for Russian bombers to attack Islamic State and the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front. Longer term, Mr. Kerry wants Russia to help ease Assad out of power as part of an overall political settlement for Syria.

That might be a reasonable bargain—if only Vladimir Putin had any record of abiding by previous commitments. The Russian president deployed his air force to Syria last year after spending four years blocking every effort at the United Nations to censure the Assad regime. From the beginning his planes have bombed marketplaces, pediatric hospitals, Turkmen villages and other non-ISIS targets in areas besieged by regime forces.

In June the U.S. had to scramble F-18s after Russian planes bombed U.S.-backed rebels in an area near Jordan where a cease-fire was supposed to be in force. The Russians returned for a second round of bombing after the Hornets ran low on fuel and departed. Moscow has repeatedly ignored cease-fire efforts and remains very much engaged in helping Assad crush his enemies, four months after Mr. Putin announced his supposed immediate departure from the country. CONTINUE AT SITE

One year ago today, President Obama announced the start of the flawed nuclear deal that he claimed would prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Unfortunately, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has made America less safe. It at best only delays Iran’s nuclear-weapons program and does nothing to protect Israel and our allies in the region from Tehran’s continued nefarious activities.

The Obama administration has gone to great lengths to save this deal. Administration officials have boasted of creating an “echo chamber” with reporters ensuring that journalists parroted the administration’s line and ignored worrisome details about the deal.

Over the last year, Iran has continued to endanger our troops and allies in the region and further its quest for regional domination.

Iran has kidnapped U.S. citizens and dual citizens as part of its statecraft. Iran still has not provided information on the whereabouts of Floridian Robert Levinson, who is the longest-held hostage in American history. Iran also continues its unjust detention of Siamak Namazi and his father, Baquer Namazi.

Iran has expanded its support to proxy forces in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, which has been made easier by the $100 billion Tehran received because of the JCPOA. The head of designated terrorist group Hezbollah recently admitted that his group, which has the blood of Americans and Israelis on its hands, receives funding directly from Iran.

Over the last year, Iran has continued to expand its ballistic-missile program. Iranian missiles launched in March were marked with a statement in Hebrew reading, “Israel must be wiped off the arena of time.” The Obama administration has backtracked from its original assertions that these launches were prohibited by U.N. Security Council Resolutions.

In January, Iran detained U.S. sailors in international waters and an investigation by the chief of naval operations noted that Iran “violated international law by impeding the boats’ innocent passage transit and they violated sovereign immunity by boarding, searching and seizing the boats and by photographing and videotaping the crew.”

There is no more important book to read right now than Heather Mac Donald’s clear-eyed, riveting new work The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. You cannot fully get to the core of the truth about the current anti-cop sentiment in the country, or be armed with the facts to shoot down Black Lives Matter lies without reading it. If you can get a copy, that is – demand is so great that there is currently a one-to-two month wait for it on Amazon.com. Don’t wait – get the ebook.

In case you haven’t already been following everything Mac Donald writes, she is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Her writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, The New Republic, Partisan Review, The New Criterion, and elsewhere.

She is the recipient of the New Jersey State Law Enforcement Officers Association’s 2004 Civilian Valor Award, the 2008 Integrity in Journalism award from the New York State Shields, the 2008 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration from the Center for Immigration Studies, and the 2012 Quill & Badge Award for Excellence in Communication from the International Union of Police Associations. In other words, unlike the legion of talking heads in the news media pontificating about the racism in American law enforcement, Heather Mac Donald has actually done the journalistic legwork, is qualified to discuss the subject, and is bold enough to speak the truth about it.

The War on Cops begins by noting that crime is skyrocketing in cities across the United States as “the most anti-law-enforcement administration in memory draws to a close.” This isn’t, however, “the greatest danger in today’s war on cops. The greatest danger lies, rather, in the delegitimization of law and order itself.” If we don’t begin to counter the present lies about law enforcement propagated by the Black Lives Matter movement and facilitated by a complicit media and by the “academic victimology industry,” Mac Donald concludes, civilized urban life will break down – which we are already beginning to witness.

Ms. Mac Donald took time out to answer a few questions about crime, terrorism, and the recent Dallas cop shooting for FrontPage Mag.

Mark Tapson: More than a dozen years ago you wrote Are Cops Racist? in which you pushed back against the anti-profiling crusade and warned that it was undermining the law enforcement progress of the previous decade. What, if anything, has changed between that book and your newest one?

Heather Mac Donald: We are now living in the most anti-law enforcement administration in recent memory and most likely in American history. The specious “driving while black” crusade of the 1990s and early 2000s was mostly promulgated by left-wing activists, albeit with help from the mainstream media.

Today, we have a president who regularly spreads the poisonous lie that the criminal justice system is racist. The academic victimology industry, presciently identified by David Horowitz’s pioneering work, has only become more entrenched and powerful over the last decade. It, too, is the essential helpmate of the Black Lives Matter movement, propelling the anti-cop narrative to powerful mainstream status.

MT: What were your thoughts upon hearing of last week’s Dallas shooting in progress, when police were dying and being wounded even as they tried to protect the demonstrators who had gathered there to protest their supposed racial bias?

WASHINGTON — President Obama hailed the Iran nuclear deal as “avoiding further conflict and making us safer” on the one-year anniversary of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Within that year, Iran has conducted ballistic missile tests in violation of a UN Security Council resolution that the administration says are outside the scope of the nuclear agreement but UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said are “not consistent with the constructive spirit” of the agreement in a confidential report cited by Bloomberg.

Iran has also captured U.S. sailors and humiliated them on-camera before releasing them, indicted an American businessman and a U.S. permanent resident who had done work for the U.S. government, and shipped arms to Yemen. Iran has warned that if the U.S. gives them any grief about their activities, they’ll consider the nuclear deal null and void.

German intelligence reported at the end of June that Iran has continued its “illegal proliferation-sensitive procurement activities” at a “quantitatively high level” — which “holds true in particular with regard to items which can be used in the field of nuclear technology.” The State Department has denied the report.

“The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution also registered a further increase in the already considerable procurement efforts in connection with Iran’s ambitious missile technology program which could among other things potentially serve to deliver nuclear weapons,” states the German report. “Against this backdrop it is safe to expect that Iran will continue its intensive procurement activities in Germany using clandestine methods to achieve its objectives.”

“All of Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon remain closed, and Iran’s breakout time has been extended from two to three months to about a year,” Obama declared in a statement released by the White House today. “The United States and our negotiating partners have also fully implemented our commitments to lift nuclear-related sanctions, and we will continue to uphold our commitments as long as Iran continues to abide by the deal.”

“The JCPOA demonstrates what can be achieved by principled diplomacy and a sustained commitment to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons,” the president added. “America’s willingness to engage directly with Iran opened the door to talks, which led to the international unity and sustained engagement that culminated in the JCPOA. We still have serious differences with Iran, but the United States, our partners, and the world are more secure because of the JCPOA.”

Secretary of State John Kerry did his own victory lap, emerging before the media at the Westin Hotel in Paris to declare that “a program that so many people said will not work, a program that people said is absolutely doomed to see cheating and be broken and will make the more dangerous, has, in fact, made the world safer, lived up to its expectations, and thus far produced an ability to be able to create a peaceful nuclear program with Iran living up to its part of this bargain and obligation.”

“The world is safer today because conflict in the region is not calculated on the basis of the potential of a nuclear confrontation or nuclear explosion, and because we have the ability to be able to work through some issues which we’ve seen, for instance with our sailors who stumbled into Iranian waters and within 24 hours we were able to get them out,” Kerry said. “That could not have happened prior to this agreement having taken place.”

Kerry added that “nobody pretends that some of the challenges we have with Iran have somehow been wiped away.”

Would Kerry, who sits on his brains, explain…if Syria is a hotbed for terror, then why is Obama escalating the admission of Syrians to the United States.???

MOSCOW—At the start of a second day of discussions on a U.S. proposal for closer military cooperation with Russia in Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry invoked the attack in Nice to emphasize the urgency of bringing about an end to the crisis in Syria.

“Nowhere is there a greater hotbed or incubator for these terrorists than in Syria,” Mr. Kerry said Friday, at the top of a meeting with his Russian counterpart Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. “People all over the world are looking to us and waiting for us to find a faster and more tangible way of them feeling that everything that is possible is being done to end this terrorist scourge.”

Mr. Lavrov began the meeting with a moment of silence for the victims of the attack in Nice that killed dozens late Thursday.

He said the attacks in Nice made the dialogue with the U.S. “even more urgent and relevant” and said the discussions Thursday night with Russian President Vladimir Putin would allow for “an intensification of efforts to find a solution to the crisis and boosting efforts for more effective work,” according to Interfax news agency.

At the start of the meetings Friday it was unclear if the U.S. and Russia would agree on a deal to increase military cooperation in Syria in exchange for Russia using its influence to ground Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s air force.

Mr. Kerry described three hours of meetings with Mr. Putin on Thursday evening as “extremely frank and serious.”

There’s plausible deniability here, but it’s not very plausible as the only real purpose for the organization being funded was to undermine Netanyahu. And when the media complains about Israel’s suspicion toward NGO’s, this is a prime example of why they have become such a problem. Foreign governments keep using them to try and control Israeli politics.

The campaign’s explicit goal was to elect “anybody but Bibi [Netanyahu]” by mobilizing center-left voters. . . .

The State Department permitted One Voice to use a taxpayer-funded grant to build valuable political infrastructure—large voter contact lists, a professionally trained network of grassroots organizers/activists, and an impressive social media platform—for the putative purpose of supporting peace negotiations. But during the federal grant period, OneVoice devised a plan to target Prime Minister Netanyahu; immediately after the grant period ended, OneVoice deployed its taxpayer-funded campaign resources to launch the largest anti-Netanyahu grassroots organizing campaign in Israel in 2015. Despite OneVoice’s known history of political activism in Israel, the State Department did nothing to guard against the clear risk that OneVoice could engage in electioneering activities using a taxpayer-funded grassroots campaign infrastructure after the grant period. Remarkably, according to the State Department, OneVoice’s conduct was fully compliant with Department regulations and guidelines.

Among the report’s most damning findings, evidence was found that the “durable campaign resources” built during the grant with taxpayer dollars included “a larger voter contact database, a professionally trained network of grassroots activists across the country, and an enhanced social media presence on Facebook and Twitter. OneVoice was even permitted to use State Department funds to hire an American political consulting firm called 270 Strategies — run by Obama 2008 campaign veterans — to train its activists in how to execute a ‘grassroots mobilization’ campaign.”

If you’re not familiar with the name Phelim McAleer, then you’re unaware of one the most fearless independent filmmakers working today. The producer and director of films such as Mine Your Own Business: The Dark Side of Environmentalism (2006), Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria (2009), and FrackNation (2013), all of which proved to be very inconvenient truths to the left, McAleer also crowdfunded his way to producing a film about abortion monster Gosnell: America’s Biggest Serial Killer, directed by actor and conservative gadfly Nick Searcy and written by novelist/political humorist Andrew Klavan.

Somewhere amid all that, McAleer also produced a play called Ferguson about the controversial killing of Black Lives Matter martyr Michael Brown by white officer Darren Wilson, reenacted onstage using only unaltered Grand Jury testimony. McAleer is not afraid to use film and theater works to force the left to face the truth about such issues.

For his latest project, McAleer has turned to the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s illegal private email server. Her staff are currently giving depositions about it under oath and on film, but Hillary’s lawyers have persuaded the judge to block the release of the tapes because they could damage her chances in the election.

McAleer finds this unconscionable and “unacceptable – that films showing the truth are being blocked from the American people. George Orwell described journalism as ‘something somebody somewhere doesn’t want published.’ So we are going to commit a series of acts of journalism.” What that means is, McAleer is creating a series of short film re-enactments of highlights from the depositions, scripted from the transcripts themselves.

Here, for example, is a video of Cheryl Mills’ deposition highlights, in her own words from the transcript. Mills worked for the Clintons for almost 30 years. She was Hillary’s Chief of Staff at the State Department. Her testimony is “amazing,” writes McAleer, “full of classic Clintonian evasions. She used the phrase ‘I don’t remember’ or ‘don’t recall’ 189 times. This deserves to be brought to a wider audience, not censored and hidden away. And we now have it on film.”

There will be a total of five short films, ending with the deposition of Hillary aide Huma Abedin, who was talkative and very casual about emailing government business with Hillary when both of them were using the server in Hillary’s basement: