RUTHFULLY YOURS

BREAD OF AFFLICTION though it may be, to me, matzo has always been a treat. Of course, finding the right delivery system for this admittedly austere cracker—preferably one involving lots of butter—helps. I’m talking about matzo brei (“fried matzo” in Hebrew), a satisfying scramble of eggs and crumbled matzo that’s a favorite among Jews forgoing leavened bread during the Passover holiday (not to mention plenty of non-Jews who have passed through my kitchen). Traditionally breakfast fare, this hybrid of French toast and scrambled eggs makes an equally comforting lunch or supper.

There are those who insist that Jews fleeing Egypt invented fried matzo the minute they hit the Sinai, but in fact the dish only became popular around the turn of the last century, when automated production made matzo more affordable and therefore ripe for riffing. The preparation method varies from family to family. One version, probably Sephardic in origin, serves up the brei like a frittata, cut into wedges. Some cooks add vanilla, cinnamon and sugar to the egg mixture before cooking. Others take things in a savory direction by adding spices or fridge leftovers. Schmaltz lovers fry in chicken fat instead of butter, and those who prefer a softer brei use more water.

I like my matzo brei scrambled and eat it unadorned. My kids like theirs with maple syrup, and various relatives go in for a garnish of jam, or a sprinkling of sugar, or generous dollops of applesauce and sour cream. With so many options available, you can see why I keep a box of matzo in the cupboard year-round. CONTINUE AT SITE

On Monday, millions of children will ask their parents: Why is tonight different from all other nights of the year?

Children asking this question in Jewish homes around the world will be told that the Passover festival commemorates the liberation of their people from enslavement in Egypt and celebrates the civilization that emerged from that breakout into independence. Families gathered at an orchestrated meal—the Seder—will begin the story by tasting the bitterness of subjection, make their way through debates over interpretations of the event, and culminate in joyful and occasionally (after the designated four cups of wine) raucous song.

Nor will the ironies of liberation be lost on households that have laboriously prepared for its re-enactment: No one who observes the exacting requirements of Passover can doubt the disciplining challenges involved in attaining freedom.

Our family celebrates Passover with personal as well as historical freight. In the summer of 1940, my parents executed our flight from a fate worse than slavery at the hands of the Soviets and the Nazis who took turns subjugating the Romanian city we escaped, Czernowitz. Every successful getaway like ours was studded with improbabilities that some call miracles.

In his recital of the Passover Haggadah (the text that guides the Seder meal), my father put special emphasis on the phrase: “And the Lord brought us forth out of Egypt—not by the hands of an angel, and not by the hands of a seraph, and not by the hands of a messenger, but the Holy One, blessed be he, himself, in his own glory and in his own person.” My father said we should likewise carry out life’s toughest tasks ourselves rather than entrust them to agents. He may have had in mind his own rescue of us and his failure to save members of his family who were murdered.

We were never to forget that our timely exit from Europe coincided with the loss of several million others like us. Every year, we include in our family reading of the Haggadah a postwar insert circulated by the Canadian Jewish Congress honoring both those who perished at the hands of the Nazis and those who went down fighting:

“On the first day of Passover the remnants in the Ghetto of Warsaw rose up against the adversary, even as in the days of Judah the Maccabee. ‘They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided’ [2 Samuel 1:23], and they brought redemption to the name of Israel through all the world.”

This tribute concludes with one of Maimonides’s 13 principles of faith: “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the messiah—and though he tarry, yet I believe.” Participants in our Seder traditionally differ in how deeply they linger over the tarrying and how fervently over the belief.

Don’t be surprised if President Obama has an emotional attachment to that Neil Diamond/Barbra Streisand song, “You don’t bring me flowers anymore.”

A month ago, we were surprised that Cuba’s Raúl Castro did not greet President Obama at the airport. After all, they told us it was historic. It had not happened since President Coolidge visited Cuba in the late 1920s. Castro would have been the second leader in Cuban history to greet a U.S. president on Cuban soil. However, he stayed home doing something rather than showing up to make history. Maybe a pirated copy of The Mambo Kings was on Cuban TV that afternoon.

Well, it happened again. Another world leader was too busy to greet the president of the U.S. He was welcomed by Prince Faisal bin Bandar Al Saud, the governor of Riyadh.

Yes, our president is now greeted by governors. It does not get any more insulting than that. Maybe having Russian jets fly within 50 feet of U.S. warships is a very close second!

King Salman was not there to greet President Obama. However, he found time to greet other world leaders just last week:

Ahead of Mr Obama’s arrival, Saudi state television showed the king personally greeting senior officials from other Gulf nations arriving at the King Salman Air Base, the Associated Press reported.

Mustafa Alani, a security analyst at the Gulf Research Centre, said the Saudi decision not to dispatch a high-level delegation to greet the president was unusual and intended to send a clear message that they had little faith in him.

It is true that Saudi Arabia is angry over the redacted pages from the 9-11 report. Frankly, it’s a tough call, and I am willing to give President Bush and President Obama the benefit of the doubt here. After all, they have more information than I do. At the same time, President Obama could make a speech about the issue rather than let his critics dominate the coverage.

President Barack Obama’s trip to Saudi Arabia this week and pending legislation that would enable families of people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to sue the Gulf kingdom have prompted fresh calls to declassify 28 pages of a congressional report said to describe links between Saudi Arabia and the terrorists.

“If all of the information comes out and [the legislation] is passed we can move forward against the Saudis,” said Jim Kreindler, one of the lawyers representing the families of Sept. 11 victims.

Here’s some background on the 28 pages:

What are the 28 pages everyone keeps talking about?

Those are 28 classified pages of a 2002 Congressional investigation into the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. They concern Saudi Arabia’s possible role in the attacks and President George W. Bush ordered them sealed after the investigation concluded.

These 28 pages are 14 years old. Why are we talking about them now?

Family members of 9/11 victims have pursued a legal effort to sue the Saudi government over the attacks, alleging it had provided some manner of support for the 19 men who hijacked the planes.

These kinds of lawsuits are generally precluded by U.S. law but Congress is weighing legislation that could allow them. The Obama administration has been lobbying hard against the legislation.

In addition, the U.S. relationship with the Gulf kingdom, a long-time ally, has been strained in recent years. In a March interview with the Atlantic, Mr. Obama complained about Gulf Arab allies’ unwillingness to carry their own weight in regional issues. Asked whether Saudi Arabia was a friend to him, he said, “it’s complicated.”

Mr. Obama traveled to Saudia Arabia earlier this week for a summit of Gulf countries.

Saudi Arabia has long said that support for the hijackers didn’t come directly from the government. In 2003 the government called for the report to be declassified. CONTINUE AT SITE

Tomorrow evening Jews will gather with friends and family to celebrate Passover. We will recount the hardships of slavery in Egypt and the harsh oppression by the Pharaoh. We will rejoice in the rescue by Moses who demanded freedom for our people. We will recite the ten plagues that were unleashed on the Egyptians when the Pharaohs refused to free the Jews .The Pharaoh finally relented but when the Jews were leaving he sent an army to capture them and return them to enslavement. We will cheer when we retell how the waters of the Red Sea miraculously parted giving the Jews an escape, and the waters returned drowning the pursuing army.

Then, we will have a moment of silent prayer in memory of the martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto who courageously rebelled on Passover in April of 1943 and held off the well-armed Nazis for over a month.

Finally, we will recount another miracle- the return of the Jews to Israel in 1948 when the seas again parted- this time for the steel hulls of vessels bringing besieged and beleaguered and traumatized survivors of the Genocide of World War 2 to safety and succor in the Jewish state of Israel.

Then we will eat, drink and be merry.

But, the story of Passover continues with great consequences:

The book of Exodus says that after crossing the Red Sea, Moses led the Jews into the Sinai, where they spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness. After travelling through the desert for nearly three months, they camped before Mount Sinai and it was there that God made a covenant with Moses and revealed the Ten Commandments on two stone tablets that codified the mandate to create a just and humane society and govern the lives of Jews and all decent people and nations. There are actually 613 commandments which cover every aspect of life-even hygiene and diet, but the Decalogue- the Ten Commandments are the most famous.

Think about that. At a time and place of local mores that sanctioned and celebrated murder and pillage and tyranny, these laws set forth principles of morality which have lasted for millennia.

Until 2005 The Ten Commandments were prominently displayed in courts, schools, churches and public grounds. In 2005 rulings on the presentation of religious symbols and sacred text on Texas public property, the US Supreme Court justified displays like the Ten Commandments but with the caveat that such displays must be clearly secular and not cross the line into proselytizing.

However, in a ruling on the display of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky courthouses, the justices ruled 5 to 4 that public officials were not motivated by a secular purpose in ordering the courthouse display but sought to advance religion in violation of the separation of church and state.

The debate continues with the ACLU pitted against all public displays of the Ten Commandments and determined citizens of all religions who fight to uphold their rights to display them. There are prominent jurists and scholars who continue to argue on that subject. In spite of these controversies, The Ten Commandments continue to inspire all the world’s religions and all decent societies- religious as well as secular.

Here, in this great nation we live in freedom from intimidation, oppression and harassment because those founding fathers who sought to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” were religious Christians who were informed and guided by the Bible and the Ten Commandments which were revealed more than 3,000 years ago to Moses and the Jewish people on their way to their homeland in Israel.

Next month, Obama will be in Japan for the G-7 Summit. There are rumors that he will visit Hiroshima and formally apologize for the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on that city and Nagasaki in August 1945. Maybe that’s why John Kerry didn’t apologize during a recent visit to the Hiroshima memorial, but merely set the stage for Obama by lamenting the suffering and calling for a “world free from nuclear weapons.”

The debate over whether or not Truman should have authorized dropping the bombs is an old one. And any objective evaluation of the decision shows that it was correct, for it shortened the war and saved millions of Japanese and American lives. More interesting than rehashing what should be a settled debate is the ideological prejudices and moral incoherence of those who continue to want the U.S. to express regret for swiftly ending a war it didn’t start and paid for with nearly 112,000 lives.

First is the idea, serially displayed by Obama since the beginning of his presidency, that the U.S. has been a bad international actor and so must atone for its sins. As the leftist tale goes, America’s corporate greed, imperialist depredations, and racist nationalism sowed the seeds of all the world’s disorder and ills. Whether poverty in Africa, violence in the Middle East, or global warming, the default response is “When all else fails, blame the Americans.”

Just watch Oliver Stone’s 10-part “documentary” on the Cold War, “The Untold History of the United States,” or read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. This is the “Yankees done us wrong” school of factually challenged historiography that has spread into popular culture, high school curricula, and whole departments in most universities. With Obama it has now reached the presidency, where its malign effects have been obvious in his foreign policy disasters caused by feckless “disengagement” and “leading from behind” predicated on reversing America’s malign interventionism.

The dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains the only wartime use of nuclear weapons in history.

No one knows exactly how many Japanese citizens were killed by the two American bombs. A macabre guess is around 140,000. The atomic attacks finally shocked Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese militarists into surrendering.

John Kerry recently visited Hiroshima. He became the first secretary of state to do so — purportedly as a precursor to a planned visit next month by President Obama, who is rumored to be considering an apology to Japan for America’s dropping of the bombs 71 years ago.

The horrific bombings are inexplicable without examining the context in which they occurred.

In 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill insisted on the unconditional surrender of Axis aggressors. The bomb was originally envisioned as a way to force the Axis leader, Nazi Germany, to cease fighting. But the Third Reich had already collapsed by July 1945 when the bomb was ready for use, leaving Imperial Japan as the sole surviving Axis target.

Japan had just demonstrated with its nihilistic defense of Okinawa — where more than 12,000 Americans died and more than 50,000 were wounded, along with perhaps 200,000 Japanese military and civilian casualties — that it could make the Americans pay so high a price for victory that they might negotiate an armistice rather than demand surrender.

Tens of thousands of Americans had already died in taking the Pacific islands as a way to get close enough to bomb Japan. On March 9-10, 1945, B-29 bombers dropped an estimated 1,665 tons of napalm on Tokyo, causing at least as many deaths as later at Hiroshima.

On Monday April 18, 2016, China officially broke ground on its first naval base in Djibouti, Africa, a country which has also been the home of the United States (U.S.) African intelligence-gathering base for the past 15 years. The Chinese base will be encroaching upon a major U.S. military installation with 4,000 troops and has the largest drone installation base outside of Afghanistan.

Djibouti may be a proving ground for China’s foreign policy as the nation looks to further expand its influence in Africa. China has participated in anti-piracy missions off the coast of Somalia since 2008 and increased those missions in 2010. Chinese President Jinping donated $100 million to the African Union (AU) and said it was to help build a standby force as well as an emergency response and quick response force.

American Ambassador to Djibouti Tom Kelly warns that Djibouti is the forefront of U.S. national security policy in Africa and raised concerns of Chinese military efforts to intercept American intelligence.

The U.S. also has to deal with Djibouti president Ismali Omar Guelleh, viewed by many locals as a dictator, who curtails free speech and human rights, makes arbitrary arrests, and uses torture on opposition. Guelleh may be increasing his ties to China following the Chinese purchase of the Port de Djibouti for $185 million. Chinese investment has also establish a $4 billion dollar railway project from Djibouti to Ethiopia; and is expected to Djibouti $20 million per year for the Djibouti naval base over the next decade.

The president musn’t express guilt over U.S. use of nuclear weapons during World War II.

“I think the president would like to do it,” John Roos, President Barack Obama’s former ambassador to Tokyo, said the other day about a possible Obama visit to Hiroshima when he attends the Group of Seven Summit next month in Japan. “He is a person who bends over backwards to show respect to history, and it does advance his agenda.”

That a visit to Hiroshima, on which President Harry Truman dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb, would advance Obama’s agenda is clear. He has long envisioned a world without nuclear weapons, announced steps to pursue it in a high-profile speech in Prague in April of 2009, and continues to push for U.S.-Russian cuts in nuclear arsenals and global efforts to secure loose nuclear materials.

That Obama “bends over backwards to show respect for history” is less clear. Just a day before speaking in Prague in 2009, he dismissed American “exceptionalism” – America’s unique historical role in promoting freedom and democracy and, since World War II, ensuring global stability – as no more special than the “exceptionalism” that Brits, Greeks, and others feel about their own nations.

The debate over an Obama visit to Hiroshima – which would make him the first president to visit while in office – has focused almost exclusively on whether he would or should apologize for the bombing. That Obama would be tempted seems obvious, for he hasn’t shied away from publicly scolding America for its faults, from its toppling of Iran’s government in 1953 to its ongoing struggle with race at home.

“The Measure of a Man,” a film whose French title translates as “market law,’ is a condemnation of an economic system that treats its workers as disposable objects regardless of how diligently they have performed or how long they have been employed. Thierry, the protagonist played by Vincent Lindon in an award winning tour de force, is an everyman who has lost his job and been put through several retraining programs that were exercises in futility, never leading to an actual job. We see his frustration in dealing with the bureaucracy that sends people jumping through meaningless hoops only to be turned down time and again. We see him interviewed on Skype by a callow employer who whittles him down to the humiliating admission that he would welcome working for less money at a position lower than expected – only to be told that he has less than a 1% chance of getting the job – though it’s not impossible.

In the most moving part of the this film, we see him at home with a severely disabled son who is treated with dignity and acceptance by him and his wife. In one scene, the parents put on music and begin to dance together, eventually including the son and having Thierry step aside and beam as his son dances with his mother. These are scenes showing all three characters accepting their fate and moving on without self-pity as best they can. Thierry undergoes all sorts of duress : a version of group therapy in which his trial interview is critiqued by his peers; a lecture by an employment counselor who urges him to sell his house and buy life insurance; a patronizing speech by his son’s school director who now doubts that the boy can achieve his dream of going to college and a disappointment by a potential buyer of his mobile home who agreed to a price on the phone but tries to bargain him down after he sees it. His life is a series of reality bites which lead to his taking a job as a security officer at a large supermarket.