RUTHFULLY YOURS

European opposition to the right of Jewish people to live in Israel amounts to “chutzpah with blood in it,” an award-winning British journalist and novelist declared in a recent BBCinterview.

In conversation with correspondent Chris Cook for a “Newsnight” film on anti-Zionism, antisemitism and Israel — which aired April 29 — Jacobson condemned the continued audacity of certain Europeans in telling Jews they have no claims or rights to Israel.

Jacobson said:

When I hear people in European cultures attacking Zionism, I think, ‘What a nerve.’ We [Europe] kick you out, we say, ‘Go to hell and we don’t care where you go.’ And you’re lucky if you’re kicked out. You’re lucky if you get out. And then we [Jews] go somewhere. We go to what for a long time was considered home and what in the Jewish imagination has been home for a few thousands years. And this begs many questions I accept about the indigenous population [in Israel]. I accept all that. But the idea that we [Europe] would then say to the Jews, ‘Get the hell out of here,’ and now we’re going to tell you where you can go? I mean there’s a Jewish word for that. That’s chutzpah. That’s chutzpah with blood in it.

During the interview, Jacobson explained his understanding of Zionism and said that the Left in Britain must reeducate itself on core Zionist ideology. “Zionism was a liberation movement. It wasn’t a movement of oppression. It wasn’t a movement of colonialism,” he said. “It was the beginning of a Europe-wide movement of liberation of the Jews from themselves…and some of the [European] countries.” This movement of liberation among Jews began “long before the Holocaust” and “the Holocaust just then confirmed the need for that,” Jacobson said.

Commenting on the antisemitism scandal currently plaguing Britain’s Labour party — specifically comments made by Labour MP Naz Shah calling for Israel to be relocated to America — Jacobson said he would like to hear more officials renounce antisemitic views and reeducate themselves. Remarks like those of Shah, Jacobson said, remind Jews of the importance of Zionism.

“The reason why Jews get so upset when they hear Zionism denounced is because for a Jew, for most Jews, it still is a liberation movement and not only in the mind,” he stated. Reflecting on 1930s Europe, Jacobson said, “Where were Jews going to go? They were being kicked out everywhere… ‘Go to your own country,’ they were told. Okay. And now they’re in their own country and now get out of that. And now Naz Shah says, ‘Get out of your own country and go to America.’ Not only do we remember Zionism for the liberation movement it was, it’s a liberation movement still.”

While Jacobson readily admitted he wasn’t brought up a Zionist, he said, “I was just brought up to believe whatever you think about Israel, don’t forget you might need it one day. There isn’t a Jew living — no, there are very few Jews living — that won’t feel in some way or another that they might need it one day.”

Watch highlights of Jacobson’s interview below:

Well, the polls are in and – not to put too fine a point on it – President Obama has bombed. Last week, disregarding the convention that heads of government don’t intervene directly in the internal elections of friendly states, the president came to London to tell us to vote to stay in the European Union. He didn’t hint or suggest or imply. He told us bluntly that, if we left the EU, we’d go “to the back of the queue” when it came to signing trade deals with Washington.

How did Britain react? Not for the first time, there was a divergence between what the pundits and politicians thought, and what everyone else thought. The journalists in the handsome Foreign Office salon where Mr. Obama made his remarks instantly concluded that he had won the referendum for the Euro-enthusiasts. David Cameron’s aides began to brief that it was all over bar the applause, that they would storm to victory by 60-40 or more.

The next day’s newspapers unanimously predicted a further swing to the Remain side, which had already been enjoying a bit of a bounce. Then, one after another, the numbers started to come in. Of the four opinion surveys that have been published at the time of writing, two put the Remain side slightly ahead, and two put Leave slightly ahead; but all four show a swing to Leave. Ordinary people, it seems, don’t like being told what to do by foreign politicians – even popular ones.

Oh yes: President Obama is popular in Britain. I realize that saying so will irk some American conservatives. Believe me, I have been through the same thing in reverse. For years, American friends, including many who were in no sense on the Left, would tell me, “Aw, man, I love that guy Blair.” To many Brits – indeed, to foreigners generally – Obama is still the telegenic mixed-race candidate who opposed the Iraq war. Nothing he has said or done since has really registered.

But, although people admire Obama, they hate being hectored. The president’s choice of vocabulary – when is the last time you heard an American say “back of the queue”? – made Brits wonder whether he was reciting lines drawn up in Downing Street. In other words, they suspected that David Cameron was using foreign leaders to bully and threaten his own country.

For the past 25 years, arms control has been a key driving force behind how many Americans view our relationship with Russia. In that period the two countries have agreed to the START I, Moscow, and New Start nuclear weapons agreements that has successfully reduced the strategic warhead arsenals on both sides by over 90%.

But relations between Moscow and Washington are not good and since the 2010 New Start agreement, the Russians have flatly rejected discussions of further reductions in nuclear weapons. The Russians have also stopped cooperation under the Nunn-Lugar agreement, named after two US Senators that put together a program to safeguard and eliminate nuclear material and warheads in the former Soviet Union subsequent to the end of the Cold War. Other agreements between the two countries have also been put on ice by Russian President Putin’s government.

At a seminar on Capitol Hill on April 20, 2016, two distinguished experts-Steve Blank of the American Foreign Policy Council and Mark Schneider of the National Institute of Public Policy-spoke about the need to refocus our relationship with Russia away from arms control and more towards managing an increasingly troublesome and dangerous relationship. A key part of that strategy must be the full modernization of our nuclear deterrent, they both emphasized.

Most worrisome said the two experts was Russia’s massive build-up of new nuclear weapons, including three new classes of land based missiles, a new submarine launched ballistic missile, and a new stealthy strategic bomber and accompanying air launched cruise missile including a hypersonic variant. This build-up will be almost completely completed by 2021-2 prior to the United States fielding a single modern element of its own strategic nuclear deterrent which is the oldest ever.

Brace yourselves! Tomorrow will elicit caterwauling tears from the left, the Eurotrash, and politicians and pundits. Even in bonny England, which contributed so mightily to the extermination of the Jews by closing the gates of Palestine in 1939, there will be a lot of tut-tutting. And, I predict, those nations which participated in the infamous Evian Conference of 1938 at which only the Dominican Republic offered to take desperate Jewish immigrants, will puff their chests and pontificate against racism and genocide.
Well, spare me. During the Holocaust one in every three Jews in the world were killed. The rough total of victims is 6,000,000 souls. Only three years after the end of World War 2, Israel became a state. It is a democracy with advanced institutions, with start-ups, tech companies and scientific and medical advances that contribute to the health and advancement of the entire world.
And today, 6.333,000 Jews live in Israel…..the largest Jewish population in the world- and growing, thanks to the rampant anti-Semitism in Europe.
Only unconditional support for Israel- its moral, historical, religious, and legitimate rights- is the correct tribute to the Holocaust victims who died with the words “Hear Oh Israel” in their last moment.
rsk

Lafcadio Hearn is a writer unusually hard to classify, certainly in terms of the conventional, institutionalised categories of genealogy, geography or language. Hearn could be claimed as a major American, Japanese, Irish or Greek author, or all of these at once, as well as being a notable translator into English of French, Japanese and Chinese.

Long before globalisation became a word in common use and “world literature” was established as a field of academic study, Hearn was a genuine writer-without-borders, making him a singular figure from the past who is our contemporary, or perhaps the future. He ranged widely, and wherever he went in the world he transformed it into text. A true literary adventurer, Lafcadio Hearn lived, and travelled, by the word. It seems he could have lived anywhere and written about anything.

Born in 1850 in the Ionian Islands to a Greek mother and Irish father, Hearn grew up mostly in Ireland, France and England and lived his adult life in parts of the world which were much more remote from one other in physical terms and in shared understanding than is the case today. Among Anglophone writers, Hearn was even more widely travelled than the likes of Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson and, for that matter, Mark Twain, who met Hearn in New Orleans in 1882 and with whom he toured.

In the English-speaking world, Hearn today perhaps is best known as a member of the generation of writers—another was George Washington Cable—that put New Orleans on the literary map. Hearn lived in the city for a decade before settling in Japan, where he was to spend the rest of his life, becoming a citizen and taking a Japanese name in 1895. Today, Yakumo Koizumi, as Hearn became known, is regarded as the nearest thing to a major Japanese writer that a non-native could have become.

Before his arrival in New Orleans in 1877 Hearn wrote extensively about places as various as Martinique, China and the United States. While working as a journalist in Cincinnati in the early 1870s, Hearn married a former slave, Aletha Foley, in defiance of the law at that time in Ohio forbidding so-called miscegenation, and lived illegally with her and her child from a previous relationship. The union, the revelation of which resulted in Hearn being fired from his job at the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer on the grounds of “deplorable moral habits”, ended in separation after three years.

Many years later, in 1891, while living in Japan, Hearn married a much younger woman, the daughter of a samurai family in Matsue. The couple had a son and a daughter. Hearn died in Tokyo in 1904 at the age of fifty-four.

There are permanent memorials to Hearn in four countries: Greece, Ireland, Japan and the United States. A museum at his birthplace in Lefkada opened in 2014, the same year that the Lafcadio Hearn Gardens opened in County Waterford. In Japan, a Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum maintained in his former residence in Kumamoto attracts around 150,000 visitors a year, according to the museum website.

There is also a house in New Orleans in Cleveland Avenue not far from the St Louis Cemetery, a nineteenth-century townhouse in a now isolated spot in what I was told by locals, when I expressed a wish to visit it, is a tricky part of town on the fringe of the CBD. The Lafcadio Hearn House, in which Hearn took a room (though it is not known for sure which he occupied), was added to the US National Register of Historic Places in 2006 after recognition of its significance by the City Council of New Orleans in 2004. (The Cleveland Avenue house was saved from destruction and restored by Pat Swilling, a property developer and former linebacker for the New Orleans Saints NFL team who became a Louisiana state legislator after retiring from professional football. Only in New Orleans.)

What have we come to? Consider April. Alexander Hamilton was allowed to remain on the ten-dollar bill because of a Broadway musical. Curt Schilling was fired from his job at ESPN because he had the audacity to say: “A man is a man no matter what they call themselves.” Harvard College deemed single sex “final clubs” dens of iniquity, but a “sex fair” made brighter an already “enlightened” university? Facing charges of child molestation, but, even so, named ambassador for President Obama’s Latino and Black youth programs, rapper Rick Ross was invited to the White House. Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe signed an executive order giving the right-to-vote to 206,000 ex-cons. In a muddled statement regarding the desperate financial situation facing New York City hospital’s, Mayor William de Blasio asserted: “There will be no lay-offs, but there will be staff reductions.” Overseas, Norwegian extremist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in a 2012 shooting rampage, claimed that isolation in his three-room suite, which includes windows, a treadmill, fridge, TV and Sony PlayStation, violated his human rights and posed a threat to his mental well-being.

Andrew Jackson was never on my short list of great Presidents; so Harriet Tubman, in my opinion, is a good replacement. But the initial instinct of Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was to toss Alexander Hamilton into the distaff sea. That showed either a remarkable ignorance of history, or a deliberate attempt to sabotage the man who first held the office he now holds. It is ironic that the left, which claims that Republican religious and social orthodoxies deprive them of believing in science, should condemn a man whose observation was based on the definitive science of chromosomes. Despite a study she had commissioned that found 87% of campus sexual assaults occurred in University-owned and operated dorms, Harvard’s president Drew Faust found fault with clubs that are independent of the College. She expressed no concern that a University-sponsored fair displaying vibrators, dildos and other sex toys will have any effect on the male libido. During his White House visit Mr. Ross had his ankle bracelet alarm go off, which presumably amused any youths that were present. As for Governor McAuliffe, he later denied to reporters that his motivation was political – the possibility that the almost 4% extra votes might help Mrs. Clinton never crossed his mind! There is nothing I can add to Mr. de Blasio’s verbal contortions. As for the cold-blooded killer Breivik who certainly had mental health problems before going to jail, the Norwegian judge decided his rights were being violated, that he should not be held in isolation…and that the Norwegian people should pay his legal bills. The moral in Aesop’s fable of the frog and the scorpion: real, embedded evil cannot be countered by benevolence.

The planet is out of control. Perhaps it is not greenhouse gasses that is the cause of climate change, but the verbal bovine faeces that vents from Washington, Brussels and other places of political power? Mark Twain must feel a sense of omniscience. Freedom of speech continues to be denied conservatives on campuses. Will it now be denied by Congress? Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has asked the Justice Department to bring civil cases against “climate dissenters,” using RICO statutes. We live in a world that condemns Israelis as racists for their treatment of Palestinians, but condone misogynist Muslim men for treating women as slaves. In Luddite-like fashion, Vermont decided that advancements in biotechnology should not apply to food eaten by “Green Mountaineers.” Up seems to be down; right is wrong; east is west. I am reminded of Roberto Binigni in Down by Law: “It’s a sad and beautiful world.” (Maybe “strange” and “crazy” would be better?) Will we right this ship that is foundering in a sea of dissembled ignorance and moral and cultural relativism, or are we doomed to another dark age?

April may not be, as T.S. Eliot once claimed, the cruelest month, but last month had its share of tragedies. The month saw two earthquakes in Japan and one in Ecuador. Dozens died in Japan and more than 480 in Ecuador. Five hundred refugees from Africa drowned, as their over-crowded boat sank in the Mediterranean. Through the 26th of April, according to Wikipedia, 478 people were killed during the month in dozens of terrorist acts in twenty-five countries on four continents. Hundreds more were wounded. Iran, trying to appear noble in Western eyes, announced that it may send Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, to help fight ISIS, another terrorist group. Vladimir Putin, a progenitor of terror and crime, announced plans for a “several-hundred-thousand strong national guard” to fight terrorism and organized crime! It smacks of Mussolini’s “Black Shirts,” the paramilitary wing of Italy’s National Fascist Party.

On Thursday morning, sailors on board the USS Cole were lining up for an early lunch. Seventeen of them died as an Al Qaeda bomb on board a fishing boat tore through the hull outside the galley. The dead included 15 men and 2 women, one of whom had a young child. For three weeks the crew of the USS Cole struggled to keep their ship from sinking while working waist deep in water with bucket brigades, sleeping on the deck and living surrounded by the terrible aftermath of the terrorist attack.

The survivors, wounded and whole, received the words “Glory is the Reward of Valor” written on the bent steel removed from the site of the explosion that tore through their ship and their lives.

The President of the United States promised that justice would be done. “To those who attacked them we say: You will not find a safe harbor. We will find you and justice will prevail.”

Despite Clinton’s words, justice did not prevail.

The father of Home Maintenance Technician Third Class Kenneth Eugene Clodfelter believed that there would be justice, but he was to be disappointed. “I just felt, for sure, you know, they’re not going to go ahead and just kiss off the lives of 17 U.S. sailors,” he said. “In fact, they didn’t do anything.”

Walid bin Attash, a planner of the USS Cole bombing and who also played a role in the 9/11 attack, is still at Gitmo. His trial continues to drag on while he and his lawyers play games. Rahim Hussein al-Nashiri, another of the planners, is still awaiting trial. But Mashur Abdallah Ahmed al Sabri, one of the members of the USS Cole cell, has already been released by Barack Obama from Guantanamo Bay.

Sabri was rated as a high risk terrorist who is ”is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests, and allies”, but that was no obstacle for Obama who had already fired one Secretary of Defense for being slow to free dangerous Al Qaeda terrorists and was browbeating his latest appointee over the same issue.

The very paperwork that was used as the basis for the decision to free Sabri describes him as “a member of a Yemeni al-Qaida cell directly involved with the USS Cole attack”. This cell “conducted surveillance” on the targeted vessel and “prepared explosives for the bombing”. Sabri had been arrested in Yemen for his involvement in the attack before he managed to make his way to Afghanistan.

Now he is a free man and has been sent back to the homeland of terrorism, Saudi Arabia.

The Farmer and the Snake

A Farmer walked through his field one cold winter morning. On the ground lay a Snake, stiff and frozen with the cold. The Farmer knew how deadly the Snake could be, and yet he picked it up and put it in his bosom to warm it back to life.

The Snake soon revived, and when it had enough strength, bit the man who had been so kind to it. The bite was deadly and the Farmer felt that he must die. “Oh,” cried the Farmer with his last breath, “I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel.”

The Greatest Kindness Will Not Bind the Ungrateful.

The moral of this Aesopian fable from a mere 2500 years ago is that doing good to evil will only lead to more evil. Aiding those who kill only brings more death, not life. It is human nature to think that people will return good for good and evil for evil. This kind of thinking perversely leads some to assume that if they are being assaulted, then they must have done something to deserve it. This logic is routinely used to argue that Islamic terrorists are simply paying us back in the same coin.

But the assumption that evil exists because evil has been done to someone else, tracing back to an original primal evil of injustice that can only be healed with social justice, is itself evil.

In September 1 1939, W.H Auden responded to Hitler’s invasion of Poland by penning the lines;

Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return

Those same lines have been routinely taken up by those eager to pen their own apologetics for evil. In the wake of another early September, September 11th, Auden’s poem was re-embraced once again by those penning essays explaining why we were the real terrorists to whom evil had been done in return for our own evil.

But while it is easy enough to dismiss W.H. Auden as naive, snakes don’t always look the way you expect them to. Particularly snakes who take refuge in the mind of man. Auden was more snake than farmer and his words were the snake-words of one scaly creature excusing the evil of another.

In September 1939, the USSR and Nazi Germany had an agreement. And the man who two years earlier had penned the line, “The consious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder” in his poem Spain, when referring to the Soviet atrocities in Spain, was not a pacifist. He was one of the snakes.

In time Auden would describe his poem as ”infected with an incurable dishonesty”. The infection, the snake bite of incurable dishonesty, passes through the words. The dishonesty is a poisonous disease.

Are those who go on to quote “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return”, to excuse and justify terrorism the farmer or the snake? On the surface of it, there is no clearer or simpler justification of evil than these lines. They presume that anyone who does evil, has been first sinned against. And while that may not entirely render them guiltless, it clearly spreads the guilt around and adds a touch of morally equivalent white paint to the murderous figure crouching in the center of the room.

The Agony of the Arab Spring
Of the five countries where citizens rose up in 2011, only Tunisia is relatively stable and free. It also produces the most Islamic State recruits.

In early 2011, two young Syrian women named Aliaa and Noura whiled away spring mornings strolling to university or lying on Aliaa’s bed talking about suitors. Dark-haired Aliaa was the daughter of an Alawite military officer; blond Noura was the daughter of a well-known Sunni doctor.

They lived in Jableh, an ancient Phoenician port where the Sunni center of town, with its cafes and Mediterranean promenade, is surrounded by green hills of Alawite and Christian villages. Aliaa and Noura were the best of friends.

Then came the Arab Spring. In Syria, it began five years ago last month. By 2013, Noura was a refugee in Turkey, and Aliaa was worrying that, “if Bashar [al-Assad] falls . . . we, here, will all be in the niqab [the Muslim face veil], or we will be dead.” Noura had once promised to name her first daughter after Aliaa. Now the Sunni was accusing her former friend of trying to convert her to Shiism, and the Alawite thought she had discovered a pattern of Saudi links in her friend’s behavior during those happier days.

“Their friendship belonged to a world that no longer made sense,” writes New York Times reporter Robert F. Worth in “A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS.” “They had redefined each other, little by little, as enemies.”